Minor things that bother you

[texaskdog]

And with certain things, such as gasoline sales, it's already the case.

I’m sure it could be done, given that concession stand prices at sports arenas generally display prices inclusive of tax.

One word:  Bars.

It is extremely common for bars to include the tax in the price of the drink. 

With gas stations and concession stands, they're only selling a handful of items.  Any time the tax rate changes, it's a relatively small endeavor to calculate the new price of each item.  Note that, at a gas station, only the fuel at the pump is priced with tax included—not all the candy bars and cigarettes and Lorna Doone cookies and frozen burritos and bottles of Yoo-hoo and bags of ice and fountain drinks and antifreeze and beef jerky that the same establishment also sells.

With bars, there are more items being sold, but the number of price points might still be fairly small.  That is, for example, they might have twenty-six kinds of beer, but they're all being sold at just one of three prices.  Or all cocktails are sold for one of only two or three prices per glass, depending on what liquor is going into the shaker—even though the bartender knows how to make thirty different cocktails by memory and can look more up on Google as needed.

But, think about how many different items are sold at Hobby Lobby.  Every time Flygut County passes a sales tax hike, do you want to be the guy who has to re-figure the sticker price of every single item?  And then, when Catpecker County next door passes a similar but different tax hike twelve months later, to do it all over again, because you're in charge of both locations?

[ Which honestly seems to underscore my point that businesses don't want to do the calculations beforehand, not that they can't.

if you cant do that math you shouldn't be in business

The math is that it isn't profitable to waste the necessary man-hours figuring out how to include tax in every item's price tag, when doing so provides your company little to no financial benefit.  If you can't do that math, then you shouldn't be in business.

So how often do prices change?  at the gas station we relabeled shelves once a year anyway (always moving things around)

[Big John]

wis-KYAAAAN-sin

The biggest error in pronouncing Wisconsin is mispronouncing the second letter as an "E".

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Sometimes I hear "wesconsin".

[CtrlAltDel]

Listen carefully to someone saying Wisconsin, and you'll hear a G in there.  Because it's easier for the mouth/tongue to switch from S to G than from S to C.

I'm not sure I'm hearing the /g/, but even if it's there, the tongue position is the same for /g/ and /k/, so that's not what would be causing the difference. If I had to guess, the difference I think relates to aspiration, whereby /t/, /p/, and /k/ are strongly pronounced, most often at the beginning of a word (compare the t of top to stop), while /d/, /b/, and /g/ are never aspirated. And, because the "c" of Wisconsin isn't aspirated as much in its position, this might explain the perception that the "c" sounds like /g/. The pronunciation of skin, scan, scare, and so on would also be similar. 

[CtrlAltDel]

Basically, I am saying if stuff runs together, its because I am being lazy.  All you go to do is give a little bit of a crap and you can not sound so lazy.  That's why it bothers me.

For what it's worth, I disagree with this assessment. The things you've discussed far are just a common and essentially universal aspect of language change. I don't think they derive from laziness, or if they do, it's not the sort of laziness I would consider to be a moral lapse. These sorts of processes are, after all, how the sounds of English that you do appreciate came about.

Didn't say it was a moral lapse.  I just say I feel lazy when I slur words together....without any help from drinking.

Fair enough. I, though, would prefer to think of myself as more evolved. 

[kphoger]

Listen carefully to someone saying Wisconsin, and you'll hear a G in there.  Because it's easier for the mouth/tongue to switch from S to G than from S to C.

I'm not sure I'm hearing the /g/, but even if it's there, the tongue position is the same for /g/ and /k/, so that's not what would be causing the difference. If I had to guess, the difference I think relates to aspiration, whereby /t/, /p/, and /k/ are strongly pronounced, most often at the beginning of a word (compare the t of top to stop), while /d/, /b/, and /g/ are never aspirated. And, because the "c" of Wisconsin isn't aspirated as much in its position, this might explain the perception that the "c" sounds like /g/. The pronunciation of skin, scan, scare, and so on would also be similar. 

You're correct.  Technically, the only difference between a k sound and a g sound is presence or absence of a puff of air coming our of your mouth at the time.  Hold the back of your hand right in front of your mouth, and pay attention to which letters make you feel breath on your skin.  Chances are, you don't feel any on the 'cin' part of 'Wisconsin'.  However, you probably don't on the 'kin' of 'skin' either, so what does that really prove?

[CtrlAltDel]

Listen carefully to someone saying Wisconsin, and you'll hear a G in there.  Because it's easier for the mouth/tongue to switch from S to G than from S to C.

I'm not sure I'm hearing the /g/, but even if it's there, the tongue position is the same for /g/ and /k/, so that's not what would be causing the difference. If I had to guess, the difference I think relates to aspiration, whereby /t/, /p/, and /k/ are strongly pronounced, most often at the beginning of a word (compare the t of top to stop), while /d/, /b/, and /g/ are never aspirated. And, because the "c" of Wisconsin isn't aspirated as much in its position, this might explain the perception that the "c" sounds like /g/. The pronunciation of skin, scan, scare, and so on would also be similar. 

You're correct.  Technically, the only difference between a k sound and a g sound is presence or absence of a puff of air coming our of your mouth at the time.  Hold the back of your hand right in front of your mouth, and pay attention to which letters make you feel breath on your skin.  Chances are, you don't feel any on the 'cin' part of 'Wisconsin'.  However, you probably don't on the 'kin' of 'skin' either, so what does that really prove?

Well, there are several differences between the /k/ and /g/ sounds, of which the most telling is generally held to be their voicing, that is, whether or not the vocal cords are vibrating while you say the sound. One way to perceive voicing is to hold your hand to your neck while you say "ffffffffffffffffffffffffff" and then "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv." But there are other distinctions between /k/ and /g/, and what can make things complicated is that not all of them necessarily appear all the time. One of those other distinctions is aspiration, which, as I've pointed out, tends to only manifest at the beginning of a stressed syllable, and even in that case, it generally only manifests in unvoiced consonants, and not voiced consonants. Think of, for example, the way Draco Malfoy might disparagingly say "Potter," with a very strong /p/, which would not happen, at least to the same degree, if his name was "Botter."

Anyway, what my point was in the preceding, and I admit I might be incorrect, is that because that aspiration is absent in the /k/ in Wisconsin, that sound might have been perceived as /g/ because /g/ always lacks aspiration. And if that is the case, then skin, scan, and scare, which have the same sound in the same linguistic context, might very well be perceived as sgin, sgan, and sgare.

[Big John]

When You Say Wisconsin, you said it all:

[zachary_amaryllis]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

[Rothman]

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Plunge right through that line!

[Scott5114]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

These are a thing because the open-source programmers back in the 90s when these projects were getting started thought recursive acronyms were pretty funny. Open-source programmers have a kind of unique culture that has a strange sense of humor.

Anyway, I don't think KDE was ever a recursive acronym. The "K" was originally for "Kool" (because CDE was already taken by the Common Desktop Environment), but later they just dropped it and it was the "K Desktop Environment", until they dropped that and now it's just the "KDE Software Collection" or "KDE SC". Whatever it's called, it's better than GNOME.

[zachary_amaryllis]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

Whatever it's called, it's better than GNOME.

agreed there.

[renegade]

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Don't forget about 'VIN number'.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Things like "Lake Kemijärvi" or "Songjiang River", in which the native word for that feature is said and thus creating a redundancy ("Lake Kemi Lake" and "Song River River" respectively). Personally I would say "Lake Kemi" or "Song River". Another thing is the recently elected European Tree of the Year, a holly oak located in the little village of Lecina, Aragon, Spain (Lecina being an old Aragonese word for oak, so that would be the "oak of Oak", although given the tree's age it seems likely the village was named after the tree).

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Things like "Lake Kemijärvi" or "Songjiang River", in which the native word for that feature is said and thus creating a redundancy ("Lake Kemi Lake" and "Song River River" respectively). Personally I would say "Lake Kemi" or "Song River". Another thing is the recently elected European Tree of the Year, a holly oak located in the little village of Lecina, Aragon, Spain (Lecina being an old Aragonese word for oak, so that would be the "oak of Oak", although given the tree's age it seems likely the village was named after the tree).

Translation is a messy and imperfect art. Most people don't know the ethnic words involved. We have "Lake Thousand Lakes", but no one seems bothered by it and few probably even know what "Mille Lacs" means in French.

[hbelkins]

The use of "K-9" for "canine."

[Scott5114]

The use of "K-9" for "canine."

K-9, you say?

(credit formulanone)

[CNGL-Leudimin]

This. That road is KS 9 (and US 77) for me, not K-9, which I consider nonstandard notation despite being official.

About the sales tax thing, that doesn't happen here in Spain (where it is called the Value Added Tax), there are fixed rates everywhere (well, at least on the mainland and the Balearics, since the Canaries, Ceuta and Melilla are under different tax regulations). Oh, and have I said the tax is (almost) always included in the price tag? So no surprises in that respect, except at some restaurants.

[SSOWorld]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Oh the good ol' department of redundancy department.

[tchafe1978]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Oh the good ol' department of redundancy department.

I remember listening to a radio morning show as a kid, the hosts hated the stat in baseball being said "RBIs", because to them that meant you were saying "runs batted ins". So they would always say it "RsBI." I suppose it make sense...

[Rothman]

...which I consider nonstandard notation despite being official.

Wut.

[1995hoo]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Oh the good ol' department of redundancy department.

I remember listening to a radio morning show as a kid, the hosts hated the stat in baseball being said "RBIs", because to them that meant you were saying "runs batted ins". So they would always say it "RsBI." I suppose it make sense...

I've always just said "RBI": "Howie Kendrick's grand slam gave him 4 RBI for the inning." It's correct regardless of whether it's singular or plural because the first word is "R" either way.

[zachary_amaryllis]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Oh the good ol' department of redundancy department.

I remember listening to a radio morning show as a kid, the hosts hated the stat in baseball being said "RBIs", because to them that meant you were saying "runs batted ins". So they would always say it "RsBI." I suppose it make sense...

I've always just said "RBI": "Howie Kendrick's grand slam gave him 4 RBI for the inning." It's correct regardless of whether it's singular or plural because the first word is "R" either way.

i once heard an announcer say 'this guy is definitely getting the runs'

and i'm thinking .. 'what.. was last night enchilada night or something?'

[1995hoo]

recursive acronyms:

php='php hypertext preprocessor'
kde='kde desktop environment'
i heard but am not 100% on gnu='gnu's not unix'

repetitive acronyms:

'atm machine'
'pin number'

that'd be like calling the thing you play football with a 'football ball'.

Oh the good ol' department of redundancy department.

I remember listening to a radio morning show as a kid, the hosts hated the stat in baseball being said "RBIs", because to them that meant you were saying "runs batted ins". So they would always say it "RsBI." I suppose it make sense...

I've always just said "RBI": "Howie Kendrick's grand slam gave him 4 RBI for the inning." It's correct regardless of whether it's singular or plural because the first word is "R" either way.

i once heard an announcer say 'this guy is definitely getting the runs'

and i'm thinking .. 'what.. was last night enchilada night or something?'

The Capitals' play-by-play announcer, Joe Beninati, frequently refers to a player who's been called for a penalty as going to "sit for a deuce." I don't know whether he's purposely punning, but I assume he is.

[jakeroot]

...which I consider nonstandard notation despite being official.

Wut.

I think he's saying that standard notation (or suffix) would be two letters for a state route/highway. Kansas would be 'KS', not 'K'. Likewise, Michigan would be 'MI', not 'M'. But it seems the single-letter suffix is the official notation.

He has a point. Not sure why those states, despite being one of many that share a common first letter, were able to capitalize on the single-letter abbreviation.