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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > sartorial tips from the fucktard D&D idiot train (Chat Thread)

«‹›2006 »

Joementum: May 23, 2004; jesus christ

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I need a source for this. I have so many friends who are all uppity about their Received Pronunciation and Spelling bullshit.

From a bit of Googling just now it seems I was slightly mistaken. The modern rift occurred when Samuel Johnson (England) and Noah Webster (America) published the different spellings in their dictionaries in the 18th Century and both versions of the words were used in each language prior to that.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 20:56

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 04:34

sexpig by night: Sep 8, 2011; by Azathoth

zoux posted:

Vietnamese was the one I was specifically thinking of but I also don't care for Cantonese. I don't know if I could distinguish them from Thai or Lao though.

I've never gotten the whole 'Chinese sounds so angry' stuff but I've never been around people speaking Vietnamese where I didn't think 'no really are they having a fight' at least once. Like, the language itself is really cool but it seems to require you to start every sentence thinking 'hey gently caress YOU buddy!'

# ? Jul 15, 2014 20:56

Filippo Corridoni: Jun 12, 2014; I'm the fuckin' man
You don't get it, do ya?

My sister had a job working for these jewish lawyers. The wife was a south african jew, and apparently talked all big about how disdainful of apartheid she was when it was happening.

Yeah, sure lady. Like all loving well-off south africans you were perfectly fine sucking F.W de Klerk's tiny boer cock, and promptly left when poor black people were allowed to reside in your fancy cities.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:00

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

From my experiences my family tends to yell a lot when they're speaking in Mandarin or Cantonese; maybe that's where the whole "angry chinese" thing comes from.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:00

zoux: Apr 28, 2006

Mandarin and Cantonese are completely different languages right? Like no cross communication, like how Spanish and Italian speaking people can kind of understand one another.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:02

silvergoose: Mar 18, 2006; IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS

Ehhhh, you can kinda figure things out knowing only one. But most people who know Cantonese also can speak some Mandarin, or are fluent.

And Cantonese sounds like yelling all the time, and apparently there's some other dialect that is even more so. Chinese dialects can get kinda weird.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:03

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

They can read each other's languages the same, but the pronunciation is mostly different, if my understanding is correct (maybe not, don't know). Wife speaks Mandarin and can read Cantonese as well as traditional Japanese and Korean characters.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:04

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

zoux posted:

Mandarin and Cantonese are completely different languages right? Like no cross communication, like how Spanish and Italian speaking people can kind of understand one another.

They sound totally different, yeah. I can understand some Mandarin when my mom speaks to me in it, but I'm totally in the dark when she's speaking Cantonese to her extended family. They've shared the same written language since ancient times, IIRC.

Cantonese does sound fairly similar to Vietnamese, though.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:04

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

I don't think you have this yelling issue with diaspora Chinese. It's a mainlander thing to just be completely oblivious to everything around you, isn't it? I've known plenty of diaspora Chinese, first and second and third generation, and they don't yell constantly like the mainlanders do.

EDIT: I love mainland Chinese answering their mobile phone. :500 decibel ringer: :don't turn it off for 30 seconds as you stare at screen: AAHHHHHH?!?! OHHHHH SHEEEESHWAAAAAAAA OHHHHH!!!! AHHHH!??!?!

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:06

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

The fob mainlanders at my university really yell, yeah. You can also tell them apart from ABCs because they have a pretty...funky sense of fashion.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:09

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

What, acid washed cutoffs, black hot pants, pink socks and black Converse high tops aren't all the rage where you live?

EDIT: With a FCUK hat and a Hello Kitty backpack.

EDIT EDIT: I live in the world's most visited city and our #1 and #2 arrival groups are Russians and Chinese. It's like living in 1982 again. I have the urge to smuggle Beatles LPs and Levis in my luggage.

ReindeerF fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 15, 2014

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:10

Warcabbit: Apr 26, 2008; Wedge Regret

ReindeerF posted:

Sorry.

Sewth Effrickens awl leev een puhth neaw thanks to theh blehcks.

You're speaking kind of strine, man.

(I had an Aussie 'nanny' for the first few years of my life. (read: foreign exchange student my mom, the teacher, put up.) I still have traces of the accent and slip fully into it now and again.)

Warcabbit fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jul 15, 2014

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:18

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

Bewdy mate.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:18

silvergoose: Mar 18, 2006; IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS

ReindeerF posted:

I don't think you have this yelling issue with diaspora Chinese. It's a mainlander thing to just be completely oblivious to everything around you, isn't it? I've known plenty of diaspora Chinese, first and second and third generation, and they don't yell constantly like the mainlanders do.

EDIT: I love mainland Chinese answering their mobile phone. :500 decibel ringer: :don't turn it off for 30 seconds as you stare at screen: AAHHHHHH?!?! OHHHHH SHEEEESHWAAAAAAAA OHHHHH!!!! AHHHH!??!?!

Ehh. My southern Chinese MIL and her family are...very yelly when speaking cantonese, first generation immigrants, and my wife is yelly when speaking Cantonese to them on the phone or such, 2nd gen obviously.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:25

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Pope Guilty posted:

It's almost like jargon is a part of every field ever everywhere.

Never call a ruler a ruler around an aeronautical engineer, it's a scale, it will forever be a scale

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:30

rscott: Dec 10, 2009

Joementum posted:

All the Francophone word endings in English got added during the Victorian era, which is why Americans don't write "centre", "colour", "labour", etc.

How do you feel about "lede", "graf", and "hed"?

useful and valuable words to play in words with friends or scrabble

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:31

zoux: Apr 28, 2006

I do crosswords like crazy so I have a very esoteric vocab.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:40

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

silvergoose posted:

Ehh. My southern Chinese MIL and her family are...very yelly when speaking cantonese, first generation immigrants, and my wife is yelly when speaking Cantonese to them on the phone or such, 2nd gen obviously.

I lapse into a very rural Texan accent when I'm back home in rural Texas, so I supersize with your wife.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:46

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

ReindeerF posted:

I lapse into a very rural Texan accent when I'm back home in rural Texas, so I supersize with your wife.

hmm

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:53

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

Obviously, you're not a golfer.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 21:56

paragon1: Nov 22, 2010; FULL COMMUNISM NOW

ReindeerF posted:

What, acid washed cutoffs, black hot pants, pink socks and black Converse high tops aren't all the rage where you live?

EDIT: With a FCUK hat and a Hello Kitty backpack.

EDIT EDIT: I live in the world's most visited city and our #1 and #2 arrival groups are Russians and Chinese. It's like living in 1982 again. I have the urge to smuggle Beatles LPs and Levis in my luggage.

God you're loving old.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:39

Mecca-Benghazi: Mar 31, 2012

My mom code-switches from Vietnamese to Cantonese a lot so I can hear her skyping her sister and then be like "wait what are they saying? Oh, it's Cantonese :downs:

:downs:

" which makes me feel bad because all I know in Cantonese now are food words. And then I hear my Thai friends talk and I'm like "Vietnamese doesn't sound like that!!"

Also whenever I write about Vietnamese in English I start dropping "ing" and plurals because who needs that poo poo, dumb as hell imo

Also, also: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004380.htm (language log is like the blog for linguists)

quote:

Hed, dek, lede, graf, tk: live with it

What do you call an apology for future behavior? Whatever the expression is, this post is an example. But it's also an educational experience, I hope, for those of you who don't know the meta-journalistic terms of art in the title.

I've never worked as a journalist, but in the unremembered mysterious way that we learn most words, I somehow learned these terms and their idiosyncratic spellings. "Hed" is head, as in headline. "Dek" is deck, which is a sort of sub-headline, a phrase or two between the headline and the body of the article that explains what the story is about. "Lede" is lead, as in leading paragraph, the way a piece starts. "Graf" is graph, as in paragraph, often used in combinations like nut graf, which comes just after the lede, and summarizes the story's content. "Tk" should be "tc", I guess, because it's short for "to come", i.e. not yet written.

That's what I think these terms mean, at least -- they aren't in most dictionaries under the non-standard spellings. In some cases (e.g. deck), dictionaries are missing the journalistic sense under any spelling at all. For example, I can't find the journalistic meaning of deck in the OED [but see below...], the AHD, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, or Encarta. Until I just checked, though, I didn't know about this lack of representation in dictionaries, because I never had any reason to check on this sense of deck/dek, any more than I normally look up any other word that I think I know and expect that others will know as well.

The legend is that the strange spellings of these words were developed in order to help distinguish meta-journalistic comments in copy (e.g. "dek tk") from the stuff that's meant to be printed. I have no idea whether that's true. But several of these terms are useful, however spelled. In particular, dek/deck and lede/lead don't really have any good alternatives; and graf and hed are conveniently reduced forms of paragraph and headline; and tk is a lot more succinct than "to be supplied at some point in the future", or whatever.

But there's a problem. Or rather, there are two problems, one old and one new.

Whenever I've used one of these terms in a Language Log post, using the idiosyncratic spelling, I've gotten email politely pointing out the spelling error, or asking me less politely what the heck I think I'm talking about. That's the old problem. It hasn't come up very much recently, because I've learned from experience and generally stopped using terms like hed, dek, lede, graf and tk, even in meta-journalistic commentary where these terms would be culturally appropriate.

But in my April 6 post "All X and no Y", I slipped up. The lede was:

"All mouth and no trousers" was the headline on a story in the 3/31-4/6 edition of the Economist. This is apparently a UK expression that I've somehow managed to miss. The deck ("Are foreign firms as keen on Asia as they claim to be?") and the rest of the story make it clear that the meaning is same as "all hat and no cattle", "all sizzle and no steak", "all bark and no bite", etc.

So I used "headline" in place of "hed", and no one complained about that. I considered using "sub-headline" or "sub-head", but after a brief struggle with my conscience, I decided to refer to the dek as "the deck", spelled in the normal rather than the journalistic way.

Well, no one has written in (yet) to complain that about the lack of ships, playing cards or outdoor furniture in the neighborhood of that deck. But Jim Lewis politely corrected my spelling. In the journalistic sense, he explained, it should be "dek".

OK, everybody, fair warning. No more pangs of conscience. From now on, as the fancy strikes me, I'm going to use hed, dek, lede, graf, tk and similar bits of journalistic jargon, spelled as seems appropriate to the occasion. Letters of complaint will be answered with a link to this post, my apology (or self-justification) in advance.

[OK, that's what I get for trying to whip out three posts over breakfast -- Jim Lewis writes:

Allow me, with all due respect and politesse, and at the risk of nitpickery, to adjust your course again. You wrote: "I can't find the journalistic meaning of deck in the OED". I use Version 1.10 of the electronic edition of the OED2, which lists, under 'Deck n1':

6. a. A pile of things laid flat upon each other.

1625 F. Markham Bk. Hon. ii. vi. §5 Any whose Pedigree lyes so deepe in the decke, that few or none will labour to find it.
1631 Celestina xix. 185 Subtill words, whereof such as shee are never to seeke, but have them still ready in the deck.
1634 Sanderson Serm. II. 287 So long as these things should hang upon the file, or lie in the deck, he might perhaps be safe.
1673 Marvell Reh. Transp. II. 394 A certain Declaration..which you have kept in deck until this season.

b. Part of a newspaper, periodical, etc., headline containing more than one line of type, esp. the part printed beneath the main headline. Also attrib.

1935 H. Straumann Newspaper Headlines i. 28 These are first decks (and streamers) only.
Ibid. iii. 87 The first three lines or 'decks' as they would be called in present-day journalism.
1965 L. H. Whitten Progeny of Adder (1966) 127 The eight-column headline told him of Pantelein's body being found. But it was the 'deck' headline that held him: county coroner cites 'vampirism'.

No entry for 'dek', though.

It's a cold and gloomy day out here in West Texas. Good day for dictionary-skimming.

It's a bit chill and gloomy here in Philly as well, but I spent the morning at the King Tut exhibit with a couple of 11-year-olds and assorted parents. No deks in sight, though there was a spectacular figurine of Ptah, whom the wikipedia describes as "the deification of the primordial mound", and whose staff is topped by a stack of hieroglyphs.]

[On the other hand, Jan Freeman (who ought to know) writes:

I have to disagree with Jim Lewis on dek vs. deck, and with you on adopting abbreviations.

At the Globe, where I was an editor for 20 years, we didn't actually use "dek" but "subhed" or sometimes "drophed/drop." So "dek" looks as funny to me as it would to any nonjournalist. (This is often a problem with workplace slang; local usage can differ dramatically.)

But even if I knew "dek," I would not use it in my own writing: There I say headline (or head, sometimes), subhead, capital letters or uppercase (not "all caps" or "up"), lowercase (not "down"), italics (not itals/italix), paragraph. I don't see why the journalistic spellings would be more appropriate just because the source is journalism; almost every subject has its in-group vocabulary, but reporters and commentators are supposed to paraphrase or translate it, not adopt it.

But while we're having this discussion, let's not forget the mysterious CQ. Some say it means "copy as quoted" -- an implausible locution, to my ear -- and it means "I have checked the spelling of this name/word and vouch for its accuracy." (Of course, an editor soon learns that some writers' CQs, like other sorts of promises, are not to be trusted.) I checked this a few years ago but the evidence was inconclusive:

(From "The Word," March 4, 2001)

The search for the meaning of cq - that mysterious abbreviation that means, to copy editors, "this is correct" - may not be over, but readers have come up with some good leads. "My first copy chief taught me the origin of this initialism," writes Jon Skillings, an editor at CNET.com. "Cq stands for cadit quaestio, Latin for 'the question drops' - or, more loosely, don't even think about bothering me with a question about the way this word is spelled."

Lorna Garey, an editor at Network Computing, also learned cadit quaestio in her early days of copy editing. Though the term has to be bent rather sharply to make it mean "this is correct," it does appear often in legal and philosophical texts, meaning "there's no more argument," more or less.

And cq is indeed an abbreviation for cadit quaestio (among other things). But I haven't found proof that this cq is the same as the editors' cq, so if you're partial to a different theory, there's still hope for your candidate.

I'm open to cadit quaestio, but I also liked the suggestion, put forth by Christopher Kenneally and Barbara McLean, that cq could be a phonetic version of sic - which means exactly the same thing. (Why not use sic? Because it's meant to be printed, to show that the writer knows he's reproducing a mistake. Editors need a code word obviously not meant for publication, like the TK abbreviation for "to come"). (End of Word quote.)

Best CQ story, from a former Globe copy editor: The green writer who, it was revealed some months into her career, thought that CQ was an instruction to the copy desk meaning "Please check"!

I wouldn't be surprised if some LL reader knew more about CQ than I could find out six years ago; perhaps you could pose the question, if it interests you.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:40

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

I object to you automatically treating me as an inferior.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:40

Mecca-Benghazi: Mar 31, 2012

Reindeer, are you like a white Texan expat in Thailand, a Thai Texan expat in Thailand, a Thai man who moved to Texas and back to Thailand, or what? Your story seems like it would be very fascinating

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:44

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

I'm just some white dude from Texas living in Thailand. I promise it's infinitely less fascinating than most things.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:45

paragon1: Nov 22, 2010; FULL COMMUNISM NOW

ReindeerF posted:

I object to you automatically treating me as an inferior.

Look at this guy assuming that loving old means inferior.

Don't be such an ageist ReindeerF

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:48

ReindeerF: Apr 20, 2002; Rubber Dinghy Rapids Bro

I'm called Dennis.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:50

paragon1: Nov 22, 2010; FULL COMMUNISM NOW

Pretty sure your name is ReindeerF.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 22:59

StandardVC10: Feb 6, 2007; This avatar now 50% more dark mode compliant

ReindeerF posted:

I'm just some white dude from Texas living in Thailand. I promise it's infinitely less fascinating than most things.

I don't know, I'd figure all the coups keep things moving.

# ? Jul 15, 2014 23:13

zoux: Apr 28, 2006

ReindeerF posted:

I'm just some white dude from Texas living in Thailand. I promise it's infinitely less fascinating than most things.

Isn't there a coup on?

# ? Jul 15, 2014 23:38

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

razorrozar posted:

Someone posted a crying Palestinian kid who lost his whole family in the D&D Images thread and I've been super depressed ever since I saw it.

me too, but in the pic i saw it was the dad who was crying & the kid's face was gone :hr:

:hr:

# ? Jul 16, 2014 00:40

illrepute: Dec 30, 2009; by XyloJW

Exclamation Marx posted:

me too, but in the pic i saw it was the dad who was crying & the kid's face was gone

the image of the israelis dropping white phosphorus on an apartment complex in gaza has been burned into my memory since 2008 so g/l on that front

# ? Jul 16, 2014 00:48

Homura and Sickle: Apr 21, 2013

ReindeerF posted:

They can read each other's languages the same, but the pronunciation is mostly different, if my understanding is correct (maybe not, don't know). Wife speaks Mandarin and can read Cantonese as well as traditional Japanese and Korean characters.

Yeah plus Cantonese speakers generally write in standard Chinese, which has the grammar and flow of spoken Mandarin.

I tried to learn Vietnamese. While the tones are very easy in Vietnamese, I gave up after concluding it is not physically possible for me to make some of the consonants in that language.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 02:34

Hollismason: Jun 30, 2007; An alright dude.

Am I crazy or has this whole Pope is a cool dude drive anyone else nuts? I constantly see my friends posting stories about how great this new pope is. Did the Catholic church just suddenly become okay with abortions, birth control, gay marriage, and equal representation of women in their religion and I didn't hear about it?

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:16

XyloJW: Jul 23, 2007

Hollismason posted:

Am I crazy or has this whole Pope is a cool dude drive anyone else nuts? I constantly see my friends posting stories about how great this new pope is. Did the Catholic church just suddenly become okay with abortions, birth control, gay marriage, and equal representation of women in their religion and I didn't hear about it?

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:20

Dirt: May 26, 2003

Hollismason posted:

Am I crazy or has this whole Pope is a cool dude drive anyone else nuts? I constantly see my friends posting stories about how great this new pope is. Did the Catholic church just suddenly become okay with abortions, birth control, gay marriage, and equal representation of women in their religion and I didn't hear about it?

But, they got a new guy who says nice things about the poor. It's like that global kidfucking scandal never even happened!

I will admit he seems a lot nicer than the previous dude. He also looks considerably less like a super villain.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:23

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; This does not make sense when, again, aggregate indicia also indicate improvements. The belief that things are worse is false. It remains false.

They've gotten much, much better. Both from internal perspectives (doctrine, politics and anti-corruption) and external perspectives (women, gay marriage and abortion) Francis represents a 180 in direction compared with previous papal "administrations". Is the Catholic church abruptly a progressive organization to the left of OWS? No, of course not- the church would explode into factions (and possibly incite violence in some regions) if they suddenly said they were ok with abortion, etc. What Francis has has done is make a number of statements that would make movements in that direction easier over the next few decades, primarily by de-emphasizing those issues in church statements compared with a focus on issues of wealth disparity and environmentalism. Realistically speaking, he's the best one could hope for, unless you're in the New Atheist camp- in that case nothing will ever atone for the past harms of Catholicism short of the public execution of all catholic clergy.

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:26

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

bring back lf

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:29

Vivian Darkbloom: Jul 14, 2004

lf scum bought me this title, don't bring back lf

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:33

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 04:34

paranoid randroid: Mar 4, 2007

pope frank is refreshing if only because he doesnt flounce around in those little loving hats and booties and oy gevalt can we get the vicar of christ some updated vestments

# ? Jul 16, 2014 05:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > sartorial tips from the fucktard D&D idiot train (Chat Thread)

«‹›2006 »

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