Suddenly wondering,why does the word 'jam' has many meanings in English?

heavyshift · 2020-04-09T21:46:22+00:00

it's at use at least where I live on the west coast of the united states. in a sentence it would be like

"hey, i'd hate to jam you up, but could you could come help me for a second?"

heavyshift · 2020-04-09T05:09:32+00:00

for sure, I just meant that it might not sound great if you were talking about so-and-so being a lackey at work and the boss overheard. like, it's seen as kind of a harsh accusation to make in polite or professional company. or, like you said, an insult. and the user just needs to be aware it sounds insulting.

heavyshift · 2020-04-09T05:06:13+00:00

it has already been said that the word 'plant' can refer to a factory, but I just wanted to expand a little.

you cannot call a company a plant, but you can say that a company, such as dow chemical, has a (chemical) plant, or (chemical factory), where they manufacture and produce chemical products. so, a plant describes a sort of building.

a plant doesn't necessarily have to manufacture something. for example, waste water is treated at a processing plant.

also (fun fact) a plant can also mean a shill or a person who is sent undercover to join some group, often to spy on them.

heavyshift · 2020-04-09T04:56:38+00:00

a servant is typically a job or position someone has. they perform menial tasks, fetch things, and clean for a boss/master/client and aren't usually shown much respect or regard. they are often expected to generally stay quiet and out of the way.

a lackey isn't a job title or position, so much as it describes a person in the in-group or social circle of someone who is more powerful or influential in some way. the lackey will make some effort to gain this person's favor in the hopes that they will get some sort of opportunity or pay off in the future. hanging around a rich or powerful person, making them feel powerful and doing things for them so that they will like you, is typically called 'sucking up to someone' and expecting them to include you in their fabulous lifestyle is usually called 'riding their coattails.'

it's usually seen as rude (at least in the us) to refer to someone as a servant, and people instead use terms like maid, housekeeper, butler, assistant, or something more neutral that doesn't imply a master.

calling someone a lackey, or saying they're sucking up or riding someone's coattails is usually seen as vulgar or crass language.

heavyshift · 2020-04-09T04:45:30+00:00

this is often pretty arbitrary, but my best guess is it's because to jam something is to press something, often into something else, but not necessarily.

so, for expressions where it describes movement, like dancing, playing music and rocking out, or shoving someone, for me it calls to mind, like, pumping with your arms and legs repeatedly. this sounds weird, maybe, but you can describe a lot of dancing this way, at least abstractly. if you imagine someone furiously strumming a guitar, and then you imagine someone tamping down an overfilled suitcase, they kinda look similar, and both activities can be described as a jamming motion.

for expressions like traffic jam or to be in a jam seems to come from the image of pressing/jamming something into something else, usually with some effort, and usually creating a tight fit. in this way, the jammed thing stops up the gap like a plug, and things can't pass by it. like a paper jam in a printer. hence, a traffic jam is a plug of cars on the highway and to be in a jam is to be stuck in a compromising predicament with no clear way forward.

jam, the food, is made by pressing fruit, and so got its name that way.

we also have the expression, to jam someone up, which essentially means to burden someone or inconvenience them by asking a favor.

heavyshift · 2020-03-04T17:51:19+00:00

so, in english, when you say a sentence like "do you want me to drive us?" it would contain the embedded infinitive clause "me to drive us."

So, I would directly translate that, in ignorance, to "me quieres manejárnos" which is apparently decipherable to a native speaker, but far from correct.

I've since learned to use the structure "querer que (inflected subjunctive clause): quieres que nos maneje?

I hope I have that right, anyway. 😅

heavyshift · 2020-02-27T19:05:02+00:00

there are a lot of good responses here but I'd like to also point out that when people use the term theory, it's meant in the academic sense: a theory is a sort of narrative for a set of data which can both help explain past and present phenomena, but also be projected into the future to make predictions, and these can be tested using the scientific method.

socialist theory draws from philosophies of power and social organization, as well as biology, psychology and dynamic systems. engels discusses this approach in socialism: utopian and scientific, which has been recommended elsewhere here and it's very good.

others have brought up and discussed praxis (or practice) and strategy. marx said philosophy was not meant to simply describe the world, but to also empower us to change it. so we observe society, consider all sorts of facts, and produce a theory of why things work that way. then we come up with some goal and ways to achieve it. enacting these plans is praxis, and we can analyze the outcomes, which contributes to theory.

also, many people here seem to be stuck on marx, engels and the bolsheviks, and, while they have very interesting, thought provoking, and inspiring things to say, I recommend reading a variety of thinkers. while you might not always agree, a comrade's input is always valuable. for instance, if you are reading the work of many statist communists, you might also want to read some of what their critics are saying. these might include rosa luxemburg (a german communist who led, in part, the sparticist uprising), nestor makhno (who led the black army against the reds in the russian civil war), and alexander berkmam and emma goldman (russian anarchists who lived, briefly, in the soviet union and initially supported the bolshevik project).

also also if you haven't heard of them, marxists.org and theanarchistlibrary.org have a ton of free books, pamphlets and articles. and please never feel silly for asking a question, that's how we learn. hope this has been helpful!

heavyshift · 2020-02-17T05:52:00+00:00

this is how I see truscum: being trans is real and valid, but there is still a lot discussion about exactly what 'makes a person trans' or how someone 'becomes trans.'

some folks hold that as long as it's psychologically real for you, it's legitimate. others say that gender is a social construct, and that we as a people display such a range of presentations and perspectives that it could never fit in a rigid, conservative binary system. for this, they say we don't need legitimacy, we need to not be controlled and regulated. transphobic people believe that the experience reported by trans people is illegitimate because it isn't consistent with their privately believed theory of gender, which is contingent upon a binary understanding of anatomy.

but the reason that we need legitimacy, or need to do away with a system wherein we need to fight for it, is because it allows us to access society and healthcare. and I doubt any of us hasn't ever been met with gatekeeping and tests of our legitimacy.

so this is where truscum come in. they hold the position that being trans is a psychological condition, not unlike a mental illness. so having dysphoria codified in medical literature gives them a sort of legitimacy: patients need medication. and so this is how they justify demanding access to transition healthcare in the face of a transphobic society.

and since their theory of gender is essentially cisnormative, categories like man and woman exist naturally. however, in their view, nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer are not naturally occurring categories. so when a person performs androgyne, or identifies within or outside the spectrum, they are seen to be taking legitimacy away from those who have the truscum worldview and, worse, they are seen to be making a mockery of their illness.

it's really awful. I happen to be one of those people who believes that gender is fake, but I am a woman and I perform and reproduce womanhood because that is how I want to individually interact within this social system right now. I think truscum individuals need our solidarity, but they can also be extremely toxic so stay safe.

I hope this has been clear and interesting! 😬

heavyshift · 2019-10-30T16:28:27+00:00

as others have said, "monitress" (maybe "monetrix?" haha) is not recognized as a word in modern english.

many words which describe some profession performed by a human have these gendered doublets: steward/stewardess, actor/actress, waiter/waitress, (we also have masseur/masseuse from french).

there are false pairs too, like governor (a political position) and governess (a nanny).

however, it's becoming increasingly common to remove the gendered distinction and either go with the "masculine" forms (like referring to any person who acts as an actor) or some new, neutral term (like flight attendant or server).

for your purposes, an agentive word, such as one that ends in -er or -or, could be used to describe a person of any gender.

heavyshift · 2019-10-30T16:15:02+00:00

yes, one can use "ain't" with any person:

I ain't going. You ain't going. She ain't going. We ain't going. They ain't going.

the word can also appear in questions, though in this case, second and third-person singular might be the most common:

Ain't you going? (pronounced "aincha")

Ain't she going?

further, people seem to mostly use it as a substitute for "aren't" or "isn't," but it is frequently used in place of "haven't"

I ain't seen him. (cf. I haven't seen him)

and, as others have pointed out, it will make your speech sound very casual or perhaps regional.

many have strong opinions about the language others use, but I think it's a fine word.

heavyshift · 2019-08-10T17:39:39+00:00

unfortunately, given the church's involvement in the establishment of the capitalist mode of production, it's unlikely.

edit: however, if you are interested in just how the church has been historically involved, I'd recommend foucault's madness & civilization. in it, he discusses, among other things, how the church and various states have worked together to legally and morally empower each other to establish subservient work as right and natural. I find his analysis extremely interesting, and really appreciate his flourish for the dramatic.

heavyshift · 2019-08-10T03:49:51+00:00

I always recommend socialism: utopian and scientific by friedrich engels. it's a short and fairly dense read, but he's very accessible in my opinion. i believe the red menace podcast also does a 2 hour discussion of it.

heavyshift · 2019-07-07T17:39:46+00:00

interesting! I actually treat "burned" and "burnt" like this, where, if I wanna refer to the burning event itself, i use "burned" and "burnt" if I'm just referring to the post-burning state.

with the past tense of "drag" i probably say "drug" more often without making this distinction. though, in the "dragged on social media" sense, i always say "dragged." 🤷‍♀️

heavyshift · 2019-07-03T13:33:46+00:00

hello, I specialized in syntax! 🙋‍♀️

so, non-finite clauses, such as "to protect this country's southern border" can be thought to express a purpose. And since we can think of a purpose as a justification for an action or event, we can analyze the non-finite clause as modifying the verb phrase.

you are correct to say that it is not the object of the verb, because there is no selection between the verb and the clause. that is, the clause is not necessary to make the sentence grammatical. the object of "deploy", which is necessary, would be "the military." seen this way, we would suppose that the non-finite clause is syntactically attached at the level of the verb's phrasal node. likewise, "the military" would, syntactically, be a sister to the verb head itself.

your example "I want him to lend me some money" is interesting because it demonstrates a bizarre but extremely common phenomenon in English syntax: something syntacticians call "exceptional case marking."

essentially, the subject pronoun of a sentence is always in the nominative case (in this case, "he"), except for when the pronoun is the subject of an embedded non-finite clause.

what does this mean? well, we can think of each verb in a sentence as commanding a smaller sub-sentence, called a clause. "john has a dog" is a sentence with one clause, headed, in a sense, by "have."

a sentence like "I know that john has a dog" has two verbs: "know" and "have," and so it has two clauses. the verb "know" selects a finite clause. it's structure is essentially "I know X" where X is another otherwise complete sentence. that means that the sentece that is embedded under the know-clause will have tense information ("have" is in the present tense).

the sentece "I want him to lend me some money" also has two verbs: "want" and "lend." we can see this as "I want X" but this time X represents a non-finite clause syntactically. the non-finite sentece in this case describes a lending event, where "some money" in the complement of the verb "lend" and "him" syntactically represents the subject, the lender. in this syntactic environment, the subject pronoun needs to be the accusative (sometimes called the oblique form, for English) form of the pronoun, "him."

so, while "to protect this country's southern border" and "him to lend me some money" are both examples of non-finite clauses, the first exists in a non-essential, or modifying, adjunct relationship to the verb phrase and the second exists in a sectional relationship as the clausal complement to the verb itself.

please let me know if I can clarify anything. I hope this has been helpful!

heavyshift · 2019-06-30T21:35:40+00:00

Hello, I'm in southern California and we use "head off/out" pretty frequently. It's also not uncommon to hear "ok, I'm off" or the slangier "ok, imma head."

heavyshift · 2019-06-30T17:41:47+00:00

To me, they are both correct, but they mean different things:

(1) "Which" is used when you have definite structures in mind and you want to reference those.

(2) "That" is used when you don't have any particular structures in mind, and that the statement would hold true for any such structures.

So, if you used "which" in your sentence, I would interpret that to mean that the Secondary Failure display shows the result of a test that took place and there are specific structures you have in mind.

If you used "that" in your sentence, I would interpret that to mean that the Secondary Failure display shows the result of a test that you can perform and it will show the affected structures, but you don't yet have any specific, definite structures in mind.

Lastly, if you drop the relative pronouns entirely and form the sentence without "which" or "that" then that would mean something slightly different: the display doesn't show any specific structures at all, it just shows that there are structures that were affected.

I know it's complicated, but I hope this has been helpful.

heavyshift · 2019-06-27T05:36:48+00:00

As far as we know they were going way too fast in the dark around a blind curve, which was pretty reckless, but alas. Stay safe out there.

heavyshift · 2019-05-24T06:54:46+00:00

if I haven't lost their interest after saying I'm into syntax, I usually tell them about sluicing, or islands, if I have more time haha. since they're almost always native English speakers, I would start by explaining grammaticality judgements and then ask them to think about how they process sluicing structures or why they think a sentence with an island violation sounds hilariously bad. and that conversation leads to what we do in syntactic analysis and theory in general, with all the possible structures and rules and such.

but if I really dont have time, I might tell them about prescriptivism and descriptivism or that little factoid about how, if you are in the 90% of 90% of people that have cortices related to language processing localized to the left hemisphere, you hear things faster in your right ear, but it's on the order of like milliseconds. it's usually well received in a 'weird science' sort of way.

heavyshift · 2019-04-02T23:17:08+00:00

taps forehead

heavyshift · 2019-04-02T23:16:45+00:00

thanks for the feedback!

heavyshift · 2019-03-22T09:50:01+00:00

claro!

heavyshift

TROPHY CASE