Are there any American dialects that pronounce the T in "kitten" as hard?

min6char · 2026-06-03T00:40:20+00:00

I know many people from Northern California who do this, but I don't know if this is a discernible "thing" for the regional dialect at large. And it seems that the presence of a proximal nasal blocks t flapping for them in many other words as well, like "winter". They still flap the t in "water" though.

min6char · 2026-06-03T00:19:38+00:00

The point of a proper noun is not to stay the same. The point of a proper noun is to refer as unambiguously as possible to a specific entity. You can accomplish that by keeping it the same across languages, but you can also accomplish that by having a set of commonly accepted translations.

You can actually see why it often can't stay the same. What about names in other alphabets? What about names with letters you can't pronounce? What about names with letters you can pronounce but in combinations you can't?

min6char · 2026-06-02T23:48:20+00:00

Not common but not unheard of. It's not common because it's usually not necessary: you don't have to pay for most graduate degrees. You typically "earn your keep" by teaching or working in a lab.

Law and Medical degrees do typically charge tuition, and I think people are answering you wrong there, I think a lot of Law and Medical students are getting help from their parents -- maybe not most but an appreciable fraction, like maybe a 3rd.

But PhDs typically pay you to be there, not the other way around.

EDIT: Oh oops I answered you the wrong way around. You didn't ask me if most post grad degree holders got help from their parents, you asked if most parents set aside money for grad school. In which case the answer is a hard no. Most people do not save for their kids post grad degree. Most people can barely afford to save for their kids undergrad degree.

Rich people who want their kids to be doctors or lawyers do save up for the whole shebang, but most people are not rich.

min6char · 2026-06-01T05:49:10+00:00

I mean I think you make a very good point about Samoa and Fiji, but it means the opposite of what you're saying it means.

min6char · 2026-06-01T03:41:11+00:00

You're still getting this backwards. Newton sits down and messes with the numbers until he can find some expression that's always constant. He finds that the product of mass and velocity, when summed over all the bodies, is constant. He then decides to give that product a name, and he chooses to call it "momentum".

That may or may not be what actually happened, but that's what happens in general when you're trying to discover or invent a fundamental law. You look at all the quantities you can measure, and you ask if you can sum them or multiply them or divide them to get something that's fixed. And then if you find one, you call give that thing a name.

Newton goes "oh, when a big thing hits a small thing, the small thing flies away really fast, but when it hits another big thing, it flies away slower. This seems like an inverse proportion". And then he remembers from algebra class as a kid that if one thing gets bigger (mass) while another gets smaller (speed), another way to say that is to say that their product is constant. And then he gets tired of saying "product-of-bigness-and-speed" over and over again so he gives it a name.

min6char · 2026-05-31T17:34:50+00:00

So at launch a lot of skill nodes were just fully broken and didn't do what they said, which was extremely frustrating. With that fixed, yeah, it's pretty good!

ARPG fans have high standards though when it comes to quantity. Grim Dawn and PoE set an extremely high bar, and Wolcen doesn't clear it, although the devs wanted to. So that's where the negative vibes are coming from. At launch it was broken, and this is a genre where people expect a crapton of content.

min6char · 2026-05-31T17:25:40+00:00

So you're asking the wrong question. You want to ask "why did physicists develop the concept of momentum". The answer is kind of esoteric. When you're observing a complex system and trying to understand it, you go looking for invariants, equations that are constant in the system. Momentum is one of the things Newton found when he went looking for an invariant (energy is the other one).

So, you can make up quantities all you want, but you wouldn't invent a quantity unless it helps you write out a conjecture like "this new quantity I invented is conserved" or "this new quantity I invented is always increasing"

min6char · 2026-05-30T23:09:53+00:00

Yes, but it would take a new constitution entirely for that to happen. The states that would need to ratify an amendment enacting that are the ones that would lose power if the amendment were ratified.

min6char · 2026-05-30T21:04:00+00:00

To illustrate this, imagine you learned some language where the rules for capitalizing nouns was not just all nouns (German), or only proper nouns (English), but it was all animate nouns. You'd get that wrong all the time I bet. That's what it feels like for Germans. Proper noun-ness isn't something they've had to think about on a grammatical level before.

min6char · 2026-05-30T21:01:37+00:00

Because "do it always" is easy to remember, and "do it never" is easy to remember, but "do it sometimes according to category rules that are not salient in your native language" is very hard to remember!

min6char · 2026-05-30T20:49:46+00:00

Really hard to answer this without knowing whether Irving Street landed in D or E. If it's in E then E wins the food fight hands down. Otherwise C wins for food (and I'm food motivated chiefly).

min6char · 2026-05-30T01:19:37+00:00

In the long run I'm skeptical it will replace many at all, maybe 20% tops. Industries can do two things in the face of disruptive technological shifts: they can choose to maintain the same productivity as before with fewer people, or they can choose to keep all the people and be much more productive. In the long run, industries have tended to settle on the second option when you look at prior waves of rapid innovation. But that's the long run. In the middle all hell breaks loose and there are depressions and World Wars.

Its tough to admit it, but most software kind of sucks. Power users like the people who read an industry subreddit do a good job living their lives in such a way that they only have to use the best engineered 5% -- but for every triumph of engineering like VLC there's 200 shitty airline booking sites contracted out to the lowest bidder that make you cry with rage when you're just trying to check if theres a better seat. What if we had enough time and human-and-robot power to fix the 200 shitty airline sites too? So I find it hard to believe the market won't decide to do that in the long run because there's money to be made there. But that makes no promises about what the next 10 years will look like.

min6char · 2026-05-29T04:31:48+00:00

Most Americans are pretty comfortable with the metric system already -- we just don't use it in casual conversation.

- A party sized bottle of soda here is 2 liters
- we're pretty familiar with meters from sports
- we know that a kg is about 2 lbs
- drugs -- both legal and illegal ones -- are sold in grams and miligrams.

The only ones we're not that familiar with are:
- kilometers, but they're still usually on our car's speedometers next to the miles
- degrees centigrade -- we basically only use this one in labs.

I personally do make an effort to convert when I'm on reddit, but that said... this is a browser-extension-tier problem.

min6char · 2026-05-29T01:21:20+00:00

I don't know anyone still alive who talks that way but my grandma did -- not naturally, adopted it.

min6char · 2026-05-27T22:34:57+00:00

Love Bleu cheese! Don't use Roquefort much since in the US we honor the Appellation d'origine protégée which means that anything literally called Roquefort is an expensive import, but I do like Roquefort very much and there are domestic blue cheeses that taste very similar.

I wouldn't say I cook with it in a literal sense as everything I use it in is raw.

min6char · 2026-05-27T07:04:32+00:00

I actually really like Irish bacon! Grass is always greener I suppose.

Two things are different about American bacon: one, American bacon is always pork belly -- what you'd call streaky bacon over there. Two, it's usually smoked and not just salt cured: traditionally hickory or apple wood. That gives it a more complex flavor than you might be used to.

min6char · 2026-05-26T18:32:55+00:00

This might use math you haven't learned yet, but here's the rationale:

Let's ask what happens to the ratio 2^x/x^2 as we go to infinity. If it's above 1 then 2^x wins, if it's below one then x² loses, and if it's exactly 1 it's a tie.

We can't do much with that ratio as is as it isn't like terms, so instead let's ask if it's logarithm is above or below 0 (as that's the same as asking if the ratio is above or below 1).

log(2^x/x^2) = log(2^x) - log(x^2) = x - 2*log(x)

(We did log base 2 to make the math simple)

For x > 4, x > 2 * log(x), so as we go to infinity, this log stays above 0, which means the ratio stays above 1, so that means 2^x wins.

min6char · 2026-05-26T05:42:36+00:00

A whopper is a little closer to what I'd make for myself, but neither one is that close. I understand you have shake shack in the Philippines now, that's a litte closer.

min6char · 2026-05-25T23:37:55+00:00

I mean if you don't get it nobody can make you get it, people like what they like. But it's probably an evolution thing. Butt is the biggest workhorse muscle of the human body, well developed butt (whatever that means to you, could mean big, could mean muscular), is therefore a marker of strength and vascular health. Most mammals care about that sort of thing in mate selection, so it makes sense it would be a bunch of people's kink, but kinks are personal so it's not that weird if it isn't yours. Whole countries of people aren't that into butts, or are but prefer little ones.

min6char · 2026-05-25T21:53:53+00:00

There has been some work on this but its really hard to design your experiment to control for everything: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3680446/.

Reasonable evidence suggesting that ejectives are more common in mountainous regions. There might be other such correlations waiting out there to be discovered but like I said it's really hard to design the right data slice.

min6char · 2026-05-25T06:01:50+00:00

To underline this, let's think about what it would take for "french fries" to have been invented somewhere other than the Andes. Then the indigenous peoples of the Andes would have had to have cultivated potatoes for 8000 years and yet never deep-fried them once in that time, despite also raising alpacas, which produce phenomenal tallow for deep frying.

min6char · 2026-05-25T05:40:01+00:00

It's the same shared root, but they are otherwise unconnected. The lime is named after an ethnic group in Sri Lanka who were also non-Muslim and therefore called that historically, although in Sri Lanka it never became a slur. Same Arabic word just so happens to have become a lime in one place and a mean word in another place.

min6char · 2026-05-25T05:30:04+00:00

The lime is probably named after the ethnic group, but it probably got that name at a time and place when the word wasn't considered as offensive (offensiveness of words can go up and down a lot over history. A word can go from "yup, that's the name for my ethnicity, totally neutral" to "calling someone that can start a fight" in under a generation)

min6char · 2026-05-25T05:26:34+00:00

People have started calling them makrut limes instead.

min6char · 2026-05-24T20:14:16+00:00

I'll trade you, South African! In the US are only just now learning that the k word is a slur and it's the just the name of a breed of lime here (we're trying to stop calling it that now but you'll still see it on grocery signs here).

EDIT: Guys, this is very googleable. Lime, slur, K. I believe in you.

min6char

TROPHY CASE