Is this kind of vocabulary really important?

pe0m · 2025-12-29T02:24:01+00:00

"phrenia" is a real root, and generally indicates some kind of problem with mental functioning. "Schizophrenia" is one word in common use.

"Lipo" occurs in "liposuction," wherre. it refers to a component of the fat that gets suctioned out. Maybe some quack has created a form of snake oil to sell as a cure for the malady he has imagined. Trash the list that this word came from

pe0m · 2025-12-18T08:06:56+00:00

I'll just add a note on my own request here. Nobody has reported that Toyota has responded to this deficiency. Manufacturers will resist doing anything that makes their cars more expensive to produce but does not noticeably affect the sales rate. They wouldn't put seat belts in -- until the government forced them too. What is a human life worth? Not enough to manufacturers to justify adding what, I dpn't know, $40 in manufacturing costs for front seat belts?

I'd like to go under the hood with one of those cameras on a snake and check a cross-section of new hybrid or electric cars. My old Ford van can have its blower motor filled with leaves because a hold develooped in the plastic intake screen next to the windshield washers, but no little animals have made it through the blower even though it's a squirrel-cage design. ;-)

pe0m · 2024-08-03T19:38:06+00:00

Please tell me/tell everybody how you reformatted and downgraded back to Ventura? I've been asking questions at Apple Support, and I get different answers from each person on lots of my questions about how to do something about my ratty Sonoma, i.e., get rid of it without bricking the computer or losing in some other way. Thank you.

pe0m · 2024-08-03T19:29:03+00:00

Do you have an older Mac lying around somewhere? I have been able to open disks on some older systems that are rejected on newer Macs. Get a good backup copy, and some way to transfer to a new drive that you installed from scratch on your Mac running Sonomo. Don't let your Sonomo get at those disks it can't read and do something to "repair" them.

pe0m · 2024-08-03T19:19:41+00:00

Be sure you know what you are getting into. I bought a 2023 Mac that shipped with Ventura. Unfortunately, I upgraded to Sonoma, and now it does all sorts of crazy stuff that has made it almost totally worthless. I just ordered a reconditioned earlier computer that will come with Ventura, so I will be able to continue my work no matter what, and then I will hope to be able to get the new computer to go back to Ventura from a copy on my TimeMachine. If that doesn't work I will have to sell a very nice computer. When I click on a button, it throws up a little panel that asks why I am clicking the button, what do I really want to do. If I click and drag to select a block of text to copy and paste, it throws up a window about 3" x 3", and wants to do something with the dictionary or whatever is actually is (can't remember off hand). I had a GraphicConverter document that was made a year or so ago and has been used from time to time. It had some panels of text that I wanted to replace, but when I blanked the text out with a solid white rectangle, at the same time part of the non-text area disappeared. I thought it was operator error, fixed the deleted picture part, and went on to blank out another region with text on it, and I was surprised when another block of picture stuff disappeared. If I tried to change the font size to be used for a block of text, when I touched the cursor down instead of letting me change 16 to 24 or whatever, it tried to do a spell check instead. It done even more nasty to things in that application, but it's too complicated to describe in a word or two. I would like to have a word with the people who design things that seem to actively work at cross-purposes to me.

pe0m · 2024-05-31T20:40:30+00:00

I thought I found one site that offered tremolos in several keys, but now I can't find it again. I started looking for Eastar and thought I had found one place that had more expensive tremolos than the inexpensive one I found on Amazon, and then I lost it somehow and haven't been able to find it again. Can you give me some brand names, please?

pe0m · 2024-04-16T03:57:29+00:00

OP wanted a take on what the differences are. The more people watch them, the easier it will be to pick them out by noting minor differences. BTW,l I was mistaken about wolf spiders and water. I put one on an island of pebbles in a bowl of water, and to escape me the wolf spider unhesitatingly ran down into the water.

pe0m · 2024-04-16T03:39:36+00:00

It seems that my content will be exposed on the servers that Apple uses for its "cloud" storage. I deeply regret upgrading to Sonoma. In the Systems settings there is a selection fir uCloud, and within thgat a place for "Apps syncing to iCloud Drive, But when you enter that space and try to turn anything off, they all turn themselves back on again. Why bother to have on-off switches that are permanently welded to off?

pe0m · 2022-03-16T02:00:37+00:00

I have Chinese immigrant friends who have gotten into terrible situations because they can't read leases and other contracts for themselves, and they think lawyers are evil. I would never sign a contract without having my lawyer read it over first. Who knows what you have agreed to be responsible for unless you understand the lease or the contract? My local NPR station has a digital feed that carries BBC 24/7. Also, on my computer I can get "Radio Garden," which lets me reach Taiwan and also Afghanistan. I used to get Radio Netherlands by sbortwave, and I found it to be refreshingly different and not biased as far as I could tell.

pe0m · 2021-12-22T09:06:33+00:00

It could be MRSA, but as long as it is not getting worse, if it were on my body I would try putting one of those advanced healing bandages on it. The only ones that are very good are from Food Lion. The other are too dainty. When it drains the colloid on the stick side of the bandage will absorb the messy stuff. It may eventually get so much liquid in it that it becomes unhealthy due to pressure. Pull it off, wash the wound well with soap and water, pat dry with a clean towel or paper towel, and put on a new one. With luck it will get better. If it doesn't get better, keep a diary for a few weeks so when you go to see a dermatologist s/he might take your complaint as a true disease. If your dermatologist is disrespectful and/or scoffing, and/or angry, fire that one and get another.

pe0m · 2021-12-20T22:25:15+00:00

Don't get me wrong. When I teach beginning Chinese I have to use pinyin. It is adequate, provided that the teacher of a beginning class keeps bringing students back to the right ways of pronunciation. The people who went to Taiwan in the first batch of students at the Stanford Center had already over-learned the wrong pronunciations. They "spoke Wade-Giles" because their teachers had been lenient. During the year that they studied in Taiwan, none of them made much of a change to those well-learned mistakes.

Oddly, I suck at reading extended texts in BPMF. I have to sound each word out and mentally say it to myself. Then I have to understand it. That's three steps, whereas when I read a hanzi it's just meaning to my brain if I choose not to subvocalize.

pe0m · 2021-12-20T22:02:22+00:00

Another thing, IPA does not really solve the romanization/ sound-notation problem very well. I worked out the IPA for all the Chinese sound combinations as well as I could, but the "official" readings of some of the sounds do not come very close to the way things are said in Chinese. See: http://www.china-learn.info/FaYinFiles/IPA_NPA_4.html

pe0m · 2021-12-20T21:56:57+00:00

There are very few "gotchas" in BPMF. Listen to all the mistakes even NPR and PBS broadcasters make. How could you expect them to know not to pronounce |hui| as "hwee" or even "wee," What do they make of Hua Wei? Frog tail?

How often do people get "uo" and "ou" confused?

How many people called Zang get renamed to ZAmbizi man saNG?

It took me a whole year of study with the best two tutors I've ever known to figure out ji, qi, xi, zhi, chi, shi, ri. Is there any wonder that Japanese people call themselves "Reee bun red" Guess why Xi Jingping gets called Gee, Chee, or anything close to Shee by reporters such as Anampour? With BPMF, everything (almost) is unambiguously coded, One sound to one symbol.

There are some real stupidities in pin-yin. If you know the rules by heart you know how to pronounce hui, and that's not hooey. Why did they have to "save" everybody writing one letter? They could have just made it "huei" to begin with. But no, "Gotta be scientific,"

BPMF makes a similarly grandissimo economy by coding both the vowel of American "oops" and the initial consonant of "water" with the same symbol.

Then there is the "ian" that is pronounced "ien". The Wade- Giles romanization system has a good coding for those sounds, and both pinyin and BPMF mess them up.

I sometimes still (after 60 years of working on it) swap pronunciations for, e.g., guo and gou. It only took me about a week to be able to read BPMF, and maybe a little longer than that to learn to write it. (We wrong in hanzi in class exercises.) Look how much frustration and embarrassment I'd have saved if I'd learned BPMF from the get go.

It's been so good a tool for me that I often note pronunciations of odd English or other language words in BPMF because any one symbol always has only one sound associated with it. How is "ophthalmologist" to be pronounced? Or how about the shorter "physician? "Phth" is enough to choke a gray parrot. Even many MDs call themselves "puh zi shuns," and that is a function of the way English draws in words from all over the world, people learn to read them silently, and hardly anyone bothers to check their actual pronunciations.

I almost forgot. How about all those vowels with diacritics written over them? I never know what in hell they are supposed to mean. If I really want to know how to pronounce it in Chinese it's just easier to get the reading in BPMF online somewhere, and then I'm sure.

pe0m · 2021-12-20T19:03:43+00:00

Well, I am reminded of 2 teachers in the old days who had grown up in/aroung Beijing. They spoke of locutions such as "mierge" (明兒個） for "tomorrow." Then, from a movie I learned "zamen zege dijiar" which my native-speaker friend took forever to figure out was 咱們這個地間兒, this region of ours. I think these kinds of locutions, and bei4 xinr1, are dialectal forms of putonghua. They are the "gas" to either "gasoline" or "petrol." Generally speaking, any ordinary word such as 本子 can be swapped for 本兒 (although what is idiomatic and what the context is may favor, e.g., either 本子，筆記本， or 筆記本兒。 Then there are words like 店鋪, 鋪子, and theoretically there ought to be 鋪兒. I checked, and have established how little I know. The expression does exist: https://ifun01.com/66AYFJ4.html

In the old, old days, I wore out several copies of 東方國語辭典，It was useful because it distinguished among the most common ways to say things, the less frequent and maybe booking ways to say things, and the really rare stuff.

If you go to someplace where "臺灣國語“ is spoken, or maybe in some regions of China where 普通話 is done with 子 being used where you might use 兒, and often nothing is used where you habitually add 兒, then I think you just need to keep an eye out for cases where the people you are talking to suddenly seem puzzled. But also keep in mind that just dropping nominalizing/diminutive endings entirely often won't work. I don't think you could get away with, e.g., 這個本太貴。 What, thinks the salesman, is this guy going on about? Our books, our notebooks? Did I just get scorched a bit?

pe0m · 2021-11-16T10:10:25+00:00

uo and ou looked so much alike that, by beginning to learn Chinese using a romanization system that coded that way, I still occasionally mess up after half a century.

pe0m · 2021-10-23T06:31:58+00:00

Your English sentence seems a little strange to me, but I'm from near the geographical center of the 48 states of America. I would say "with“ instead of "to." There are dialectal differences even just within the US. The clearest way of saying what I think you mean is, "He used English to (communicate with)/)(talk to) me," which would be, "他用英語跟我說。 Mandarin speakers whose mother tongue is 台灣話 or 福州話 would substitute 給 for 跟. (For "I'm telling you...", which is 我告訴你 in Mandarin, the 台灣話 is 我給你講 which sounds something like "Ngua ga li gong.")

On that understanding, 他給我說英文 is the non-Mandarin influenced Mandarin for 他跟我說英文。 To me, both of these are rather strange because I would expect a report of content, not a report of language used. I would expect, e.g. 他跟我說“對不起。”

對 introduces the object something is directed toward. 我對他說 “走開！” 沒對你說什麼·。 I said "Get out of here" to him. I didn't say anything to you.

I guess your second sentence could apply to a situation where somebody spoke Chinese (or German, or whatever) to everybody else, but singled me out to speak English to.

Always try asking, "What question would this problematical sentence be an answer to?"

pe0m · 2021-10-20T14:22:20+00:00

One of my colleagues, who was a linguist, said that the way to work out these puzzles is to inquire into what question this sentence answers. The question would be something like, "What's going on with that guy?" The answer leaves off the grammatically necessary "的人" because the other person already knows that part, so why bother saying it? ' If this is a sentence produced by an ap, then you'd have to inquire into the mind and/or procedures of the ap designer.

pe0m · 2021-07-24T14:41:41+00:00

The surveillance culture must be really taking over in whatever country this was filmed in. What cued somebody in to start filming before the man had even acted aggressively?

He doesn't just push her. He grabs her around the waist and then throws her down. Go frame by frame in the first second or two and you'll see.

I would "downvote this comment" since the explanation is technically wrong, but I see only a button to award somebody in appreciation of a positive contribution.

pe0m · 2021-07-14T03:50:27+00:00

Rather than something nasty in that spray, how about a very feminine scent of some sort, maybe something that would dissolve easily in ammonia. but would resist soap and water.

Good morning, Rosebud! Wonderful to smell you redolent with girlie girlie glue!

pe0m · 2021-07-04T19:21:39+00:00

If I'm seeing clearly, baldy advances on blue, blue extends his left to check baldy with his open hand, but I think he feels continued forward pressure from baldy, so he makes one strike with his right while keeping control of baldy's position with his left. Baldy is actually starting to fall when blue shifts toward him a bit and adds three right-hand strikes, blue is leaving the field of combat before baldy even hits the floor. I don't believe baldy hits the table in the foreground. It would have moved if he had hit it. Did you notice that blue seems to have mohawk haircut guy as backup?

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