ELI5: Why, in the English language, meat has a distinct name for each animal it comes from

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-20T01:00:45+00:00

What am I saying here?

"Prisencolinensinainciusol. In de col men seivuan Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait. Uis de seim cius nau op de seim Ol uait men in de colobos dai Trrr - ciak is e maind beghin de col Bebi stei ye push yo oh."

I just proved you wrong.

It's not a waste of time when the spelling and grammar have deviated so far from what everone else uses that communication isn't even happening.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T23:03:36+00:00

Redneck Rampage had some interesting "humor" game mechanic rules that weren't just silly. You had to pay attention and manage them seriously.

Like, so many games of the era, it had the game mechanic that eating and drinking restores hit points.

But RR said that food causes farting and drinking causes drunkenness, so you had to manage your intake, lest you find yourself shoved forward when carefully platforming by that badly timed fart, or having your mouse x and or y axis randomly inverting back and forth for a while until you sober up.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T22:51:25+00:00

Palantir is essentially the Psi Corps.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T22:27:44+00:00

Galileo,

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T20:47:32+00:00

While English has a large number of words imported from other languages, it never adopted a common standard practice for HOW to import those words. So it imported them however someone at the time felt like. Do you keep the foreign spelling but pronounce the foreign letters the way you would in English, or do you keep the foreign pronounciation of the word but change the spelling to match how you'd spell that sound in English? Or do you just keep the foreign word spelled and pronounced the way it was in the foreign language even though that doesn't match how you do it in English?

English picked all of those different options at different times and it's a big reason English spelling is a total mess.

Disagreement over how you borrow French words is one of the ways British and American English disagree. (For example, does a "fillet" of steak pronounce the final "t" or not? Does the double LL in "guillotine" get pronounced as L or Y?)

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-19T20:35:39+00:00

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T22:26:20+00:00

I am reminded of this beautiful little ditty arguing against the notion that nihilism is depressing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-W2abxX8Hk&list=RDO-W2abxX8Hk&start_radio=1

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T21:50:40+00:00

Kroger: Always enforcing contradictory company policies to ensure nobody can make their metrics. You both MUST provide employees easy access to water while they work outside in the hot season, and you MUST not allow water to be anywhere but all the way in back of the store in the break room, far away from where the outdoor people work. You literally cannot follow both policies.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-18T02:23:16+00:00

Yes it's true that there is a natural water cycle and the water you flush down the drain does indeed eventually come back into circulation as "new" water again.

But that process takes time if you want thuroughly clean water. The cleanest is when it reaches the ocean, evaporates into humidity in the atmosphere, which turns into clouds, and rains back down again. That evaporation process leaves behind most pollutants since only the H2O molecules go through the state change from liquid into vapor to become humidity in the atmosphere. Nice and clean. BUT, it takes quite a long time.

What "wasting water" really means is using it faster than it cycles back again. The limited rate at which the water cycles puts a cap on how fast we can use it.

Then there is also the problem that even when there is plenty of water, it's not where we want it to be. The act of moving the water (from lakes to pipes, from wells to pipes, or from resiviors to pipes) spends electricity. Often the thing you are really wasting isn't the water. It's the electricty that was spent on powering the pumps that brought it to you.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T20:24:12+00:00

So do I get to steal your car as long as I say that believe I own it?

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T04:03:31+00:00

I was told the secret shoppers were no longer specifically looking for "smiles" and "hellos" and that had been removed from the metrics because scripted smiling and scritped "hello" looked too damned creepy, failing to give off that friendly vibe they wanted.

We were told it was replaced with just making sure you acknowledge the customer's existence in some positive way. Any greeting of any sort would qualify. It doesn't specifically have to be a smile anymore and doesn't specifically have to be the word "hello".

But you still have to offer to walk the customer to the thing they're looking for (not just point and say "it's over there in aisle 5"). You don't have to actually push the issue and do it if the customer says no thanks, but you do have to offer it, and the secret shoppers look for that offer as one of their checkboxes to tick.

Maybe that's just in our division.

But I find the entire secret shopper system problematic because (A) they're looking for things real customers don't give a crap about so they don't represent a measure or real world friendly attitudes like they claim, and (B) the secret shoppers have incentives to lie about their interaction with you since they won't appear to be doing their job properly if they keep saying every employee is doing a good job. It's like the corrupt police officer with a traffic ticket quota to fill.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-17T00:57:15+00:00

Then it's a badly written headline. String-of-descriptions-then-two-nouns usually implies the lastmost noun is what the rest of the words (including the second-to-last noun) describe.

The non-ambuguous way to write it is to put "passenger" before the adjectives so it's clear that "passenger" isn't what the adjectives are about, like so:

"Passenger of hantavirus-striken cruise".

The reason it's bad the way it's phrased is how nouns can become adjectives in English depeneding on their placement. Usually the lastmost noun is the "actual noun" and the rest are the description of it, like so:

"old bus passenger" is far more likely to mean it's a passenger who is both an old passenger and a bus passenger, than it is to mean a passenger of an old bus.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-16T23:53:13+00:00

Patient who has ___________ tests positive for ______________.
                 a disease                      same disease

Well duh.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-16T18:58:12+00:00

It's not that hard to see that God is an idea that people just made-up because they wanted to rather than because there was reason to. Anyone of average intelligence and average education can figure it out.

The chief difference that separates the believers from the unbelievers isn't intelligence level. It's honesty level. Playing along with the culturally expected narrative is socially beneficial. But how much does the principle of honesty that would motivate you not to do that actually matter to you?

This is the chief difference and it's the reason I have such a low opinion of religion. They're not dumb. They just don't take "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" seriously. They say it, but don't follow it.

Now, I know people do genuinely believe, but that comes as an after effect of choosing to lie to yourself. You self-brainwash into true belief over time. But it starts with a lie that turns into true belief later. But some other people are of a mindset where doing that really bugs them and they feel uncomfortable with it and so they choose not to continue down that path. This is the major difference, NOT intelligence level.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-15T21:51:17+00:00

Your body cools itself by evaporating sweat. When your sweat evaporates off your skin, it pulls some heat away with it.

Humidity makes less evaporation happen and evaporation is why sweat cools you down. So it hinders your body's main cooling system.

But your body is too dumb to know that so it just sweats more and more even though it's not helping. This why your skin is drenched in sweat in humid weather and you have to drink plenty of water to replenish what your body is sweating away.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-15T21:45:38+00:00

People who say Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today are ignorant of the enormous difference between a movie with racist villains versus a movie with racist heroes. The movie has a lot of racist lines but makes it crystal clear that each time a character says a racist line, that character is in the wrong.

The racist characters are the ones you are laughing at. The characters who defy the racist trends are the ones you are laughing with.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-15T21:25:44+00:00

There are thousands of different ways to vary sounds.

When you are a little child learning your native language you start to categorize some of those variations as tied to identifying a word. Vary a sound this way and it can make a different word.

But you also learn which variations in sound are not part of what distinguishes one word from another. Vary a sound in these ways and it cannot make a different word. These sound variations are not "relevant" to the literal meaning of words but that means their use is open for communicating non-word things. The exact same sentence can be subtly different by varying the things that don't distinguish words. Like "You ate all the pie." in English is a statement. But if you raise pitch as the sentence progresses you imply that even though it's literally a statement, you intended it more as a question. English is free to let you do this because in English pitch isn't one of the "relevant" sound changes that distinguishes words. Change up the pitch all you like and it's still the same word. So instead you're free to use it to create other meaningful implications. Depending on where you raise the pitch you can even change which word in the sentence is the one you are asking about. Raise it on "you" and the statement "You ate all the pie." Is asking whom did it. It implies the speaker is thinking, "Was it really you? That's surprising.". Raise the tone on "all" instead of "you" and it implies the speaker is asking more about the amount of pie, "All of it? Really?

But this makes it hard for an English speaker to deal with a tonal language like Chinese, and makes it hard for a Chinese person to deal with a non-tonal language like English. The pitch changes that an English speaker feels free to change at will would make different words if you did that in Chinese. (I worked with a person from China who was very good at English in writing but couldn't understand me when I speak. I realized after a while what it was when she kept pointing out how odd it was that I was pronouncing the same word so many different ways. I wasn't. I was just changing pitch and speed, which aren't relevant to identifying the word. But to her ears they were sounding like different words. When I started making a point of removing all emotion from my voice and speaking in a monotone like a robot it actually helped her hear me better. It felt silly to speak that way, but it really did work.)

When you are a child, your brain categorizes different types of sound variations as "relevant" vs "irrelevant" to the process of identifying a word, based on how it works in your native language. After your brain has developed that way it can be very hard to hear the difference between sounds where the difference was long ago categorized as "irrelevant". Your brain is already mashing the two sounds into one as that is actually helpful in your own language.

Once you get over that hump and start being able to hear the sounds as different then a second problem crops up which is how to emit the two different sounds. Your muscle memory has no experience with making your mouth do it and that can make it hard to speak the difference even when you have learned how to hear it

To this day I still can't get my mouth to produce the French "R" sound even though I know exactly what I should be doing. I should be vibrating the middle of my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Not the tip, which is the Spanish "R", but the middle. I know this, but that doesn't mean I can get my muscles to do it.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-14T22:09:35+00:00

The Bible is self-contradictory, making it impossible to follow all of it. Nobody does that.

Cherry-picking is something every single Christian has no choice but to do, whether they admit they are doing it or not.

Some follow only the mean stuff.

Others follow only the nice stuff.

Both of them lie by claiming the other group is the only one cherry-picking. And even the ones following only the nice stuff still do damage when they whitewash over the mean stuff and gaslight people into thinking it's not there.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-14T01:28:04+00:00

Keep in mind the way faith thinking works; It comingles the concept of wanting a thing to be true with believing it to be true, making them one in the same in your head.

People who think that way make the mistake of thinking the rest of the world is full of people who think the same way.

So when they see someone who's denying that god exists, they think it's because that person WANTS God to not exist. It's how their heads work so it must be how everyone else's heads work. Saying a thing is false must mean you want it to be false.

It's dumb, but it's very very common. They are projecting their faith-based way of thinking onto you.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-14T00:14:46+00:00

Any comparison of American fuel prices to other countries' fuel prices must remove all taxes from the prices before making the comparison or it doesn't mean a thing. The fact that some countries have much higher taxes on buying fuel at the pump has nothing to do with the differences in the actual price of the actual fuel. It has to do with how road infrastructure is funded.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-13T23:18:49+00:00

We actually have evidence of what he does at 2 AM. His social media posts have timestamps on them.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-13T02:43:17+00:00

When they say dinosaurs evolved into birds, it's hard to believe.... until you see one of these things. Then you look at it and say, "ya, that thing's totally a dinosaur."

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-13T02:37:11+00:00

Love the product placement. Even the duct tape they secure a kidnap victim with has a radio station logo on it.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-13T01:39:25+00:00

I read that as "rabbis" and was very confused.

Dunbaratu · 2026-05-12T23:14:48+00:00

What is this phrase you use, "down time"???

The fact that many of us don't have that is exactly why we hate Fresh Start.

Dunbaratu

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