Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

As someone from NC with a LOT of family from eastern NC specifically, I'd like to provide an addendum to "bless your heart".

I see it frequently cited as always meant sarcastically/disingenuosly. It certainly can mean "screw you", "go away", or "... so much fail".

However, if there's one thing people should understand about southern/NC etiquette, it's that passive aggression is the primary form of aggression. There are plenty of southerners who would never tell you to GFY straight to your face. That doesn't mean they aren't thinking that and trying to say that, though. Perhaps even with a "bless your heart".

Given all of that, "bless your[/their] heart" is absolutely to be taken at face value about as often as it shouldn't. That level of plausible deniability provides the highest level of potential passive-aggressiveness.

I can't speak for absolutely everybody, but at least if someone from eastern NC says "bless your heart", they could mean anything between "GFY" and "I'm so sorry that happened, please come to my house so that I can shower you with hospitality". You might never know which they meant, and that's intentional.

I also take it to mean that it's either work others are often unwilling to do, or something that's really difficult, or something that I've been wanting for a long time but haven't gotten anyone to help me with.

For example: There's a fluorescent light above my desk that flickers and has been driving me crazy for years. I can't get facilities to fix it because they need a ticket that's approved by management and has an approved budget, and all their other tasks are more urgent.... so it slowly drives me mad for a year. Finally, a facilities person says "You know what... I'm not supposed to do this without management approval... but I'll just fix this real quick and it'll be our secret" ..... Me: "Oh, thank you, you're doing God's work"

Ah, yeah if it had been worded like that I'd have recognised it as the idiom, but hadn't occurred to me it could be an unusual wording of that idiom.

I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.

nah. far easier to be offended. that'll show 'em.

I was wondering the same. After a little searching, I reckon they're referring to 人 on a keyboard using a dàyì layout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayi_method

My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway

> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about

The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.

I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.

The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.

Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_axe#/media/File%3ACMO...

you don't learn about this character normally in China. So I would say it is impossible this is the explanation.

in china because there's 80% chance that ball was made there

[flagged] shows on comments when flags significantly outweigh downvotes.

[delayed] shows when a comment isn't being displayed yet because it's still less than N minutes old, where N is the 'delay' setting in the commenter's profile (about which, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

Does that answer your question?

Submarine basically transliterates to “undersea-er”. In a hodge podge language like English it doesn’t seem strange.

In Cantonese pronunciation ru often becomes jyu (in Jyutping), ri becomes jat, similarly for rang, rong, ran. I guess this same shift is likely reflected in mandarin pronunciations in some areas. This suggests that this is a general change.

I think the relevant wikipedia article might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology, which should reflect the shift from the earlier Cantonese-like pronunciation (yu style) to modern Mandarin-like (ru style), but it's a bit beyond me. Maybe this "The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme /ɻ/." is relevant?

More discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/orf800/questio... and at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?16,126118 which suggests "If a word is pronounced "y-" in Cantonese but "r-" in Mandarin, it's reconstructed as "gn", after Hokkien".

Here is a comment that must be helpful because it got upvoted, but it's impossible to understand because the sibling comment it replies to is hidden somewhere at the bottom of the comment list.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat].

Locked. Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034160#39035348

This is almost too polite to be Stack Exchange satire.

You wanted to report them for asking you to do the thing that you also thought had to be done? What would you even report them for? Giving valid criticism? Responding quickly?

> how much water is in that well?

Given the viscosity of air vs. water, one might assume there's no water in the well. Also, given some surface area of a bear, and air pressure from a cushion of air formed under the falling bear, the fall speed does seem a little high, at least for a calculation with that number of decimal places, but perhaps the well was located in the crust of the earth where gravity's a tad higher.

Living bears are also buoyant, and will be slowed down considerably on meeting the water, so the bear is unlikely to have reached the bottom of a water-filled well for a long period, if at all.

To answer OP, I'd say the bear is brown, because of the mud from the base of the (somewhat empty) well. However to an outside observer, given the lack of light in the well the shade of brown might not be discernable. A human in the well with the bear will see the colour of the bear as a low relative concern compared to A) being in a well and B) being in a well with a bear.

One variant of this question was designed to test the theory that students try to fit the inputs to an answer regardless of whether the answer has anything to do with the question.

People see this as some sort of failing of students but I think it says more about the teachers. You’ve overtrained students on problems that mean nothing to them, then you throw another nothing problem at them that’s simply three times as much nothing as the usual level of irrelevance.

Randall Monroe said it best: we should be teaching high school students how to split the bill for a birthday dinner. That’s more complicated math than most 20 year olds can correctly manage. It’s also what they’re going to do with math about 75% of the time.

What is definition of bottom of the well? The water level or the possible bottom when pumped empty or dry?

> Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered

I think if a bear fell into a well, there would be friction between the bear and the side of the well...

Except polar bears are actually black, AIUI. On their skin, underneath the fur. Or if you go by the fur, they're (off-)white.

I couldn't get GPT4 to answer it either, even with several variations on the prompt. It gets too fixated on the "bear" part, so it just assumes that the answer is "white", because that's a "common trick question".

I find it interesting that it disregards the rest of the question, and just picks "the most common answer to a trick question involving the color of a bear"!

Chat GPT 3.5: https://chat.openai.com/share/9187924c-64ab-4246-a2b0-0c9cea...

Regenerate for more languages solutions

Jon Skeet is who Chuck Norris calls when confronted with a regex[0]

(Apologies for the Medium link)

[0] https://medium.com/geekculture/the-chuck-norris-of-programmi...

I really like preserving english word order and just swapping out words for their lowest string distance portuguese equivalents, especially false cognates. I also forcefully transform english -ing and -er words into portuguese equivalents or completely new words if necessary. Everything comes out hilariously backwards and almost but not quite nonsensical, tortured yet parseable with mental error correction, like some portuguese newspeak. I especially like rendering book, movie and video game titles this way, especially to my english speaker friends who consume all this content in native english and aren't used to or look down on their translated portuguese versions.

I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head.

There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.

That isn't a literal translation. That's a translation of an unrelated word.

There's a Chinese in-joke, though, where they like to say "day day up", translating 天天 "every day" as if it were just 天 "day" twice in sequence.

They found a 2nd, different clipart, from the same original artist, with a different Y with the same Axe.

That proves that the original (Chinese) artist actually thought that the image is associable with Y, and they were paired before going on the ball, not someone (other than the original artist) picking the wrong image to go with a letter.

Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.

> sometimes he just says and does things to see what kind of reaction it gets from people

pours cereal box out onto the floor

"Some have called me a cereal instigator."

Extending this, can there be found a single image that can be representative of all letters of the alphabet?

A is for A Xylohphone

B is for the Band in which I will play the Xylophone

C is for the all the Concerts in which I will play the Xylophone

D is the for the Disappointment my parents showed for my selection of the Xylophone

.

.

.

M is for the Mallets, used to play to Xylophone

.

.

.

W is for the time Wasted, learning to play the Xylophone

X is for the way the Mallets are held whilst playing the Xylophone

Y is for Why did you choose to dedicate so much time to playing a Xylophone?

Z is for the Zoo to which the Xylophone was donated as entertainment for the chimpanzees

Just having the stream-of-consciousness writing above, I think it should also turn into the story of the eventually fatal decline of enthusiasm for the instrument.