What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"
A simple one I think, I refuse to call twitter by other names.
It has no other names.
X-Twitter is almost acceptable (ex-Twitter, not wrong)
Also liked when I read the other day “… Twitter, now called X, …”
hear hear!
It’s called Xitter now, pronounced shitter.
Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.
Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.
Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).
So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.
And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.
Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?
"white chocolate" doesn't exist. It's just sugar and a little bit of cocoa butter. It's edible wax. It's not chocolate and it doesn't belong in any assortment of sweets, ever. Cocoa butter is skin moisturizer and that's it.
It provably does exist. And it's delicious. I could go to the supermarket and buy some right now. Except I'm fat and trying to lose weight.
It does exist in the way that chocolate ‘solids’ exist as an element of chocolate. A typical chocolate bar consists of both chocolate solids and cocoa butter. It’s still an element of what you’re eating,
So just cuz you eat ‘chocolate’ because you think you only favor the solids, you’re still eating the butter too in what makes chocolate. It’s like drinking milk products and then getting pedantic over people who use butter as a food even though milk contains some the same elements.
But again this is about stupid hills to die on. And you picked an intolerant and ignorant stance so I guess you technically win in this particular topic.
TIL I like eating wax
I'm allergic to chocolate solids but can eat cocoa butter. So, in a society that is unreasonably obsessed with chocolate, it is nice that there is occasionally a "white chocolate" option on things that for some reason come in 15 flavors of chocolate and little else.
I would argue it’s actually congealed demon jizz but it’s definitely not fucking chocolate.
Thank you for being fun and not a terrible person.
I agree with your feeling for the most part. White chocolate is not chocolate and does not belong in chocolate assortments or in the lofty company of actual chocolate. It's a byproduct of chocolate making more than a chocolate itself. That being said, candy and sweets that are made with cocoa butter can be nice. I'm just not going to eat it when I want chocolate.
The "is a hot dog a sandwich" and similar discussions are solved with the mighty sword of language and not some rigid taxonomy about fillings and bread.
Imagine a set of food items on a table, hot dog amongst them, but not other pseudo-sandwiches. I ask you to "Please pass me that sandwich." If there is but a moment's pause in your mind before you reach for the hot dog, even if it's as you surmise I must be speaking about the hot dog as there are no other sandwich-like items available, then it is not a sandwich.
Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The "wrong" word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener's comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.
Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing "libraries" of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.
I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we'd do such a thing, and it'd never be adopted (and probably it's been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can't be misinterpreted can be a real chore.
I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.
From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.
Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.
My reasoning is that a hotdog is a sausage. When you say you want a sandwich, you don't say "pass me a ham" you say "pass me a ham sandwich." When ordering a named sandwich, "I'll have a Ruben" it's widely understood that a Ruben is a sandwich so the modifier is already packaged in the name. A sandwich has "Sandwich" as a defining modifier.
When you ask for a hotdog you don't say, "give me a hotdog sandwich" you say, "give me a hotdog." The same situation works with bratwurst, you don't order a brat sandwich. To further reinforce this, if you're in the south and central US and order a Hotlink it comes on it's own or in a hotdog bun but if you order a "hotlink sandwich" you get two hotlinks cut length wise and placed on a hamburger bun or bread.
A sausage can have a bun as a condiment and still be just a sausage. A sandwich can have sausage, but is still refered to as a sandwich. So a hotdog is a sausage served with bread, not a sandwich.
Hot dog is obviously a taco
If you go to France and order a taco, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Those abominations are not tacos and as a native Texan that's my hill to die on.
I suppose you feel the same way on the "soup is cereal" too?
I've usually heard that framed the other way around, but, yes, that sort of argument is also easily solved by this test.
I'll recklessly posit that most "is x a y?" arguments can be addressed with this methodology, noting the exception of the fruit and vegetable ones, since the answer is simply a little more complicated, e.g. a tomato is botanically a fruit and culinarily a vegetable. The word fruit and vegetables have similar but functionally different meanings in botany and cuisine terminology, which explains the distinction.
I use a similar example.
If I went to a restaurant and ordered a 3 meat sandwich, and they gave me a hotdog, I'd be fucking pissed. Likewise if I ordered a hotdog and they gave me a taco with solidified beef and relish, I'd be confused, and concerned that I got somebody else's weird special taco order.
Categories aren't limited only to the forms and functions, but expectations. You can redefine or consolidate terms all you like but all you're doing is causing confusion. If that's what people are after then good troll I guess.
If you think of sandwich as a verb, then any food that is "sandwiched" can be a sandwich. Hamburgers, hoagies, hotdogs, tacos, quesadillas, etc. However, by convention, when there is a more common, dedicated word for foodstuff you should use that instead. Tacos are sandwiches but it is weird to call them that when we can just call them tacos.
Umm acktually a tomato is a fruit and strawberries aren’t berries. 🤓
But if, instead of a hot dog, there are sliced deli meats on the table and you ask me to pass the sandwich, I'm still going to pause and be confused because component parts are never the final product. I'm not sure what this proves.
I have a different issue.
A hot dog is a Frankfurt sausage or frankfurter in the United States. Frankfurters were notorious in the sausage scene for having the Frankfurt bend. You've probably seen this bend on fancier sausages like Louisiana Hot Links, or Chicken Pineapple. But US hot dogs, whether Ball Park or Oscar Meyer or whatever are these straight things.
Hot dogs are no longer hot dogs.
taxonomy
shit
Is that the right word
I've been using "ontology" when talking about item classification to sound smart
I guess it worked bc no one said "You mean taxonomy, right?" yet. My illusion of pretending I'm not a dumbass to people IRL isn't broken yet I hope.
An article from the ancient aliens people who run "The Secret Nazi Laser Weapons of the Luftwaffe" so boomers can fall asleep cumming their pants to right wing hokum at 2 AM?
That's not real information
But hot dogs aren’t sandwiches they’re tacos. It perfectly logical to describe a hot dog as an American taco. If there were no taco items on the table and you asked for a taco I’d think you were being funny, but I’d pass you the hot dog.
Tacos are sandwiches...
The medical symbol of the staff with the snake is only supposed to have 1 (one) snake on it. A staff with 1 snake is the Rod of Asclepius (the son of Apollo and Greek demigod of medicine), a staff with 2 snakes is a Caduceus which is carried by Hermes as a messenger or herald.
Physicians get 1 snake. Couriers and heralds get 2 snakes. Any medical professional or organization that uses 2 snakes is wrong and needs to go study the humanities and classics for a bit.
No ticket, no support.
Even if it is for batteries for your wireless keyboard and mouse. Ticket please.
I love telling whiny users who claim they've always had "this" problem that I cannot fix what I do not know is broken. If there's no ticket, then nothing is broken, so quit your whining.
"I have to track the batteries as well as the time spent, and a ticket is the way to do that."
Stupid KPI and accounts not knowing that consumables are not just food.
Same for software development. Create a ticket or piss off, I will not do undocumented/uncredited work.
Bah, undocumented is my modus operandi. Uncredited is unforgivable. Ill absolutely throw together a ticket and add it to the sprint after I've fixed an interesting problem that kept me from working on the boring ticket that's been in my backlog for three sprints. _
Things happen by accident or on purpose. No one over the age of 3 should be using "on accident".
CEREAL FIRST, THEN MILK!!! COLD MILK! I DON'T CARE HOW YOUR MOM USED TO FIX IT, THIS IS THE ONLY CORRECT WAY!!!
This is the way.
I want a full bowl of cereal, with milk added to soften/moisten it; not a bowl of milk with some cereal floating on top.
But then I finish the cereal. Still hungry - some milk in the bowl. I proceed to add more cereal on the milk. Fuck you.
I can feel your trauma through this post. We hear you. You are heard.
No no no cereal first then hot water wtf u on?
I allow an exception for cereals that get soggy/flavorless very quickly when wet (e.g. frosted flakes). Controlled 'dunking' with your spoon after the fact optimizes the amount of milk exposure. 🤓
This is the only way to eat frosted mini wheats.
"Spectacle Fighter".
In the late aughts, game critic Ben "Yathzee" Croshaw came up with that term to describe games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, beat-em-up type games where the point is less "can you get through" and more "how high can you get that combo meter? How COOL can you make yourself look while beating up all these fodder enemies?"
A few years later the industry coalesced on an agreed-upon term for this subgenre -- And called it "Character Action".
Yathzee has just accepted defeat and uses the term everyone uses, he has to, he works in games media.
I refuse. Character Action is a dumb, DUMB term because every action game is a character action game, because there is ACTION and CHARACTERS in all of them.
Whereas "Spectacle Fighter" was perfectly descriptive of just WHAT made those games special. You are FIGHTING, and the objective is to LOOK SPECTACULAR.
Less has less syllables than fewer, so it takes fewer effort to say
Fewer efforts.
Wait, aren't these adjectives meant the be used the other way around or did I woosh the joke?
The word "literally" has been forever ruined by people who use it to mean "figuratively." Worse, there is now literally no way to actually convey the original meaning of the word "literally" in a concise, clear way.
You have to say something like, "A is literally 10 times bigger than B...and I mean that ACTUALLY literally." And then people will STILL assume that you're speaking figuratively.
Try using "precisely" or "roughly" where applicable. It lets people know you're talking about firm realities and aren't using hyperbole.
It's a stupid, imperfect workaround and I hate that it's necessary, but it's the best we have for a decade or three until people stop bastardizing "literally".
This one exactly. But don't lose hope, the word doesn't really convey figuratively other than online people who mostly sound foolish trying to push buttons. It is usually used as an emphasis when someone wants to say how close to the actual literal situation things were (even if not literally the same). People who use it as "figuratively" are in decline, kind of like people that throw a fit over "moist" and as long as we keep pointing out how ridiculous they are (both moist dramatics and literal confusers) their relevance will continue to fade.
That's how language works.
Many words shifted meaning over time, some gained connotation, some lost it, some turned to something completely different.
Just look at the word "gay", it shifted from "happy" to "haha homosexuals are outwardly happy, so we call them gay semi-ironically" to "homosexual". The homophobic connotation was added, then the original meaning got lost.
You can complain, sure, but just read an old text from the 17th century and try to find a sentence that means exactly the same today as it did back then.
I'm fine with language evolving; my issue is that there used to be a word that succinctly conveyed a particular idea, and now there is no way to concisely convey that idea in English.
"Gay" changing its meaning isn't the same thing, because there are still plenty of ways of saying "happy" in English.
I agree. I understand the need for a more relaxed and less clinical way of saying gay, but I still don't understand how a word became its own antonym. I'm ESL so I tend to pay attention to words that native speakers don't and that's my only explanation.
It is a fact that A is 10 times bigger.
Figurative feelings don't care about your literal facts.
Right with ya. I literally refuse to use the word when I mean figuratively.
Wait are you being literal right now? Like, actually??
Yes. And by actually, I of course mean facetiously, because language changes.
There literally-literally is.
And to over-egg that particular pudding point, word doubling might be a common thing in "simpler" languages and, ahem, pooh-poohed in "complex" ones, but that second "literally" restores the original meaning.
For now.
Until some bright spark starts using "literally literally" to mean "figuratively" anyway.
Don't worry, people will create a new phrase soon það you'll have some years before that one gets ruined also.
"exactly 10 times bigger" or maybe "legit 10 times bigger" can be used in a simalar way.
But language changes so me being stupid and wrong is also correct 🤔
I has been used figuratively for literal centuries.
It does bug me when the context needs clarity and the person won't clarify which way they mean it.
Literally can mean literally ( My girlfriend literally stabbed me in the back. I'm bleeding out and need an ambulance. )
It can also mean emphatically ( My girlfriend stabbed me in the back. She emptied my bank account, shot my dog and left town with my best friend. )
I won't use it in the latter way, and will sometimes use the adjective proverbial ( proverbially ) if my metaphor could be plausibly read as literal. ( I could drive to Maryland and assassinate Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh for a fresh cruller right now. )
Stick to the side of the path your country drives on or at least move to that side if someones comming the otherway. I don't get how this isn't common knowledge but it also doesn't matter all that much.
Except when you're walking on a road, you should walk on the opposite side of vehicle traffic.
Yes, the one exception which is based on safety due to the massive difference in speeds.
And going out of the way, instead of stubbornly coming towards me as if you own this road and I couldn't run you over.
If you think about it, that's following the rule on the footpath that would otherwise be there. That edge would be towards traffic, it's just reduced to zero width.
I know you are talking about interactions between 2 people on foot. However, when it comes to automobile and pedestrian interaction, interestingly, the government of the Canadian Province of Ontario has a website dedicated to pedestrian safety, and specifically recommends walking on the side of oncoming traffic:
If there is no sidewalk on a street, or if you use a wheelchair or scooter and the sidewalk you encounter is not wheelchair-accessible street, you should:
So some may apply this principle to a different situation.
Ah I see you are from the UK too. Lots of other countries seem to grasp this concept a lot better. The UK seems unable to walk on the fucking left. If everyone walked on the left then no one has an issue.
The amount of people stubbornly walking towards me on the right hand side of the path whilst I stick to my guns on the left pisses me right off!
Bonus points for groups of people that are so far up their own arse they feel the need to walk abreast taking up the entire path. Fuck all of you!
deep cleansing breath
Same goes for people that think escalators and travelators are rides. If you want to stand there, on the slowest dumbest ride ever, and this is way cooler than getting to where you want to go quicker,, move over and keep the overtaking lane open.
When people say 'I could care less'. I know what they mean, but it is absolutely not what they said. I hate it even more when I hear it in a song or a TV show/movie. That tells me it made its way past a whole slew of writers and editors. I hate it. It's 'I couldn't care less'. COULDN'T!!! Like you care so little that you couldn't care any less.
Pluto is a MOTHER FUCKING PLANET
It has enough mass to deform into a spheroid, it orbits on the major plane of every other planet.
"Clearing their orbit" is utter bullshit, Earth hasn't even cleared its orbit that's why we get the Perseid and The Leonid meteor showers.
Fuck you NDT, I know you didn't start it but you SURE as FUCK popularized it.
And I will literally fistfight any of you who disagree idgaf where or when.
I live in a high altitude area. It gets very hot. People will say that it's because we're "closer to the sun" as if the 6000ft/1800m difference is what matters vs the 93,000,000mi/150,000,000km distance to the sun is affected by something so small.
The difference is the lack of atmosphere to soften the various types of light from the sun.
Petty hill
If you keep correcting very minor grammatical mistakes when I am speaking, such as “you mean fewer, not less”, I will just stop talking to you entirely
Technically, I wait until you're done speaking to strike
Turns out language is pretty damn flexible. Even if I made an obvious mistake, you meant what I knew.
It's simple though. If you can count it, it's fewer. If not, it's less.
Fewer people. Less noise.
That isn't a grammatic rule. Some guy in the recent past was like "I think it sounds better that way." It was his personal preference.
That's all.
They've always been used interchangeably, for as long as English has been a written language.
People who love to "correct" this are just showing ass to anyone who knows any better haha.
I hate hate hate when people try to discredit a theory because "it's a theory not a fact" as if the label of "fact" exists on some kind of science ladder for an idea. "Facts" is a colloquial word like any other, it's not some special category above theories.
Moreover, the most tried and tested theories are facts. Science rarely just disproves an established theory outright. Einstein's General Relatively equations reduces into Newton's Laws of Motion in most situations. Newton's Laws of Motion weren't "wrong", it's just General Relatively is more specific and accurate.
The Scientific Method usually just builds on what already exists without claiming we were all unfactual for working with what we had.
Begging the Question is a logical fallacy, a circular argument. So when a position brings a question to mind that is other than a challenge to its validity, it raises the question.
Load the goddamn plane by column, window seats to aisle seats, grouped by odd/even seat numbers and make people line up largest seat number to smallest. It takes an extra five minutes before you board the plane and saves you twenty or thirty. It wouldn't even cost you the five if it was the standard.
Standard wedding photography is set up to make photos look “old”. And it’s so hideous and awful. Most filters used for wedding photography look atrocious.
Let major moments in time look like they were experienced at that time! I’m looking at you, black and white photograph from 2016. Artificially making something old, when at one time they were the present, gives so much incongruity to the experience.
Let something as important as a wedding day look like it’s a product of that time. Not from decades previously.