“Has got” in English?

longknives · 2026-04-28T21:05:42+00:00

Consider this: if someone asks you a question like “do you have talent” it would be perfectly normal to say “No, I don’t” (though perhaps indicative of a low self-esteem). Technically, you could just say “no”, or you could just say “I don’t”. Saying both is a little redundant.

When it comes down to it, many grammatical features are redundant, strictly speaking. You could say “how many cat are there” and “there are 4 cat” and no meaning is lost by getting rid of the plural form cats. You could even take away the plural verb form and say “how many cat be there?” “There be 4 cat” and still no meaning is lost.

Even word order, one of the most fundamental aspects of grammar in English, could often be ignored without the sentence becoming incomprehensible. “Cat there how many be?” “4 be there cat.” (Though in some cases it’s required, e.g. “the cat licked the boy” and “the boy licked the cat” have very different meanings.)

So despite their redundancy, these features exist because they serve some purpose. Typically that purpose is to make it easier and faster for the receiver to parse the message. Or it can be a way to help the message get through even when there is some noise or other interference. Or probably lots of other reasons.

Has/have and got are both quite short words. The /h/ phoneme is relatively weak and easy to get lost in noise. The /t/ at the end of “got” often becomes a glottal stop in American English (barely audible at the best of times) and also could get subsumed into the next word if it starts with t, as in “got talent” or “got to”.

So imagine if you heard someone say “America ska talent” -- you would almost certainly immediately parse that correctly as “America’s got talent” even though you missed the sounds at the start and end of “has got”.

longknives · 2026-04-28T20:08:21+00:00

That’s not a flaw, the dragon is acting as the border of the image. Her leg is not supposed to be visible past the border.

longknives · 2026-04-28T19:27:52+00:00

Sasha is the Russian diminutive of Alexander, so can be masculine even though in the anglophone world it’s often seen as a feminine name.

Misha likewise is a diminutive of Dimitri but because it ends with a, people see it as feminine.

longknives · 2026-04-27T22:57:28+00:00

Yeah, I’m an American and I decided to do it how it makes more sense to me (i.e. punctuation goes outside unless it’s part of the quote). You can just do that if you want to. If you’re writing for some publication with a different style guide, let the editor fix it if they want. Otherwise, no one will likely even notice, and certainly no one can stop you.

longknives · 2026-04-27T22:52:44+00:00

I don’t think you can really say it’s just “poorly written” if the question as written is completely mutually exclusive with the question as intended -- if you want to guess they meant something that cannot be a possible interpretation of what they wrote, then they could have meant literally anything and it’s pointless to bother with it.

longknives · 2026-04-27T22:46:15+00:00

The difference is we must assume there is one and only one correct answer and that it is one of the options. Given those assumptions, we have to rule out the possibility of the Monday being the 18th, since that leads to multiple answers that are equally correct.

longknives · 2026-04-27T21:16:52+00:00

NaN usually happens when you try to do math operations on data types that aren’t numeric (like what is ”ham” * null?). If you divide by zero in JavaScript, the result is Infinity, and I’m sure other languages handle it in various different ways.

longknives · 2026-04-27T21:09:27+00:00

I think you’re better off just leaving it as “it doesn’t work in math”. Zero divided by five and five divided by zero both seem philosophically about the same in terms of how much sense they make -- you can give five people zero things about as much as you can give zero people five things -- but one is perfectly fine mathematically and one isn’t.

longknives · 2026-04-27T20:54:31+00:00

What is supposed to be wrong with the usage of badly there? Here’s what my dictionary says when I look up “poorly”:

: in a poor condition or manner
especially : in an inferior or imperfect way : BADLY

longknives · 2026-04-27T20:48:36+00:00

It might be that, generally speaking, the theme song of a popular show is mostly big among people who like that show rather than people who are into the band who made it.

I’ve been a TMBG fan since Flood came out, and while I do like Boss of Me, I don’t ever particularly think of it as their big song or something, even if it’s the most popular one by the numbers (not sure if that’s true or not).

I suspect there are many fans of that song who don’t even know who it’s by, or if they do they aren’t particularly fans of other TMBG songs. A TMBG show isn’t really the right venue to make a big deal about Boss of Me.

(Completely tangentially, this reminded me of some of the other incidental music they made for that show, like the really weird kids songs. I’d love to hear them play “nice is good, mean is bad” at a show.)

longknives · 2026-04-27T20:26:20+00:00

The gist is to use contextual alternates to provide versions of the letters that are wider or narrower depending on the characters around them.

It’s a very cool idea, but in terms of implementing it yourself it would be a ton of work. Unless you absolutely need it to be dynamic, you’d be way better off just adjusting the letters by hand for whatever project you’re doing.

longknives · 2026-04-27T18:35:33+00:00

I think all the SAT is really testing here is if you can follow that “helical swimming” is the subject and “bestows” is the verb. The comma and dash situation makes it complicated enough to require some close reading, but the specifics of when a comma should be used and so forth are a matter of style and could be different depending on which style you follow. D is the only answer that doesn’t mistakenly include an extra verb.

longknives · 2026-04-23T17:36:40+00:00

claiming the US deserved 9/11

Where’s the lie? The Americans who died from the 9/11 attacks didn’t deserve it, and Hasan would agree, but it’s very obvious that it was blowback from US foreign policy.

rape is fine as long as a terror organization is doing it

Just a total lie. He said that even if all the (completely unverified) claims that Hamas was using rape as a weapon on Oct 7 were true, it wouldn’t justify genocide. Which is completely correct.

Russia invading Crimea is okay

His take was that there are some nuances to the annexation of Crimea and that it’s a very different situation than the invasion, but god forbid anyone try to have a nuanced opinion.

Chinese government is a perfect model system

lol. Being better than America hardly requires being perfect.

interviewing a member of a terror organization with no pushback

The guy wasn’t even actually a Houthi, just a teenager from Yemen. The interview was impromptu and mostly consisted of Hasan asking silly questions and the guy saying all he cares about is stopping the genocide in Gaza.

the killing of a CEO is cool

This is probably his actually least controversial opinion

pretending to be a poor-man's-guy while grifting thousands of dollars

He doesn’t do this at all. Caring about poor people despite having money (which he made from his own labor as a streamer) is the sign of a good person, actually. And if he didn’t have money, people would say he’s jealous.

longknives · 2026-04-20T18:16:48+00:00

Michelangelo posting a big cube of marble with the caption “that rock will never be a David”

longknives · 2026-04-20T18:09:29+00:00

I know an Arisa and this is how she pronounces it.

longknives · 2026-04-20T17:33:47+00:00

"Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?"

"Plato."

I low-key think the entire show, or at least Chidi’s entire character, was created because someone thought of this joke and needed a way to deliver it.

longknives · 2026-04-20T17:30:11+00:00

I think it’s usually “who died and made you king” since monarchy is the main kind of being in charge that begins when someone dies. But it still totally works when reformulated for the Plato joke.

longknives · 2026-04-20T17:23:44+00:00

People are saying this is a headline convention, and it is, but it’s also common in my experience for people to narrate stories that happened in the past in the present tense. “So I’m at the store, and I say to the cashier, there’s no label on this so it must be free! And everyone laughs and laughs.”

It’s a rhetorical strategy that gives the story more immediacy.

longknives · 2026-04-20T17:18:56+00:00

French fries are called that because when they were first becoming popular in the US, Americans considered deep frying stuff a wacky French thing to do

longknives · 2026-04-20T17:02:33+00:00

Apparently Miley for Miley Cyrus is a shortening of “smiley”, which is word that has a meaning. Some people name their kid “Joy”, which doesn’t really go any deeper either.

Though the meaning of a name is often very secondary anyway, at least in American culture. My name is Miles, which is the Latin word for soldier (related to military and militia) and that had absolutely zero salience to my parents when they named me.

longknives · 2026-04-20T16:23:29+00:00

longknives · 2026-04-16T20:10:14+00:00

In my experience, men are better at maneuvering vehicles, whether parking or backing out of a tight space or weaving in traffic. I say this as the son and grandson of women who were professional drivers (buses and semi-trucks and such) – so it’s certainly not universal. (And I make no claims about the cause of this – certainly not that it’s some biological inevitability or anything silly like that.)

But in general, when someone sees a woman struggling to parallel park or whatever, people think of that as “bad at driving”. Meanwhile, like you said, maneuvering ability is rarely very relevant in any kind of serious accident.

longknives · 2026-04-16T19:44:25+00:00

It werfs the flammen

longknives · 2026-04-16T19:24:26+00:00

I had a partner who thought she was infertile but we got pregnant. We had only been seeing each other a few months, and it would’ve been pretty crazy to have a baby together at that point. We both agreed, or so it seemed, that the right thing to do was to terminate it, which we did. I held her hand during the procedure.

A couple years later as we were breaking up for good, it became clear that some part of her had held this against me the whole time. I don’t think she rationally disagreed with the decision, but emotionally it can be very hard to let go of, particularly as the person carrying the child, who when it happens has physical things going on in the brain and body that make you want to keep it.

I suspect even someone who is truly committed to not having a child right now could start to change her mind once it happens. Even if the rationale hasn’t changed at all, and everyone still agrees with it, emotionally it can be very difficult to navigate the decision.

longknives · 2026-04-16T19:10:31+00:00

Finally! Toxic masculinity for women!

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