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Post by Verbivore on Jun 17, 2021 21:40:49 GMT
This is a not-very-important thought, but I have been reading about the enormous number of spiderwebs being found in Victoria in Australia. The report says that one should not “get out the insecticide and spray them”. My not-very-important thought is that spiders are not insects so theoretically should not be affected. Indeed, so, LJH. Not only is it a bad idea to poison the arachnids but it's fairly difficult. Spiders "smell" through their feet. Given how tiny is their footprint relative to their body size, only a direct hit on the spider body is likely to have much effect. If they sense poison – or any other unliked substance – on a surface they tend to avoid it. I have a spider-repellant method for areas I wish the animals to avoid (e.g. my bed headboard) that involves spraying the surface with strong-scented essential oils (peppermint, among others) mixed in water with an emulsifier. I've watched spiders walk right around such barriers rather than across them. Mostly I leave the critters to their own devices. As long as their webs are fresh and functioning they are catching more objectionable beasties. Victoria usually has an abundance of winter webs that catch the morning frost and make gorgeous nature-art.
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 17, 2021 23:18:41 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jun 17, 2021 23:46:41 GMT
I have been thinking about the post in which Vv described as wafflegab the language used by Professor Offord when responding to his award. Perhaps I can say a few words on behalf of the professor? Whilst I do not have any idea what is meant by “epistemic violence” or if it differs from any other kind of violence, it does seem to me that the professor is working quite hard to use value-free language, something which I think should be applauded. His achievement in that respect is not too bad for someone who is a self-declared activist-educator in the fields of humanities and cultural studies and who, I assume, is accustomed to grinding his axe.
The use of value-free language is unusual these days. I could, for example, have referred to the professor as being a “self-confessed” or a “self-styled” activist but either would have implied a value judgement by me. I could have said that the use of value-free language is “all too unusual” but that, too, would have been evaluative and betrayed my opinion.
Have folk noticed that governments perceived to be non-democratic are often described as “régimes”, a term not applied to British or Australian governments. When Osama bin Laden was killed/assassinated/murdered a few years ago, the event was described as an attack on his “compound”. But I am not sure how it was any more of a compound than number 10 Downing Street or the White House, both of which are also secure areas accessible only to approved people.
In reading news reports, it is important not to be misled into adopting an attitude as a result taking the casual words of the journalist as careful statements.
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 18, 2021 2:52:50 GMT
LJH:
1. Baden O brought "value-free" language to our university in the early '90s (and subsequently to others in Oz and o/s). He's one of the pioneers of its implementation in AU, NZ, and CA universities. But worthy as it be, I'm sure there's also a load of material therein for the Pythons, or David Mitchell, to create a sketch from.
2. "In reading news reports, it is important not to be misled into adopting an attitude as a result taking the casual words of the journalist as careful statements." Indeed. (I think?)
I follow the advice of my late* Pater (b 1889), who was a dairy farmer and wowser Methodist lay preacher.
"Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see." Pater certainly applied that maxim in his dissection of the news, both in The Paper and on The Wireless. He used to analyse deeply. (Perhaps it was all those empty hours with his head under cows as he hand-milked them.)
Yet in an act of what I can only see as cognitive dissonance he believed his bible: read it from Genesis to Revelations over every 365-night; lived it and preached it. If he had doubts on those scriptures he kept them very private, but then he was a quiet man who usually said little about anything.
* How late after a person's demise does one conventionally cease referring to "the late" so-and-so? Pater's been late for lunch now for 61 years. Is he still the late Oswald M?
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 18, 2021 23:24:58 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jun 19, 2021 16:40:41 GMT
The article on aboriginal sign languages was interesting but I wonder how they know that these languages have been used for “thousands of years”. I can well believe it but I would like to know what evidence there is.
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 19, 2021 23:35:20 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jun 20, 2021 14:43:08 GMT
Whatever botanist say I think that Australians will continue to call the plants that grow in Australia wattles and nearly everybody will call the flat topped thornbushes found in Africa acacias. It reminds me of the controversy regarding the downgrading of Pluto from a planet to a minor planet.
I am tempted to say that these sorts of issues don’t arise in zoology but I have recently discovered that there is a dispute as to whether there is one species or six species or even eight species of giraffes.
In biology, it’s all to do with shared percentages of DNA and lots of taxonomists have fun erecting new and improved hierarchies of organisms. When one considers that humans share 98.5% of their DNA with chimpanzees, one begins to wonder how appropriate any of it is to defining species. There are “lumpers” and “splitters” and they are all entitled to having their fun providing the rest of us can continue to talk about wattles in Australia and acacias in Africa.
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 23, 2021 1:13:09 GMT
An expression I see increasingly often in Australian news media is "x-year anniversary". I also see it in US media, but have yet to encounter it on British services such as the Beeb and Guardian. Is anyone else finding this usage (anywhere other than on the perpetually subliterate (anti)social media)?
No matter how often I bitch about this silly usage, it doesn't stop! Here is my latest missive to the AU Aunty.
In his article 'Can't stay, won't leave', James Purtill writes: "On the one-year anniversary of the fire …".
Please, can ALL reporters/journos of Aunty ABC cease using this ridiculous, tautologous American import! I have made the request of numerous ABC authors, but the message apparently isn't getting through across the service.
Anniversary derives from annus – year, and versus – a turning. To say 'one-year anniversary' is the same as saying the 'one-year turning of the year', which is a nonsense.
All that's required is 'first anniversary'.
Regards (Me)
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Post by Dave Miller on Jun 23, 2021 2:47:20 GMT
I’m afraid the x-year anniversary is endemic on the BBC and elsewhere in Britain. It grates on me, not just because of the tautology, but because the format allows such horrors as “six month anniversary” and even (yes, really) “three week anniversary”.
Perhaps people just don’t understand anniversaries. I remember shouting at the telly when watching the first programme in the tenth series of X-Factor. Simon Cowell kept referring to it as the tenth anniversary. No, Simon, ninth anniversary!
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 23, 2021 7:12:28 GMT
Six-month anniversary (ugh! – I've heard/read it!): how about 6th lunaversary? But who celebrates "week"aversaries, for heaven's sake?!
Oh well, I suppose I shall never run out of things to gripe about. lol
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jun 23, 2021 9:38:25 GMT
>>Oh well, I suppose I shall never run out of things to gripe about. lol<<
One hopes not.
May I gripe about “lol”? It used to mean”lots of love” until the modernists stole it. There is the story about the person who ended a letter of condolence with the expression LOL and upset the recipient who misunderstood the intention.
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Post by Verbivore on Jun 23, 2021 10:23:52 GMT
[…] May I gripe about “lol”? It used to mean”lots of love” until the modernists stole it. There is the story about the person who ended a letter of condolence with the expression LOL and upset the recipient who misunderstood the intention. Indeed, LJH, it's evolved from Lots Of Love (as I recall always written with periods: L.O.L.) to Laugh(ing) Out Loud(ly): lol / LOL, which itself is a shorter substitute for Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Arse Off or ROTFLMAO. I also recall of that L.O.L. era that love letters were marked S.W.A.L.K. for Sealed With A Loving Kiss. Such slop!From another board: “Three dead, 2 tubers missing after going over dam” – a June 18 headline on the US ABC. My first thought was a YouTube prank gone wrong. (On second thoughts, was it an odd headline about potatoes? Or yams?) How tech changes us, our thought patterns, our language ... . From L.O.L. to lol, from tubers (tube riders) to YouTubers …
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jun 23, 2021 17:02:51 GMT
This website lists several WW2 “postal acronyms” which were well known when I was a lad. We kids used to laugh about Burma but I think I may even have used Italy and Holland on the back of envelopes.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_postal_acronyms
But I notice that the obscenity of CHINA is missing!
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Post by Dave Miller on Jun 23, 2021 21:38:47 GMT
(Snip)
But I notice that the obscenity of CHINA is missing! Oh dear, LJH, you’ve got me trying to work that one out … All I can find on line is “Come Home, I’m Naked Already”, which is not high in the catalogue of obscenities. What do you know that I don’t?
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