Random Thoughts

[kphoger]

'Fun Size' candy bars just aren't as fun as the regular ones.

They're fun compared to dropping a $2 candy bar in the bag of every trick or treater you get on halloween.

I'd have more fun dropping a $2 candy bar in the bag of every trick-or-treater I got on Halloween.  (We don't hand out candy on Halloween because our family does trick-or-treating in my parents' neighborhood, and my wife and mother and I tag along with the boys.)

[GaryV]

I just got a pop-up ad (in a game app) for pumpkin spice cannabis.

[Flint1979]

Strange things that happen. There are two lakes in Cadillac, MI and they have a man made canal between them. In the winter the canal freezes while the two lakes are unfrozen, then when the two lakes freeze the canal unfreezes.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Strange things that happen. There are two lakes in Cadillac, MI and they have a man made canal between them. In the winter the canal freezes while the two lakes are unfrozen, then when the two lakes freeze the canal unfreezes.

That makes sense to me. The smaller, shallower body of water is going to freeze faster and thaw faster than the two larger, deeper ones.

[Flint1979]

Strange things that happen. There are two lakes in Cadillac, MI and they have a man made canal between them. In the winter the canal freezes while the two lakes are unfrozen, then when the two lakes freeze the canal unfreezes.

That makes sense to me. The smaller, shallower body of water is going to freeze faster and thaw faster than the two larger, deeper ones.

But would it unthaw at below freezing temperatures? For the entire month of January and February some winters in Michigan it doesn't get above freezing at all so I'm wondering how the canal could unthaw.

[GaryV]

Strange things that happen. There are two lakes in Cadillac, MI and they have a man made canal between them. In the winter the canal freezes while the two lakes are unfrozen, then when the two lakes freeze the canal unfreezes.

That makes sense to me. The smaller, shallower body of water is going to freeze faster and thaw faster than the two larger, deeper ones.

But would it unthaw at below freezing temperatures? For the entire month of January and February some winters in Michigan it doesn't get above freezing at all so I'm wondering how the canal could unthaw.

Unthaw = freeze? Unfreeze = thaw?

[D-Dey65]

I've been in Florida for over 24 years, and for some reason I only realized in recent months how seldom I hear the music of Zebra on any local album-oriented rock radio stations.

You have not only multiple rock radio stations, but multiple album-oriented rock stations? Where I live you either get the classic rock station, or the station that plays half classic, half modern rock. Such variety!

Yeah, and as I recall, Jethro Tull seems to get a little more airplay than Zebra on the rock stations in this area. However somehow, I don't think too many stations will be playing this song this year;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCxCaK83pOo
Of course, I could be wrong.

[Flint1979]

Strange things that happen. There are two lakes in Cadillac, MI and they have a man made canal between them. In the winter the canal freezes while the two lakes are unfrozen, then when the two lakes freeze the canal unfreezes.

That makes sense to me. The smaller, shallower body of water is going to freeze faster and thaw faster than the two larger, deeper ones.

I figured out that both Lake Mitchell and Lake Cadillac are 28 feet at their deepest point. I believe the canal is only a few feet deep so that would support the reason it freezes first but what I don't understand is how does it unthaw with the temps still below freezing and the two lakes are still frozen?

[kphoger]

Unthaw = freeze? Unfreeze = thaw?

TIL unthaw is a synonym for thaw, as used for more than 400 years.  The OED only has one definition for unthaw, and it is defined as a variation of thaw.

[Rothman]

Unthaw = freeze? Unfreeze = thaw?

TIL unthaw is a synonym for thaw, as used for more than 400 years.  The OED only has one definition for unthaw, and it is defined as a variation of thaw.

*rips page out of the OED*

Nope.  We're not accepting that any longer.

[Big John]

Unthaw = freeze? Unfreeze = thaw?

TIL unthaw is a synonym for thaw, as used for more than 400 years.  The OED only has one definition for unthaw, and it is defined as a variation of thaw.

It's like inflammable and flammable.  Both mean the same thing but the prefix makes it sound it is the opposite. So it is usually preferred to use the word without the prefix to prevent confusion.

[kphoger]

It's like inflammable and flammable.  Both mean the same thing but the prefix makes it sound it is the opposite. So it is usually preferred to use the word without the prefix to prevent confusion.

The word inflammable means that it can be inflamed.  In fact, centuries ago, that verb was spelled enflame.

Rather, it's more like how the de- prefix can actually reinforce the root word rather than signifying its opposite, and thereby denoted meaning the same as noted, and dissever meaning the same as sever, and a defrauding being the existence of actual fraud, and delimiting meaning the setting of limits, etc, etc.  Of course, nobody has a problem with those...

However, it's most like the word unraveling meaning that the thing is being raveled.  This one has just become so commonplace that hardly anyone uses the un-prefixed word anymore.

(I fully expect Rothman to start using the word raveled now.)

[JayhawkCO]

This one doesn't involve a prefix, but I'm always kind of amazed that 'sanction' can have literally opposite meanings. It either means approval or punishment.

Bill is kind of the same. Either it means money or it means document that says you owe money.

[kphoger]

This one doesn't involve a prefix, but I'm always kind of amazed that 'sanction' can have literally opposite meanings. It either means approval or punishment.

Bill is kind of the same. Either it means money or it means document that says you owe money.

The biblical contronym is this:  "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2.24)

Now, I don't generally reach for my meat cleaver when I want to join to pieces of meat (flesh) together...

[JayhawkCO]

This one doesn't involve a prefix, but I'm always kind of amazed that 'sanction' can have literally opposite meanings. It either means approval or punishment.

Bill is kind of the same. Either it means money or it means document that says you owe money.

The biblical contronym is this:  "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2.24)

Now, I don't generally reach for my meat cleaver when I want to join to pieces of meat (flesh) together...

Not to be gross, but you are kind of separating flesh in the former as well.

[kphoger]

Not to be gross, but you are kind of separating flesh in the former as well.

For what it's worth...  ancient Hebrew tended to use very concrete terms for abstract ideas.  (Maybe modern Hebrew does too, I don't know.)  Thus, the phrase "become one flesh" likely referred to a reality that was much broader in scope than—but not exclusive of—sexual union.  It was a way of expressing the overall marriage union of man and woman, a union that certainly included sex but also so much more than that.

[JayhawkCO]

Sure, but was the term for meat cleaver related to the same word as 'to cleave' in Ancient Hebrew? Or is 'meat cleaver' an Anglicism?

[kphoger]

Sure, but was the term for meat cleaver related to the same word as 'to cleave' in Ancient Hebrew? Or is 'meat cleaver' an Anglicism?

I have no clue what the ancient Hebrew word for meat cleaver is.  My point is only that the biblical phrase "cleave unto his wife" used to throw me off because that verb is its own antonym in English.  That word and your "sanction" are the two words I always think of first when I think of contronyms.

Also...

Someday, your house might burn down by burning up.
At that point, your smoke alarm might go on by going off.
Afterward, you'll probably need to fill in a bunch of forms by filling them out.

[JayhawkCO]

Sure, but was the term for meat cleaver related to the same word as 'to cleave' in Ancient Hebrew? Or is 'meat cleaver' an Anglicism?

I have no clue what the ancient Hebrew word for meat cleaver is.  My point is only that the biblical phrase "cleave unto his wife" used to throw me off because that verb is its own antonym in English.  That word and your "sanction" are the two words I always think of first when I think of contronyms.

Also...

Someday, your house might burn down by burning up.
At that point, your smoke alarm might go on by going off.
Afterward, you'll probably need to fill in a bunch of forms by filling them out.

And this is why English is among the hardest languages to learn. Certain words have zero meaning, such as 'get':

Get out
Get off
Get on
Get off on
Get away
Get away with
Get around
Get in
Get across
Get after
Get at
Get behind
Get between
Get by
Get down
Get into
Get through
Get to
Get with

[CtrlAltDel]

Sure, but was the term for meat cleaver related to the same word as 'to cleave' in Ancient Hebrew? Or is 'meat cleaver' an Anglicism?

I have no clue what the ancient Hebrew word for meat cleaver is.  My point is only that the biblical phrase "cleave unto his wife" used to throw me off because that verb is its own antonym in English.  That word and your "sanction" are the two words I always think of first when I think of contronyms.

Also...

Someday, your house might burn down by burning up.
At that point, your smoke alarm might go on by going off.
Afterward, you'll probably need to fill in a bunch of forms by filling them out.

And this is why English is among the hardest languages to learn.

This is not really true. English is not known as a particularly difficult language to learn, although it does have its rough patches. And while it can take some time to get comfortable with phrasal verbs, other languages also have them and many languages that don't have similar structures with prefixes and suffixes, including English as well:
abject
conjecture
eject
object
project
subject
etc.

On the whole, this is just vocabulary, and familiarity with it will come sooner or later.

If you want a complicated language, try Fula, as described by John McWhorter:

For my money, there are few better examples than Fula of West Africa of how astoundingly baroque, arbitrary, and utterly useless to communication a language's grammar can become over the millennia and yet still be passed on intact to innocent children. Fula has as many as sixteen genders in the sense that we parse the concept in Indo-European languages, and which gender a noun belongs to is only roughly predictable beyond the one gender that contains humans. Moreover, within each gender, the marker varies arbitrarily according to the noun: leemuu-re "orange" but in the same gender class is loo-nde "jar." Adjectives, instead of taking a copy of the marker variant its noun takes, take their own particular marker variant, which must be learned with the adjective. Thus a big orange is not leemuu-re mau-re, but leemuu-re mau-nde.

Fula is even more elaborated than this. There are often not just two, or even three, but four variants of the gender marker. Thus in our gender that contains oranges and jars, the marker turns up as -re in leemuu-re "orange," as -nde in loo-nde "jar," but as -de in tummu-de "calabash"; in another gender, a strip is lepp-ol, a feather is lilli-wol, a belt is taador-gol, whereas a leather armlet is boor-ngol. Besides this, like any language, Fula has its irregulars: in one gender, you have to know not only that a noun will take either -u, -wu, -gu, or -ngu as its marker, but also that the occasional noun will go its own way and take -ku instead. On top of all this, Fula also has an additional complexification, of a sort found only occasionally among the world's languages. One of its genders is for diminutive versions of things, such as little boy versus boy, and another is for the opposite, augmentative versions, such as big rock or boulder versus just rock. By giving a "neutral" Fula word the marker for one of these classes, we create a diminutive or augmentative version of that noun—thus, there is a diminutive "gender" and an augmentative "gender."... That alone is no big deal, but Fula can't just leave it at that (the way its distantly related Bantu cousins such as Swahili do).

To wit: for most Fula nouns, when we tack a new diminutive or augmentative gender marker onto the end of the word, simultaneously the consonant at the beginning of the word changes in some way—and as often as not there are two different consonants that it might become, depending on which of the genders we are switching to. A man is gor-ko. The article for the augmentative gender is -ga (this is actually one of four variants for this gender plus an additional one that pops up irregularly!), but one says not gor-ga but ngor-ga. There is another consonant change to make gor plural: the plural article (like French les or Spanish los/las) is be, but one says not gor-be but wor-be.

All that is regular in this process, then, is that the consonant will change if the noun is given an article for diminutive, augmentative, or plural. But each consonant makes its own particular changes; a monkey, waa-ndu; some monkeys, baa-di (di rather than the be of gor because the singular genders each have their corresponding plural ones!); big monkey, mbaa-nga. And then some consonants have only one other consonant that they change into across the board instead of two; some consonants just don't change at all; and finally there are many nouns beginning with consonants that just refuse to change on these words even though they do on others; as with so much in Fula, you just have to know.

And finally back to those adjectives: not only does an adjective take its own gender marker instead of copycatting its noun, but an adjective also undergoes its own consonant mutation according to whatever its first consonant is. If you thought the occasional little ripple in Spanish like la mano blanca "the white hand" was bad, where masculine-suffixed mano is counterintuitively followed by a feminine-marked adjective, then imagine having to make your way in Fula where "a living monkey" is waa-ndu yeet-uru, but "a little living monkey," because of consonant mutations proceeding independently in the noun and the adjective, is baa-ngel geet-el, and this sort of thing is par for the course, central to almost any sustained communication in the language!

[vdeane]

Given that Doctor Who is resetting its season count yet again, does that mean we now have Disney Who in addition to Classic Who and Modern Who?

[mgk920]

This one doesn't involve a prefix, but I'm always kind of amazed that 'sanction' can have literally opposite meanings. It either means approval or punishment.

Bill is kind of the same. Either it means money or it means document that says you owe money.

The biblical contronym is this:  "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2.24)

Now, I don't generally reach for my meat cleaver when I want to join to pieces of meat (flesh) together...

It also depends on the translation of that scripture that you are using, they can vary greatly from each other and even have completely different meanings.  Case in point, which is correct - "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt not commit murder"?  Those are completely different meanings in English.

Mike

[Rothman]

Given that Doctor Who is resetting its season count yet again, does that mean we now have Disney Who in addition to Classic Who and Modern Who?

Wait...what?  Linky please.

It was just fine with Classic Who being seasons and NuWho bring series.

[ZLoth]

Given that Doctor Who is resetting its season count yet again, does that mean we now have Disney Who in addition to Classic Who and Modern Who?

Wait...what?  Linky please.

https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/doctor-who-season-1-reset-is-confusing-but-makes-sense-2366975/
https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-season-14-ncuti-gatwa-numbering-change/
https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/russell-t-davies-confirms-that-doctor-who-series-14-will-be-rebranded-season-1-2362786/

[Rothman]

Given that Doctor Who is resetting its season count yet again, does that mean we now have Disney Who in addition to Classic Who and Modern Who?

Wait...what?  Linky please.

https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/doctor-who-season-1-reset-is-confusing-but-makes-sense-2366975/
https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-season-14-ncuti-gatwa-numbering-change/
https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/russell-t-davies-confirms-that-doctor-who-series-14-will-be-rebranded-season-1-2362786/

Ugh.  What a poor decision by RTD.

I was hoping that Timeless Child nonsense would be retconned.  Oh well.