How about..."oh baby, you're so fucking sexy"?
/Advance apologies for offending one's sensibilities.
![m013.gif](http://www.laymark.com/l/m/m013.gif)
How about..."oh baby, you're so fucking sexy"?
/Advance apologies for offending one's sensibilities.
scheherazade:
Nice choice of word, gendanken .
Noun
dilettantism (countable and uncountable; plural dilettantisms)
The act of behaving like a dilettante, of being an amateur or "dabbler", sometimes in the arts. Also the act of enjoying the arts, being a connoisseur. Can be perceived as superficial.
Please elaborate.
gendanken
One must use one's utmost skill in one's glottic endeavors to communicate to one's audience one's penultimate thoughts on the state of things, such as it were.
Well excuse me for not writing "one or more." I didn't realize that I was still on duty in my day job as a writer for a government agency.The article "a" you wrote up there in "a word" means a single word and not every language has one.
Shi is the verb "to be." Wo shi Mei-guo ren -- I am (an) America(n) person. But it's only used in the equative sense. The words we translate as adjectives are stative verbs, so the one we translate as "large" means "to be large." Gou da -- (the/a) dog is-large.Are you making this up as you go or maybe I'm wrong? I thought the word 'shi' in Chinese meant "it is", which is a way of saying "yes".
I don't speak Cantonese but in Mandarin bu yao, literally "not want" is a common way to respond "no" to an offer or an entreaty to do something. Anglophones rework that into the more comfortable construction "don't want." It's also used for "don't," as in bu yao gei wo tang -- don't give me soup.I love the Darth Vader meme that got started years ago over a bootleg copy of Star Wars in Cantonese, where Darth Vader screaming "Noooooooooooooooooo!!" is translated into "Do not want".
I lost the nested quote so I'll have to get back to you on that.Not sure what the 'huh?' is meant to convey.
It's quite common for expat communities to conserve an older form of a language. My mother's family was Bohemian (we call them "Czech" now because it's easier to spell and pronounce) and when talkies came out there was a modest Bohemian-language film industry in the Midwest where the immigrants had gathered--a generation earlier. When they proudly took some of their films to Czechoslovakia the people there had trouble understanding them and hired voice-over actors to dub them into the 20th century language. They said it sounded like their grandparents' speech.did you know it used to not be that way? Americans speak an English closer to the "original" of England. The Brits dropped their r's shortly after New Englanders started colonizing. Don't know why, though
I'm not talking about the R, I'm talking about the D and the T. That's why those two words are homonyms in American English, but not in British English where the consonants are pronounced clearly. In America we flap our intervocalic D's and T's. Leader and liter are also homonyms, for example.Now that I think of it, the English pronunciation of the 'r' in 'rider' and 'writer' is not the same as the rolled 'r' of Spanish.
In Spanish an initial R is a distinct phoneme and is trilled; it's equivalent to a RR. The R after a consonant in negra is a little indistinct. Try the R in caro. That's the same way we Americans pronounce the second half of "avocado.""Requete chula, mi negra!"
It was used to joke about it. We can't blame a person for the color of his skin because he got it from his parents. But we can blame him for the way he talks... Here we would say that he has a choice and can talk any way he wants, but in fact few people are more than minimally conscious of the way they talk and only notice the way other people talk. So for most people, the way they talk is also something they got from their parents.Was the 'oh crap' used to communicate a sudden realization of something?
A buck says you've lost interest by now,
but I took the time to read what you linked til my eyes crossed.
However, I have found source after source citing the Dyirbil language classing women as inanimate things. And that, dear sir, is quite interesting.
So for most people, the way they talk is also something they got from their parents.
clearly erroneous, ja? the rule sets that govern placement are altogether not entirely rational hence the easy associations are necessarily suspect.
I'm familiar with the concept of word classes and I've seen a couple of proposed paradigms of word classes. The Chinese words we translate as adjectives are regarded by (AFAIK) all linguists as "stative verbs." They have three types of verbs: stative, equative and transitive. To argue over some of the fine points that the word-class paradigms stress is a little too pedantic for me. What's the difference between "I am sick" and "I am ailing"? They both mean the same thing but "sick" is an adjective and "ailing" is a participle. Chinese doesn't have the progressive tense so they just say wo bing, "I ail." (I may have misspelled that.)It does, depending on how we understand the system of word classes.
So much for tradition, eh?Someone operating out of a traditional understanding of the system of word classes will perceive them in any language.
For all of these detailed differences between Chinese and English, they are still remarkably similar in many ways, particularly syntax: subject-verb-object. As I mentioned before, Japanese syntax is topic-description, which requires you to adopt a whole new way of thinking.I've read a comment recently where a native speaker of English who learned Japanese for three years said that he has learned more about English grammar in those classes than he did in his English classes.
You mean like Mongolian or Manchurian?I'm not Chinese, nor anything close to that. . . .
The Chinese seem to regard "to be sick" as a change of state rather than a quality. They regard size as a contest: a common way to ask whether Joe is taller than Sue is Zhou gao, Su gao -- "Joe is tall, (or) Sue is tall?". . . . but this is how I understand adjectives too - a conglomerate of quality + the fact that it exists in relation to something.
And who is this famous "they" of whom you speak, Kemosabe? Do Chinese, Bantu, Olmec and Maori philosophers also use this paradigm?In fact, in philosophy, they sometimes list three basic and inextricable categories: 1. thing, 2. quality, 3. relation.
Jim Henson and the whole Muppeteer team love to have fun with words and language. That was one of the things that made Sesame Street so successful with its audience AND their parents and teachers. Many episodes of Fraggle Rock featured issues of words and language.No language is "weird" if one is born into it or is otherwise fluent in it. Unless, perhaps, one is a fraggle.
If everybody in the community uses them then there's no disrespect. Or at least for them it's no more disrespectful to call each other a dickhead or a shitface than it is for us to call each other a dilettante or a (whatever one of you called me on a previous page).How is it even possible to not be disrespectful of other persons and use swear words??
Children think farting is funny. They have to be taught to be offended by it. Obviously there's something unnatural in our adult attitude toward it.Swearing is like farting: it may not be intended to offend anyone personally, but it does.
Now it routinely appears on the kids' page of the Washington Post."Fart", I hear, used to be considered a curse one couldn't say on American television.
and "dick," "crap" and "piss." "Asshole" and "bullshit" haven't made it to prime time yet, but women use them in business meetings so it won't be long.You can say "pussy" and "bitch" on the networks now . . . .
American culture goes through these huge pendulum swings with some regularity. As I've noted in other threads, look at our national attitudes about alcohol and religion. The 20th century saw a complete swing from -1 to +1 to -1 on both issues.. . . . and its perfectly normal to see bush and tits on the big screen where only 10 years ago you'd be burned for it. This means someone is changing the rules.
She's Canadian. That's just her dialect of English.Know what I consider a far more telling form of dilettantism? I can't put my finger on it, but its something about the way scheherazade is writing in here that screams of it. Its in her excessive use of 'one' in place of first person singular, as in here:
"One could broaden one's vocabulary."
No to both. English is a Germanic language, not Latinate (or Romance as we say today), and that's not where the faux rule about split infinitives came from.Most style/grammar guides these days aren't in the least concerned about split infinitives, either. That "rule" only developed because English is a Latinate language, and it is impossible to split an infinitive in Latin.
In Victorian times "leg" was taboo so the word "drumstick" was coined.Over the centuries, the particular words considered taboo morph. Even the categories considered taboo evolve. And it varies from culture to culture.
Rule 3 (Important-property): If a subset of referents has some particular important property that the rest of the set does not have,
then the members of that subset may be assigned to a different class from the rest of the set, to ‘mark’ that particular important property. In Dyirbal, the important property is often [+harmful]. (reid)[/FONT]
Ah, here it is:I lost the nested quote so I'll have to get back to you on that.
How can the word "lisp" be of imitative origin if no one who lisps can say it? If it was of imitative origin it would be, at the very least, "lithp."Dictionary.com assures us that the word (which has cognates in all the Germanic languages) is of imitative origin. Huh?gendanken said:I used to love pointing out that the sadist who put the ‘s’ in ‘lisp’ ”
Well I did say "most people." This rampant migration of families all over the landscape is a recent phenomenon. But more importantly, at least in the media-saturated USA, radio and TV compete with parents for linguistic authority over their children. Network announcers and actors speak in the now-standard hybrid Hollywood-New York accent, where their studios are concentrated. So every generation grows up speaking a more standardized dialect of American English, to the point that they're not even dialects anymore but just accents (differing only in pronunciation rather than grammar and/or vocabulary)not so. consider a hick moving to cali with children
More precisely, they were rational centuries or millennia ago to the Iron Age or Bronze Age or Stone Age people who unconsciously crafted them. As I noted earlier, many of these ancient paradigms have decayed and are now largely impossible to figure out. Why is sun masculine and moon feminine in Latin, but the other way round in German?I am sure that the rules that govern category placement are rational . . . .
How about cryptic sexual dimorphism? We've always wondered how birds of most species can tell which ones to court since they all look the same. It turns out that their eyes have more kinds of photoreceptors than ours and they can see up into the ultraviolet spectrum. They have ultraviolet pigmentation that identifies their sex.In biology, there is the phenomenon of cryptic speciation: to the ordinary human eye, nose and ears, the animals seem the same - yet they are of different species.
Entertain, comfort, educate, nourish, transport, babysit, protect...He who neither rouses fear by his anger, nor confers a favour when he is pleased, can neither control nor protect. What can he do?
Everything in moderation. People who insert one or more four-letter words into every sentence are likely to offend the more sensitive among us and bore the others. But to understand their impact and to therefore use them sparingly and judiciously is simply to make use of the entire vocabulary that the language provides.So if you don't use profanity as part of your verbal pallette, what the bloody hell do you substitute? I dunno, swearing and getting raunchy makes me feel liberated and free. I wouldn't give it up.
He who neither rouses fear by his anger, nor confers a favour when he is pleased, can neither control nor protect. What can he do?
Entertain, comfort, educate, nourish, transport, babysit, protect...
Why? Do you suppose that rousing fear and conferring favor are the only important things we can do for each other? Isn't that a rather Paleolithic model of a human community?
On what planet in what millennium? Everyone needs leadership and security, but we also need all the other things I mentioned, from education and transportation to entertainment and plumbing. And it takes a considerably greater percentage of the population to provide the latter than the former.Control and protection are what is sought.
On what planet in what millennium?
That's a rather unbalanced perspective on civilization. It can be argued that communication is a much more fundamental part of all of those things--especially when they're successful.Always, everywhere. Control and protection are an integral part of a successful education, transportation and all the other things you mention.