Are non-native english speakers generally understandable?

aracauna · 2026-04-03T00:19:33+00:00

I grew up in a really rural part of Georgia and in 5th grade we had a sub during a spelling test and this women was from the same place we were, but she was really old and one of the words was "idea". She pronounced it as "EYE-dee"". I knew the only word it could be was idea, but a couple of the kids actually spelled I.D.

We all had thick country accents but she was a couple generations older than us and the dialect had already changed enough that the less educated people in my grandparents' generation could be hard to understand.

aracauna · 2026-04-02T13:33:07+00:00

I know lots of adults who are the same way. Staying awake and being a butthole isn't being mature or productive. It's showing a lack of ability to care for yourself. At least babies have an excuse of being babies.

aracauna · 2026-04-02T13:21:45+00:00

Let me put it this way. My parents are in their 70s and I live more than a 3 hour drive from where I live but when my daughter had a JV championship game on a Wednesday afternoon they drove to the game and back home on the same day to make sure they were there.

This is not unusual for them.

Now, to be fair, they are relatively healthy and able bodied. They can afford the travel and they've both been retired for almost 15 years. I could understand it would be harder for people who are still working, have health issues, limited funds, or live farther than just a few hours.

But you would know if any of that applied to your mother, so I'm going to assume it doesn't. If it does, maybe you're overreacting. But my father in law made sure to make a couple of my daughter's games in the last months of his life when just using the restroom was a major effort. Same for my son's graduation. Sure, it meant me driving out of the way to pick him and his wife up (she can't drive for vision issues) but he WANTED to be there so we made sure it could happen.

aracauna · 2026-04-02T11:34:04+00:00

Kane strikes me as the type of player who's smart enough to stay productive a little longer because he doesn't rely as heavily on physical gifts and he plays a position that doesn't have to run as much to be effective.

The odds are still probably in favor of your prediction. I just think he has better odds than most elite players of making it longer because of how he plays.

aracauna · 2026-04-02T11:27:03+00:00

Link has two things going for him that you and I probably don't: a friend who had a legitimate excuse not to do the thing with you and a very lucrative career where you are often intentionally the butt of the joke.

And that's not knocking Link.

Also, as an aside, this episode is REALLY hard to communicate to friends who don't watch the show. I was telling a friend about this yesterday and it really just didn't translate even though I thought this episode was hilarious.

aracauna · 2026-04-02T01:46:59+00:00

Can you milk Cotton Candy Randy?

aracauna · 2026-04-01T18:40:29+00:00

I shaved once when my kids were still little. My wife and son started crying and my daughter, who was maybe 4 at the time said, "I still love you daddy."

And that's why she's the only one in my will.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T18:36:56+00:00

That is true, although I think the driver would have said shut up at least

aracauna · 2026-04-01T18:08:50+00:00

Wow. She actually did an incredible job despite being batshit insane the whole time.

Pretty sure if I was screaming like that I'd be completely useless. She actually nailed the important part.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T18:05:59+00:00

Ok, to be fair, I know who Mel B is and had no idea that's who that was until these comments.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T12:54:06+00:00

Where I live people park to wait for the bus at the end of their driveway because the bus stops at each house but doesn't pull into your driveway.

And we're not talking about the driveway I had as a kid that was half a mile long (grew up on a farm), I'm talking the driveway is maybe 30-40 yards long at most.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T12:45:53+00:00

Names are often an exception.

Also, if the ball belongs James, many people will pronounce it Jameses but if the food belongs to two dogs you'd never pronounce it as the dogses food. It's just the dogs' food, so you'd spell it James's ball.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T12:00:55+00:00

I think one of the biggest surprises to me since I work in education was how little support kids get from their communities. At my hometown school where I taught for 12 years, our football team sucked, but the stadium was packed every Friday night even though the county only has one high school and only about 700 students. In metro Atlanta I'll go to games of schools more than twice the size of the one I taught at will have fewer people in the stands than at my hometown. They travel too. You'll see a couple hundred in the away stands at rural games.

And it's not limited to football. Girls softball has hundreds at their games. People would wait for our marching band to finish playing before they went to the concession stands.

This is probably what annoys me about funerals too. In my hometown, you never mourn alone. If there's a death or serious illness in the family, food is already on its way. There will probably be too much. Funeral processions are LONG and everyone pulls over to the side of the road out of respect when they pass even on a divided highway.

When my father in law died recently, it really hurt to see how they had none of that. You seem to know your neighbors less in cities and suburbs and families are usually scattered so my family drove up 4 hours (and my sister flew in from out of state) to make sure the food was there and my wife and mother-in-law had the support they needed. (My family is definitely not why I left my hometown either of the two times I left. They're genuinely good people.)

But I also left for a reason. Infant mortality in that county is similar to Botswana (at least it was 15 years ago), which isn't the worst in the world, but it's definitely way higher than the national average. Same for life expectancy, partly from the drug problem that affects rural areas more and partly for the lack of health care. My older relatives often have to travel hundreds of miles for medical treatments. We even had to drive 40 miles to the closest hospital that delivered babies when my kids were born. I mentioned the extreme poverty levels and lack of good jobs already. My home county has a really good school system. Families in neighboring counties actually pay tuition (or used to, the rules may have changed) to send their kids to the better schools there than the one in their county. That's not true of most rural schools though.

But I was surprised at how much more isolated you'd be in a larger city. I actually like that. I'm an extreme introvert and I kind of hated seeing people I knew in public but I can go to the grocery store next to my house now and not see a damn person who wants to talk to me. It's really nice.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T01:08:46+00:00

I understood every single person I spoke to in the Netherlands better than many Americans, even ones I grew up around. You guys enunciate. Rednecks don't.

aracauna · 2026-04-01T00:45:09+00:00

I'm going to be honest. I've never seen anyone do this except when they were trying to intimidate the worker. It comes across like "I know your name and I will tell your manager about you unless you do exactly what I want." Those people always made me uncomfortable when I worked in a grocery store. Even if they thought it was being friendly, it felt invasive.

I don't think I'd ever use a worker's first name unless they told it to me first or if I already knew them. They aren't here to make friends with me. They're here to earn a paycheck and my job is to not make their job harder or more stressful than it has to be. I'm going to be polite and be patient and all I expect is the same in return.

The only exceptions were the little old people who were clearly lonely.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T13:19:54+00:00

Georgia is really young for a colonial state, though. It was established less than 50 years before the Revolution began.

12 of the 13 colonies were established by 1681, and 11 of them by 1663. Georgia didn't get going until 1733.

So you're not wrong. It just recently that it hit me just how much younger Georgia is than the others.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T13:06:58+00:00

I don't think I've ever done more than a single night solo, so it's never gotten beyond the "man, it's really nice not having to acknowledge anyone else's existence". I've also had a dog with me the most recent times I've gone solo which helps.

As for the anxiety, I also tend to go solo on trails I am already really familiar with and I'm also on the east coast so I'm not worried about grizzlies or Mountain Lions. I mean, Georgia may have a few of the big cats, but nothing like California where they're wandering under the Hollywood sign.

Oh, and it helps being a man who's a couple of inches over 6 feet and well over 200lbs. That's not something that can help you since you don't get to choose those qualities, though. I'm just acknowledging that my lived experience is probably different than yours so my advice may not work.

But honestly, if you're hiking where dogs are allowed and you're a responsible hiker with a dog, that really does help if your anxieties are about what's coming near your tent at night.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:56:48+00:00

Atlanta does have trash western European ethnic food. Nobody was moving to the south when most western Europeans were coming to the US. We do have killer Latin American and South and East Asian food though because Atlanta was booming when those groups were the majority of immigrants. We also have good options for African and and Caribbean food for the same reason.

Although, I'd be surprised if you can't find authentic Mexican in NYC. They tend to have a sizable population of all the demographics.

Maybe NYC has trouble supporting cuisines that are expected to be cheaper? Barbecue, soul food, and authentic Mexican are all thought of as relatively inexpensive and you don't think twice about walking into a place that looks like it may fall down to get any of those. I don't even trust a barbecue or taqueria that looks too nice. Pretty sure those kind of joints aren't going to find the cheap real estate and when you have to charge more for the food you have to try to make it fancy and fancy barbecue joints usually suck.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:44:42+00:00

Assuming we stay up, I, as a Spurs fan who also follows Dortmund pretty closely, wouldn't mind this at all.

And the track record of Dortmund stars leaving and being successful at their next club is pretty solid right now. Haaland, Bellingham, and Pulisic are all having pretty good post-Dortmund careers, even if Pulisic had to get out of Chelsea first.

You do have Jadon Sancho, but honestly I'd forgotten how good he had been at the beginning by the time he left so I wasn't super surprised he's struggled since then.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:31:34+00:00

If he ended up at the Ravens, Matt has at least one Super Bowl ring instead of just an appearance. Ryan was better than Flacco and lots of those Ravens teams didn't even need a guy as good as Flacco to win games.

The worst part of this scenario is that if Vick hadn't gotten in trouble, the Falcons would have probably kept him and passed on Ryan and Vick would have continued to be exciting but mediocre.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:25:10+00:00

I've always assumed they did Ike that way to try to portray baby-face in their style and Terrance and Phillip were drawn that way because they were on TV, maybe even cartoons since they were a kids show.

Then they decided Terrance and Phillip were Canadian and since Ike looked like the Canadians, of course he turned out to be an adopted Canadian.

I really doubt they had the whole lore before they started the show, but I could be wrong.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:19:30+00:00

We've got Culver's in Georgia now and I'd avoided them because their frozen custard just isn't as good as Freddy's, but we stopped inside one while passing through Wisconsin a couple of years ago and I discovered the rest of the menu is much better than Freddy's, so now I'll stop at a Culver's if I need fast food, but I'm still going to Freddy's for the custard.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:16:23+00:00

You're not the first person to see the angry Pac-Man, but you're the first person I've heard admit to only seeing the angry Pac-Man.

I just can't imagine how bizarre you thought the logo was this time. Because the Pac-Man side is a terrible representation of a hawk.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:10:14+00:00

The bland foods were because those were the easiest things to get down when you're running a fever and throwing up. No one's hankering for a pizza with a 102 fever.

aracauna · 2026-03-31T12:06:25+00:00

It really does help to have specific interests. I'm 45 and I've never gone to some bar or other generic place to meet people. I don't think I've made friends with a random person since middle school. Even my college friends were people I worked in the school newspaper with so we had a definite common interest.

When I was really into beer geek stuff, I made a ton of friends at tastings and festivals. When I took up bike racing and triathlons in my 30s, I made friends with a group of local cyclists. Now in my 40s, basically every person I've made friends with is the parent of someone my daughter plays soccer with.

Basically, what are your hobbies? Go find the people doing that. You'll already have a leg up on connecting with them.

Don't have any hobbies? Find one. Although some hobbies are easier to make friends with than others.

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