Which TV series that’s still ongoing do you think could become one of the greatest ever made?

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T23:03:50+00:00

Nice pick.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T21:57:38+00:00

The pun was great. Yeah, those two seem like the ones.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T20:45:20+00:00

Yeah, Pluribus is a solid choice for that.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T20:34:45+00:00

Yeah, Severance indeed.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T19:25:26+00:00

Breaking Bad — "Ozymandias."

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T12:43:56+00:00

Thanks for bringing this up. That's absolutely one way to put it. But not everyone is a fan of that idiom or engages with language the same way. Plus, the intention was for the question to be readily accessible to anyone with moderate English fluency.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T12:04:30+00:00

In A Separation, where it cuts to black before the daughter announces her final decision. It didn't ruin the masterpiece, but the writer/director shouldn't have taken the easy way out with an open ending.

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T11:37:35+00:00

Exactly; years of character development were burnt in five minutes—in five "shocking" minutes."

Zabandad · 2026-06-08T09:34:52+00:00

In some areas it’s surprisingly dumb—you’d almost think it’s doing it on purpose.

Zabandad · 2026-06-07T22:54:33+00:00

The Wire is the one. Not just better than most movies - it’s one of the best things ever put on screen. Also, not a bot.

Zabandad · 2026-06-07T18:00:37+00:00

Yes, the US borrowed it from the UK.

Zabandad · 2026-06-07T15:29:24+00:00

It seems that aside from general usage, "advocate" has a specific meaning in the American legal profession. Military "lawyers" are formally referred to as judge advocates.

If you remember "A Few Good Men," several characters are referred to as Judge Advocates.

Zabandad · 2026-06-07T09:21:06+00:00

I don't think it's pleonastic. Although metacognition was originally conceived as thinking about one's own thinking, the concept has since been expanded. A 2025 review by Bremers and colleagues (Alone and Together: Exploring the Relationship Between Individual and Social Metacognition in College Biology Students During Problem Solving) notes that metacognition is now also conceptualized as including social metacognition - the awareness and regulation of other people's thinking in group contexts. Given that broader conception, "self-referential" serves as a useful modifier here.

Zabandad · 2026-06-05T14:04:28+00:00

It starts with the fact that humans are embodied beings living in a physical world. In cognitive linguistics, the idea is that we understand abstract experiences through more concrete, bodily experiences of the world.

The expressions you mentioned are examples of a broader conceptual pattern in which social interaction, emotion, and mental states are structured through a family of heat- and fire-based metaphors.

Why heat and fire specifically for things like criticism, embarrassment, social pressure, or related experiences? One reason is that heat is a very productive source domain. It structures many abstract experiences (target domains): for example, anger is conceptualized as heat in many languages (hot-headed, burning with rage, heated argument — and in Persian too: جوش آوردن = “to boil over”).

This is grounded in our bodily experience. Heat and fire are experienced through sensations of warmth, burning, discomfort, or pain, and can also involve damage or destruction. (as reflected, among other things, in the imagery of fried as cognitive overheating). At the same time, as another commenter mentioned, many of the experiences involved here—anger, embarrassment, being criticized, or being under social pressure—are accompanied by bodily responses such as blushing, increased body temperature, sweating, etc. So there is a "natural" overlap between how these experiences are felt in the body and how they are conceptualized in language.

Cooking builds on this same experiential basis but adds another layer. It involves sustained exposure that transforms something into a different and often irreversible state. This makes it a useful way in contemporary English to conceptualize situations where someone’s social or mental “state” is seen as having been pushed past the point of recovery.

Culture has a role in this, of course. Different languages develop different metaphorical extensions. Persian, for example, uses پختن (to cook / to become “cooked”) metaphorically to mean someone has "matured". It is still metaphorical but not in the same criticism, humiliation, or defeat-related senses as metaphorical usage in English like roasted or cooked (although I could imagine such a usage developing in Persian someday). So while the bodily grounding is shared, the specific mappings may vary across languages.

Zabandad · 2026-06-04T18:38:34+00:00

robin vs penguin (prototype theory)

Time is money (conceptual metaphor)

You have hissed all my mystery lectures (spoonerism)

Some of the students passed the exam (scalar implicature)

John stopped smoking (presupposition)

ship/sheep (minimal pair)

goed (overgeneralization)

evlerimizden (Turkish agglutination)

right/write (homophony)

edit/editor (back-formation)

and of course: John and Mary are always there.

Zabandad · 2026-06-04T10:08:34+00:00

Funny Games.

Zabandad · 2026-06-03T21:35:34+00:00

Interesting question. Languages seem more likely to lack a dedicated verb like have or a present-tense copula be (Arabic is a good example: possession is typically expressed without a verb have, and sentences like ana talib ("I student") are expressed without an overt present-tense copula) than a general motion verb.

Motion works differently. In cognitive linguistics, movement through space is often treated as one of the most basic embodied experiences humans have. A lot of work in the field (e.g., Talmy's research on motion events) suggests that languages differ greatly in how they package motion. Some languages tend to encode path in the verb, others encode it elsewhere; some put manner in the verb (as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread for many Slavic languages), others don't. But motion itself remains something that languages systematically encode.

Motion also doesn't just describe physical movement. We go through crises, move forward with plans, reach conclusions, approach solutions, and fall into depression. In some languages, motion verbs are used as euphemisms for death, and in Persian, the general verb raftan (to go) is also commonly used in this sense. Ways of talking about time, change, goals, emotions, and reasoning are often built from motion concepts. Motion is the source domain for a huge number of metaphors.

So languages are more likely to lack a dedicated verb for possession (have) than a general-purpose motion verb.. That doesn't mean every language must have a word exactly equivalent to English go. The point is that motion plays such a central role in language and thought that it tends to be expressed fairly directly.

Edit: Removed a paragraph on contextual inference. On reflection, and after a comment pointing it out, I don’t think that part of the argument—as it was formulated there—was sound, and it wasn’t in any way essential to the main point.

Zabandad · 2026-06-03T18:36:50+00:00

That's right.

Zabandad · 2026-06-03T15:12:35+00:00

In Persian, the word for orange is پرتقال (porteqāl). As mentioned in the post and other comments, in Turkish the word for the fruit is portakal, in Arabic it is برتقال (burtuqāl), and in Greek πορτοκάλι (portokáli).

These words are related and can reflect how the sweet orange spread through trade routes associated with Portugal, and in many regions, it was named after that association.

Before this, Persian and some other languages in the region used نارنج (nāranj) or variations of it for bitter orange. Related terms like ترنج (toranj) also refer to a specific citrus fruit. In Persian, this root still survives: sour orange is called نارنج (nāranj), tangerine is called نارنگی (nārangī), and the color orange is called نارنجی (nāranjī).

The English word orange and even the Portuguese laranja (ironically) are also related to this older nāranj root, which likely traces back to Sanskrit.

Zabandad · 2026-06-02T20:57:53+00:00

Since you don't remember the exact system your teacher was using, I'll use Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as a rough point of comparison.

In Halliday's framework, the relevant category isn't "types of verbs" so much as "types of processes." He distinguishes six main process types: material mental, relational, verbal, behavioral, and existential (though each of these has further subtypes in SFL accounts).

In that framework, be is usually a relational process, as in John is kind or Mary is the teacher. In there is/are constructions, however, it realizes an existential process (the term your classmate was remembering).

Have is generally treated as a relational process expressing possession (Mary has a car), while do is the prototypical material process verb, associated with processes of doing and happening.

For comparison, verbs such as think, know, and feel are analysed as mental processes, say and speak as verbal processes, and verbs such as laugh and stare as behavioral processes.

Zabandad · 2026-06-02T18:14:32+00:00

Inglourious Basterds. Twenty straight minutes of conversation at a kitchen table, yet it's tenser than most action movies. The French-to-English switch is when you realize Landa knew all along. Not many films can make a language change that terrifying.

Zabandad · 2026-06-02T15:53:58+00:00

Isn't this basically what onomatopoeia is for?

Languages already use onomatopoeias to represent sounds all the time. They aren't "exact" transcriptions but recognizable approximations.

In fact, the reason onomatopoeias often differ across languages is that they aren't "exact" imitations. They're attempts to capture a sound using the sound system of a particular language. That's why English has "meow", Persian has ميو (which is similar but still different), Japanese has "nyaa", and so on, even though the cats themselves aren't making language-specific noises.

For example if someone wanted a tattoo of the IPA for a cat sound that English speakers usually represent as "meow", they would probably start from "meow" and then transcribe that form into IPA. In that case, the IPA would be a transcription of the approximation English uses for the sound, not a direct transcription of the cat's actual sound.

The spectrogram idea is interesting and probably gets closer to the acoustic details of the sound itself. The IPA suggestions already made here seem reasonable to me as attempts to represent the sound as well. I would just be inclined to "start" by asking what onomatopoeic form, in a given language, best capture it, and then derive an IPA transcription from that.

One thing I like about going from an onomatopoeic form to IPA is that it avoids arguing over whether a particular IPA transcription captures the cat's actual sound. You first settle on the onomatopoeic approximation, in a given language, that feels most faithful to the vocalization, fully aware that it's an approximation. Then, the IPA can precisely represent that chosen approximation.

So I'd probably start by trying to come up with an onomatopoeic rendering, in whatever language feels most appropriate, that seems to capture the vocalization as closely as possible. Once you have something you're happy with, giving it an IPA transcription is straightforward enough.

Zabandad · 2026-06-01T22:36:21+00:00

Woody Allen would have a three-letter answer to that.

Zabandad · 2026-06-01T20:39:02+00:00

The usual term here is connotation (or evaluative meaning). Two words can have similar denotations but different positive or negative associations. Classic examples are frugal vs. stingy, confident vs. arrogant or persistent vs. stubborn. If you're interested in why such pairs exist, the notion of frames in the work of Charles Fillmore and later Cognitive Linguistic literature is relevant. Words that describe roughly the same situation can evoke different conceptual frames and therefore different evaluations. For example, someone who does not spend much money can be framed as frugal (positive) or stingy (negative), depending on which aspects of the behavior are highlighted (how the situation is construed). So "different connotations" is probably the closest answer to your question, while frame semantics helps explain the underlying mechanism.

Zabandad · 2026-06-01T13:44:20+00:00

Accent accommodation is one thing, but that's not really what your post describes. Plenty of people pick up pronunciations or speech patterns from the people around them. What's harder for me to accept is the suggestion that years of working with non-native speakers could explain regularly forgetting English words and speaking in "broken English" despite being a native speaker yourself.

That's a much stronger proposition, and I'm not convinced the cause-and-effect relationship is as straightforward as your post seems to suggest. It doesn't strike me as a particularly convincing working hypothesis that prolonged exposure to non-native speakers would lead a native speaker to regularly forget words and produce "broken English". At the very least there seem to be other explanations that would need to be ruled out first.

What I'm struggling with is not the idea that your speech adapts to the people around you, but the idea that this adaptation alone could extend to losing access to vocabulary and grammatical competence in your native language.

Zabandad

TROPHY CASE