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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 1, 2020 15:32:23 GMT
September seems to be a month devoid of any opportunity to say anything witty to kick off a conversation. The following contribution, whilst not relating to September, will have to do.
A search for long single word anagram pairs on the web produces many examples of such entities, some with as many as seventeen letters, but almost all are obscure scientific words or others which are, at best, made up with multiple affixes, are rare and are unlikely to be used in normal speech or writing. But an eleven letter pair that are common enough now are coronavirus and carnivorous. It is the longest and best example of which I have heard and for which I am indebted to Paul Sinha. Does anyone know a better pair?
Incidentally, people will be aware that when searching on Google and misspelling a word, one often receives a message reading “Did you mean — ?”. I have just searched “anagram” which I spelled correctly. Google asked me if I meant “nag a ram”. Someone somewhere has a sense of humour.
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 1, 2020 20:40:29 GMT
LJH: I like your coronavirus / carnivorous anagram pair – a worthy start to the month.
There's not a lot to say about September other than in Oz it's the beginning of spring – and has 23 birthdays on my calendar. (I've read somewhere that there are more Virgos than other star/sun signs because of Christmas office party shenanigans. I was an, er, accidental Christmas country dance babies.)
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 2, 2020 9:41:24 GMT
As you write, LJH, not a lot 'appenin' in September, eh. For want of anything relevant to language, I offer the following, which some could find useful. Any Moon geeks out there? I asked DuckDuckGo for the times of today’s full moon and it led me to the homepage of Moongiant. Their Explore the Moon Map is fun. (Well, for some people. LOL) It’s like an early GoogleMoon nav-map might be (of course there are no McDonald’s to clutter the place – yet). The site has numerous other features, but the map does it for me, and I thought it shareworthy. As you were …
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 2, 2020 22:09:28 GMT
As a young man I was fascinated to the point of obsession by the Apollo programme. To me it was (and still is) mankind's greatest achievement, and the thought that twelve humans have walked upon the surface of the Moon remains mind boggling. Each time I look up at it, orbiting a quarter of a million miles away, I'm stunned not only by its sheer existence but by the thought that we've actually been there!
I was disappointed and confused by the rapidity with which the general public lost interest in the programme. Apollo 11 in 1969 held humanity breathless and in awe of such a momentous achievement, but by the time of Apollo 17's swansong a mere three-and-a-bit years later, most people had all but lost interest.
Nowadays we have lunar-landing gainsayers, loonies who believe every piece of unscientific twaddle they read on Facebook; I'm not a violent person but I think it a shame that each and every one of those conspiracy nutters wasn't drowned at birth.
Of those twelve men who visited the Moon's surface only four remain alive, and the youngest of those, Charles Duke, is 84. How is that possible?
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 2, 2020 22:46:59 GMT
Twod: I recall many times in my youth getting out of bed at strange hours to watch one or another Moon landing / walk broadcast by the (then new) wonder of satellite television. The pictures were grey and grainy but oh so fascinating.
How far humanity has come since then (not all "advances" desirable). Now we watch Musk's and Bezos's space antics and just yawn. Perhaps so much excitement has given way to ho-hum.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 2, 2020 23:19:22 GMT
Space exploration is indeed amazing.
At the end if May, I posted a message regarding the Rosetta mission. It is worth another mention in a different context.
Rosetta was a space probe built by the European Space Agency launched on 2 March 2004. Along with its lander module, Rosetta undertook a journey of ten years to visit a comet and, on the way, performed flybys of Earth, Mars and two asteroids. On 6 August 2014, the spacecraft reached its destination and performed a series of manoeuvres to orbit the comet. Then, on 12 November, its lander module Philae performed the first successful landing on a comet. Bearing in mind that Earth, Mars, both asteroids and the comet are all orbiting the Sun at different speeds and the journey took ten years, it was an outstanding achievement by those involved.
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 3, 2020 10:31:01 GMT
Rosetta certainly gained my attention! Even with modern computers, the ability of those involved to calculate its three-dimensional, orbital motion through space was extraordinary.
Elon Musk's devices, in particular, are quite astonishing. A rocket that can land, vertically, on an autonomous boat on the high seas! I watched his manned spacecraft, live and in high-definition TV, travel all the way to the ISS and dock there; no more grainy monochrome. I'm not too keen on the man himself but I'm amused by the names he gives his devices, such as "Falcon Heavy Rocket", "BFR" (Big F*****g Rocket), and the autonomous boat called "Of Course I Still Love You". Nasa never came up with that sort of thing.
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 3, 2020 12:01:21 GMT
[...] I'm amused by the names he gives his devices, such as "Falcon Heavy Rocket", "BFR" (Big F*****g Rocket), and the autonomous boat called "Of Course I Still Love You".[...] And on the automotive side, his Tesla models are S, 3, X, Y. The Model 3 was to have been the E, but apparently the greater subtlety of the 3 was considered a smarter poke in the eye to "decency".
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 3, 2020 20:32:27 GMT
And on the automotive side, his Tesla models are S, 3, X, Y. The Model 3 was to have been the E, but apparently the greater subtlety of the 3 was considered a smarter poke in the eye to "decency". I hadn't spotted that!
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 8, 2020 15:05:34 GMT
Another go at sorting out English spelling — www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53941008Don’t hold your breath. ReadScript looks worse than the present “system”. I wouldn’t vote for anything that puts capital letters in the middle of a word.
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 8, 2020 18:52:56 GMT
I don’t much like any of the suggestions in the article which LJH linked, but perhaps that’s because I like to insist on traditional (odd) spellings. I do see, though, how the complexities can cause problems for those struggling to learn.
I can see that simpler spelling would help, and that once it has been accepted as traditional (much as the quoted example of musick becoming music) then there is no objection - but by what route might we get there? I don’t think imposing a new system stands much chance. We might halfheartedly try, and end up making mistakes with the new system.
Change occurs naturally and tends to head for simpler variants, so perhaps the slow-but-safe method would be to start accepting simpler spellings as we encounter them, without the objections which we so far normally raise.
How then to deal with (one of my pet objections) “break” when the writer means “brake”? I don’t know.
There's certainly a danger of local pronunciation, too easily dismissed in the article, influencing the change in strange directions. The article refers to color versus colour, then points out that both are pronounced “culur”. I pronounce both versions the same way, certainly. Neither of them do I pronounce as “culur”, though.
The samples differ, of course, but beyond that seem to have a problem deciding quite how “question” is actually pronounced. We see queschen, queschun and even questshen. The first two nearly get it, but the last makes no sense for me ... or for the struggling learner. None of them actually matches what I - or, more importantly, most people - actually say. I admit that in day-to-day informal chat I will say something like “quess-chøn” (I’m using the ø for a schwa, as it exists on my iPad). In more formal speech, I will say “quess-tee-øn”.
And what’s this strange retention of the letter q, anyway? Why not kweschun (etc)? That saves the problems arising from differing uses of “qu”: is Quebec kwebek, or kebek? Confusion? Kwel domarj!
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 8, 2020 22:22:37 GMT
I seriously doubt that any major reform, such as those suggested in that article, will happen. Languages change "naturally", and forced wholesale changes are unlikely to take. Just look at earlier attempts, all of which failed. (Even Noah Webster managed only a relatively few changes, such as ~or replacing ~our, ~er replacing ~re, etc. – and Americans reportedly still have trouble with spelling.)
Perhaps the most effective change would be to (a) train teachers properly to teach English, and (b) make greater efforts to instil standard spelling as early as possible, and (c) have parents read to and with their children from the earliest age. I'm sure that the latter is what helped me whizz through spelling and reading at school; Mater had me reading at four years beyond my age-peers by the time I started school. (I was also fortunate in having competent teachers at a good – state – school, which no doubt contributed, but Mater gets the praise first.)
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 9, 2020 11:11:41 GMT
We taught our children to read fluently - and gave them a start in other subjects too - before they commenced school. When they started there, my daughter had to sit, bored, marking time for a term, while my son was less literate after half a term than he'd been when he started.
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 10, 2020 21:23:32 GMT
In the absence of anything else reportable, I note that Diana Rigg has died. RIP
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 12, 2020 3:49:26 GMT
Public shocked as celebrities give baby stupid name – Betoota Advocate: Aussie satirical “news”paper Having suffered the taunts and blows of horrid sobriquets as a schoolboy, I’m sensitive to how people name their sprog. Some names (even if just unusually spelled, otherwise ordinary names) can cause lifelong problems for those so afflicted. I knew a chap whose only name (he used no family name) was Tertius, because he was his parents’ third-born. He had sisters Una and Secunda – I kid you not. His parents weren’t celebrities but university professors of the classics. Saddling children with such odd names is surely a form of child abuse.
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