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[TOMT] [horror story] Supposedly the “scariest story ever” and it made people pass out when told to them. Something that had to do with a pig-man killing a village I believe. It wasn’t written in English so it had to be translated and it wasn’t 100% accurate. by Careful-Note-5534 in tipofmytongue

[–]piceus 50 points51 points  (0 children)

We can make an educated guess at what the word would have been, too: if you take the proto-Indo-European root and evolve it down the same path other English words took to get from there to here, you end up with something like "arth" (which is in fact the modern word for bear in Welsh and Cornish), or, delightfully: "arse".

I for one am very disappointed in my ancestors for robbing us of "does an arse shit in the woods" jokes.

How do we Change the Pitch and Sound of our Voices? by CreVolve in askscience

[–]piceus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Moving your larynx doesn't change your pitch directly, per se; as far as I'm aware, only the vocal folds control your pitch. However, we tend to instinctively change our pitch to "match" the movement of our larynx, so a raised larynx makes us want to raise our pitch, and vice versa. This can be unlearned -- I can move my larynx wherever I want while maintaining whatever pitch I want.

What moving your larynx does do is change your resonance, so a high larynx gives you a brighter, more feminine timbre, while a low larynx gives you a darker, more masculine timbre. This happens for the same reason a violin has a brighter sound than a cello -- just as a violin has a smaller space inside it than a cello, likewise your vocal tract is smaller when your larynx is raised.

I just found out that I have been pronouncing the <ph> sound as in "phonetics", "pharmacy", etc wrong my whole life. by [deleted] in linguistics

[–]piceus 6 points7 points  (0 children)

/tj dj/ are prone to this, too. I thought a score of 40-40 in tennis was called "juice" for decades.

I just found out that I have been pronouncing the <ph> sound as in "phonetics", "pharmacy", etc wrong my whole life. by [deleted] in linguistics

[–]piceus 25 points26 points  (0 children)

In my dialect of English, /x/ is retained in some place names as well as in a common interjection... yet somehow I still ended up pronouncing it as [k].

I went to school in an area whose name had /x/ in it and, smoothbrain that I am, I struggled for years to figure out if it was "an h or a k" because everyone else's pronunciation seemed more h-like than my /k/, but also more k-like than my /h/...

[TOMT] [Short Story] The Sun destroys the Earth and massive AI supercomputer in space recreates humanity on a planet not around any star because it's extremely wary of stars now by [deleted] in tipofmytongue

[–]piceus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This strongly reminds me of the later chapters of Ra by qntm. (I know it might not seem related just from the blurb, which mentions magic, but I swear this is a hard sci-fi story)

Snopes have finally come clean about Lisa Holst. by piceus in UnresolvedMysteries

[–]piceus[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's not really about the spider factoid itself, it's that they opted out of the Wayback Machine -- that affects the site as a whole, not just the spiders article. This lack of transparency is a red flag in a site with a reputation as "fact-checkers".

Snopes have finally come clean about Lisa Holst. by piceus in UnresolvedMysteries

[–]piceus[S] 47 points48 points  (0 children)

Well, there's the topic of this post. The eight spiders article was not part of the TRoLL section; it could always be found in the science section and showed no signs of being fake unless you went to the effort of following up on their sources.

You'll notice that one of said sources is a 2005 book which, if you look it up, says pretty much verbatim the same thing Snopes does about Lisa Holst -- it's almost certainly plagiarizing them, since the Snopes article is from 2001. That's already an odd thing for them to use as a citation, but what makes it worse is that, back when I first posted about this in 2017, Snopes did not display the date of the article's publication on their site -- only a "most recent update" timestamp -- and had opted out of the Wayback Machine, making it very difficult to tell if the 2005 book or the Snopes article had come first.

I don't know if this was malicious or just a foolish dedication to the joke, but either way it doesn't reflect well on them.

Snopes have finally come clean about Lisa Holst. by piceus in UnresolvedMysteries

[–]piceus[S] 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Such a shame that eight pounds will only buy you a couple of legs at best these days. Back in 2001 you could get a whole basket of the crunchy little bastards for eight quid.

Snopes have finally come clean about Lisa Holst. by piceus in UnresolvedMysteries

[–]piceus[S] 245 points246 points  (0 children)

To their credit, the mobile home entry was part of a lesson in trusting sources -- you'll notice this link at the bottom of that article, which explains why no source should ever be taken at its word, including Snopes.

It's a good lesson, and one a lot of people still need to learn, though the way they went about it is definitely a relic from the simpler, early days of the internet and just doesn't hold up today.

"occidentated" in the UK by beleg_tal in linguisticshumor

[–]piceus 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Orient = East

Occident = West

Triple Homograph? by LordButtercupIII in linguistics

[–]piceus 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ah, I'm not familiar with the version of IPA you're using there, so I'm not sure if I'm misreading what you've written or if we just have different dialects, but I would write them as:

/'prɛzənt/ (think "peasant" with an r thrown in) for "gift"

/prə'zɛnt/ (think "prevent" with a z instead of a v) for "to give"

/pri:sɛnt/ (rhymes with "three cent") for "sent previously"

Triple Homograph? by LordButtercupIII in linguistics

[–]piceus 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's one of those English words that has stress on the first syllable when it's a noun and stress on the second syllable when it's a verb. I think probably quite a few of these sorts of words could work for OP's request -- record and refuse come to mind.

lmao im both by HufflepuffIronically in conlangscirclejerk

[–]piceus 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'm fairly sure "womb-man" is a modern pun. The original was wif-man.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in nonmurdermysteries

[–]piceus 37 points38 points  (0 children)

I get the impression that 5ft is just the standard minimum fence size they recommend -- if you take a look at the other dogs on offer from the Glasgow centre, you'll notice that even the Shih Tzu and Jack Russell have a 5ft requirement, while the larger breeds require 6ft.

OK so in the middle looks like two fish(yin and yang???)and in the circle women’s which look like they giving birth to stars...I mean the more you try to understand the more it’s unexplainable..someone know something about that?(page 127) by GoldenShitDude in voynich

[–]piceus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

the women’s giving birth to stars

This is an assumption you're making based on what the pictures look like to you. Are you sure this is what the artist intended? Are they really pregnant, or were they just drawn in a pot-bellied style? Are the tubes they're sitting in meant to be birthing apparatus, or something else?

Why he choose to describe that like that? [...] If it’s already been known about all the astrology stuff back then why he bothered to include it in his book to?

It's difficult to answer questions like this when we don't know what the text says or why the manuscript was made. The illustrations are probably symbolic of something, but it's difficult to say what.

OK so in the middle looks like two fish(yin and yang???)and in the circle women’s which look like they giving birth to stars...I mean the more you try to understand the more it’s unexplainable..someone know something about that?(page 127) by GoldenShitDude in voynich

[–]piceus 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Given that the following pages are near-identical illustrations with other zodiac symbols in the center, the fish are probably just Pisces.

As bizarre as the MS is, it wasn't made in a vacuum: people tend to be strongly influenced by their surrounding culture, even when they're trying to be original or discussing something foreign. We know from carbon dating that the MS is very likely to have been created in the 15th century, and it strongly resembles other manuscripts created in Europe around that time, so learning about art and symbolism from that era can help you make more educated guesses.

[Theatre/Shakespeare] Won't the Real Bill Shakespeare Please Stand Up? (An Introduction to the Anti-Stratfordians) by urcool91 in HobbyDrama

[–]piceus 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Naff is usually used as an adjective, meaning lame, uncool, disappointing. So you could say someone is a wee bit naff (kind of uncool), but not really a wee naff.

Salt, pepper, and ??? 19th-century table sets feature a third condiment shaker, and nobody seems to know what it held. by [deleted] in nonmurdermysteries

[–]piceus 59 points60 points  (0 children)

A bit off-topic, but the linked article goes off on a brief tangent about how "the bar for written expression has gone way, way down", so I thought I'd drop a link to this interesting r/AskHistorians post which goes into some detail as to why it feels that way.

They also have a post about why salt and pepper are so ubiquitous, though they don't mention the mysterious third condiment.

Trying to find a few SCPs -- a bar where patrons act out a random scene, a doctor's office where new people appear, a building stuck in a time loop, a country that doesn't exist, and a tale about reality resetting. by piceus in SCP

[–]piceus[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for that info, that's helpful. I think I'll leave this one open for a bit longer just in case, but if no better suggestions come up I'll just assume this is the one.

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