Personally I love oranges but cant stand orange juice.
D&D is not as good as it is popular. It’s a very idiosyncratic game that’s mostly focused on a particular kind of play, but people treat it like it’s a general purpose tool.
Clearly people can have fun with it, and that’s what really matters. I’m still convinced many of them would have more, easier, cheaper, fun if they picked up a different game.
Decimate means 1/10th destroyed, lost, whatever. I don’t care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete. I get that the meaning of words changes over time, but it has the prefix deci. 1/10th. You don’t get to decide something that starts with 1/10th means near total even if it’s a scary sounding word.
This is my anthill and I’m dying here.
I read a Matt Helm spy thriller where the hero knows that his boss has been replaced by a double because the real guy would never use ‘decimate’ to mean ‘eradicate.’
I have so many like that one. At some point in English one billion dropped its value three orders of magnitude and it is spreading to other languages. What now is called a billion it was one thousand million or a milliard.
More recently, one dude used the word hallucination for what AI do and everyone ran with it, there was already a word to describe that phenomenon, fabulation. Hallucination means something completely different.
So we get to hundred, then thousand up to hundred thousand, why would we use a thousand thousand for a million, or ten hundred thousand, or a hundred thousand thousand? A new word at each separator just makes easy parsing.
One hundred seventy three thousand million four hundred sixty two thousand four hundred twenty just sounds so much worse and harder to parser when hearing it.
Yeah, there was a word: milliard. Billion came after that, when the number is a million million.
Yeah, but the AI bros don’t want to imply that the LLMs are lying to you.
If you anthropomorphize the AI, you don’t want to imagine that they lie to you.
My anthill is myriad. It’s the same as many. “Myriad stars”, not “a myriad of stars”.
You only get to decide one tenth of what other people do.
Does English have sufficiently scary words that are also etymologically correct?
A population being halvsied just doesn’t hit the same, you know?
Bimate removal of half.
Decimate comes from decimatus past participle of decimar removal of 1/10.
If your military unit is getting bimated, make sure you say “bye, mate”
“Those guys split us right down the middle, then finished half of us off.”
In battle, right?
My biggest gripe about it is that it should mean sacrificing a tenth (or a small portion) in order to preserve the whole.
So many words that mean completely destroy, and we have to make the one meaning specifically not that to also mean completely destroy. The language is weaker for it.
Penultimate must send you into spasms as well
…how are people using penultimate incorrectly? Am I using it incorrectly? Does it not mean second to last?
Learned that the hard way when I got off a train in the fucking middle of rural Japan with fucking nothing nearby and no cell signal.
I didn’t even know it had an alternate or wrong meaning
Meanwhile I hear it used correctly maybe 5% of the time
Seems like we all have different experiences with this word
I’m going to guess, based on the pattern of other misuses, they use it like “ultimate”, but with emphasis?
Yes
At least the dictionary still lists the real meaning as valid.
Do we have any other words where adding the prefix “pen” to it means “next to”?
Pen is more like “almost”, like in peninsula, almost an island.
Don’t start, the other lemming just taught us it’s almost an isle; island is a completely different unrelated word that they shoved an s in by mistake
I see, I thought they were synonyms, english isn’t my first language.
In fairness, so did they!
Penis
😔
My personal gripe in this area is people misusing “objectively”.
Such as declaring that a certain movie or game is objectively good.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
I understand your point, that a person might not like a particular movie or game and therefore think it’s ‘not good.’
I’m saying that even when you’re talking about a subjective experience there are criteria that a disinterested party can rate and successful or unsuccessful.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
If I don’t like that piece of art, am I wrong? Am I objectively incorrect of the opinions inside my own head?
Lots of people dislike award winning movies, songs, and games. Are those people measurably wrong? No. The plural of subjective opinions is not an objective one.
You can dislike something, and still appreciate its merits.
Say I get a bowl of broccoli soup. Is the bowl clean? Is the soup the right temperature? Was it made with wholesome ingredients? I may not want it because I don’t like broccoli, but I wouldn’t tell someone else not to try it.
Objectively, it’s a good bowl of soup.
See?
If a piece of art was created 100 years ago and every professional critic of the time thought it was trash without any merit, and then 100 years later the critical reception of that same piece had changed and it was considered a piece of high art, is that piece of art objectively good? Objectively bad? Was it objectively bad 100 years ago and then somehow became good?
Good point.
But, unless you’re talking about a hypothetical situation where the art was hidden away and rediscovered, the work must have had some merit or it wouldn’t have lasted 100 years.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn’t it ‘objectively’ good?
In this earlier definition looking for objective merit, it leans heavily on professional opinion. If a small number of individuals not thinking a work that is “objectively good” is good doesn’t change that, then the opposite must also be true. Therefore, if we have a situation where the critical consensus is that a work is bad, and only a small number of people think it is good, then we have a piece of art that is “objectively bad” by using the critical standards, but which is held onto by a small number of people who disagree.
At the top of this discussion I didn’t define “art” merely as visual pieces (I actually used examples of movie and games). So that art could be anything expressive- music, books, plays, movies, games, and beyond. I can think of art and artists not appreciated in their time, and then over time critical perception turned around.
This is all a long way of saying critical opinions are at the end of the day still opinions. That’s why even critics disagree with each other.
Bringing it back to the previous point: if I tried that bowl of soup and I didn’t like it, am I objectively incorrect? I found it to be a bad bowl of broccoli soup because I like my broccoli soup a certain way.
RIP Diane Keaton
I feel like when it comes to judging an artwork, saying that something is objectively good does actually mean “for the majority”, because there is no singular point of absolute goodness to compare it to.
So even if there’s a little leeway in the definition of “objectively” that doesn’t necessarily mean that the statement is wrong.
saying that something is objectively good does actually mean “for the majority”, because there is no singular point of absolute goodness to compare it to.
I agree completely that people use it like this.
I always interpreted it as “break into ten pieces”
It comes from the Latin “decimatio”, a form of Roman military punishment where every tenth man had to be executed by his mates.
“You did poorly, as punishment we’ll take away 10% of your capability” seems counterproductive.
From what I’ve read it was used to punish things like cowardice or mutiny.
It was super brutal, they were divided in groups of ten people, draw straws and had to execute themselves the one with the short straw using clubs.
If I fuck someone 10 times then havent i decimated them?
No, you’ve only gone and dekamated them.
Pineapple on pizza is fine. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it.
It’s “by accident” not “on accident”, you uneducated fools.
A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. Yes, I know “kilo” means 1000 - I don’t care since it’s obvious from context.
Back in the day, using base-10 prefixes for base-2 stuff was considered fine. 1024 is close enough to 1000, after all. It only changed when some dickhead realised that, by insisting that a kilobyte (and the bigger units) was 1000 bytes, they could sell you less hard drive space without lowering the number on the box.
If you don’t believe me, look at your RAM. Nobody’s ever sold RAM by the “gibibyte”.
I wish it was socially acceptable to interest-dump someone and for them to do the same to you.
Just getting a 5-10 minute lecture deep into a topic that someone is passionate about is fun and educational! Much better than trying to make small talk or talk about the 3 common topics at your workplace (at mine it is local tv, energy spending/taxes, and cars), which is often sports. Then you get to learn about other people’s interests too!
I don’t say “bless you” when someone sneezes, because it’s an archaic tradition based on superstitious nonsense.
If you’ve never worked on a holiday you shouldn’t be allowed to go to stores and restaurants on holidays.
Pancakes are fragile narcissists. You need a WHOLE FUCKING INTERNATIONAL HOUSE TO SLAKE YOUR EGO, YOU THIRSTY, PATHETIC BREAKFAST FOOD!!
You’re nothing, nothing, compared to the waffle!
Steak is overrated. I’d take a smash burger over a steak 9 times out of 10, and that 1 time out of 10 will just be because I’m in the mood for peppercorn sauce.
Horsepower is a stupid way to measure how powerful a car is. What is this the 1800s?
“Road Works” usually means it doesn’t.
The “End Construction” signs you sometimes see on the side of the road aren’t actually protesting growth.
Nice!
For years, growing up, there were signs saying “adopt a view point” in the highway we’d drive out to see family over the holidays.
For years, I thought they were saying something about road saftey, warning drivers to look at whats coming up instead of directly in front of them. Something akin to the picking a spot on the horizon to sail towards to keep the boat straight my dad had taught me for sailing…
At some point i realized the blue signs were all guidance or info, not rules or warning. At one point I thought they might be politically motivated, like the “please dont litter” signs along that same highway- where they pleading with us to form and opinion, any opinion.
I think I was in my late teens before I finally saw one that said “this viewpoint adopted by <company>” and realized they were literally asking people to sponsor the scenic pull-off spots along the highway.
I still prefer to read them as some poor civil servant waging a private campaign against nihilism, picking the nicest bits of scenery for his message, hoping to shock the american public out of their unfeeling malaise.
Go slow children ahead
People shouldn’t be able to be told what color to paint their house. More people should experiment with wild colors inside and out.
The way the US spells things is stupid
The letter “u” belongs in neighbour, harbour, savour, etc.
I prefer the US spelling of these words. The U doesn’t do anything phonetically and was not present in the Latin from which many of the words derive.
Maybe this is regional, but its feel like people pronounce them neighber, harbur, and savor,
Definitely regional, and that’s the fun part of languages.
You’re probably right but this is where might makes right kicks in.
The native English-speakers that I work with are pretty evenly split between those who speak American English and those who speak British English. I have found that while I have mostly adopted American English spelling myself, I always write “behaviour” because a particular Brit I work with often talks about software behaviour.
As a non-native speaker I tend to mix the two. School taught me british spelling, internet taught me american. Colour is one of the words where I’ve always stuck with british spelling.
I was super surprised when I learned that RuneScape got me stuck on the British spelling of Armour as a kid. Armour has a U in it and you cannot convince me otherwise!
I use both spellings. Armour: The kind you wear. Armor: The kind you drive.
I think I was just a rebellious teen but I (an american English speaker from my earliest) always spell colour with the u. No idea why
I do that too, and I blame Neopets.
I’m always very annoyed by technical tools that stick to US spelling and that will consider “colour” to be a syntax error. I sometimes set up aliases to get rid of those.
No u!
Today, I know what true enlightenment feels like
I like that there’s multiple spellings of words, gives me a better success rate.
There should be more mature games.
I don’t mean like sex games, I mean like games intended for adults that can have mature content and mature stories without it being heavily watered down.
Games should have as much leeway as the film or book industry when it comes to mature content - Though I guess that’s getting murky too lately.
A great example of this is Halo.
The Flood is a horrible body horror parasite that transforms your body and invades and consumes your mind, your thoughts and your memories. It’s corruption based on revenge of the Precursors for the Forerunner’s war against them out of petty anger. The original trilogy shows this off well, and acts like a horror game when you’re getting swarmed from all angles by them.
343 era games are like “bad guys are robots, Flood too scary and gorey we removed them.” All for that lower Teen rating just to sell more copies to a broader audience. They remove the bloodiness and the gore. Hell, you could make a lake of Covenant and human blood in CE. Now you might get a couple splashes of blood to not tip that ESRB scale.
Pathetically watered down in many other aspects, but this was one that always bothered me.
343 have no idea what the fuck they are doing and never have
I personally love the story of spec ops the line, in the end you’re not exactly a villain but you certainly dont feel like a hero
Press a to fuck this wench
Press b to kill this wench
Press x to do both
Press y to do both in the opposite order
