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

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

#291

Post by epicide »

semireg wrote: post #264
swores wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing some joke or wordplay, or are you just a genuine believer who felt God warranted a mention here?

I married a southern gal, eastern North Carolina to be exact. As a Minnesotan, I have become familiar with the following: 1. "[he/she/they] are doing the lord's work" roughly translates to, "that task is so terrible/annoying, but someone has to do it, so props to them for doing it without complaining." 2. "bless their heart" roughly translates to, "they are really trying, but wow, so much fail"

As someone from NC with a LOT of family from eastern NC specifically, I'd like to provide an addendum to "bless your heart".

I see it frequently cited as always meant sarcastically/disingenuosly. It certainly can mean "screw you", "go away", or "... so much fail".

However, if there's one thing people should understand about southern/NC etiquette, it's that passive aggression is the primary form of aggression. There are plenty of southerners who would never tell you to GFY straight to your face. That doesn't mean they aren't thinking that and trying to say that, though. Perhaps even with a "bless your heart".

Given all of that, "bless your[/their] heart" is absolutely to be taken at face value about as often as it shouldn't. That level of plausible deniability provides the highest level of potential passive-aggressiveness.

I can't speak for absolutely everybody, but at least if someone from eastern NC says "bless your heart", they could mean anything between "GFY" and "I'm so sorry that happened, please come to my house so that I can shower you with hospitality". You might never know which they meant, and that's intentional.

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

#292

Post by dang »

slim wrote: post #286
dang wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged] shows on comments when flags significantly outweigh downvotes. [delayed] shows when a comment isn't being displayed yet because it's still less than N minutes old, where N is the 'delay' setting in the commenter's profile (about which, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ). Does that answer your question?

it answered it for [delayed], thanks :) so there is no way to show [flagged] ?

We have different mental models here; in mine, that question isn't well-formed, so I need to know what you mean by it :)

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

#293

Post by timthorn »

Anthony-G wrote: post #253
Ancapistani wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, “you’re doing God’s work” is a relatively common - if somewhat archaic - idiom. It means roughly “I appreciate what you’re doing.”

I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.

Yorkshire is known as God's own county; I don't think that is an American import.

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

#294

Post by CRConrad »

Anthony-G wrote: post #253
Ancapistani wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, “you’re doing God’s work” is a relatively common - if somewhat archaic - idiom. It means roughly “I appreciate what you’re doing.”

I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.

Also, relentless dominance ("cultural colonialism") of film and TV for decades.

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

#295

Post by CRConrad »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #213
kortilla wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?

I'm confused too. Their posts brought up two points: 1. Y might be for yellow than axe. -- I agree but that remains a theory. 2. The designer likely used a clipart of axe by searching "axe" in Chinese ("斧头"). The exact image was found. -- ..OK? Not sure how this means anything, let alone "solved". To be fair, other comments in that 2017 threads confused me too, e.g. > 1. The letter 'A' and an upside down Y-shaped cha…

> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about

The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.

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

#296

Post by CRConrad »

random_ind_dude wrote: post #272
hedora wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y. Combining that: > 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art: > Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language…

I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe. The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one. Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue. https://en.m.wik…

So does the Chinese (Mandarin? Cantonese?) word for "submarine" begin with a 'U'...?

Naah, the Swedish hypothesis is far more convincing.

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

#297

Post by CRConrad »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #202
Waterluvian wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost too polite to be Stack Exchange satire.

Nowadays it seems like every other comment on Stack Exchange is full of forced and phony politeness. That's in their rules too.

A bit like HN in that regard.

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

#298

Post by CRConrad »

oneshtein wrote: post #204
thaumasiotes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered I think if a bear fell into a well, there would be friction between the bear and the side of the well...

If bear is alive and not oiled, then yes.

Fur is probably pretty low-friction to begin with. Also, bears presumably have wax glands in their skin like other mammals, so if the bear hasn't showered very recently that would lessen the friction even more.

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

#299

Post by CRConrad »

philwelch wrote: post #216
behnamoh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is this one: A bear falls into a well. The depth of the well is 19.617 meters, and it takes the bear 2.0000 second to reach the bottom of the well. What is the color of the bear? https://qr.ae/pKqzpC

I like the work he put into the answer but he totally flubs it at the end. Black bears are actually dark brown and brown bears are also brown, so there’s no need to try and guess a specific bear species; the bear is necessarily brown.

Except polar bears are actually black, AIUI. On their skin, underneath the fur. Or if you go by the fur, they're (off-)white.

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

#300

Post by CRConrad »

londons_explore wrote: post #85
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.

In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask. Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort in…

> Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.

But the artist who drew the pic wouldn't necessarily -- I'd go so far as to guess probably doesn't -- know how it ended up on that ball; who copied it from where and what word (or letter) that person thought it illustrated.

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