Words that seem related but aren't (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Words that seem related but aren't (2015)

#81

Post by Handytinge » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 5:07 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #35

mdp2021 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trigger an immune response, which is not something you generally want to do to your readers In general, you expect readers not live «immune response[s]». It is called "sensation", and you either expect readers to be mature and having learnt to manage it as much as they learnt all other physiological and emotional and intellectual control, or if not mature you want to expose them to the world of serious adulthood fo…

Depending on what you're writing, sensation might well be the entire purpose of the writing. So words that trigger the wrong sensation should absolutely be avoided, and not used to test the reader's maturity or anything like that. However, these sensations are extremely cultural. As a non-American, it's funny to see Americans trying to impose their cultural sensitivities on other countries and cultures. Like criticis…

> I also remember from many years ago an American interviewer trying to interview a black British athlete what it was like for him as an "African American". He corrected her that he's British, and she corrected to "African American Brit".

Ah this is an old internet rumour. Either a) no footage of it survived to be on the internet or b) it was always a rumour.

Here's some discussions respectively from 2015 (trying to find it) and 2000 (stating a slightly different version of it):

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2bf9fw/black_peo...

https://everything2.com/user/iain/writeups/Why+I+don%2527t+u...

If you can find a video source of it, I'd be curious to see it.

Re: Words that seem related but aren't (2015)

#82

Post by mcv » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

Handytinge wrote: post #81

mcv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what you're writing, sensation might well be the entire purpose of the writing. So words that trigger the wrong sensation should absolutely be avoided, and not used to test the reader's maturity or anything like that. However, these sensations are extremely cultural. As a non-American, it's funny to see Americans trying to impose their cultural sensitivities on other countries and cultures. Like criticis…

> I also remember from many years ago an American interviewer trying to interview a black British athlete what it was like for him as an "African American". He corrected her that he's British, and she corrected to "African American Brit". Ah this is an old internet rumour. Either a) no footage of it survived to be on the internet or b) it was always a rumour. Here's some discussions respectively from 2015 (trying to…

It probably stems from before Youtube. Not everything on TV ends up on Youtube.

I've been googling this a bit, and I found a lot of people remembering seeing it on TV (but that's not conclusive either, because we can create fake memories about this sort of thing), but no link to a video. Best we can probably hope for is a confirmation or denial from Kriss Akabusi himself, but then someone has to ask him.

Re: Words that seem related but aren't (2015)

#83

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #80

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. It's pretty much exactly analogous to "da Vinci". The concept of the algorithm is named for the person, al-Khwarizmi, and not for the place, Khwarazm. Why would you remove the al- ?

> The concept of the algorithm is named for the person, al-Khwarizmi, and not for the place, Khwarazm. Why would you remove the al-? Well, the word does not refer directly to that person, so the fact that its etymological origin happens to be the nisba suffix of that person's name doesn't mean it's not a mistake to include the article. Of course, we can presume that most of the people involved in the gradual coining…

> the word does not refer directly to that person, so the fact that its etymological origin happens to be the nisba suffix of that person's name doesn't mean it's not a mistake to include the article.

I can't follow you. Go back to the van der Waals force. Just like Arabic al-, Dutch van and der are grammatical particles; Johannes van der Waals is "John the Walloon". The capitalization is exactly what this would lead you to expect.

And of course the van der Waals force is no more a direct reference to Johannes van der Waals than the algorithm is to Muhammad al-Khwarizmi or the Eiffel Tower is to Gustave Eiffel. And also no less. They're all things that are named after individual people but are not the people themselves. Why aren't you arguing that the name of the van der Waals force was just a big mistake?

When you name something after someone, you use the name of the person being honored. You don't cut their name into random hunks and use those.