• (disco) in reply to Gaska
    Gaska:
    Lucy as "lucky"

    Holy fuck. One of my teachers insisted Sean is pronounced "seen", but with that one it is a very unusual spelling/pronunciation. Lucy though?

  • (disco) in reply to obeselymorbid

    Obligatory XKCD

    <img title="I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'." src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/baby_names.png" hey look I don't have to close tag!

  • (disco) in reply to Fox
    Fox:
    Also, considering we often dealt with solutions of much higher, and in many cases dealt with solvents other than water in higher level labs, some of which were irritants and at least one of which was carcinogenic, spilling the solvents was still a big problem.

    That's why the mnemonic specifically states "water". You need to know your reagents and reactions to stay safe.

  • (disco) in reply to Jaime

    Well, I mean, if the rule applies to other neutral solvents, too, then why limit it specifically to water? Of course you also need to know your reagents - yet another rule - but it's silly to take a perfectly good rule and only teach it for one specific situation.

  • (disco) in reply to Fox
    Fox:
    it's silly to take a perfectly good rule and only teach it for one specific situation.
    Isn’t that pretty much how a lot of the education system works?
  • (disco) in reply to Gurth

    ...good point.

  • (disco) in reply to dse
    dse:
    What I want to know is, why do British add "R" to the end of idea.
    What do you call a deer with no eye?
  • (disco) in reply to urkerab
    urkerab:
    What do you call a deer with no eye?

    A doe.

  • (disco) in reply to dcon
    dcon:
    Merry == Mary != Marry for me.

    I'm the opposite. Mary and marry are just a bit more nasal than merry. Mary and marry are too similar to really differentiate between; merry is slightly different if I'm enunciating.

    Gaska:
    I had an English teacher that pronounced "men" like "mean" :camel:

    I had a teacher who pronounced "eyes" like "ass"... well, not like I'd pronounce "ass", but it sounded more like "ass"-with-a-thick-accent than "eyes"-with-a-thick-accent.

    The class was computer pattern recognition, and he spent a good deal of the semester talking about facial structure.

    Gaska:
    I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'.

    I don't see Lolita on that list.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    These discussions always remind me of one of my high school English teachers, who once told us of having gone to a lecture where the speaker went on and on about somebody named /ˈælbɚt ˈkæməs/. It took her halfway through the lecture to figure out he was talking about French author /alˈbɛʁ kamy/ (Albert Camus). The moral of the story, of course, was to encourage us to make the effort to at least try to pronounce names close to correctly.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek

    This begs the question of whether the French pronounce anything correctly to begin with.

    <yes I used "begs the question" correctly>

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    at least try to pronounce names close to correctly.

    It's always hilarious when people try to pronounce Tsaukpaetra. Most people give up before opening their mouths, but the few brave ones who attempt it are always applauded....

    HardwareGeek:
    Albert Camus
    Would have attempted to pronounce this like that.
  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    It's always hilarious when people try to pronounce `Tsaukpaetra`. Most people give up before opening their mouths, but the few brave ones who attempt it are always applauded....

    How's it supposed to be pronounced?

    I'd have said Ts as in 'its', au as in 'auto', k as in 'sick', pae as in 'paedophile', tra as in 'extra'. 3 syllables: Tsauk•pae•tra. (I can't decide whether the t goes to the 2nd or 3rd syllable, or both)

    (I can never remember how any of those standard pronunciation symbols are supposed to sound)

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    French pronounce anything correctly

    I've never really understood the mapping between orthography and phonology, but I think I manage to get reasonably close, mostly. Of course, I've never claimed to know French (as a Latin-derived language, I can recognize enough words to kinda get some sense of the meaning, sometimes), so I may be more wrong than I think I am.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    pae as in 'pet'
    Very close! I personally say that syllable "pay", though the computer usually likes your version more.

    Also, I saw that :hanzo: edit! I'm keeping the first version for my raisins!

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    I'd have said Ts as in 'its', au as in 'auto', k as in 'sick', pae as in 'paedophile', tra as in 'extra'. 3 syllables: Tsauk•pae•tra.

    That's pretty close to how I pronounce it in my head, although I give the au more of an a-oo diphthong, like ow in 'cow.'

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Very close! I personally say that syllable "pay", though the computer usually likes your version more.

    I'm probably influenced by the tiny bit of German I learned, of which one of the few things that stuck was that when two vowels that can't belong together are put together, the first one's silent and you sound the second one: wie = 'vee', Wein = 'vine'.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Also, I saw that :hanzo: edit! I'm keeping the first version for my raisins!

    I hope, if the pet is a dog, you won't feed it those raisins...

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/f4/aa/3b/f4aa3b834d23ff91dde8092ac7328eb0.jpg

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    `pae` as in 'paedophile'Peter File

    Here, ITCTFY.

  • (disco) in reply to kt_
    Alcohol: vomiting, decreased coordination, diarrhea, central nervous system depression, tremors, difficulty breathing, blood acidity, coma and death

    So basically the same as for humans, then. Just more dangerous because it doesn't take much to put a lap-sized handful of fur to a 0.030 BAC.

    Salt: excessive thirst

    LOL

  • (disco) in reply to kt_
    kt_:
    pet is a dog
    yeah, but the poor bitch is getting up there in years.

    Unhealthy/Irritable

    Weird, she loves chocolate. But I'm not in the habit of feeding her the other stuff (I don't eat most of the other stuff, except Avocado). I do eat undercooked Milk though on occasion, should really get into pasteurizing the stuff.... The raisins are for decoration!

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Salt: excessive thirst

    Is that why she's so thirsty after... Um, yeah better not finish that sentence I suppose...

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Weird, she loves chocolate.

    Yeah, I've never known a dog that'd refuse to eat sweets. Still, they usually like eating boiled chicken bones and other stuff that could kill 'em. Pretty stupid they are, those dogs, when it comes to food.

    Oh, I've also known a dog that liked beer. It didn't die of liver failure.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Is that why she's so thirsty after... Um, yeah better not to finish

    :giggity:TFY

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra

    Dogs like sweets, and cats like fatty foods, both of which describe chocolate, but it's poisonous to them and can be deadly if they consume enough, especially the smaller animals (the lethal dose is smaller). Also, the darker the chocolate, the more toxic it is to them.

    That said, unless your dogs are small, it's more of a concern if they find your chocolate stash and go at it unimpeded, than if you're giving them a tiny nick of it infrequently.

    Most of the other foods on that list will just cause gastric distress and possibly kidney or liver failure over a prolonged time.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    find your chocolate stash and go at it unimpeded

    Fun story about that. Toddler managed to snag a new box of Ding Dong snacks from the freezer unit (luckily they closed the door afterward) and consumed exactly one snack. Bitch stole the box and took it outside, and proceeded to rip into the other 9 snack units with wild abandon. The carnage was pretty good, considering she wasn't a puppy anymore and hadn't destroyed anything for a while...

    Filed under: Neither were punished, neither died, and we only lost a box of Ding Dong treats by the end.

  • (disco) in reply to kt_
    kt_:
    Pretty stupid they are, those dogs, when it comes to food.

    Not that different from humans then.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Ding Dong

    Wikipedia: close to three inches in diameter A white creamy filling

    The name is rather appropriate.

  • (disco) in reply to obeselymorbid

    Three inches in diameter?

    Ouch.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Ouch

    You have to work your way up to it. But by then probably the only things you'll be accepting are elephants maybe wales.

    Filed under: I hear they're a delicacy in some places

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Three inches in *diameter*?

    Ouch.

    :giggity: https://youtu.be/sV0lKD3KPsc

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    The moral of the story, of course, was to encourage us to make the effort to at least try to pronounce names close to correctly.

    In college, I took an Irish History class taught by an Irish guy. I always thought this was funny: he would talk about a famous story from (IIRC) the Book of Kells called the Cattle Raid of Cooley, which he pronounced as you'd probably guess, "cool-ee", but there happened to be someone in that class with that last name, spelled that way, but he pronounced that person's name more like Cull-uh. :wtf:

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    not like I'd pronounce "ass"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6etQ2VaaGr4

  • (disco)

    One of my lecturers at University was German, and pronounced "angle" as "angel". Since he was teaching a class on vector mathematics, the word came up a lot.

  • (disco) in reply to Jaloopa

    I once took a series of math lectures given by a professor with a strong accent. He pronounced the second letter of the Greek alphabet as "BEE-tuh", which wouldn't be so bad if he didn't also run words together so that the initial consonants all disappeared.

    Things got rather complicated when β, ζ, θ and η ("EE-tuh", "EE-tuh", "EE-tuh" and "EE-tuh") all showed up in the same equation. Thankfully he rarely used ξ, π, φ, χ and ψ ("FIE", "FIE", "FIE", "FIE" and "FIE") together.

    Oh well. The Greek alphabet is used to being beast of burden to mathematicians' needs. Very sad life. Probably have very sad death. But at least there is symmetry.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss
    DCRoss:
    BEE-tuh

    Standard pronunciation in the UK. BAY-tuh sounds strange to my ears.

    I also had a lecturer with the worst lisp I've ever heard. If he said "slip", you honestly couldn't tell if it was "slip" or "flip", both were "thlip".

    He also couldn't spell it out because "ess" and "eff" both came out as "eth", so whenever he used an unfamiliar word that needed spelling out (his handwriting was also atrocious, so copying from the blackboard was also out), it was given to us in the phonetic alphabet. "thierra, lima, indigo papa"

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    This begs the question of whether the French pronounce anything correctly to begin with.
    Since all spelling is essentially arbitrary, of course they pronounce things correctly.

    French, though, is pretty consistent when it comes to pronunciation of spellings, but the reverse isn’t so true. That’s to say: with some basic knowledge of French you can pronounce most words correctly when you see them written down, but if you only know the pronunciation, writing the word down is a hit-and-miss affair.

    Compare this to English, where you can neither assume anything about a word’s pronunciation from its spelling, nor about its spelling from the pronunciation. Or to, say, German, where you can do both fairly accurately.

    Cue examples intended to disprove all of the above …

  • (disco) in reply to Gurth

    That's because, to borrow a phrase from James Nicoll, "English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

  • (disco) in reply to Gurth
    Gurth:
    French, though, is pretty consistent ... Compare this to English, where you can neither assume anything about a word’s pronunciation from its spelling, nor about its spelling from the pronunciation

    Mostly because we've borrowed so many words from French, German, and about a zillion other languages, none of which follow the English rules for pronunciation...

  • (disco) in reply to Gurth
    Gurth:
    with some basic knowledge of French you can pronounce most words correctly when you see them written down

    Yeah, I mean, about all you have to do is pretend there aren't any consonants.

  • (disco) in reply to Gurth
    Gurth:
    with some basic knowledge of French you can pronounce most words correctly when you see them written down

    Until you run into a nasal vowel, which most Americans can neither hear properly, nor pronounce.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    This **begs the question** of whether the French pronounce anything correctly to begin with.

    twitch

  • (disco) in reply to antiquarian

    Go back up and view the raw for that post.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    I did. You didn't, unless you were joking, in which case I will grudgingly accept a whoosh badge.

  • (disco) in reply to antiquarian

    It was a lengthy post about French pronunciating things correctly that depended on the assumption that the French pronunciate anything correctly in the first place. So, it begged the question.

    And yes, I'm joking when I imply that the French way of pronouncing words is by definition the wrong way of pronouncing them. But only slightly.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    It was a lengthy post about French pronunciating things correctly that depended on the assumption that the French pronunciate anything correctly in the first place. So, it begged the question.

    I'm sure I'll regret asking this: if the French don't pronounce French words correctly, who does?

  • (disco) in reply to antiquarian
    antiquarian:
    I'm sure I'll regret asking this: if the French don't pronounce French words correctly, who does?
    I think what you mean to say is:
    anotherusername:
    So, it **begged the question.**

    And yes, I'm joking when I imply that the French way of pronouncing words is by definition the wrong way of pronouncing them. But only slightly.

    Filed Under: Irony Proof
  • (disco) in reply to Fox
    Fox:
    I think what you mean to say is:

    Unlike you, I generally say what I mean the first time.

    Filed under: I got your irony proof right here

  • (disco) in reply to antiquarian
    antiquarian:
    anotherusername:
    It was a lengthy post about French pronunciating things correctly that depended on the assumption that the French pronunciate anything correctly in the first place. So, it begged the question.

    I'm sure I'll regret asking this: if the French don't pronounce French words correctly, who does?

    https://youtu.be/HxT75krIYsU

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Oh, you meant that kind of correct. I might have known.

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