Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

english.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 309 posts

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#51

Post by dotancohen »

Jun8 wrote: post #46
WJW wrote: post #12

First comment on the answer: > This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen. And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.

No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... . BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 . The highest scored answer is this one: https://stack…

Have you read this one? It's got the HTML parser answer beat by a lap and a half.

The only comparable answer I'd ever seen was something on Seasoned Advice, the culinary SE. I'll have to go dig that up.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#52

Post by ajmurmann »

saaaaaam wrote: post #23
WJW wrote: post #12

First comment on the answer: > This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen. And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.

I’ve just read a dissertation about a plastic ball. I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s a mixture of impressed, horrified and bemused…

To me it felt like a new season of Serial

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#55

Post by jon889 »

It’s questions like these that made StackExchange worth visiting and browsing. When they decided to be super strict about being on topic it made the quality of the sites go downhill a lot. Now there is much less reason for experts to hang out on the sites and while there provide answers to new questions.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#56

Post by primitivesuave »

tialaramex wrote: post #49
primitivesuave wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines…

I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then. I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so woul…

You're right, I didn't put that together, and now find myself descending down the rabbit hole of Navy slang :)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Nav...

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#57

Post by unwind »

nomilk wrote: post #17

The most upvoted answer gives the explanation the ball manufacturer is Swedish ('axe' in Swedish starts with a 'y'), but other answers say it was probably manufactured in a country where English wasn't the first language (e.g. China) and the 'y' for axe was simply a typo. The evidence against the Swedish explanation is that the ball says c for 'cat' and d for 'dog', but in swedish the translations are 'katt' and 'hun…

Dog in Swedish is "hund".

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#58

Post by unwind »

throwaway_673 wrote: post #44
nomilk wrote: post #17

The most upvoted answer gives the explanation the ball manufacturer is Swedish ('axe' in Swedish starts with a 'y'), but other answers say it was probably manufactured in a country where English wasn't the first language (e.g. China) and the 'y' for axe was simply a typo. The evidence against the Swedish explanation is that the ball says c for 'cat' and d for 'dog', but in swedish the translations are 'katt' and 'hun…

Is there also a Swedish version of the ball? In that case I have a possible explanation. When the ball was copied, they may have worked from images. You need more than one image because the ball is round. Could the copycat have used an English version for one of the sides, and Swedish for the other? By looking at the images and letters around the Y, they actually make more sense in Swedish The poster may have made a…

Worm in Swedish is "mask". "Mark" means "ground".

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#60

Post by lolinder »

primitivesuave wrote: post #50
lolinder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt. [0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t

The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904)

Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.
Post reply on HN