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Why does the Declaration of Independence have so many, but also so irregularly, capitalized words? For instance, why is the bland word “Course” capitalized but not the weighty-sounding “human events”?
From an article by Jon Lackman in Slate:
In the century prior to 1765, nouns were generally capitalized. (The reason for this is now obscure; Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that earlier writers “imitated our Mother Tongue, the German.”) By the Revolutionary War era, however, chaos was the rule. Everyone, it seems, had a different style, and individual authors vacillated from one sentence to the next. …
My guess would be that lots of capitals look heavy-handed, which was out of fashion during the Enlightenment (which is capitalized, of course.)
Other founders, including Jefferson and Madison, dropped caps with reckless abandon.
But the scribes who wrote up the formal version from Jefferson’s draft liked a lot of capitals.
… In America, Franklin attributed the change to printers who felt that light capitalization “shows the Character to greater Advantage; those Letters prominent above the line disturbing its even regular Appearance.” Author Thomas Dyche wrote in 1707 that capitalizing all nouns is “unnecessary, and hinders that remarkable Distinction intended by the Capitals.” As you can see, Dyche couldn’t convince his publishing house to change its ways, even for his own book.
I’m guessing that heavy capitalization started to seem heavy-handed during the 18th Century, an era when lightness of touch — What Would Voltaire Say? — was prized.
Eventually, heavy capitalization faded in the English-speaking world. But then German philosophy became fashionable from the 1830s with people like Coleridge and Emerson. Some German concepts sounded more profound in German so they were often left untranslated. The Germans still capitalized each noun and American students tended to bring over the capital with the noun: e.g., “Zeitgeist” rather than “zeitgeist” for “spirit of the age.”
My vague recollection is that 50 years ago, William F. Buckley enjoyed satirizing the pompous spirit of his age by spelling it “the Zeitgeist.” I carry on that affectation when I write about “the Woke” although I doubt if many readers get my obscure humor.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
……Oh yes, we just laugh on the inside.
– Yes that’s one of the ways I use capitalisation but it always feels slightly lame when I do it. I write “the Narrative” or “Progress” when sneering at liberal-progressives but it doesn’t even count as a witticism; it’s just to convey that the term has been given special meaning.
– “Black” and “White”, when used to name the ethnic/racial groups should be capitalised now. They’re not used as adjectives to describe the actual colour of people (eg. a “white horse”) but rather to indicate a team, faction or group. The armies fighting the Russian Civil War weren’t actually red-coloured or white-coloured; apart from the flag and cap badge of the Reds and the summer uniforms of some of the Whites.
A White Horse Is a term used to describe an animal figure cut out of turf over lying white chalk. There are a number of these figures on hillsides in England, and they are believed to go back to iron age times.
A similar figure is the Cerne Giant, an outline of a man with a huge phallus.
The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name.
Horses that are white are usually described as "grey" by anybody connected with horses.Replies: @prosa123, @ScarletNumber
Oh, but English is still heavy on capitalization. In French, Swedish, Italian, Danish, …, you shouldn’t capitalize every word in a headline or title, although English influence is beginning to make itself known there. (Danish capitalized all nouns up until the end of WWII, when anti-German feelings caused them to change.)
As for the Declaration of Independence, I think “Course of human events” is more logical than “Course of Human Events”. For one thing, “human events” modifies the main noun “Course”, they are more like adjectives in function, even if they are nouns in form.
I think it went even further than that. At least, my 1892 grammar of Dano-Norwegian says that you have to capitalise not only nouns but the pronouns I, Jer (you and your); De, Dem, Deres (other forms of you and your) and En (one).Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Having Capitals appear at random in a sentence gives the appearance of those old ransom notes that were made by cutting words out of a newpaper or magazine and pasting them to a piece of paper so the FBI couldn’t trace the author through his typewriter or handwriting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg-BnSx1ik0
Funny Steve should mention this. I made a decision to use capitals in my most recent comment thus:
Being me, I wondered of and on for days whether or not I should have capitalized the way I did in the intro to each line. I probably shouldn’t have, being that those words are not proper names and all, but I did it because I liked the way it set off each part. I think graphic style is a legitimate reason sometimes for this kind of thing.
Sometimes I will capitalize random words throughout a sentence and only catch them if I remember to proofread before hitting publish. I imagine the people of old didn’t want to start a whole new Declaration of Independence ,for example, after mistakenly capitalizing some random word in its Conclusion.
OT— Steve, I think we’re gonna need to have another separate Contemporary Pop Music post (I missed the last one, dammit).
Please post it when you start a new night owl session, thanks. 🙂
Besides continuing the sport of personal pop music taste up for judgment, I’d like to see the following hashed out:
Do guys who aren’t really into (new/good) music who go gaga for Lana Del Rey, Emily Haines (Metric), Grimes, and going back a bit, Liz Phair (zing!) appreciate more the actual music, or more the image and attitude of said dames? I think it’s the latter.
‘Tis not to say the above artists haven’t put out some good tracks (okay, I think Phair is musically lame), but their coquettish appeal, rather than their actual music, seems to be the overarching reason for some dudes to simp on the internet while praising them as artists. NTTAWWT, but there’s dissonance when the topic is music and lyric quality. (Of the above, Grimes is/was a real musical innovator.) The past pop music thread had some amusing disagreements over whether some of the above artists and the like are worth the ‘hype’ (we won’t mention Taylor Swift—she’s strictly for young chix).
DP is a mensch and means well, but there’s a lot of forgettable random shite in here, from both sexes:
Instead of scribes that might decide to change our Capital Letters for us, it’s Software now that often gets the final say in the matter. Software is screwed with, err, updated, so often now that most of us (including me) will not spend the time to turn off the default settings that allow auto-filling, auto-correcting, etc.
You write it one way, and the software doesn’t like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it’s the few who’ve made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us “don’t have a need to know.”
But as you note, our minders like to scratch their totalitarian itch by coding up palace rules for lettering; plus capitalizing the Proper words: Gay; Trans; Black; etc.Replies: @PiltdownMan
They are frail reeds for the tens or hundreds of millions, who've been so badly served by our soi disant educational systems that they can neither spell, write grammatically, nor produce a coherent, let alone logical, written argument.
When I first saw the title, I thought you might mean the recent sell-off in the markets. I thought capital letters, especially in internet usage, started dying twenty years ago.
You write it one way, and the software doesn't like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it's the few who've made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us "don't have a need to know."Replies: @Redneck farmer, @bomag, @Cagey Beast, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Wilkey
I love it when a correctly spelled and used word gets “auto-correct”.
- George Orwell, 1984
You write it one way, and the software doesn't like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it's the few who've made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us "don't have a need to know."Replies: @Redneck farmer, @bomag, @Cagey Beast, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Wilkey
My initial thought was that the digital age reduced the us of capitals; code doesn’t care.
But as you note, our minders like to scratch their totalitarian itch by coding up palace rules for lettering; plus capitalizing the Proper words: Gay; Trans; Black; etc.
I've asked her why, and she says that on their smartphones, that extra stab at the keyboard's shift key to get a capital letter is simply too irksome and not ergonomic, the way it is implemented.
I wonder if a qwerty keyboard is at all optimal for a two-thumb keyboard. The layout was determined by the design limitation of mechanical typewriter—to ensure that physical strike bars didn't get jammed.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Jonathan Mason, @Mr. Anon
Paul Revere, a simple mechanic in the parlance of the age, wrote phonetically. He omitted all unvoiced r’s showing the great endurance of the Bostonian accent.
(Actually, the New England non-rhotic accent was a carry over from how most English people did and do speak and re-adding all r’s to standard American dialect came later )
Interesting extremes between German which is very heavy on capitals, and Spanish that hardly ever uses them. For example in Spanish the word for Puerto Rican is NOT capitalized (except as first word of sentence.)
I can never be sure whether it should be Web page or web page in English.
Perhaps the reduction in the use of capitals in English have had some economic motive, for example type setters font libraries might require less capitals if they are only used for proper nouns and beginning of sentences.
I certainly think it is easier to read faster without the extra capitals that you find in German.
Another fact that could be that with the invention of the typewriter less capitals meant less use of the shift key.
Auf Wiedersehen!
During the 1980s I remember much talk about the terrible threat of a nuclear holocaust. Now there is only (the) Holocaust. The ‘the’ and the capital ‘H’ tell you all you need to know. It’s not something to be questioned, just believed in and knelt before. Don’t bother mentioning any of those other trifling small ‘h’ holocausts. There is only (the) Holocaust and it is a jealous holocaust. “Thou shalt have no other holocausts before me”.
As American has expunged its German immigration history, so too has it expunged the incredible influence of German philosophy and scientific thought of the 19th and early 20th century. The 19th Century influence of Germanic intellectualism vastly intimidated and intrigued the Anglo-American world, causing an arms race intellectually.
To give one example: the modern American law school, with its Socratic dialogues and pseudo-scientific approach to case reading, was birthed by Christopher Langdell at Harvard in the late 19th Century, directly as a result of Germanic philosophic and study. Langdell and his followers thought law could be “scientifically” analyzed like the Germans were doing to science and philosophy.
Another example: how Mark Twain attempted (and struggled) to learn German, to keep up with 19th Century intellectuals.
And, of course, more famously, German intellectualism and scientific progress created Marxism, and Marxists thought that Germany would be the foundation state of the Great Communist Paradise. To the extent that, even after gaining Russia, the commies still tried to take Germany through organizing, which led to the NAzis rising to smash them back.
This insecurity of the Anglo-American world towards Germanic intellectualism eventually spilled over into politics and war. The Anglo-American world (mostly the English, who were the top dogs empire-wise over the 19th Century) were terrified by the rising power of the German Empire once the HRE was destroyed. It created a Thucydides trap which led the Anglo-Americans to twice smash the German empire of the 20the century before it destroyed them.
White, we should capitalize White when speaking about race. I know “they” say it’s not grammatically correct… >@ck them.
IMO, it’s helpful to remember Hedley Lamar’s little speech in Blazing Saddles: “….mugs, pugs, thugs; nitwits, half-wits, dimwits; Indian agents, Mexican bandits…”. The point is that the common nouns are not capped but the proper ones are.
- "Black" and "White", when used to name the ethnic/racial groups should be capitalised now. They're not used as adjectives to describe the actual colour of people (eg. a "white horse") but rather to indicate a team, faction or group. The armies fighting the Russian Civil War weren't actually red-coloured or white-coloured; apart from the flag and cap badge of the Reds and the summer uniforms of some of the Whites.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
.
A White Horse Is a term used to describe an animal figure cut out of turf over lying white chalk. There are a number of these figures on hillsides in England, and they are believed to go back to iron age times.
A similar figure is the Cerne Giant, an outline of a man with a huge phallus.
The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name.
Horses that are white are usually described as “grey” by anybody connected with horses.
Most notably the one on Hudson Street in Manhattan. It gained fame in 1953 when the poet Dylan "Do not go gentle into that good night" Thomas consumed 14 whiskeys (some reports say 18) at the bar, and died.
you rang?
(Actually, the New England non-rhotic accent was a carry over from how most English people did and do speak and re-adding all r’s to standard American dialect came later )Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
The thing about that Bostonian accent is that, besides leaving out “r”s where they are supposed to be pronounced, they also add “r”s where there are none.
“Ya’ can’t get good chowda in Middle Americur.” On the whole it probably works out even.
“The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name”.
I’ve heard that a white horse was used as a “dog whistle” by Orangemen, in reference to King Billy’s horse. That might explain some of these pub names.
You write it one way, and the software doesn't like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it's the few who've made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us "don't have a need to know."Replies: @Redneck farmer, @bomag, @Cagey Beast, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Wilkey
I’ve recently been beavering away at Natural Language Processing (NLP) tutorials to learn how to use Python to analyse texts. So far, one of the first steps is to make the text entirely lowercase and to ignore “stop words”, such as “the” and “and”. I guess that means our artificial intelligence overlords can’t tell the difference between “a bomb” and “the Bomb”. If the Kremlin announces it will be using “the Bomb” tomorrow, the AI won’t catch it.
Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.
The novel, written in a style based on late 18th century English[1] is a frame narrative told from the focal point of Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786,[2] attempts to entertain and divert his extended family (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house) by telling a tall tale version of Mason and Dixon’s biographies (claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys). [Wikipedia]
This is done by many writers, and kind of bugs me if overused. It’s a cousin of scare quotes. I’d call it sacastiCaps, or ridiCaps (which use an “intercap” or “camel case”). For instance, someone might write “The Way We Do Things Around Here.” Add a trademark symbol to complete the effect.
Wikipedia’s irony punctuation entry is related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
And here’s Wikipedia on scare quotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
And camel case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case
I also like that the drafters (Drafters?) use the spelling “chuse.” It’s something a kindergartner would be corrected for now. Here’s Article I, Section 3.
The draughters.
But as you note, our minders like to scratch their totalitarian itch by coding up palace rules for lettering; plus capitalizing the Proper words: Gay; Trans; Black; etc.Replies: @PiltdownMan
I’ve noticed that my teenage daughter and her friends dispense with it entirely, outside of schoolwork.
I’ve asked her why, and she says that on their smartphones, that extra stab at the keyboard’s shift key to get a capital letter is simply too irksome and not ergonomic, the way it is implemented.
I wonder if a qwerty keyboard is at all optimal for a two-thumb keyboard. The layout was determined by the design limitation of mechanical typewriter—to ensure that physical strike bars didn’t get jammed.
When I text, I tend to only capitalize the first words of sentences because my phone is smart enough to recognize that it is the first word of a sentence and it does it automatically. Even here I tend to eliminate the final period of my post, as it is obviously overReplies: @Hangnail Hans, @Jonathan Mason
Since the advent of the internet, commas seem to be becoming less used as well. Seems like there were a hell of a lot more of ’em when I was in grade school. Anyone else notice this?
A White Horse Is a term used to describe an animal figure cut out of turf over lying white chalk. There are a number of these figures on hillsides in England, and they are believed to go back to iron age times.
A similar figure is the Cerne Giant, an outline of a man with a huge phallus.
The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name.
Horses that are white are usually described as "grey" by anybody connected with horses.Replies: @prosa123, @ScarletNumber
The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name.
Most notably the one on Hudson Street in Manhattan. It gained fame in 1953 when the poet Dylan “Do not go gentle into that good night” Thomas consumed 14 whiskeys (some reports say 18) at the bar, and died.
I enjoy obscure humour.
They’re also left untranslated because German concepts sound much less profound when they’re translated literally into English since German words just compound simple words together e.g., “Zeitgeist” is literally just “timespirit” or “timeghost” (Geist being a cognate of ghost). Birth control pills in German are “antibabypille”. Etc.
Off Topic: The war is going so badly for our client state that even the editors of the NYT, who dutifully publish the regime’s anti-reality propaganda, are calling on the Biden administration to stop acting like they believe their own lies.
From Moon of Alabama yesterday:
Putin will go down in history as Russia’s George W Bush, who bumbled into an unwinnable war of choice that left his nation permanently poorer.
Obviously Ukraine is churning out a lot of low-quality propaganda. But the maps don’t lie: Russia was crushed in Kiev, is in full retreat around Kharkiv, and is sacrificing the remainder of its regular army for some rust belty small towns whose prewar population was under 20k and are now depopulated rubble.
Russia had also alienated its former mild supporters, like Slovakia, Breitbart, Trump, and BoJo, while humiliating and further marginalizing its remaining friends.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Johann Ricke
http://www.military-today.com/ukraine/soldier_64.jpg
Looks like the work of Ukrainian animals.
http://www.military-today.com/ukraine/soldier_63.jpg
Buy the dip.
I've asked her why, and she says that on their smartphones, that extra stab at the keyboard's shift key to get a capital letter is simply too irksome and not ergonomic, the way it is implemented.
I wonder if a qwerty keyboard is at all optimal for a two-thumb keyboard. The layout was determined by the design limitation of mechanical typewriter—to ensure that physical strike bars didn't get jammed.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Jonathan Mason, @Mr. Anon
The QWERTY keyboard hasn’t been optimal since typewriters got rid of individual keys, never mind texting. Nevertheless inertia is a powerful force so it is here to stay.
When I text, I tend to only capitalize the first words of sentences because my phone is smart enough to recognize that it is the first word of a sentence and it does it automatically. Even here I tend to eliminate the final period of my post, as it is obviously over
A White Horse Is a term used to describe an animal figure cut out of turf over lying white chalk. There are a number of these figures on hillsides in England, and they are believed to go back to iron age times.
A similar figure is the Cerne Giant, an outline of a man with a huge phallus.
The White Horse is also very commonly used as a pub name.
Horses that are white are usually described as "grey" by anybody connected with horses.Replies: @prosa123, @ScarletNumber
Crazy Horse tends to be popular as well
In a suburb of Atlanta, there is a Della Street. I forget whether it is Della Street Lane or just Della St. It’s not very long.
At Ga. Tech there is a building named Lyman Hall, after Lyman Hall, thus the Lyman Hall building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing
When I text, I tend to only capitalize the first words of sentences because my phone is smart enough to recognize that it is the first word of a sentence and it does it automatically. Even here I tend to eliminate the final period of my post, as it is obviously overReplies: @Hangnail Hans, @Jonathan Mason
Obviously? Obviously over what? There’s a preposition there, looking for company. Looks to me like you died in mid-sentence.
“Perhaps he was dictating!”
The FBI clearly had nothing on the great Harry Crumb.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
– George Orwell, 1984
What I hate is how they drop the “the’s”. Like in “CIA” instead of “The CIA.”
Or when they skip the &’s, like in “ATT” instead of “AT &T.”
Or when they dump the apostrophes, like in “Mcdonalds” instead of “Mcdonald’s”.
By all means Capitalization should be and now is used as a ThoughtControl weapon.
“Black” must now be capitalized because, you know, reasons…
Although I don’t think any actual Negros were involved in creating this rule.
“White” remains lower case other than in the now common description, “White Supremacist.”
“Every linguistic tool must be deployed in the relentless war against civilization!”
The biggest thing I’ve noticed about language recently is the indifferent way that people, especially younger people, use prepositions. They seem to think that where a preposition is called for, any preposition will do. Thus we get phrases like “Robbery to a gas station” which I’ve heard many times on the local news. This phenomenon I chalk up to laziness and creeping illiteracy. A lot of young college-educated people can’t even manage a single paragraph of expository prose. When they try, they end up with an unintelligible word-salad.
Then there are other changes in our language which are, I think, more intentional. Like the proliferation of certain words and phrases that spring up all of a sudden with such ubiquity that it is hard to imagine that their appearance is organic. For example, during COVID, one heard terms (unrelated to COVID) being used by everybody all the time: “supply-chain”, for example, or “resilience”. It’s almost as if these words were consciously injected into common parlance in order to prepare people’s minds for a “new normal”. Whoever used the term “supply-chain” prior to March 2020, outside of specialists? But since, everybody uses it. Almost as if the purpose was to a.) get you used to thinking about the supply-chain, and b.) get you used to it’s steady and unavoidable break-down (at least when it comes to delivering consumer goods). “Resilience” is a word much beloved by the globalist Davos crowd. And now it is seeping down into common usage. Organizations now even have “Resilience Officers”.
We saw this after 9/11 too, with terms like “homeland”, which had hardly ever been used in common parlance in America. Nobody described America as “The Homeland”. No civilian, anyway. Then, post-911, the word started getting spewed from every media orifice with great frequency.
As the old saying goes, words have meaning. More than that, they have uses. They have, behind them, agendas. The language you are programmed to use is not accidental.
Right. This title could have been on top of some Finance Dude’s Poast. Ooops, sorry for my Olde English.
Please post it when you start a new night owl session, thanks. 🙂
Besides continuing the sport of personal pop music taste up for judgment, I’d like to see the following hashed out:
Do guys who aren’t really into (new/good) music who go gaga for Lana Del Rey, Emily Haines (Metric), Grimes, and going back a bit, Liz Phair (zing!) appreciate more the actual music, or more the image and attitude of said dames? I think it’s the latter.
‘Tis not to say the above artists haven’t put out some good tracks (okay, I think Phair is musically lame), but their coquettish appeal, rather than their actual music, seems to be the overarching reason for some dudes to simp on the internet while praising them as artists. NTTAWWT, but there’s dissonance when the topic is music and lyric quality. (Of the above, Grimes is/was a real musical innovator.) The past pop music thread had some amusing disagreements over whether some of the above artists and the like are worth the ‘hype’ (we won’t mention Taylor Swift—she’s strictly for young chix).
DP is a mensch and means well, but there’s a lot of forgettable random shite in here, from both sexes:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1527413711404777472Replies: @Joe S.Walker
There are certainly males who will hype up female artists in pursuit of some kind of nebulous fantasy connection. It’s what Vox Day would call a Gamma trait. I own up to doing it myself when I was younger, but these days I see the likes of Lana Del Rey or Liz Phair as beneath contempt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akhmS1D2Ce4Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Jonathan Mason, @Joe S.Walker, @Jonathan Mason
At Ga. Tech there is a building named Lyman Hall, after Lyman Hall, thus the Lyman Hall building.Replies: @Milo Minderbinder
The Outerbridge Crossing is named for a guy named Outerbridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outerbridge_Crossing
LOLZ!!! Thanks!
Enter Joe Biden, stage Left. Joe begins his soliloquy. Joe forgets his lines, not that he would have made much sense. Enter WOC stage extreme Left, who interprets Joe’s grunts and whistles. Her knowledge is Informed and Visualized by her Inspired Critical Mass of Lived Experience.
Suddenly, off in the distance, a riot breaks out on the
AmericanUS side of the Canadian Border.I love the fact that we now have a Haitian Immigrant Alphabet
GirlEsteemed Woman of Color to now interpret and relay the random utterings of a semi-comatose, barely competent cue card reader.To make this farce complete: An AI program to convert all the wisdom into whale songs that school children must recite in lieu of the Racist Pledge of Allegience.
You write it one way, and the software doesn't like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it's the few who've made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us "don't have a need to know."Replies: @Redneck farmer, @bomag, @Cagey Beast, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Wilkey
These hidden, automatic “corrections” by our overlords’ software packages have often utterly changed the meaning of something I’ve written with no warning. I hate them.
They are frail reeds for the tens or hundreds of millions, who’ve been so badly served by our soi disant educational systems that they can neither spell, write grammatically, nor produce a coherent, let alone logical, written argument.
Bring back the long s
ſ!
Meanwhile, a mass shooting in what used to be a beautiful city has transpired, conforming strictly to “Sailet’s Law,” with some culturally traditional dim-brained tragicomedy sprinkled in:
Officers pursued the suspect into a Chicago Transit Authority train stop and arrested a suspect as well as a person who Brown said obstructed the officers.
A woman fleeing in a group along with the alleged shooter came in contact with the third rail at the train stop and has been hospitalized, Brown said.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/shot-fatally-outrageous-act-violence-chicago-mcdonalds/story?id=84856528
American conservatism.
From Moon of Alabama yesterday:Replies: @Pixo, @Joe Stalin
OT: Russia is getting humiliated by a smaller and poorer adversary and it drives the Putinists crazy.
Putin will go down in history as Russia’s George W Bush, who bumbled into an unwinnable war of choice that left his nation permanently poorer.
Obviously Ukraine is churning out a lot of low-quality propaganda. But the maps don’t lie: Russia was crushed in Kiev, is in full retreat around Kharkiv, and is sacrificing the remainder of its regular army for some rust belty small towns whose prewar population was under 20k and are now depopulated rubble.
Russia had also alienated its former mild supporters, like Slovakia, Breitbart, Trump, and BoJo, while humiliating and further marginalizing its remaining friends.
I've asked her why, and she says that on their smartphones, that extra stab at the keyboard's shift key to get a capital letter is simply too irksome and not ergonomic, the way it is implemented.
I wonder if a qwerty keyboard is at all optimal for a two-thumb keyboard. The layout was determined by the design limitation of mechanical typewriter—to ensure that physical strike bars didn't get jammed.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Jonathan Mason, @Mr. Anon
Tell her that tapping letters with your finger is far too irksome and that it is much easier to dictate into your phone like any sensible person would. You can even dictate,,,,,. Or???
When I text, I tend to only capitalize the first words of sentences because my phone is smart enough to recognize that it is the first word of a sentence and it does it automatically. Even here I tend to eliminate the final period of my post, as it is obviously overReplies: @Hangnail Hans, @Jonathan Mason
It may not be optimal, but it is good enough, because the most common letters are in the middle and words like the and that and there are really easy to type. That is why Q and Z are in the corners. (The letter Z is much more common in American English, because it often replaces the S in British English.)
And the rise of equity.
Market Capitalization vs. Equity: What’s the Difference?
Capitalization….
Does anybody remember the one Hate Hoax with the gay who claimed his homophobic neighbor left him a vicious note on his doorstep deriding his festive backyard decor (several pissing cherub fountains?)? He posted the note to social media after (of course) setting up a GoFundMe account, and the money came pouring in.
Then some Spergy nogoodnik noticed that the author of the hate note and the gay dude had the same peculiar writing habit of Capitalizing Every Word In The Sentence.
Gay guy reluctantly admitted that the whole thing was fabricated, and then promptly refunded all funds sent to him.
I've asked her why, and she says that on their smartphones, that extra stab at the keyboard's shift key to get a capital letter is simply too irksome and not ergonomic, the way it is implemented.
I wonder if a qwerty keyboard is at all optimal for a two-thumb keyboard. The layout was determined by the design limitation of mechanical typewriter—to ensure that physical strike bars didn't get jammed.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Jonathan Mason, @Mr. Anon
The implanted brain-chip that directly sends your thoughts to your phone will fix that problem.
up to today students in elementary school in German spend a considerable amount of time learning which word shall be capitalized and which not. I wonder how schools in English-speaking countries use the additional time they gain by not having to teach Capitalization.
From Moon of Alabama yesterday:Replies: @Pixo, @Joe Stalin
On the other hand, the Putin Dead Russkie counter continues to inch upward every day and the mothers of Russkie KIA wonder why the bodies of their sons aren’t coming back home to be honored, buried and the life insurance collected.
Dead Russkies (Bad Stuff)
Die Erwachten? Die Aufgewachten?
You see it in Danish texts up until the early 20th century, especially in Bibles and religious texts. In Gothic or “Fraktur” font. It disappeared once everyone moved to
Helveticathe Roman alphabet.Danish State Archives: Gothic Script – an introduction
So that’s what Karl Marx was talking about in “Das Capital.” Now it all makes sense!
OT, but if this happens enough it could bring an end to the war. It’s a pity the US aren’t taking in thousands of blonde Ukrainian women.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10839637/Father-DUMPS-partner-falling-22-year-old-Ukrainian-refugee-came-live-them.html
Buzz, at first thought your blockquoted capitalized nouns were commenters’ handles, given that there are commenters here that go by “economist/Economist” and “fish”. In other news: Race Huckster, Ex-Man, and Democrat Candidate are still available as troll handles for commenting.
Capitalization rules in written English exist for a reason. When they are not followed within paragraphs of any length the text all runs together and is difficult to read.
Yes. And, in my opinion, it confuses the understanding of what is written.
As for the Declaration of Independence, I think "Course of human events" is more logical than "Course of Human Events". For one thing, "human events" modifies the main noun "Course", they are more like adjectives in function, even if they are nouns in form.Replies: @Graham
“Danish capitalized all nouns up until the end of WWII,”
I think it went even further than that. At least, my 1892 grammar of Dano-Norwegian says that you have to capitalise not only nouns but the pronouns I, Jer (you and your); De, Dem, Deres (other forms of you and your) and En (one).
Or rather, “at first I thought” …
Carlyle!
Emerson’s reading of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller (1825), his essays on and translations of German literature, so affected him, he made a pilgrimage to Carlyle’s Scotland estate in the summer of 1833, when Carlyle hardly knew he existed!
Carlyle’s Germanic prose single-handedly revived capitalisation in the English language.
The Bible translation used in lectionaries in American (maybe English too) Catholic churches still use the word holocaust for a burnt offering, such as Abraham’s offering of the ram after nearly sacrificing Isaac. That particular passage is read during the Easter Vigil, so Catholics (who bother to sit through the Vigil Mass) hear it every year. So far, I have heard of no campaigns or demands by the ADL to alter the translation as they have demanded other parts of the Liturgy be changed. Notably, the King James Version uses burnt offering in place of holocaust found in Latin and Greek.
I learned from feminists that “he” explicitly means a man, so this passage is crystal clear that the Framers intended the Vice President to be a man. If they had meant “he or she,” they would have said it. So the Constitution definitely requires that the Vice President be male. Does anyone here know how I can get in touch with Jonathan Turley?
It is similar to other questions: Are Jews an ethnic group or a religious community? Are Mexicans Caucasian, Indian, or mestizo?
The answer is clear and simple in every case: whichever works best for them, and worst for you.
“I’m guessing that heavy capitalization started to seem heavy-handed during the 18th Century, an era when lightness of touch — What Would Voltaire Say? — was prized.”
Although at times Voltaire could also be heavy-handed when mocking and satirizing his intended victims and targets. Or perhaps during their own time previous ages thought that they were aiming for subtlety but generations later are viewed as long winded, pompous, and heavy handed. Time does have a way of doing that. One generation’s subtlety is another generation’s abstruseness (and thus is viewed with suspicion and accusations of heavy handedness).
Capitalization remains still very hot here at Unz.com particularly at Newslink section
FYI
https://nypost.com/2022/05/21/judge-who-cut-c-blu-loose-is-partially-responsible-for-nyc-crime-surge-source/
Try it with anorectic and, ironically, dyslectic.
Thanks.
I think it went even further than that. At least, my 1892 grammar of Dano-Norwegian says that you have to capitalise not only nouns but the pronouns I, Jer (you and your); De, Dem, Deres (other forms of you and your) and En (one).Replies: @Reg Cæsar
I is still capitalized in Danish. The opposite of English, it is not first person singular but second person plural, informal. The English equivalent would be ye. Jer and jeres no longer are. Both languages seem to feel the stand-alone I needs some orthographic support. Hence, capitilization.
Ye has died out in English (except among Paddys and Newfies), and has been replaced redundantly by y’all, youse, yunz, etc, in certain bailiwicks.
Thank goodness, the Germans no longer use headache-inducing blackletter (Gothic).
We have Hitler to thank. He disliked 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔲𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔢𝔡𝔩𝔶 𝔍𝔢𝔴𝔦𝔰𝔥-𝔦𝔫𝔣𝔩𝔲𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔡 𝔰𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔭𝔱 so it was officially discontinued in 1941.
…unless it works in their favor that it doesn’t. Power politics is nothing if not flexible.
It is similar to other questions: Are Jews an ethnic group or a religious community? Are Mexicans Caucasian, Indian, or mestizo?
The answer is clear and simple in every case: whichever works best for them, and worst for you.
Putin will go down in history as Russia’s George W Bush, who bumbled into an unwinnable war of choice that left his nation permanently poorer.
Obviously Ukraine is churning out a lot of low-quality propaganda. But the maps don’t lie: Russia was crushed in Kiev, is in full retreat around Kharkiv, and is sacrificing the remainder of its regular army for some rust belty small towns whose prewar population was under 20k and are now depopulated rubble.
Russia had also alienated its former mild supporters, like Slovakia, Breitbart, Trump, and BoJo, while humiliating and further marginalizing its remaining friends.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Johann Ricke
My impression is that the Russians lately have been making some progress on a limited objective in Luhansk. Maybe they’ll capture this one minor city and declare victory?
Donetsk city and about half of the oblast by population (four million total about equally split ante bellum) were part of a second puppet state, and is where Russia has focused its offensives, and where Ukraine concentrated its defenses. Similar to many WWI offenses Russia’s attempts to advance have involved gigantic losses for no or tiny gains.
It is looking increasingly like Russia’s military will be unable to conquer the rest of Donetsk oblast, which they have publicly committed to doing and cannot abandon without humiliation.
An anti-Putin coup or his death or abdication may be the best way out. It would allow Ukraine to perhaps formally recognize Russia’s annexation of the pre-war puppet states and Crimea while letting Russia withdraw from the hostile areas it now occupies but are poor and ruined and not worth keeping.
I don’t think Russia has the ability to safety escalate its attacks against Ukraine because the West could respond by providing longer range and current generation anti-ship and cruise missiles that could hit Russian ships in port and Russian cities. Our newest missiles we are withholding could quickly sink most of the Black Sea Fleet and destroy Russia’s expensive new bridge to Crimea. Instead we now give them our stockpile of shorter range cold war missiles.
Also despite the war Russia continues to pay Ukraine to send gas to Europe through its pipelines, and escalating could jeopardize this.
Suddenly, off in the distance, a riot breaks out on the
AmericanUS side of the Canadian Border.I love the fact that we now have a Haitian Immigrant Alphabet
GirlEsteemed Woman of Color to now interpret and relay the random utterings of a semi-comatose, barely competent cue card reader.To make this farce complete: An AI program to convert all the wisdom into whale songs that school children must recite in lieu of the Racist Pledge of Allegience.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Steve Sailer
Person of Alphabet
Then there are other changes in our language which are, I think, more intentional. Like the proliferation of certain words and phrases that spring up all of a sudden with such ubiquity that it is hard to imagine that their appearance is organic. For example, during COVID, one heard terms (unrelated to COVID) being used by everybody all the time: "supply-chain", for example, or "resilience". It's almost as if these words were consciously injected into common parlance in order to prepare people's minds for a "new normal". Whoever used the term "supply-chain" prior to March 2020, outside of specialists? But since, everybody uses it. Almost as if the purpose was to a.) get you used to thinking about the supply-chain, and b.) get you used to it's steady and unavoidable break-down (at least when it comes to delivering consumer goods). "Resilience" is a word much beloved by the globalist Davos crowd. And now it is seeping down into common usage. Organizations now even have "Resilience Officers".
We saw this after 9/11 too, with terms like "homeland", which had hardly ever been used in common parlance in America. Nobody described America as "The Homeland". No civilian, anyway. Then, post-911, the word started getting spewed from every media orifice with great frequency.
As the old saying goes, words have meaning. More than that, they have uses. They have, behind them, agendas. The language you are programmed to use is not accidental.Replies: @Steve Sailer
“Whoever used the term “supply-chain” prior to March 2020, outside of specialists?”
“Supply chain” was fairly novel to me when I was at MBA school 40 years ago. It’s hardly bizarre that a useful newish term would become more familiar over the last 40 years. Generally, supply chains worked remarkably smoothly over those decades, so there wasn’t much headline news about them breaking down like there has been for the last two years.
Suddenly, off in the distance, a riot breaks out on the
AmericanUS side of the Canadian Border.I love the fact that we now have a Haitian Immigrant Alphabet
GirlEsteemed Woman of Color to now interpret and relay the random utterings of a semi-comatose, barely competent cue card reader.To make this farce complete: An AI program to convert all the wisdom into whale songs that school children must recite in lieu of the Racist Pledge of Allegience.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Steve Sailer
Person of Alphabet.
Where I live we traditionally followed English spelling rules, so spellcheck/autocorrect is harassing me on words like color, we’re supposed write it colour, we also use humour, etc. I abide by internet spelling with American rules in an attempt to make myself better understood .The kicker is that we got beaten on the ass back in the time I had to learn spelling and grammar, so every time I give in to foreign rules it bothers me a little.
In the old South Africa corporal punishment was used in schools, usually with a light bamboo cane or flat wooden bat. Boys could legally receive up to 6 strokes of the the cane on the buttocks per day allowing of course time to heal if you were constantly in trouble. It left bruises, male or female teachers did not pull their punches, and you could get beaten for failing a test, talking back, or using bad grammar and spelling, for instance, a million reasons. Girls were beaten on the palms of their hands, sometimes boys too. I was 17 at the time of my last legal beating.
There was generally some humo(u)r involved, it was a rite of passage and you had to keep your composure in front of others. Teachers usually gave their canes names like Jan Brand (Johnny Burn, roughly translated), or medicine. I remember a wooden bat called Justice 2. The teacher involved would joke that he broke the first one on a student.
English is my second language.
Thanks,
A former beaten child, herself
English uses a lot of capitalization to this day. My language, Portuguese, does not capitalize language names or nationalities. It doesn’t even capitalize the names of the months or of the days of the week. I have no idea why that is. Maybe it’s because of how french- I mean French, rolls? In any case, I like it.
You write it one way, and the software doesn't like it and changes it behind your back. The Individual can still have his way, sometimes with a lot of annoyance, but it's the few who've made the rules in the software who determine Capitalization now. The rest of us "don't have a need to know."Replies: @Redneck farmer, @bomag, @Cagey Beast, @Jus' Sayin'..., @Wilkey
Spelling and grammar rules have never exactly been democratic. It took the invention of dictionaries for spelling to become standardized, and those dictionaries weren’t edited by democratically-elected bodies.
But at least in that case the men doing the standardization had immense authority in their subject. James Murray, the principle editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (see the Mel Gibson movie “The Professor & The Madman”) was an intensely well-read man and autodidact who would put all but a very few proclaimed intellectuals to shame. He also apparently came from very sturdy stock: he had 11 children with his second wife, every one of whom survived into adulthood.
Nowadays no one really knows who the hell is doing the standardization, or on what authority they do it.
There used to be a not-so-minor movement to be more forgiving about non-standard, phonetic spelling in the classroom – or even give up the teaching of spelling completely. There were many reasons that was an entirely stupid idea, but I suspect the principle reason people gave up on the idea is the widespread adoption of computers, especially when used to search for information. How do you search for anything when there is no widespread agreement on how to spell it?
Wasn’t Buckley gay?
We have Hitler to thank. He disliked 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔲𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔢𝔡𝔩𝔶 𝔍𝔢𝔴𝔦𝔰𝔥-𝔦𝔫𝔣𝔩𝔲𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔡 𝔰𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔭𝔱 so it was officially discontinued in 1941.Replies: @nebulafox, @J.Ross
I like the old German script. Always a treat to see pre-WWII German language newspapers and books and stuff with it. Looks cool.
But then, I like the old Reich. Not the one you are probably thinking of, either. 😉
Luhansk city and oblast (population 2 million) both were already under Russian control before the war as a puppet state (LNR).
Donetsk city and about half of the oblast by population (four million total about equally split ante bellum) were part of a second puppet state, and is where Russia has focused its offensives, and where Ukraine concentrated its defenses. Similar to many WWI offenses Russia’s attempts to advance have involved gigantic losses for no or tiny gains.
It is looking increasingly like Russia’s military will be unable to conquer the rest of Donetsk oblast, which they have publicly committed to doing and cannot abandon without humiliation.
An anti-Putin coup or his death or abdication may be the best way out. It would allow Ukraine to perhaps formally recognize Russia’s annexation of the pre-war puppet states and Crimea while letting Russia withdraw from the hostile areas it now occupies but are poor and ruined and not worth keeping.
I don’t think Russia has the ability to safety escalate its attacks against Ukraine because the West could respond by providing longer range and current generation anti-ship and cruise missiles that could hit Russian ships in port and Russian cities. Our newest missiles we are withholding could quickly sink most of the Black Sea Fleet and destroy Russia’s expensive new bridge to Crimea. Instead we now give them our stockpile of shorter range cold war missiles.
Also despite the war Russia continues to pay Ukraine to send gas to Europe through its pipelines, and escalating could jeopardize this.
“the drafters (Drafters?)”
The draughters.
True.
I wouldn’t be that harsh on the gals themselves, but I think we agree that simping for singers like Lana and Liz as is the province of groan men. As sonic guilty pleasures, sure, okay: I’ll pump the classic hit remix of Del Ray’s “Summertime Sadness” if it pops up on the car radio. (Video is pure cheese 🫠 )
Humans are a bit like that too. They are fitted with different internal decoders and hear different things.
As a jazz fan (primarily) I decode music as a combination of sound frequencies of different instruments including the human voice, rhythms, and sometimes sentiments expressed by the lyrics, if there are any, but rarely in a way that takes into account the sexual attractiveness of the performer.
Many people listen almost entirely to the sentimental content of the lyrics, especially women. And of course there are songs that express universal sentiments. As George Orwell pointed out, humans have common sentiments, and sometimes there is a simple and popular poem that does the job perfectly.
Who has not thought at least once: "Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away"?
But in jazz, it is usually not the sentiments that are popular, but the way the musical story is told. A great song might be recorded by 50 great recording artists, and they all have their pros and cons.
One of my favorite songs is Perfidia (and not just for the sentiment!). But which is the best version.
Well, here is the worst. It is not that bad, but the excruciatingly bad Spanish pronunciation of Nat King Cole murders it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mKKHAXZjzg
Here is a great, great version. Listen to this at home and it is almost impossible to stop yourself from dancing with the vacuum cleaner like Fred Astaire, but the lyrics are possibly a bit lackluster and lacking in venom, although the real lead vocal is Goodman's virtuoso clarinet line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vevSK7ZXcJs
And this might just be the greatest version of the song on record as Linda Ronstadt sings like she means it, and a great band publicly execute the song--killing it, as they say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zcc-TwI4B0Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akhmS1D2Ce4Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Jonathan Mason, @Joe S.Walker, @Jonathan Mason
Strike “as”; lazy edit.
We have Hitler to thank. He disliked 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔲𝔭𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔢𝔡𝔩𝔶 𝔍𝔢𝔴𝔦𝔰𝔥-𝔦𝔫𝔣𝔩𝔲𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔡 𝔰𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔭𝔱 so it was officially discontinued in 1941.Replies: @nebulafox, @J.Ross
Nazis disliked Fraktur, not because it was Jewish, but because it was old, and they wanted to be thought of as the party of the future (but not Futurist because that’s a separate thing). Thing is, they were okay with occasional use of freaking Copperplate, which makes Fraktur look like Mongolian as opposed to Sinhalese in terms of simplicity and clarity.
Yes but, Russia deciding it has what it wants is in the interests of everyone except the evil missile-selling neocons, who started the war, who told Elensky to drop negotiations, and who (in the event of Russia unilaterally stopping) would immediately restart the fight. Oh, I see what’s wrong there.
Capitalization is not the only standard for writing styles that are changing. The Unz Review and other blogs have their fair share of young people (I’m presuming) who have dropped capitalizing the first letter in a sentence and have likewise done away with paragraphing and punctuation.
It’s impossible to sort out sense from nonsense since their thoughts are arranged into incomprehensible sequences of sentence run-ons one after the other.
Is this another aspect of individualization run amuck in our society; that is, part of a “clown show” that passes as culture?
I make it easy on myself when I run across one of these “clown shows”. I don’t bother with them; I move on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akhmS1D2Ce4Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Jonathan Mason, @Joe S.Walker, @Jonathan Mason
Voice sounds a bit like a white man’s Rihanna, but the instrumental backing is terrible. 3/10.
As Basil Fawlty might say, “You started, you invaded Ukraine.”
We took over their government in a season of violence and used that to substantiate the Russia hoax and to prosecute a bloody civil war. Russia's motive isn't taking Kiev, it's ensuring that this sort of thing does not continue. Even if none of that were true, which is silly, accommodating that is a non-negotiable step in getting Russia to go home. Right now NATO and the neocons are doing everything they can to prolong the killing because they are making money off of it. Even if Russia started it, Elensky actually tried at one point to stop it, and it was us and not Russia who commanded him to knock it off.
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1527917896684302337?s=20&t=aEDriInLhC2ecT1GKhBfnA
Thanks for those points, Wilkey. I suppose the modern computer searches can catch the mis-spellings too, as they do when you make a simple typo mistake on duckduckgo. At some point, well, you can’t just go spelling it any which way or words blur with each other …
"I'm at The traveler from an antique land."
"The Rime of the ancient Mariner." (VG!).
"There is nothing new under the Sun."The phrases above were dictated and left unedited. Obviously Google knows about the poem about the elderly saylor, because it has spelled the word rhyme in the same way as the title of the poem, but look what it did with the word sailor! Weird!Replies: @Joe S.Walker
Whadda you lookin’ at? You all saw him. He had a gun.
We took over their government in a season of violence and used that to substantiate the Russia hoax and to prosecute a bloody civil war. Russia’s motive isn’t taking Kiev, it’s ensuring that this sort of thing does not continue. Even if none of that were true, which is silly, accommodating that is a non-negotiable step in getting Russia to go home. Right now NATO and the neocons are doing everything they can to prolong the killing because they are making money off of it. Even if Russia started it, Elensky actually tried at one point to stop it, and it was us and not Russia who commanded him to knock it off.
I have no idea how Google algorithms work, but it is interesting how they seem to be able to screw up common phrases in dictation.
For example you will say something like “pot calling the kettle black” and it will come out with “pot calling the bottle back”, when you would expect that their algorithms would default to the cliche.
I dictate most of my posts, texts and messages, (including this one), and for the most part the results are excellent, and obviously Google is very used to my voice, so it is odd that Google has problems with stock phrases, and often comes up with creative alternatives and adds capitals.
“4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie.”
“I’m at The traveler from an antique land.”
“The Rime of the ancient Mariner.” (VG!).
“There is nothing new under the Sun.”
The phrases above were dictated and left unedited. Obviously Google knows about the poem about the elderly saylor, because it has spelled the word rhyme in the same way as the title of the poem, but look what it did with the word sailor! Weird!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akhmS1D2Ce4Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Jonathan Mason, @Joe S.Walker, @Jonathan Mason
Frankly, I think that track is very poor musically – nothing unexpected happens, there are no real dynamics, the voice is completely processed, the lyrics are vague psychobabble from what I can hear. But it’s entirely typical of records you hear nowadays. I don’t understand why people like them.
"I'm at The traveler from an antique land."
"The Rime of the ancient Mariner." (VG!).
"There is nothing new under the Sun."The phrases above were dictated and left unedited. Obviously Google knows about the poem about the elderly saylor, because it has spelled the word rhyme in the same way as the title of the poem, but look what it did with the word sailor! Weird!Replies: @Joe S.Walker
Perhaps Google gets more searches for the Sun newspaper than it does for Ecclesiastes.
Says who?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akhmS1D2Ce4Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Jonathan Mason, @Joe S.Walker, @Jonathan Mason
To play music on a computer you need programs with decoders that can play a particular format and turn it into sounds.
Humans are a bit like that too. They are fitted with different internal decoders and hear different things.
As a jazz fan (primarily) I decode music as a combination of sound frequencies of different instruments including the human voice, rhythms, and sometimes sentiments expressed by the lyrics, if there are any, but rarely in a way that takes into account the sexual attractiveness of the performer.
Many people listen almost entirely to the sentimental content of the lyrics, especially women. And of course there are songs that express universal sentiments. As George Orwell pointed out, humans have common sentiments, and sometimes there is a simple and popular poem that does the job perfectly.
Who has not thought at least once: “Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away”?
But in jazz, it is usually not the sentiments that are popular, but the way the musical story is told. A great song might be recorded by 50 great recording artists, and they all have their pros and cons.
One of my favorite songs is Perfidia (and not just for the sentiment!). But which is the best version.
Well, here is the worst. It is not that bad, but the excruciatingly bad Spanish pronunciation of Nat King Cole murders it.
Here is a great, great version. Listen to this at home and it is almost impossible to stop yourself from dancing with the vacuum cleaner like Fred Astaire, but the lyrics are possibly a bit lackluster and lacking in venom, although the real lead vocal is Goodman’s virtuoso clarinet line.
And this might just be the greatest version of the song on record as Linda Ronstadt sings like she means it, and a great band publicly execute the song–killing it, as they say.
To continue the Ronstadt llorando theme, here’s my fave of hers of misty memory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkenwKMMph4
First of all, you’ve been making that same joke for weeks, it was never funny in the first place, and now it’s getting rather old.
Second, the referent of that joke, the supposed German invasion of Poland that initiated WWII, is itself historically contentious and complicated. It was not the straightforward act of mindless aggression it’s being used to signify here.
Third, the modern nation of Ukraine does not consist entirely of people who identify as Ukrainian and who were just minding their own business before Russia invaded on a whim. The people in the Donbass identify as Russian, want to be united with Russia, and have no interest in being ruled by an independent Ukraine. Russia likewise considers these people to be Russian and wants to gather them in. The government in Kiev disagrees and is basically holding these people against their will and sending paramilitary groups like Azov to terrorize them. This is an “invasion” only from the point of view of the Zelensky regime, and it is a pseudo-legal contrivance.
Fourth, at any rate, it is clear to anybody with half a brain that Russia has been provoked past the point that any sovereign state can be expected to tolerate.
I don’t know what kind of cheap points you expect to score with this kind of talk. Russia didn’t start the fight, she’s just finishing it.
“Course” in this context contains an element of “Fate”: not merely a random process, but influenced by the Will of God. Wyrd: our Germanic ancestors implicitly distinguished the subtlety of causation before they were even literate.
In the old South Africa corporal punishment was used in schools, usually with a light bamboo cane or flat wooden bat. Boys could legally receive up to 6 strokes of the the cane on the buttocks per day allowing of course time to heal if you were constantly in trouble. It left bruises, male or female teachers did not pull their punches, and you could get beaten for failing a test, talking back, or using bad grammar and spelling, for instance, a million reasons. Girls were beaten on the palms of their hands, sometimes boys too. I was 17 at the time of my last legal beating.
There was generally some humo(u)r involved, it was a rite of passage and you had to keep your composure in front of others. Teachers usually gave their canes names like Jan Brand (Johnny Burn, roughly translated), or medicine. I remember a wooden bat called Justice 2. The teacher involved would joke that he broke the first one on a student.
English is my second language.Replies: @stillCARealist
More reasons to homeschool!
Thanks,
A former beaten child, herself
Humans are a bit like that too. They are fitted with different internal decoders and hear different things.
As a jazz fan (primarily) I decode music as a combination of sound frequencies of different instruments including the human voice, rhythms, and sometimes sentiments expressed by the lyrics, if there are any, but rarely in a way that takes into account the sexual attractiveness of the performer.
Many people listen almost entirely to the sentimental content of the lyrics, especially women. And of course there are songs that express universal sentiments. As George Orwell pointed out, humans have common sentiments, and sometimes there is a simple and popular poem that does the job perfectly.
Who has not thought at least once: "Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away"?
But in jazz, it is usually not the sentiments that are popular, but the way the musical story is told. A great song might be recorded by 50 great recording artists, and they all have their pros and cons.
One of my favorite songs is Perfidia (and not just for the sentiment!). But which is the best version.
Well, here is the worst. It is not that bad, but the excruciatingly bad Spanish pronunciation of Nat King Cole murders it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mKKHAXZjzg
Here is a great, great version. Listen to this at home and it is almost impossible to stop yourself from dancing with the vacuum cleaner like Fred Astaire, but the lyrics are possibly a bit lackluster and lacking in venom, although the real lead vocal is Goodman's virtuoso clarinet line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vevSK7ZXcJs
And this might just be the greatest version of the song on record as Linda Ronstadt sings like she means it, and a great band publicly execute the song--killing it, as they say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zcc-TwI4B0Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
Mason you magnificent psychic bastard! Before refreshing, I was about to respond to your “instrumental backing” backing comment thus:
But I retract! You gave my comments some thought. Thanks. I’m not a jazz aficionado myself, but I like good music whatever the genre.
To continue the Ronstadt llorando theme, here’s my fave of hers of misty memory:
Definitely a club/car track—it’s programmed acceleration energy: You’re either susceptible to ‘euphoric’ sequential sound surges or you aren’t. The arrangement is tight if maybe conventional in a ‘tried and true’ way. Also, I like the singing and lyrics. 🙂
Permanent Washington believes it built a trap out of Ukraine and is now boastful about how it was done:
………Northern aristocrat ….can’t say which is worse.
English: America, American (noun), American (adj.), Americanize, Monday, May
Dutch: Amerika, Amerikaan, Amerikaans, amerikaniseren, maandag, mei
German: Amerika, Amerikaner, amerikanisch, amerikanisieren, Montag, Mai
Spanish: América, americano, americano, americanizar, lunes, mayo
French: Amérique, Américain, américain, américaniser, lundi, mai
The Capitalization of Nouns. What an interesting Question, and one I never saw asked before. Can the Explanation be letter frequencies in fonts of metal type?
It is a matter of historical record that the orthography of the Welsh language was radically altered with the introduction of printing for that very reason – among other things the letter k was abolished in favour of c – and that the letter x was adopted as the standard mathematical variable because printers had plenty to spare.
Bear in mind that up to 1700 most books were printed in Latin, an octavo/quarto/folio at a time. If Shakespeare used some letter less or more frequently than Cicero, why not dip into the upper case font once lower case was used up?
It is a matter of historical record that the orthography of the Welsh language was radically altered with the introduction of printing for that very reason - among other things the letter k was abolished in favour of c - and that the letter x was adopted as the standard mathematical variable because printers had plenty to spare.
Bear in mind that up to 1700 most books were printed in Latin, an octavo/quarto/folio at a time. If Shakespeare used some letter less or more frequently than Cicero, why not dip into the upper case font once lower case was used up?Replies: @Steve Sailer
So sometime printers would use capitals because they’s run out of lowercase letters?
Here’s an unmodernized passage from Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” (1742) with the original capitalization.
It’s not entirely schematic but there is some logic to the capitals with the most prominent nouns in each clause generally capitalized, even if they’re ordinary objects like “Bell” or “Bed”. So in the Declaration “Course” gets a capital but “human events”, which just modify “course”, don’t. I’ve also felt that the practice tends to reflect the 18th-century sense of the solidity of things; e.g., Love, Pride, Disdain, Disappointment all have defined, translatable meanings, like a currency based on weights of gold and silver. It can actually be easier to read Alexander Pope’s poetry with the original typography for this reason because it’s based on contrasting objective noun concepts, usually inside each line. Looking at original pages of Boswell’s Life of Johnson which appeared 50 years later it seems to follow modern practice much more: it’s Boswell’s personal view without the pretence of authorial omniscience that Johnson assumed in his biographical studies.
Should read “kahnt” (get good chowda etc). My late bro’-in-law came from “Bahstin” (Jamaica Plain, when it was all Irish) and had an accent as thick as chowda–which is not supposed to be thick, by the way, but that’s another story.
Putin will go down in history as Russia’s George W Bush, who bumbled into an unwinnable war of choice that left his nation permanently poorer.
Obviously Ukraine is churning out a lot of low-quality propaganda. But the maps don’t lie: Russia was crushed in Kiev, is in full retreat around Kharkiv, and is sacrificing the remainder of its regular army for some rust belty small towns whose prewar population was under 20k and are now depopulated rubble.
Russia had also alienated its former mild supporters, like Slovakia, Breitbart, Trump, and BoJo, while humiliating and further marginalizing its remaining friends.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Johann Ricke
You must be joking. We spent maybe \$1T on Iraq. That 5% of today’s economy. During WWII, we spent 2 years’ economic output over 4 years. WWII cost large amounts of money and 400K GI’s in the prime years of their productivity. That was the equivalent of 100 Iraq wars. We got over that and went on with life.
I am Liking the Capitals. Like every time I see Stuff, like Capitalized, I Like the way it, like looks in the sentence. Using Capitals is like a smile simile, similarly like a positive emphasis to like happily draw your like attention to the word, although some might like find this comparison like kinda sketchy. What is up with being down with saying like all the time? I liken saying like all the time to finger nails on a blackbored. Mean while Algae and Fungi are like Like’n being Lichen cause they like each other.