71–80 of 89 posts
I tend to become much nicer when I switch over to Spanish, mostly because I usually speak it in customer service situations. Spanish is my language to help people. That and I always love the look I get when the pasty Russian girl starts sounding like a Columbian.
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I wish people would make themselves familiar with examples before citing them as evidence of vague general claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonalds_Restaurant...
Have a TL;DR? Am I supposed to red a 1000 lines Wikipedia article before I comment on anything?
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Have a TL;DR? Am I supposed to red a 1000 lines Wikipedia article before I comment on anything?
In general that is probably a sound practice :) At the very least one gets informed
My life was not profoundly enriched by reading about the coffee case, either.
My wife, on the other hand, has spent a lot more time in France than I have, and apparently learned from the school across the tracks--she's much more apt to stutter and fumble with vocabulary (she's got an anecdote about learning the difference between cravat and crevette), but she's much more talkative and seems to get more done with her style.
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Same in Spanish ('usted' and 'tu', respectively).
The problem with the German version is that "Sie" also means "she" and "they". Usted at least does not mean "she." So, are you talking about your sister… or are you talking to your superior? (My 2nd most hated thing about German.)
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Same in Spanish ('usted' and 'tu', respectively).
And in most Indian languages.
I speak 2 languages fluently and a few others adequately. I definitely think my behavior is a little different when speaking Spanish versus English, but I don't think there are any deep-seated psycholinguistic reasons for this - it's more because of cultural differences. An example: in Colombia, when demonstrating the height of a child, you hold your hand vertically, while when talking about the height of an animal,…
That claim is because it is usually perceived that lots of words and expressions in English are shorter than their Spanish counterparts.
car vs carro
dog vs perro
lol vs que risa jajajajaja
I'm really interested in an expert explanation of why this is complete bullshit.
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And French, "tu" (familiar singular) and "vous" (formal singular, or plural). English used to have "thou", but of course that's long since extinct.
Trivia, "thou" was actually the informal pronoun. On the other hand in Mexican Spanish, "usted" is fading away. It's curious how different cultures get rid of different options.
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Short version: the woman suffered third degree burns over 6% of her body (1% = the size of a handprint) including her crotch, and lesser burns over 16%. She required emergency medical attention, expensive skin grafts, etc. This was not just someone spilling a bit of coffee on their arm and flinching in pain, but instead was a horrific life-threatening injury (I’m somewhat reminded of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that wat…
So is 170° too hot for coffee? I still don't quite get it. is that Fahrenheit, or Celsius (the latter probably physically impossible, but still)? What temperature is coffee now (at McD and at Starbucks?)? Feeling sorry for someone doesn't appear to be beneficial to people's judgement.