211–220 of 286 posts
On another note, I always wished "never mind" was spelled "nevermind"
"Each other" is like that for me, and according to search results, a lot of other people. I pronounce it ee-chother. "Eachother" feels as natural as "somebody", "nobody", "anybody" to me
Is nobody going to mention that "taco [N WORD]" is one of the words there? (Third page from the end)
Is nobody going to mention that "taco [N WORD]" is one of the words there? (Third page from the end)
I suspect the entire list was produced by an AI entity which had not been prompted to avoid giving offense. I predict a range of (tedious) opinions about whether a prohibition on that particular word is an appropriate inclusion in a system prompt.
That's also not a term I've - thankfully! - ever heard, so I've no idea if it's hallucinated. This is not an invitation, HN, to define or explain it to me.
My favorite adjective he's coördinated is "burntwing", used to describe moths spiraling downwards after passing through candleflames. If I had crafted such a descriptive contraction, my former styling would've been "burnt-wing", had I even been capable of generating such concise imagery [1].
McCarthy's stylings have helped me to reduce hyphenations in my own writings — reducing their usage mainly to contractedwords which might be all-too-confusing without them.
[0] pg104 has ten words that I do not know their definitions, yet through context they work to advance the storyline of character racists (book is set in 1950s).
[1] decades ago, during college burnout, I was searching for the essense of "burntwing" — reduced to writing a professor about "feeling like a burning airplane in tailspin." My trajectory back then was definitely burntwing.
Off the top of my head, peanut butter, black hole, and amusement park are concepts that can't be easily intuited by just combining the two singular terms, but I also wouldn't consider them as phrases.
"Peanut butter" would be dealt with by including a reference under the "butter" entry. Something like: ' N, culinary. A paste made of ground up nuts, sometimes with additional oils and other ingredients. E.g. "peanut butter", "almond butter".' "Amusement park", same. Falls very much under the "place of recreation" definition of "park". "Black hole" is maybe a bit different, because it's a scientific term - and certai…
Is nobody going to mention that "taco [N WORD]" is one of the words there? (Third page from the end)
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Just as an example: some people find the word "jerry-rigged" to be racist, as it previously replaced "nig___-rigged". Same with "rule of thumb" (due to origins in caning people). There could be no Huckleberry Finn written in a world without pottylanguage.
Who defines the boundaries of acceptable language? I'm not advocating for ebonics classes, but a language's entire purpose is to be useful, to convey information (including hatred).
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
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Which are the two words?
["water that's", "boiling"]
["water", "that's boiling"]
["water that", "s boiling"]
Something else?
> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"
Boiling water is mostly same as boiling anything. So I would just have "boiling". No need for "boiling water". I see no reason why boiling water could not just be covered by whatever general boiling entry covers.
If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.
Ha — you're probably right that it would have been less controversial. But I kept it precisely because it's arguable. Added a parenthetical acknowledging the HN debate and framing it as on-the-fence by design