- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
The same can be said of
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:stuck_out_tongue:Admin
at least there's a canon spelling of that one.
Admin
Go on, see if you can guess which. :smile:
Admin
lacking any firther information, and given that none is hidden in the raw i'm going to guess that you didn't watch because that would have required effort to watch and quote.
Admin
(we should have a page that has a link to all these common memes so there aren't 800 copies of them.)
Also, for some odd reason this came up in my GIS:
[image]Admin
FTFY. [image]
Admin
Read as
Admin
Or better, 1.21 jigglyw/tits
Admin
"Pee Enn Jee"
Admin
There is a clear exception to this rule in the case of the Small Computer System Interface. Larry Boucher has had his making-up-new-words privileges revoked for that.
Admin
Admin
I always thought "sexy" was an after-the-fact attempt.
Admin
Shaw was a bit of a crank about reformed spelling but I suspect a lot of people have wished ever since that he got his way. Even so: The real problem words are bow (tie) bow (polite address) bough (of tree) rough, tough, cough, lough. You can tell the people who only know written English because they don't know the difference between loose and lose, which actually do follow the rules. Because I speak RP (sorry about that) you can hear the difference when I say brake and break, but most people do not distinguish them. An RP-user pronounces break with an almost French é, but the a of brake is much softer. As a result, Shaw's reformed spelling would have had problems of its own.
Admin
If you really want to discuss bizzarities in English pronunciation, I will refer you to the following.
Jon Pertwee, when playing Doctor Who, was often a bit wimpish, and found himself intellectually flummoxed by situations where ideas were lacking and performances fell flat.
Tough Troughton, though, thought through trough thoroughly.
Admin
If you can say that ten times quickly without turning your tongue into a pretzel, I will give you seven Internetz ;)
Admin
Difference Engines?
Admin
Very appropriately given the way it migrated into ever more bizarre connectors, terminators and data rates. Considering the sheer number of USB connectors in the world, that has been an astonishingly stable set of designs. Is the micro USB the most successful connector ever? But there were at least 12 different SCSI external connectors alone.
Admin
According to Wiktionary: Break: /bɹeɪk/, [bɹʷeɪ̯k] Brake: /bɹeɪk/
Pretty darn similar to me. The only difference between /eɪ/ and /eɪ̯/ is that the latter makes explicit the fact that the second phoneme of the diphthong does not form a separate syllable. As for /ɹ/ versus /ɹʷ/, I'm not sure the labialized and unlabialized versions actually sound any different; whether they do or not, it has nothing to do with the vowel sound you're discussing.
Admin
Were the tables wooden? Do you have pictures of the books on them?
Admin
Like applying for research grants. To put together an application that goes into enough detail to satisfy the grants board (including bullet-pointed lists of the results you expect to get and any patentable spinoffs the institution will be able to claim), you first do the research and then apply for the grant to help fund it.
Admin
I'm not eating any of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6yySZA47r4
Admin
Is that why the cleaner was renamed Cif?
Admin
Tell her not to blow up any stars while she's at the costume contest, the judges take points off for that.
Admin
It's bugging me now; what character is she dressed as? I tried a reverse GIS, and got nothing.
Well, I say nothing; the 'visually similar images' brought up Babymetal, Mythbusters, three cardinals sat together, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Oh, and a pizza place :wtf:
Admin
Wow. No conflict of interest there.
Admin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Phoenix_Saga
Admin
I think that's the standard.
Admin
Not as much as you might think. Most of the people on the board won't really know even approximately what you're up to in the first place, let alone be able to understand what you're telling them. Being on the committee is often thought of as prestigious (though if my boss is anything to go by, it's more of a PITA than anything else, as you've never got enough time to do the job right) and is, of course, functionally an unpaid job. Committee members also have to be winning money in from elsewhere. More often than it ought to, acceptance goes to the superstars because they've got a track-record of being accepted. (OTOH, having seen a few unsuccessful applications in my time, a lot of the failures fail because they're obviously crap, a waste of everyone's time.)
I loathe the money side of the research grind.
Admin
You do know that people rarely speak exactly according to dictionaries?
Admin
Women are in fact very under-represented in management. I think you mean that many managers are at d*** level.
Admin
(not homoiophone, which would be similar-sounding, but homophone, which is same-sounding.)
Seems schools have become a bit negligent the last few centuries. They don't teach children to pronounce words as they are written anymore.
Admin
That's probably not usually distinguished even by people who speak with RP, especially as it isn't typically a long vowel (or diphthong) leaving very little time for people to pick up on the difference at all.
Admin
Too true. When we look at poets who in the past appeared to be using half rhymes, it's often the case that words have changed pronunciation, e.g. in the 19th century stone and gone rhymed. Dictionaries follow on behind. They record usage, usually of a particular group at a particular time, but the biggest problem for dictionaries in real languages is that there are no rules other than what the speakers follow. If you speak with an English regional accent, other people will understand you; there is no compiler to throw out an error. I live on the border of 3 distinct regional accents - Wiltshire, Somerset and Bristol. There are a lot of Home Counties incomers like me, making a fourth population. Some of my wife's vowels have slightly mutated into Somerset, Tony Blair is interesting - a trace of Australian with an overlay of Fettes, and perhaps voice coaching to make it more "estuarine" so as to sound less posh to the Labour voters. At best a dictionary can suggest to a non-native speaker how to pronounce a word in the most vanilla way, but it can't claim to be "correct". "RP" really means "if you sound like this you will be assumed to be social class AB1", BBC English was something a bit different.
Admin
Wow. I'm impressed. I tried a troll, and you answered it sensibly.
(Btw, we share this opinion/observation on dictionaries and dialects.)
Admin
Hmmm. I've worked in HIPAA / HITECH / ARRA2009 workplaces. It's a lot of fun. ARRA2009 makes managers (= CO people) of those workplaces personally responsible for breaches. In legal terms, the regulations pierce the corporate veil for such violations of regulations. An aggrieved patient can sue the company and the CO people.
In most parts of business in the USA, Mitt Romney is right: "corporations are people, my friend." But in this one case they aren't.
That's why front office people go into full-on "when in danger when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" when there's even a minor breach.
Also, health care IT people have a responsibility not to spread patients' data all over the place. It's theirs, not ours. But that's secondary to fear of being sued.
Admin
HERETIC!
Admin
Are you from Loughborough?
Admin
That depends on the language. In English, dictionaries are, indeed, descriptive. In some other languages, French being probably the most notable, they are prescriptive. The Académie française defines words, and if you use them differently, You're Doing It Wrong™.
Admin
What's particularly fun there is that the French people persist in Doing It Wrong anyway. :D
Admin
None of my managers have ever been that short.
Admin
When I was married, my manager was DD.
Admin
I surmise that the British Broadcasting Corporation would want to distinguish HIPPA ("aitch eye pee pee ay") from Hippa ("hippa") for the sake of the poor schmuck who has to read it on the air. They probably also do this in print media to be consistent, since the printed stories are often generated from the on-air script.
Admin
I know I'm late, but the graph totally leaves out a whole section: Data exposed by IDIOTS.
(Note, that's not a shout, it's an acronym: Idiots Developing IncOmpetenT Software. I didn't say it was a good acronym.)
Admin
I've seen worse. Much worse.
Admin
I haven't mastered this technique myself, but I've observed particularly skilled developers who could vaguely describe the problem using just the right words to get management to panic, but fail to communicate the actual issue to their peers.
Eventually manager panicfest escalates to the point that the CEO is CC'd on the email, at which point the original developer has an epiphany and replies-to-all with his brillant solution. Then the "who can be the first to manage the solution to this" becomes "who can be the first to congratulate the rockstar developer who solved this".
It doesn't pay immediate dividends, but it does come back in your favor at performance review time.
Admin
Let me try: Imbeciles Developing Infernally Obstructively Tangled Software
Admin
IMO recursive acronym is always good. Just that your "acronym" is not exactly acronym.
"IDIOTS Developing Insecurely Obfuscated Technological Solutions" could have been better.
Admin
Depends on a company. Over here it there aren't many requirements to push code into development trunk / head. But after that there's automated tests, QA, security checks, audits, and some other arcanes I'm not aware of before it goes live on production (there's even a quick check on production's staging before the swap). Sadly bugs still manage to reach end-users.
Admin
reminds me of a story where a tech got a phone call from a paranoid nutcase: the guy had unplugged his computer completely, (no power, even), AND wrapped it in tinfoil, and thought that still wasn't enough, AND when the tech FINALLY got a chance to speak, the guy cut him off after ONE WORD with "you're one of them, aren't you!" and hung up!