21–30 of 42 posts
Am I the only one for whom the "Bitstream Charter" font family on this page causes the text to be mostly invisible (except for some punctuation characters)? System Information: "Bitstream Charter" is installed; Georgia is not installed; Happens in Firefox, but not in Chromium; Arch Linux
You know, as you drive through Montana and you say, "wow, what a cute heifer there, next to that ox".
(And the driver forgets to steer)
OT: I was standing next a few freely roaming cows last week, and I was reminded just how awesomely huge and powerful these animals are.
I have never seen a `matador`, but it blows my mind that he doesn't become `a door mat` instead, after a run in with the bull.
In the word "aurochs", the "aur" prefix is the same as German "ur" indicating beginning or origin. (To beer drinkers around the world it may be familiar in the name of Pilsner Urquell, the original pale lager. Quell means source.) So aurochs is literally "original ox". I don't think there is any other English word that preserves this prefix.
Am I the only one for whom the "Bitstream Charter" font family on this page causes the text to be mostly invisible (except for some punctuation characters)? System Information: "Bitstream Charter" is installed; Georgia is not installed; Happens in Firefox, but not in Chromium; Arch Linux
Same here (Firefox, Linux). Strangely, when I took a screenshot with Firefox's built-in tool, the text was visible in the image.
In the word "aurochs", the "aur" prefix is the same as German "ur" indicating beginning or origin. (To beer drinkers around the world it may be familiar in the name of Pilsner Urquell, the original pale lager. Quell means source.) So aurochs is literally "original ox". I don't think there is any other English word that preserves this prefix.
Auroa/Aurora, Auricle, Auriferous, Auriscope, Auroral, Aurum, Auspicious.
Aurora / aurum come from Greek. Auricle and a few others are from Latin auris, ear. Auspicious comes from Latin "auspex" (bird seer) so the root is avis, bird.
> How old were you when you learned that a violin and a fiddle are the same instrument? Today!
> Oxen is the sole surviving old weak plural ending in -en I had heard that -en was a surviving "dual" suffix, I think in some presentation from Larry Wall (regexen anyone?) Given oxen were often used in pairs, the dual form survived. Alas I'm no linguist so I can't confirm this.
Regarding another note from the article, Dutch also has the "double" plural for child/children with kind/kinderen. As the cases became less and less used, "-er" stopped being seen as plural so people naturally added -en to it to make it plural. A bit like if people started saying "ox/oxens" in English because "oxen" doesn't feel plural enough.
I hoped to see a paragraph on hexadecimal notation (eg: 0xbeef), alas we'll have to settle for Stack Overflow's [1] wisdom on this: > Short story: the 0 tells the parser it's dealing with a constant (and not an identifier/reserved word). Something is still needed to specify the number base: the x is an arbitrary choice. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2670639/why-are-hexadeci...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph#Origin
> The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for "ox" (as in the Biblical Hebrew word Eleph (אֶלֶף) 'ox'), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on an Egyptian hieroglyph, which depicts an ox's head.