archduck

One can surely make the case for certain morphemes being unutterable, but phonemes?

Perhaps I'm just whooshing on some hyperbole here, but it's hard to imagine something like /g/ being frowned upon.

Do you feel like saying "ein Ex-Freund von mir" still carries this boyfriend connotation as opposed to "mein Ex-Freund"? The latter is clear to me, but I could see myself saying the former and thereby mistakenly suggesting a past relationship. (Non-native speaker.)

On the other hand, it's clear that "eine Ex-Freundin von mir" means ex-girlfriend.

Maybe I'll stick to "ehemaliger Freund" or just use "Kumpel" instead of Freund(-in) altogether. Otherwise people will think I've dated everyone I know.

lol

In 1) and 2), it's clear the speaker is making some kind of conjecture. In 3), I think there's some bleed-over interfering from the idiomatic "I guess" which indicates that you're reporting hearsay or hedging your commitment to its accuracy. Some languages express this "evidentiary" modality more formally, e.g. via some kind of morphosyntactic change that makes it explicit. English has a ton of ways of expressing modalities, but they're wrapped up together in various kinds of constructions that express tense and aspect as well ("TAM" is an acronym for tense-aspect-mood used in lots of linguistic analysis across all kinds of languages).

Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.

In addition, in printed news at least, the article writer rarely gets to write the headline.

Hell, some people even manage to make gobs of money publicly documenting their irregular intercourse on video.

ASAP, to my ears, always connotes urgency, and I'd even go so far as to say that its usage without this sense is universally dispreferred, if not outright misusage. Or at least I used to think so ... until a misunderstanding arose because our CEO did, in fact, use it in such a way (i.e. "whenever you are able").

H. Paul Grice (the four maxims guy) calls connotations like these implicatures, extra propositions which are "implicated" (implied) in addition to "what is said" (the utterance), and they can be conversational or conventional. Conversational implicatures are cancellable, meaning that they can be disavowed, whereas conventional implicatures cannot. So for instance, "I used to do a lot of drugs. I still do, but I used to too" cancels the implicature which arises from "used to" ("not anymore"). After consistent usage, however, conversational implicatures may become conventional and cannot be cancelled - they have moved from the pragmatic level to the semantic level (i.e. they're part of the meaning of the utterance itself rather than derived contextually).

The point being, is it even possible to cancel the urgency connotation of ASAP? Is it not just outright weird to say, "I want these TPS reports done ASAP - but no rush"?

My intuition says that ASAP necessarily connotes urgency, due to its consistent usage in this sense, whereas "as soon as possible" only optionally does (so it's much more acceptable to say, "I want these GPS reports done as soon as possible - but no rush").

Super weird coming from our CEO, because otherwise everything is in fact urgent (sigh...).

Some of those which carry boats / Are the same which carry ships

There are U-Schiffe too, which are larger than U-Boote, but the claustrophobia element wouldn't have been as intense in the film. On the other hand, an U-Schiff would have never become unstuck from the bottom of the Mediterranean. Another example of ships getting stuck where boats don't. (If you haven't seen the movie, this likely makes zero sense.)

I sure as hell won't install a browser extension if its source code isn't publicly available; I don't see how the government should or even could protect us from every update made to all of the software packages I import (even if the punishment for malware is severe); and large corporations may be able to get their hands on source code, but I don't trust them either. The FSF may be stuck in the '80s in some ways, but their fundamental principles are solid. I much prefer their vision to one that has users "freed" from source code, trusting large and opaque companies and government agencies, whose interests may not align with mine, to shield me from malicious actors, of which there are many. Honestly, if anyone is stuck in the past and not relevant anymore, it's not the FSF; it's people who downplay malicious actors, fail to recognize that software is often tiny, or updated frequently, or written by someone anonymous or outside of US jurisdiction whose behavior we can't punish with US law. A lot of software is made up of forks too, and not many software forks end up useless like in his anecdote about his company forking Windows... Yeah, this dude obviously hasn't been keeping up to speed since his retirement.

The original source is over a hundred pages of polling data, so I won’t link to that.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/381628

> More intelligent people can play host to far more sophisticated parasitic memes. Educated adults are less likely to believe that lizard people rule the world

There's evidence that highly educated people are _more_ likely to believe in the Qanon conspiracy.

Belief isn't just shorthand for "checking out the evidence and making claims about the world on the basis of the probability of that evidence." There can be a will to believe whatever supports your social or material interests that trumps reason. We are now living in post-epistemological times.

Interestingly, at the end of the article he brings up pro wrestling and remarks on not believing it anymore. But this kind of credulity is almost the opposite of what pro wrestling is all about - you have to buy in to take part (kayfabe). Everyone does, everyone knows it.

Tell that to all the descendants of Genghis Khan....

Ha! In your dreams.