a little bit of this, a little bit of that

2018.10.05
Cracked.com, a daily source of interesting content, had a bit on 5 Oddities Of Everyday Language That Leave Experts Baffled - why we would say "King-Kong" or "Fiddle-Faddle" or "Flip-Flop" and not the reverse:
But then there's another theory which says that words that represent things that are spatially nearer to the speaker usually have higher vowels (me versus you, here versus there, this versus that). This sounds pretty dumb until you learn that it actually holds water across different languages. For example, in French, "me" is je, "you" is tu, "this" is ce, and "that" is ca. In German ich/du, hier/da, dies/das.
I think "how near is it?" and "what order are things happening?" are pretty central to my way of modeling the world - like I have trouble remembering what key is which on the keyring unless I map it left-to-right, entering the house order (car key, outer door, inner door).

I remember helping Ksenia build up her English, coming from Russian with fewer articles - "a spoon" (as in, any spoon) vs "the spoon" (a particular spoon) was pretty easy but "this spoon" (a particular spoon) vs "that spoon" (a particular spoon a little further away) was tougher.

And don't get me started with "adjective order", how we all somehow know it's the "giant angry red dragon" and not the "red giant angry dragon". I long to know if there's an underlying logic that established the order, or if it's just arbitrary.


Did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a Wikipedia article on?
Makin' way for Justice Boof. Awesome we're going to have a known perjurer on the bench, for life.
So, Al Franken got knocked out of the senate, and this lying - perjuring, actually - shit bag is bound for the SCOTUS?

Also concerning for me is conservative women in general closing ranks and willing to take a "boys will be boys", lets all just move on stance for this shit, partially out of political expediency. Is there a gender version of the concept of "an Uncle Tom"?
And this FBI investigation was such a sham fig leaf. What a farce.