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“Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

english.stackexchange.com

11–20 of 166 posts

Re: “Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

#12
post #9

This is the kind of deep investigation of a super specific issue I always enjoy reading. This is what I thought the internet would be, 20 years ago.

Pretty sure we had stuff like that in 1997!

I would love to see a deep investigation proving/disproving this point

Re: “Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

#17

This is the kind of deep investigation of a super specific issue I always enjoy reading. This is what I thought the internet would be, 20 years ago.

It's a shame that the internet devolved into cat pictures, pervasive advertisements, and political shouting matches. On the other hand, there are still some great communities out there for great discussion. I consider HN to be one of them.

Re: “Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

#18

This is the kind of deep investigation of a super specific issue I always enjoy reading. This is what I thought the internet would be, 20 years ago.

The smaller stack exchanges are a really wonderful source of content I never thought I needed to know. I always check out the "hot network questions" side panel when I land on stack overflow and almost always find something interesting.

Re: “Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

#19
post #6
post #4

The answer is one of the top comments: > Yellow. Looks like a squiggle of yellow oil paint squeezing out of a short, fat tube.

Possible, but there's ample evidence around the Yxa (Swedish name for axe) theory. Even use in a similar context: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNTu2.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/xzaQ9.jpg And it matches the "U" for "U-Boat", which apparently would be more common in Swedish (Ubåt) to refer to a submarine. It does require you believe whoever made the ball mixed Swedish and English, which seems possible given that it is a…

"Ubåt" is the most common word for submarine in Swedish, and there is also a little used longer version "undervattensbåt" which also starts with "U".

Re: “Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?”

#20
post #17

This is the kind of deep investigation of a super specific issue I always enjoy reading. This is what I thought the internet would be, 20 years ago.

It's a shame that the internet devolved into cat pictures, pervasive advertisements, and political shouting matches. On the other hand, there are still some great communities out there for great discussion. I consider HN to be one of them.

Perhaps unintuitively, the Something Awful forums are another relatively small, intelligent community.
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