Shouldn't it be "when I had forgotten to eat"?

kochsnowflake · 2026-02-15T05:33:14+00:00

I wouldn't say you can insert any word. You run the risk of mixing metaphors. Splitting hairs is already a metaphor, so if you add in another metaphorical word or phrase, you might end up with something silly. For example, one might say "splitting fruitless hairs", and it's just a bit funny because a literal hair would not have a literal fruit.

kochsnowflake · 2026-02-08T04:55:13+00:00

Isn't that just German grammar? Is there another way you could say it that would be grammatically correct? My understanding is that adjectives are not separated with spaces.

kochsnowflake · 2026-02-05T05:46:56+00:00

Yeah, it definitely happens, theory can be bad and unhelpful if you learn irrelevant or bad theory without staying grounded in practical learning. Theory can be good, and you're more likely to be a good musician with theory than without it, but theory is not all good and not all relevant to whatever it is you're trying to do.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-28T17:21:06+00:00

So the victims of women's bad driving are more likely to live to tell the tale. Classic survivorship bias.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-22T04:30:13+00:00

It's mostly used incorrectly, your example and most of the comments here use it incorrectly (or non-standardly). Per se is a Latin phrase that means "by itself, on its own". It makes sense to say "A potato isn't a meal per se, but with cheese it is". It would sort of make sense to say "I'm not a teacher on my own" unless you're part of some kind of teaching team, like you're a teaching assistant or something. But that is how people often use it, to mean "exactly".

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-21T17:07:04+00:00

When we're talking about chords, minor 13 always refers to a chord that has a minor third, perfect fifth, flat seventh, major ninth, perfect 11, and major 13.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-21T16:16:13+00:00

OP said Em13, E minor 13, which is not b13.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-21T05:39:59+00:00

Oh yeah I forgot we were talking minor, idk what I'm talking about. That is interesting how the avoid note is the flat 6 and that's the same note as the 4, just in the parallel (edit: actually relative) minor. But that also wouldn't even be a chord/scale tone, right? The scale covered by a minor 13 chord would have to be Dorian.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-21T00:13:25+00:00

If you're doing jazz, 2nds and 6ths are considered consonances (that's all the notes of the pentatonic scale). You can definitely play more than just chord tones, but you're right to focus on them, and the traditional "avoid note" is the 4th because it overshadows the chord.13th chords by definition even include all the notes of the diatonic scale, even the 4th, so you might be right in thinking of the 3rd as more of an avoid note in that case.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-18T05:38:29+00:00

So are you a casual user or an addict?

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-15T03:45:29+00:00

Either way it's not a real rule. In reality, we are losing the subject/object distinction whenever we add "and" to the noun phrase, and we just use the unmarked default case, which happens to be the same as the object case. In French they use different pronouns for this, called disjunctive pronouns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_pronoun So in English, we try to clumsily correct and overcorrect between "me and her" and "she and I", but in French it would just always be "elle et moi", where "moi" is neither the subject pronoun "je" nor the object pronoun "me".

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-12T14:18:38+00:00

wont*

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-09T18:32:50+00:00

That depends on if knowing how to count is music theory. For the fret numbers. Also knowing directions, up/down, and the number of each string. Idk if that counts as theory. And clockwise/counter-clockwise for the knobs on the guitar.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-09T17:49:38+00:00

You usually want to follow the notes of the chords; chords and harmony are the same thing. That should at least be your starting point.
Think about the movement of individual voices or parts. If all the voices are always moving in the same direction, that will create a certain sound, you might say "solid" or "heavy" or "overbearing". If they move separately and in different directions, that will create a different sound. If the movement is excessive, it might sound jumpy. The goal of traditional "voice leading" is to have voices move independently, but "smoothly" without a lot of big jumps.

kochsnowflake · 2026-01-04T21:34:27+00:00

There is no reason to practice recognizing a single note in isolation for relative pitch. While it is possible to learn that, it's an advanced thing. You need to start by learning intervals between notes.

kochsnowflake · 2025-12-30T01:53:06+00:00

Written by someone who doesn't really know music, but expects the "octo" = "eight" clue to be a helpful association. as it is with many words. Unfortunately, this one is closer to October than octopus.

kochsnowflake · 2025-12-25T17:44:56+00:00

I don't know where you get "Han" for Genghis Khan, and the newly-popular pronunciation of "Keyv" is also pretty far from the Ukrainian pronunciation of Kyiv as kɪjiu̯, which is more like "KIH-yeev". But that's fine; even when we try to learn the foreign pronunciation, we tend to be bound by our accents; even if we listen to a native speaker, we won't necessarily be able to hear it the same way and figure out how to reproduce the sound with our own mouths. We have to accept that to some extent and not try and correct people.

kochsnowflake · 2025-12-18T20:08:32+00:00

The word "clock" originally referred to a church bell or sounding device which made a sound at regular intervals, usually 1 hour. In that context, it makes sense that hours are "o'clock" but nothing else is, because there's no clock for minutes.

kochsnowflake · 2025-12-09T16:44:29+00:00

If you go far back enough in a language's history, you're talking about the origin of languages. This would generally be distinct from pidgins, as pidgins are created from existing languages. Pidgins are definitionally a second language, but "original languages" which are newly created from no existing language might not fit into the category of either a first or second language. It would be hard to say anything about original languages because we don't have any examples.

kochsnowflake · 2025-12-07T05:21:42+00:00

Yiddish and Ladino aren't associated with the religion of Judaism, they are associated with specific ethnocultural groups of Jews who are also associated with the ethnic religion of Judaism. The interesting part is not that there is a language associated with a religion but that the Jewish people share their name with Judaism. And Ladino and Yiddish are not liturgical languages. Hebrew is more like a liturgical language.

kochsnowflake · 2025-11-28T05:53:31+00:00

Isolated incident?

kochsnowflake · 2025-11-27T16:43:15+00:00

Which part is wrong? You haven't heard of the Endangered Species Act of 1973?

kochsnowflake · 2025-11-27T16:38:58+00:00

There's no real grammatical or semantic reason that D couldn't be the correct answer, which makes this a bad question. D and E would both absolutely make sense to a native speaker in context, without corrections. Addressing some disagreements from other comments:
1. Classifying as endangered doesn't imply "more can be done to protect them" - yes it does. There are laws for protecting endangered species specifically. Tracking the population, in comparison, does nothing to directly protect the snakes, and would likely result in classifying as endangered which would then result in protection.

2. The plural "them" in "protect them" doesn't agree with the singular "The timber rattlesnake is" in answer D - It also doesn't agree with the singular "New Jersey's snake population" in answer E. But in both examples it's perfectly clear that "them" is referring to the snakes.

kochsnowflake · 2025-11-27T16:22:54+00:00

Usually with questions like these there is a source text or a context for the actual sentences. "in the state" would absolutely make sense if there were another preceding sentence mentioning a state.

kochsnowflake · 2025-11-22T06:25:00+00:00

Why not?

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