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I couldn't imagine why. English only really became the global language of commerce and science with the end of the Cold War, before it was either English or Russian (in those countries that were affiliated either way). English only really rose to global prominence after WW2; before it was French that was internationally seen as the language of diplomacy (there's a reason it's called “lingua franca“), whereas German was prominent in both science and humanities as well as throughout Eastern and Northern Europe. Before the rise of French Italian had its 15 minutes of fame, and throughout the Middle Ages Latin was the language of international communication (and in some regards, e.g. as the language of the Catholic Church and its clergy or as the language of academia it continued to fulfill that role well beyond the 16th century). And that only covers Western and Central Europe, really. All of these languages have grammatical genders, and yet they became important languages of interregional communication because of a powerful dynasty or state backing it and/or because of its great cultural prestige. It's the same with English, and it seemingly being particularly easy to learn (I'm not too sure about that btw, afaik most linguists agree that the difficulty to learn a new language mainly depends on its proximity to the language you grew up with. Also English grammar can be surprisingly tricky, and its pronunciation is super hosed up) doesn't really figure into that, I think.
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Dec 6, 2016 19:45
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One other bit of English king trivia: Edward VIII, with a reign of 326 days. That's the king alongside Wallis Simpson, his wife. And the entire reason he only ruled for 326 days. Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Prince of Wales, was crowned on January 20th, 1936 after George V died. Unfortunately for Britain, he didn't really give a huge poo poo about being king and caused some furor when he repeatedly violated protocol or broke with tradition. But his girlfriend was the big problem. Wallis Simpson was an American socialite who had become Edward's mistress before she had divorced her second husband. She began spending a lot of time around him, and he was recorded as being "slavishly dependent" on her; apparently she showed "abrasive irreverence" toward his position as prince and later as king and had a domineering personality (I don't know of any credible theories that she dommed the King of England, but feel free to let your mind wander). Edward began letting her appear in court, which created tension with the Church of England (which traditionally holds a very dim view of divorce), and ministers were reluctant to send important documents to Fort Belvedere due to the fear that Wallis may start reading confidential information. Eventually, it became clear that Edward VIII intended to marry Simpson. And this was an absolute no-go: as king, Edward was head of the Church of England. As I said before, the church was extremely anti-divorce and Simpson still had one living ex-husband and hadn't even finished divorcing the second (she was not meant to remarry until they were both dead). The British public recoiled in horror at the idea of such a scandalous American woman becoming queen, and the British Cabinet rejected the idea of giving her a lesser title in case of marriage. Edward couldn't just go ahead with it without his government resigning in protest. So he quit. On December 10th, 1936, King Edward VIII signed the documents that officially abdicated him from the throne. Several months later once her divorce became absolute, Edward went off and married Wallis Simpson. Edward's younger brother, Albert Frederick Arthur George, suddenly found himself thrust into the role of king after figuring he'd spend his entire life in his brother's shadow. He reportedly broke down crying when telling his mother the news; he was completely unprepared for the responsibility and suffered from a terrible stutter that he never quite got rid of. Regardless, he assumed the name George VI and declared his older brother, the ex-king, to be the Duke of Windsor. This made Wallis Simpson, the upstart American, the Duchess of Windsor. Edward's story doesn't quite end there. He and Wallis met with Adolf Hitler, as Edward had experienced some horrifying scenes during World War I and viewed appeasement to be an excellent alternative to starting another war. The British public took a dim view of this, and Edward was even accused of leaking Allied war plans to Germany. He was appointed Governor of the Bahamas in 1940, where he did a decent job (while still being incredibly racist toward the black population) before resigning in 1945. He spent the rest of his life in retirement in France, never holding any important jobs and simply acting as a socialite like his wife before him. 27 years later at the age of 77, Edward died. Wallis Simpson followed him 14 years later, addled by dementia; she spent the last 6 years of her life completely unable to speak. Meanwhile, the reluctant King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, narrowly avoided being blown up by German bombing in London and willingly suffered the same rationing restrictions as the rest of the population. George maintained a close relationship with Winston Churchill and met with him every week for dinner and discussion of war and politics, and regularly visited the troops, bombing victims, and factories to keep up morale. He hired Lionel Logue back in 1926 as a speech therapist to try and overcome his stammer, and the two remained close friends as Logue helped him rehearse speeches and radio broadcasts. Overall, George VI was ten times the king Edward VIII likely ever would have been. Unfortunately, George was a heavy smoker and ended up suffering from severe cancer and other ailments after World War II. He died 50 years before his wife, resulting in his eldest daughter receiving the call while on vacation in Kenya. At the age of 25, Elizabeth II found herself queen. And she may very well be immortal at this rate.
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Dec 6, 2016 20:14
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On the topic of languages, English is structurally fairly simple, probably because it's been spoken by so many different people, rather than the other way around. Languages that are spoken by a lot of non-native speakers tend to get whittled down to the basics over time. This process of simplification has probably been slowed down considerably by the standardization of written language though. Jasper Tin Neck has a new favorite as of 13:42 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 20:55
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The "franca" from "lingua franca" does not refer to the French, and the term predates the era of French as the language of diplomacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
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Dec 6, 2016 20:55
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For all the bitching about how awful English is, it could be worse - Greek was the trade language of the Roman Empire  .
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Dec 6, 2016 20:58
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chitoryu12 posted:as king, Edward was head of the Church of England. As I said before, the church was extremely anti-divorce
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Dec 6, 2016 21:19
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:On the topic of languages, English is structurally a fairly simple probably because it's been spoken by so many different people, rather than the other way around. 
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Dec 6, 2016 21:38
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TheWeepingHorse posted:The "franca" from "lingua franca" does not refer to the French, and the term predates the era of French as the language of diplomacy. Huh, blow me down, another thing learned. Thanks! 
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Dec 6, 2016 21:44
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chitoryu12 posted:Eventually, it became clear that Edward VIII intended to marry Simpson. And this was an absolute no-go: as king, Edward was head of the Church of England. As I said before, the church was extremely anti-divorce and Simpson still had one living ex-husband and hadn't even finished divorcing the second (she was not meant to remarry until they were both dead). The British public recoiled in horror at the idea of such a scandalous American woman becoming queen, and the British Cabinet rejected the idea of giving her a lesser title in case of marriage. Edward couldn't just go ahead with it without his government resigning in protest. It's one of those strange things to think about, that this was a major crisis for the government back in the 1930s, but seems comparatively quaint to us today. Then again, go back 50 years or so before that, and you discover that British politics was defined almost entirely by where someone stood on the question of Irish home rule (so much so that the Conservatives and whatever Liberals were aligned with them on the issue were referred to almost exclusively as "the Unionists" right the way through until the Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified). Then, a few years later, the dominant single issue was tariff reform, where the defence of free trade turned out to be the one thing that managed to pull the entire Liberal Party back together when they'd spent years ripping themselves apart over home rule and the Boer Wars. By the same token, it's odd to think that during the Gilded Age in America, the dominant question in politics was whether the currency should be coined in gold and silver or in gold alone, or whether there should be unlimited coinage of silver if bimetallist policies were enacted. Another "fun" fact, actually, is that the United States was in a sustained state of depression for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (possibly due to the protectionist trade policies pursued by most of the governments at the time - I'm not really sure) which was known, at the time, as "the Great Depression". It has since been renamed in some quarters as "the Long Depression" (though the really ultra-minarchist libertarians, of course, deny that it was a depression at all because Cleveland is their favourite president). Wheat Loaf has a new favorite as of 22:03 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 21:56
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chitoryu12 posted:One other bit of English king trivia: Edward VIII, with a reign of 326 days. From what I understand it was the upper class and the government (basically the same) that had problems with Wallis. The lower classes either didn't care or liked Edward and wished him well. His father, George V said something about how the boy wouldn't last a year and that he hoped there was nothing standing in the way of Albert and "Lilibet" (Elizabeth II's nickname). Incidentally George VI's younger daughter, Margaret, died nearly exactly fifty years after him. He died February 7, 1952 and Margaret on February 9, 2002.
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Dec 6, 2016 23:55
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Corrode posted:I just picked stuff off the top of my head, I'm in no way a comparative linguist - happy to be wrong. It's just the theory I've heard described, I don't make any claim to how accurate it is This thread moves fast. I just think "a loving horror show" is a bit overboard!
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Dec 7, 2016 02:05
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Ego-bot posted:I heard somewhere that the English language, as a lingua franca in Europe at least, owes a lot to the King James Bible. Not sure how true that is though. While this itself is untrue, I understand it played a major part in unifying the various English dialects into a more standardized form. IIRC, it was actually the second translation of the bible into English.
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Dec 7, 2016 08:40
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Vaginal Vagrant posted:While this itself is untrue, I understand it played a major part in unifying the various English dialects into a more standardized form. IIRC, it was actually the second translation of the bible into English. It was far from the second. Wikipedia lists seven complete translations before it. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 08:52 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 08:48
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Alhazred posted:What caused the biggest resentment was that it was seen as really loving tonedeaf to cosplay as a poor peasant while the real peasants were starving. She did literally cosplay as a peasant, too. At the Hameau de la Reine estate within the Versailles grounds, she had a fake rustic "village" where hired commoners acted out scenes from rural life and servants maintained for her a menage of barnyard animals, including sheep and goats. Those were carefully manicured, washed and perfumed so as not to insult Marie's sensibilities when she came to milk them and otherwise tend to them. While doing so she wore clothes of a common fit made of the finest fabrics, and used tools produced by top artisans, including fine porcelain milk jugs of a design made only for her. A relatively well known fact, but interesting nonetheless is that M. A.'s notoriously austere brother Joseph II of Austria wrote her a thirty page letter of instructions where he attempted to explain to her the dangers of reckless opulence and the public disdain it caused, and warned her of the coming revolution "of her own making" ten years before it came. He especially hated her love of masquerades and "incognito" social outings which only served to boost her ego as on such occasions everybody knew who she was anyway, and so she was surrounded by sycophants saying the most flattering things about her and pretending not to know with whom they were speaking.
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Dec 7, 2016 08:55
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Marie Antoinette's conduct as queen makes her hard to sympathise with but perhaps that sort of behaviour is perhaps inevitable when you take a young girl (she was, what, 16 or 17 when she was married off to Louis?) whose parents weren't all that's interested in her and had something like half a dozen other sisters to compete with, even if she is already a princess, and make her queen of the most richest and most powerful country in Europe (and possibly the world). Speaking of the House of Bourbon, is there any truth to the story that Louis XIV only bathed three times in his adult life and he was so mouldy that one day an attendant pulled his sock off and one of his toes dropped off?
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Dec 7, 2016 10:01
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Wheat Loaf posted:Speaking of the House of Bourbon, is there any truth to the story that Louis XIV only bathed three times in his adult life and he was so mouldy that one day an attendant pulled his sock off and one of his toes dropped off? No, Louis was actually supposed to be quite fastidious about cleanliness, considering his era. He would change his undergarments several times a day to get rid of sweat. He would have his limbs rubbed with spirits and oils to clean them every morning. He liked to swim during warmer months, and he spent a bunch of time in the royal bath house which he had carefully fitted and decorated according to his personal tastes and supplied with perfumed, heated water. The myth comes from the fact that Louis refused to take "medical baths" which were performed by a physician and included a regimen of blood letting, enemas and other terrible treatments. steinrokkan has a new favorite as of 10:15 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 10:12
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It was the courtesans that probably didn't have access to a bathroom every day. They just changed clothes (several times a day, we're still speaking about wealthy nobles) and used lots of perfume. That anecdote is funny, though, because Louis XIV did die after one of his legs became gangrenous (because of a blood clot misdiagnosed as a sciatica).
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Dec 7, 2016 10:32
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She was 14 and her husband 15 when they married. She was said to have been a happy and carefree child, bad st school but with lots of friends. When she was promised to the French heir, she had to take a hard last-minute course in French language and etiquette which she detested. After reaching the French border during her departure to Paris, she was forced to not only abandon every single one of her Austrian friends and attendants, but also had to completely disrobe and put on French clothing instead to make some hosed up point, I don't know. Large parts of the French royal court hated her because of her not being French (many called her simply “l'Autrichienne“, the Austrian, which also was a play of words on “l'autre chien“, the other dog), for not caring about courtly protocol, for seeking friends of her own instead of sucking up to the powers that were etc. The public either hated her because she was foreign, because she was seen as way over the top ostentatious (not unreasonably so, though she toned it down a lot in the years preceding the revolution. Not that anybody cared at that point) or because she wasn't - when she let herself be portrayed in a relatively simple gown in reaction to the criticisms that she was too ostentatious, the silkmakers of Paris actually went to the streets, claiming that with a queen like this it was no wonder that their business was suffering. During her imprisonment and the following execution after a show trial she seems to have grown quite a bit as a person, to; even her sworn enemies had to admit that she carried herself with great dignity and have well thought-out replies to the attacks in court. I think that she was a ultimately a young girl that was abruptly thrown into a terrifying new life where ostentation was one of the few “outs“ of everyday misery her life as queen offered. Later in her life she seemingly realised what was going wrong, but at that point it was too late. I sure wouldn't want to be in her spot, neither during the trial and execution nor before.
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Dec 7, 2016 10:37
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steinrokkan posted:No, Louis was actually supposed to be quite fastidious about cleanliness, considering his era. He would change his undergarments several times a day to get rid of sweat. He would have his limbs rubbed with spirits and oils to clean them every morning. He liked to swim during warmer months, and he spent a bunch of time in the royal bath house which he had carefully fitted and decorated according to his personal tastes and supplied with perfumed, heated water. Right. So it's one of those things that history has exaggerated a bit, like the madness of George III. He did have mental health problems, of course, but mainly recurrent at the end of his life rather than something he had from day one; the Prince of Wales was only regent for the last nine years of a 59-year reign.
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Dec 7, 2016 10:38
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steinrokkan posted:The myth comes from the fact that Louis refused to take "medical baths" which were performed by a physician and included a regimen of blood letting, enemas and other terrible treatments. Enemas were quite startlingly popular back in the day, at least in hoi-polloi Europe.
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Dec 7, 2016 11:17
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Samovar posted:Enemas were quite startlingly popular back in the day, at least in hoi-polloi Europe. I've read that public bathhouses were really common in early medieval Europe, and only lost in popularity when bathing there started to be seen as a good way to catch the plague. That's also when anti-sex sentiment really became common, as it again did later when Syphilis was introduced to the continent. The book I read this in was from the seventies though, so this info may not be up to date.
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Dec 7, 2016 11:29
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Platystemon posted:It was far from the second. If you read through all those links, you'll see they're mostly based off Tyndale's translation. I forgot about the Wycliffe translation though so at least third.
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Dec 7, 2016 12:43
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So, apparently, prior to WW1 (and penicillin), one of the most efficacious treatments of Syphilis was a prodrug of arsenic. Neo-Salvarsan was an effective drug treatment that won its creators the Nobel Prize - it also had wonderful side effects like your hair falling out, horrible rashes, organ damage, your limbs possibly going necrotic. Also, it was rarely administered (intravenously of course) alone. Mercury salts, and iodine, and potassium iodide were all to be administered alongside the course of arsenic, so in addition to suffering the latent stages of arsenic poisoning, you also got to experience neuropathies, all your teeth falling out, and the fun feeling of losing your mind. The sufferer of this treatment probably got the shittiest bargain pre-chemotherapy you can think of - on one hand, the end stages of Syphilis, on the other, one of the worst course of toxic elements you can imagine. It's kind of crazy to think just how loving bad Syphillis was, in the days before antibiotics. Every 'cure' for it in those days is loving horror show. It makes AIDS look like a pleasant death.
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Dec 7, 2016 12:56
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For a brief period of time having syphilis was fashionable, having it meant that you were a player.
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Dec 7, 2016 13:17
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Vaginal Vagrant posted:If you read through all those links, you'll see they're mostly based off Tyndale's translation. Hmm, so they borrowed more than I thought. Even the Geneva Bible, “one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into English”, is an 80% match. As for the Authorised Version: quote:And the debts of the translators to earlier English Bibles are substantial. The translators, for example, in revising the text of the synoptic Gospels in the Bishops' Bible, owe about one-fourth of their revisions, each, to the Geneva and Rheims New Testaments. Another fourth of their work can be traced to the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. And the final fourth of their revisions is original to the translators themselves. Historical fun fact: translators were lazy. Wikipedia’s list is likely incomplete, but after the AV, it jumps one hundred and fifty years to the next possibly original (and bad) translation. So that’s three original English translations in four centuries.
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Dec 7, 2016 13:25
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A White Guy posted:So, apparently, prior to WW1 (and penicillin), one of the most efficacious treatments of Syphilis was a prodrug of arsenic. Neo-Salvarsan was an effective drug treatment that won its creators the Nobel Prize - it also had wonderful side effects like your hair falling out, horrible rashes, organ damage, your limbs possibly going necrotic. Also, it was rarely administered (intravenously of course) alone. Mercury salts, and iodine, and potassium iodide were all to be administered alongside the course of arsenic, so in addition to suffering the latent stages of arsenic poisoning, you also got to experience neuropathies, all your teeth falling out, and the fun feeling of losing your mind. Penicillin wasn’t used till the Second World War. At first, it was so precious it was extracted from a patient’s urine and re‐used.
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Dec 7, 2016 13:39
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Reading the Wikipedia page on people who disappeared mysteriously, it's clear there's two kinds of disappearances: there's people who were kidnapped, or murdered and their remains never recovered, and those are very tragic examples; the other kind is stuff like this man:quote:c. 834 – Muhammad ibn Qasim (al-Alawi) led a rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate but was defeated and detained. He was able to flee but was never heard from again. People who just walked out of history, never to be seen again. They might have lived, they might have died, but we honestly just don't know what happened to them. It's like reading the Wikipedia page for, say, a politician who achieved some significance in their role, then their page just stops in 2006 or whenever because they retired from public life completely.
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Dec 7, 2016 14:32
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System Metternich posted:She was 14 and her husband 15 when they married. She was said to have been a happy and carefree child, bad st school but with lots of friends. When she was promised to the French heir, she had to take a hard last-minute course in French language and etiquette which she detested. After reaching the French border during her departure to Paris, she was forced to not only abandon every single one of her Austrian friends and attendants, but also had to completely disrobe and put on French clothing instead to make some hosed up point, I don't know. Large parts of the French royal court hated her because of her not being French (many called her simply “l'Autrichienne“, the Austrian, which also was a play of words on “l'autre chien“, the other dog), for not caring about courtly protocol, for seeking friends of her own instead of sucking up to the powers that were etc. The public either hated her because she was foreign, because she was seen as way over the top ostentatious (not unreasonably so, though she toned it down a lot in the years preceding the revolution. Not that anybody cared at that point) or because she wasn't - when she let herself be portrayed in a relatively simple gown in reaction to the criticisms that she was too ostentatious, the silkmakers of Paris actually went to the streets, claiming that with a queen like this it was no wonder that their business was suffering. During her imprisonment and the following execution after a show trial she seems to have grown quite a bit as a person, to; even her sworn enemies had to admit that she carried herself with great dignity and have well thought-out replies to the attacks in court. I think that she was a ultimately a young girl that was abruptly thrown into a terrifying new life where ostentation was one of the few “outs“ of everyday misery her life as queen offered. Later in her life she seemingly realised what was going wrong, but at that point it was too late. I sure wouldn't want to be in her spot, neither during the trial and execution nor before. My fiancee has a fascination with Marie Antoinette, and this is generally the same opinion she has. It's easy to deride her decisions when you haven't had to live in the situation she did, and I think everyone would agree that chopping her head off was (to put it mildly) a bit of an overreaction.
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Dec 7, 2016 14:41
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A few pages back a poster pointed to how English has a difference between pig and pork. And then someone was like that isn't unique and we just kinda skipped over it. Well I'm here now to tell you English food terms are super interesting!We all know about William and how for a long period the kings of England spoke French. And I'm sure plenty of you know that modem English has a fuckton of loan words and things from that period. But the thing people don't think about is were those words tend to focused. Unsurprisingly, a lot of English legal and military terms come from French (attorney, army, guard, baliff, culprit, parole, jury, squad, soldier, etc.). But one of the fields that was really affected was food. So the interesting thing isn't that we have a word for pig and pork, the interesting thing is that pig is based on Old English and pork is based on French. And this pattern is pretty common in Modern English. Cow/Beef Sheep/Mutton Deer/Venison. This divide exists of course because our Norman overlords weren't gonna be working with the farm animals, but they certainly needed to be able to describe their cuisine. English also has a bunch of phrases like "law and order" or "love and cherish" that exist because one is German and one is French.
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Dec 7, 2016 14:51
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For those the term is legal doublet (sometimes triplet).
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Dec 7, 2016 15:31
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alpha_destroy posted:A few pages back a poster pointed to how English has a difference between pig and pork. And then someone was like that isn't unique and we just kinda skipped over it. Well I'm here now to tell you The French prominence in early flight also led to the three aviation/nautical distress code words: Mayday: Critical emergency, I'm sinking or crashing, there's a fire and we can't put it out. From m'aider, 'help me' Pan-pan: Mechanical breakdown, there was a fire but it's out now, I'm not in critical danger. From panne, basically breakdown. Sécurité: Navigation hazard. My rudder's jammed so I can't avoid traffic, I just passed a floating CONEX box so be sure not to hit it, stuff like that. The code words for everyone but the controllers/rescue and the stricken vessel/aircraft to stfu and to announce that it's now OK to resume normal radio traffic are also French-derived, usually rendered to English speakers as seelonce mayday to stfu and seelonce feenee to resume normal traffic. hogmartin has a new favorite as of 17:58 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 17:52
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hogmartin posted:The French prominence in early flight also led to the three aviation/nautical distress code words: That's not so much due to the dominance of France in the early days of flight, which was largely over by the time radio-telephony started to become widespread (although it did lead to the adoption of a lot of French terms for newly-required aircraft parts such as fuselage. aileron, empennage, nacelle, monocoque and so on) but because the adoption of the distress word 'Mayday' happened at London's Croydon Aerodrome, where most of the traffic was with Paris. It also ties into the point made at the top of the page, that English didn't really become the default international language (of the West, at least) until after WW2. Before then it was French, and it had been that way since at least the early 19th century. So when folk needed to concoct new stock words for the radio it was perfectly reasonable to make French the go-to language. It has the added advantage in English-speaking countries that words like 'Mayday' and 'Pan-pan' don't come up much (if at all) in ordinary English chatter so they stand out much better. If someone on the radio asks for 'silence' and the meaning is ambiguous. Switch the pronounciation to the French and it has a very clear and official meaning.
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Dec 7, 2016 18:18
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the future is WOW posted:Also Heroin, originally marketed by Bayer as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. Whoops! Weirdly enough, morphine and other opiates are now an approved and verified treatment for cough in end-stage COPD/Emphysema patients.
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Dec 7, 2016 19:55
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I was always suspicious of Mayday = m'aider because these days people shout 'a l'aide!' in emergencies afaik but what do I know. edit: looking it up, the current opinion seems to be that it's more because it could sound like m'aider but that someone came up with mayday first and it's a semi-coincidence. Another French Fun Fact: Louis XIV made having a fistula fashionable since he suffered from one for a long time so lots of people pretending to sit uncomfortably etc. NLJP has a new favorite as of 21:56 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 21:52
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A White Guy posted:So, apparently, prior to WW1 (and penicillin), one of the most efficacious treatments of Syphilis was a prodrug of arsenic. Neo-Salvarsan was an effective drug treatment that won its creators the Nobel Prize - it also had wonderful side effects like your hair falling out, horrible rashes, organ damage, your limbs possibly going necrotic. Also, it was rarely administered (intravenously of course) alone. Mercury salts, and iodine, and potassium iodide were all to be administered alongside the course of arsenic, so in addition to suffering the latent stages of arsenic poisoning, you also got to experience neuropathies, all your teeth falling out, and the fun feeling of losing your mind. Malaria works! But then you have to sort of cure the malaria too.
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Dec 7, 2016 22:01
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NLJP posted:I was always suspicious of Mayday = m'aider because these days people shout 'a l'aide!' in emergencies afaik but what do I know. edit: looking it up, the current opinion seems to be that it's more because it could sound like m'aider but that someone came up with mayday first and it's a semi-coincidence. It could come from "venez m'aider" (come help me), which is an actual sentence. Just shortened to the last word for the sake of brevity/clearness.
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Dec 7, 2016 23:06
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I've always liked that the cars box during a grand prix They say "box box box" not because there is a square painted outside the garage, but because the Germans use "Boxenstopp", and as box is easy to hear on a crackly radio it stuck.
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Dec 7, 2016 23:35
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I've also heard that "A-OK" came about because the "A" is a sharper sound that's easier to hear on an old scratchy NASA radio. No idea if it's true, but it sounds reasonable.
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Dec 7, 2016 23:50
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alpha_destroy posted:A few pages back a poster pointed to how English has a difference between pig and pork. And then someone was like that isn't unique and we just kinda skipped over it. Well I'm here now to tell you Funnily enough this is what I was referring to in the first place, so we've come full circle!
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Dec 8, 2016 00:21
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chitoryu12 posted:My fiancee has a fascination with Marie Antoinette, and this is generally the same opinion she has. It's easy to deride her decisions when you haven't had to live in the situation she did, and I think everyone would agree that chopping her head off was (to put it mildly) a bit of an overreaction. It really is a tragic story; she was apparently not all that bright and just didn't understand the intrigue of a royal court. As was said she wasn't that great of a student but she didn't write well at all and barely spoke any of the languages one would be expected to at court. She was literally a teenager when she was thrust into an already unstable political situation that she just didn't get. France already had bad enough issues that the king at the time (Louis XV) basically couldn't enter the actual city of Paris dressed like a king. Him and his court had to dress down and pretend they weren't royalty. France also got a sound thrashing in the Seven Year's War and was in crazy debt; it didn't help that Louis XV liked to gently caress pretty much everything and the royal expenditures involved a rather large number of mistresses. He was apparently a mix of a decent but declining ruler and a petulant manchild. A lot of the problems that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI faced were based entirely on simmering resentment toward the royalty that they had absolutely no hand in. The fact that Marie Antoinette just loved living in luxury and Louis XVI didn't deny her like...anything no matter how expensive it was just made matters worse. While the nation was suffering serious financial issues she was spending poo poo loads of money on things even other royalty considered completely and totally frivolous. Granted the other big snag was that the entire aristocracy at the time just plain wasn't willing to give up their opulent lifestyles. Marie Antoinette got pretty much the entirety of the blame. There was really nothing she could have done by the point that opinion turned totally against her. Intrigue and machinations within the country's political engine just made it worse as every problem the country faced just got thrown at her feet while her husband became severely depressed and basically let her run things. It was a broken, impossible to fix situation that she didn't have the tools or skills to deal with at all.
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Dec 8, 2016 01:10
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