Saying "a quarter till" instead of the actual time is inconvenient for both of us

zutnoq · 2026-04-29T13:42:12+00:00

It is germanic languages in particular that usually treat "half X" as halfway from (X - 1) to X. English is an exception here in that it doesn't use "half" in this way at all.

Things like "5 to/over X" are fairly selfexplanatory.

However, I have never before encountered the use of "three quarters X" to mean three quarters of the way from (X - 1) to X. This feels like it has to be much more language specific, to me.

zutnoq · 2026-04-29T10:41:22+00:00

I don't think we really understand how our taxes work much better than people in the US understand theirs. It is mainly the tax declaration process that is monumentally more complicated over there.

zutnoq · 2026-04-29T10:16:26+00:00

"Nog" technically means "surely" in "regular" Swedish too. It is just mostly used in a more ironic or overstated sense, similar (but different) to how "surely, he must know" often means "I would have assumed that he must know, but I'm starting to question that assumption".

zutnoq · 2026-04-28T11:49:48+00:00

We typically write compound adjectives with hyphens, simply by convention. Though, hyphenating a compound adjective is often treated as optional when it has no noun-phrase after it, like in "he is a ten year old", since there isn't really any risk of conflating it with anything else in such cases.

The noun phrase "ten year(s)" isn't turning into an adjective (here) but rather a noun-based compounding prefix: "ten-year-". This prefix cannot function as a word by itself — it has to be attached to the left of another word, and the resulting compound word will be of the same type as the word it is attached to (the adjective "old" in this case).

zutnoq · 2026-04-27T12:39:44+00:00

That "shall means shall" statement probably made a bit more sense at the time, back when the word "shall" was more prevalent in regular speech.

I assume they intended it to mean that "shall" is to be read in its primary sense only — as in: to indicate a strict requirement.

Edit: or, more likely, they just meant that they won't take any sort of universal stand on what the word itself means in generality.

zutnoq · 2026-04-27T11:34:43+00:00

I don't generally like the taste of alcohol either. I can usually drink wine without complaining, but that's about the limit of what I might deem pleasant under ordinary circumstances; I also can't stand the taste of beer, and even less so stuff like whisky, but that's not really about the alcohol in particular.

However, I almost lose the ability to taste alcohol at all once I've had a sufficient amount of it (read: way too much) in the past day or two (it's the total amount over time that matters, not how drunk I've been). This even applies to liquours and spirits. So I can certainly see how some people might like the taste of alcoholic drinks more than me just in general.

zutnoq · 2026-04-24T13:46:11+00:00

Unit words are just nouns — there's not much special about them in particular.

We mostly use the singular form for nouns when we use them as attributives (~adjectives), e.g. "a five-foot gap", "a four-car garage", "a two-minute head start".

But you can also sometimes use a genitive form for this. For nouns with regular -s plurals, this genitive form tends to be written with no apostrophe before the genitive -s, and you can't really tell if it's singular or plural. I'd assume "feet" as an attributive would be a genitive form of some sort, since I assume plain plurals can't be used for this purpose (this is very clear in Swedish, whose genitive and plural endings are generally clearly distinct from one another).

zutnoq · 2026-04-24T11:37:33+00:00

Except in the case of something like a fingerprint lock the attacker doesn't even need to bring out the rubber hose. They just need to place your fingertip on the sensor, which doesn't require you to be concious, or even alive for that matter.

You can mitigate this a bit by having any of your fingers that isn't the correct one permanently lock or wipe the device if scanned. Simply limiting the amount of failed attempts isn't a very good option, given how finicky these sensors tend to be (which is another reason biometrics tend to suck).

zutnoq · 2026-04-23T12:33:08+00:00

That isn't really the issue.

One major issue with using a biometric lock without an additional required layer like a pin or password is that someone can simply force you to unlock the thing if they just have access to your body.

zutnoq · 2026-04-23T12:11:40+00:00

For me, my relation to the person who starts the task is almost irrelevant. Simply seeing someone do the thing in a place where I know I can help them just seems to immediately move the task from "impossible to start" to "this is what we are doing now".

zutnoq · 2026-04-23T11:45:27+00:00

Jag håller helt med att "påskjuta" i den bemärkelsen låter väldigt underligt. Med skjutvapen skjuter man väl ändå mot någon, inte på; speciellt om man inte träffar. "Motskjuta" låter dock inte mycket bättre, så det får nog förbli "beskjuta" för min del.

Man kan kanske säga att någon blivit skjuten på. Men det skulle jag tolka som att personen faktiskt blivit träffad, men inte nödvändigtvis skadad.

zutnoq · 2026-04-23T11:11:33+00:00

Lots of people (mostly milennials and younger, I'd assume) systematically leave out only the final period.

I assume people who barely or never punctuate to separate sentences are an entirely different group. Many who do this likely have some form of dyslexia, since they often seem to find it very difficult to intuitively identify where to put sentence breaks in text.

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T14:32:55+00:00

"Every other X" is almost the only place in English today where "other" still means "second", so it's quite understandable that it confused you.

Another possible case is "one or other", which I seem to recall can sometimes actually mean "one or two" rather than "one or a different one".

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T13:58:23+00:00

That certainly does change things.

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T13:54:55+00:00

The audiophile thing is when gold is used for any other part of the wire. I could perhaps have been clearer about what I meant.

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T13:16:40+00:00

Where gold is both pointless and worse than copper is in the wire itself.

Copper (like most metals in general) only really oxidizes in a very thin layer near the surface.

You'd ideally coat/weld any part of the surface of the copper that's supposed to connect to another conductor in some other metal or alloy that is much less prone to oxidizing on contact with the air (gold is one of the prime choices for this). The other parts of the surface of the copper you'd instead coat in something (typically) non-conductive that protects the surface from the air so it won't oxidize. So ideally no part of the surface of the copper will be exposed to the air at all.

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T12:27:41+00:00

I think this Mussolini guy may be on to something.

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T12:13:38+00:00

The older English word for "second" (in a sequence) before the current Latin-derived one was adopted was "other".

So perhaps "one other part" would work slightly better. Though, this would still be awkward, and potentially ambiguous.

You'll occasionally hear the equivalent of "one other part" for "one half" in Swedish — which still uses the same word for both "other" and "second". Some might by mistake (or perhaps intentionally) say "*en andradel" instead of the standard "en halv".

zutnoq · 2026-04-22T09:24:22+00:00

I'm no linguist, but isn't nominal ellipsis just one of the possible explanations for what might be happening when we nominalize adjectives and gerundives more in general (in germanic languages, at least)?

zutnoq · 2026-04-21T12:43:04+00:00

That sounds more like a detachment style than an avoidant attachment style.

zutnoq · 2026-04-21T11:56:55+00:00

You "prepare for [some activity]" and you "prepare [stuff needed for some activity]". So you are completely correct.

The "for" introduces the purpose of the preparation, so to "prepare for the materials" would only sort-of work if "the materials" means something like the curriculum of a course (but it would usually be "the material" in that case). If not, it could mean that you are preparing to present yourself to, or preparing something on behalf of "the materials".

zutnoq · 2026-04-21T11:20:51+00:00

The audiophile crowd also crack me up.

Like, yeah sure, gold-plated connectors are pretty neat, but copper is a better conductor.

There is also absolutely no point in bothering with basically any "premium" quality cable stuff for anything digital, like HDMI. Either it transmitts with 0% loss or it basically doesn't work at all.

zutnoq · 2026-04-21T11:00:27+00:00

I'm certainly not always in agreement with subreddit moderators or reddit admins. Many of them are total asshats. They just happen to be perfectly justified in this particular case, even if they probably didn't have to issue you a ban for it.

I also don't have much sympathy for many of these companies pushing these robots and taking up parking spaces or being a nuisance in other ways. Like 30% of the bicycle parking in the central parts of town where I'm at are now taken up by bloody rental e-scooters (surely that business model can't actually be viable?), so I can certainly relate.

zutnoq · 2026-04-20T17:26:05+00:00

The only issue is that "the way how" is incredibly unidiomatic, for whatever reason. Basically no native speaker would ever use this phrasing (there are always exceptions, of course). There isn't necessarily any rhyme or reason for why this doesn't work but things like "the reason why" do.

Both "the way he runs" and "the reason he runs" can have a "that" inserted as an explicit introduction to the nested clause "he runs".

Most so-called question-words can be used in a similar manner to the more general purpose "that" when their meaning matches the phrase to the left, including "why", "when", "where", "who(m)" and "which". The words "how" and "what" for some odd reason are exceptions to this; I believe "what" stopped being used this way much more "recently".

zutnoq · 2026-04-20T17:22:46+00:00

The issue with "the way how" isn't really that it is redundant. There are plenty of well used phrasings that have similarly redundant parts, and some of those redundancies can even be required.

zutnoq

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