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Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ.

I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.

This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write.

The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.


> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.

Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.


Most writing is intended to communicate. Business writing is intended to create an impression.

someone starts using business english and my bullshit meter pegs.

my significant other loves the "real life mormon housewives" and "lovingly blind" reality shows, and when they use business english (a weird thing to do when talking about relationships, but hey, what do I know I'm an engineer) it's a tell that they're lying.


I think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.

As a US student, clarity and simplicity was always emphasized when I was being taught to write.

Never thought of Strunk & White as being distinctly American, but I guess you have a point.


It's most likely that they are. As farfetched as this sounds, the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop influenced American writing a great deal, encouraging writing to be taught in the "American" / Hemingway style.

> “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.”

https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...


> thought to write

Taught?


Yea. I've been in the States for 8 years, yet sometimes my brain thinks about a word and writes it down phonetically.

But hey, at least you know I didn't use ChatGPT to conjure that comment.


Sorry for the pedantry, but "thought" and "taught" are actually phonetically different (/θɑːt/ vs /tɑːt/).

I appreciate that. I tried to pronounce them, and out loud I do differentiate.

But the voice in my head does not.

Pedantry is what makes me better.


That may not be true if you struggle with "th"? Some ESL speakers do.

intentional typo to throw off the clankers :)

or an intentionally-prompted typo to throw off the anti-clankers. ;)

"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."

- Network (1976)


Why are your comments in double quotes?

Growing up as a child whenever the family drove somewhere, if my dad saw someone with car trouble he would stop.

It helped that he was a real engineer and an excellent mechanic, but I think there was also a Christian duty in there as well for him.


Parker's Automotive is a pretty cool youtube channel, guy goes around in his truck and mostly does work for free. Seems like every day he's finding someone stopped in a lane.

I think he's been able to parlay it into an awesome youtube career, and the amount of people who stop on the street to sing his praises is unreal. Sometimes 15+ in one video, it's nuts. He's a hero to the people. Love to see it.


I try to stop when I can, and occasionally pick up a hitchhiker, but I don't risk it when I have kids in the car.

This TV show is horrendously bad.

I found it exceptionally good (season 1 at least).

Men can't have children.

That really should only matter for the direct maternity leave and maybe some disruption at work during pregnancy. The years of child raising after that point is probably more important for this?

By that stage most mothers have already formed emotional bonds to their children which can't easily (at all?) be replaced even by a father. Raising a child isn't some sort of equation, Marx.

So have paternity leave too so men can form those bonds.

Men can care for and raise children.

Which is a great backup, but they tend to be physically, psychologically and emotionally less suited to it. Most men are less motherly than most women. We are not blank slates.

Evidence?

Men are less "motherly" because we are discouraged by society from being that. Even your choice of words shows your prejudice.

I was my kids primary parent when married and a single dad after divorce. I am MUCH better suited to raising kids than my ex-wife was. That is largely a result of how I was raised to have empathy and care about people.


> Even your choice of words shows your prejudice.

My implication that being motherly is good for a primary child raiser shows my prejudice? It's actually just a random phenomenon detached from fitness?

What's your opinion of apple pie?


To try to remove the word motherly there, your comment could be written as:

Most men are worse parents than most women.

Do you think that is a good representation of what you are saying? Do you think it's true? Are men inherently worse at parenting, or is there something else at play?

And I would also like to know what your evidence is for that.


I think we are coming close to some of the issues causing the current fertility crisis.

Men and women play two different, complementary, and equally necessary roles when rearing children. Still, rearing children is more time-consuming for the woman than it is for the man.

> Men and women play two different, complementary, and equally necessary roles when rearing children.

Numerous studies and several meta analyses found no significant differences between children raised by 1 man and 1 woman, 2 men, or 2 women. Studies or interpretations which found differences made errors such as not controlling for divorce.[1]

[1] https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equali...


Big if true

People who don't want to die before taking a holiday.

> Microsoft Windows

> UNKLE

I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online.

DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oRwnUM10mf4


>Psyence Fiction

Its kinda crazy, I loved that album in the 2000's, but hadn't really listened to it in about a decade until youtube brought it up again recently.


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