Idioms don’t have to (and often don’t) make sense. How do you feel about “head over heels”?
- 5 Posts
- 506 Comments
Civilians can’t just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I’ve ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
There’s that old line that if my aunt had wheels she’d be a bicycle. Maybe the command form is muddling the topic here, but using the be-verb with an adjective like that attaches a subject complement, essentially describing the subject. But “I am fast” describing a person doesn’t mean that saying “I drive fast” is describing a drive as a noun.
Some flat adverbs sound perfectly natural to most speakers, like “play nice” or “drive safe”. Others have less acceptability among people in general, like “That tastes real good.”
How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn’t clear it’s almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.
Looks like aks was the original pronunciation
that pinball game that was on xp
This one? Someone made an ad free port of it for android but it unsurprisingly got pulled off google. You can play it here and there’s a link to the git where you can prob get it for android still
Fuckin Logan Airport won’t sell you a beer before noon. Goddamn bullshit puritan laws
Born Slippy
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipto
World News@lemmy.world•Child bride faces execution in Iran unless she pays £80,000 in ‘blood money’English
20·8 days agoDo you usually see people replying to your comments with “yeah” plus further information as disagreement?
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipto
World News@lemmy.world•France’s far-right leader hit by egg, days after flour attackEnglish
3·9 days agoI think people have been throwing produce for a long time in general. But there’s a list of stuff thrown at politicians on wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_of_objects_being_thrown_at_politicians
I’m partial to the Australian “egg boy” because a ska band wrote a song about it
Expansionism? Fantasy is bad? I think you’re bringing something to the conversation that isn’t there.
As long as we’re fantasizing about something that’ll never happen with mandatory retail we might as well fantasize about it happening to an entire continent at the same time
There was a short story I can’t find right now based around the idea that everyone gets one legal murder in their life.
I don’t think the comic said country





I mean, the main point is that language doesn’t have to make “logical” sense. It’s not a math problem. Just look at all the inconsistencies in pretty much every aspect of a language. It’s all there simply because of history and people agreeing on meanings for words and phrases. For example, you’ve got something like prepositions. There’s literally zero logical reason why we talk or speak to someone, but we don’t tell or converse to someone.
And people who are more rigid in thinking about language always seem to think the language they learned growing up is the most “correct” version, whether that has a basis in history or not. Like even though literally has been used as an intensifier for (literally) hundreds of years, that seems to be a sticking point, whereas something like very, which has a similar root (veracis meaning truth), any sentence using very doesn’t have to have an exact truthful meaning.
Hell, once we go back to “original” meanings of words, where do we stop? The singular use of “they” is older than that of singular “you”, but I somehow never see the “singular they is confusing” crowd advocating for a return to thee/thou.