People are saying “whenever” when they just mean “when” and I hate it with a fiery passion.
“Whenever I was at the game yesterday…”
When. WHEN!!
Boneless wings are just chicken nuggets.
Time zones shouldn’t exist. There should just be UTC time and you would go to work at the equivalent of your morning time.
Tabs, not spaces.
I don’t give a shit if your arguments perfectly align to the function. It’s only semantic indication. Use the goddamn special character that has its own dedicated key.
void main() { //code }Is better than
void main() { //code }Why would you want to put it on a separate line? Are you paid by the height of the source file or something?
English verbs have historically had present form, past form, and past participle form, eg. go / went / gone. I’m sad to see the past participle form being phased out of American English. People I went to school with and who I’m sure were taught differently (not to mention innumerable podcasters and public radio personalities), now say things like: “By the time I got home I found he’d already went,” eliminating the past participle and instead using the past form. Had saw is not uncommon either. I am old enough I refuse to incorporate this development in the language. If I ever encounter had was/were in the wild I might blow a gasket. Now entering my fuddy-duddy years :(
Okay I believe you and all, but I genuinely don’t understand. My partner has even criticized this in my language but I don’t get it.
Sincerely someone who wants to understand and was unfortunately homeschooled by dumb fucks
Thanks for asking–I’ll try to keep it brief (so as not to bore), and my apologies if I am retreading stuff you already know, but I’ll have to do some lead-in to explain why I care about this at all.
Why past participles?–and why I love them:
Starting with a couple of example sentences that could help differentiate the “simple past” form versus the “present perfect” form that uses the past participle:
- I saw a shooting star last night.
- I have not seen a shooting star.
In the first example, the time mentioned is “last night”-- a time period that in the mind of the speaker is finished or closed.
In the second, there is no time frame mentioned, but we intuitively understand that it is making reference to a period of time that is unfinished or still open–in this case that period is “in my life.”
I really appreciate the nuance that a change in verb form can impart, and so elegantly done!
Participles in telling stories
When it comes to telling stories to each other we almost exclusively keep the main actions in the sequence of events in simple past forms, eg.:
- I woke up.
- I got a shower.
- I ate breakfast.
- I couldn’t find my car keys.
- I had to take the bus to work.
But what if I wanted to have a little twist in the story where I make reference to stuff that happened before my narrative? In English we’ve got this great trick up our sleeves. I could use the past perfect, formed by had + past participle, eg:
- I couldn’t find my car keys. Little did I know that my wife had accidentally dropped them into the laundry basket. So I had to take the bus…
Simple, clean, elegant, and provides a satisfying twist :) Otherwise I would have to tell it like:
- My wife accidentally dropped my keys into the laundry basket. I woke up. I got a shower…
Or like this:
- …I couldn’t find my car keys. Earlier my wife accidentally dropped my keys in the laundry basket, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had to take the bus to work.
I guess all are valid, but I certainly find option 1 the nicest. Option 2 has spoilers. Option 3 is what many other languages do.
Verbs and simplification in languages
If I recall from my dabbling in linguistics, there’s a tendency among most languages to become simpler in terms of their grammar over time. Most English verbs are now “regular,” and you can make the simple past and past participle just by adding -ed to the end of the verb, eg.:
- yell - yelled - yelled
- ask - asked - asked
- smile - smiled - smiled
But among our oldest and most common verbs we’ve got bunches of “strong/irregular” verbs, eg.:
- go - went - gone
- take - took - taken
- see - saw -seen
These are the verbs that people are changing in spoken American English at present. People are “regularizing” the past perfect forms by dropping the past participle and using had + simple past. I know it mainly comes down to linguistics drift and personal choice, but I appreciate that these irregular participles have purpose (by being a part of the perfect tenses, and the nuance they can create), and history. Moreover, I think having greater mastery of these forms in your speech and writing helps make reading texts written in English before the end of the 20th century so much easier.
Long story short: people can and will speak English however they want. No big deal. But in the case of excising the irregular past participles from English, I’ll hold on to what I was taught and grew to love about English grammar.
Water is wet
Anyone who puts always-on blue LEDs in electronics deserve the oubliette. People who put such LEDs in electronics meant for the bedroom deserve an oubliette that’a slowly filling with water.
That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.
But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.
My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.
Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(
The beeping! My damn air fryer has to let everyone in the neighborhood know that I’m making food at 3:00 am, I hate it so much
Gonna ignore the fire alarm someday because I’ll just assume someone is air frying something
You can muffle the beeper pretty effectively with some tape, the old air fryer we had terrified one of the dogs because of the incessant beeping. My coffee scale by default beeps whenever you touch it, thankfully that’s 100% mutable.
I also hate this.
Or just excessively bright LEDs. Just because LEDs are super efficient, doesn’t mean they should take them as bright as they can go.
Appliances and cars should never have an internet connection for any reason.
Also fuck touch screens give me buttons.
touch screens can be justified IMO, IF the company let it function as a diagnostic computer but the auto industry seem terrified of actually making something resembling a competent configurable UI. Internet could be nice if the appliance just used SNMP or similar protocols that have been around for decades, but the companies seem to love that shitty malware they call an App.
Though as a kind of “exception”, I think that charging poles for electric cars should have modbus or Ethernet and a local protocol (matter maybe?) to use with smart home systems for automation and cars should have a standard affordable way to check errors and status of sensors.
“an historic” is wrong and terrible if you pronounce the “h”
“A historical” does sound a lot like “ahistorical” when spoken out loud.
Just an observation I just made.
Not in my accent. I would pronounce the first ‘a’ as /ə/ and the second as /eɪ/.
Thirteen months, 28 days each + one day. (Plus another day when there is a leap year).
It would just work.
Lousy Smarch weather…
That’s a cool thought experiment on what we do with that extra day. Like super ball out cookout?
We could make it a national holiday or something. Like New Year’s Eve.
Pedestrians have the right of way. Most of the other hills are survivable.
Where I live, it’s the law that on crosswalks you have to stop to let them cross, doesn’t matter how fast you’re going.
Except where trams are involved. Those have a license to kill.
All dates should be formatted according to ISO 8601 standard (YYYY-MM-DD).
Months should be adjusted so September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month respectively (so the literally meaning of the names accords with their actual meaning).
Not cleaning your kitchen knife after sharpening is trashy and contaminates your food with metal shavings.
Related: 12-hour AM/PM time, at least in written language, is dumb compared to 24-hour time. I don’t want to have to infer from context if 8 is morning or evening. Build that disambiguation into the written time, ffs!
yes!! I’m a fan of 24-hour time, though we should honestly switch to metric time, I think we’re at least a second French revolution away from that happening 😅
I use nanoseconds unix timestamps as my date mechanism.
are you a computer?
on smartwatch 🙃
Pineapple on pizza is delicious, that is all
February should only have 1 r
Februay feels weird to say
