Stuff That Really 'Grinds My Gears...'

Should I go to the clinic? Maybe I should go to the clinic.

I hate to waste Medicaid resources on something that will go away on its own, but on the other hand I’m getting up into the demographic where people just get sick and die :fearful:

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Go to the clinic. That’s why it’s there.
And no, it doesn’t always go away on its own.

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Agree – such things can change to pneumonia fairly quickly. Happened to me once, and I was only 30.

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Do you pay into Medicare/Medicaid? If not, is your income below the level that taxes are deducted from your income? (These are rhetorical questions, I have a feeling we know the answer).

Then take advantage of these things that you paid for before the government takes them away, stealing that money for their buddies.

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I don’t even come close to feeling bad about this. My taxes are supposed to be directed towards the public good, and I want them to be.
Social systems are in place in order to be used. I am happy to see people being saved from a patriarchal system that would rather sweep them aside so it doesn’t have to see them starve or die.

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Do you not have legal limits on those things? When Britain joined the EU, lawnmowers had to be silenced to comply with regulations. I guess on 1st April 2019 the local Leavers will be removing the silencers from their mowers to celebrate their “freedom” - except that noise limits will stay in law.

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We do have noise limits around here, but who knows how well they’re enforced. It gets worse when they are several going on at once.

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Science video pronunciations:

“SupernoBi”

“Fungae”

“Belosiraptor”

It’s a small thing, but so many more people get these wrong than get them right, and at least educators ought to get them right.

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Nuculer

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Go to the clinic.
At best they’ll send you home with instructions to rest and drink lots of fluids.
Or they’ll send you for a chest xray and maybe some of the good cough syrup.

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Aluminium. That’s just wrong. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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It’s how most English-speakers pronounce most Vs.

Scientific jargon often comes from Latin, or from Greek transliterated into Latin, and judging from Latin loanwords transliterated into other ancient languages, that’s not how most Latin-speakers pronounced any Us/Vs in the ancient world.

It’s a problem because some terms, such as Linnean names, are supposed to be the same across languages; of course there will always be accent differences, but there could be similar consonants and similar vowels.

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lithium, beryllium [boron is a non-metal]
sodium, magnesium, aluminium, [silicon is a nonmetal]

Notice something?
One country has to be out of step with everybody else. Ridiculous “customary units.” Ignoring element naming conventions. Throwing tantrums over the overdue reclassification of Pluto. CDMA. NTSC (Never twice same color). Using capital M as a symbol for thousands. 60Hz power. US letter. 3 ring binders. Inability to pronounce Derby or schedule. Imposing cannabis ban on rest of world then sneakily starting to dismantle it at home. Florida. Texas.

On the plus side: harmonising the spelling of color, labor and so on to Latin rather than French. Kodachrome. The P-51 Mustang (to a British specification).

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Sorry, I deleted that post by accident, and it doesn’t seem to come back now? I will flag it, I guess, in hopes it can be fixed.

Seeing how this is a venting thread, it may be unfair to treat this as a formal position, in which I case I’ll apologize; but as I usually trust you a lot on language, seeing you dismiss what I’d consider ordinary and even traditional pronunciations is a surprise. I don’t think it would make things better.

Things like Linnean names are supposed to be written the same across languages, but I’ve never heard the idea they should be pronounced the same. I have seen that for place names, and it seems to me very hard to apply well. English orthography is already a confused mess for people to learn. It doesn’t become easier by prescribing different values in different classes of words.

Here too it can even be hard to say what counts as a scientific name. Ok, velociraptor makes sense. But what about scientific names also used as vernacular names, like bacteria, rhinoceros, anemone, geranium, not to mention close derivatives like bovine or giraffe? If supernova isn’t English, are names like Venus and Jupiter? Anatomical terms like femur, penis, and vagina, or more general scientific terms like radius, vector, fetus?

And while most Romance languages don’t have it quite so bad, it seems to me English speakers would not be alone in having trouble with such a scheme, seeing as how some languages don’t even have Latin’s h, l, and r sounds. If it’s easier for them to adapt the pronunciations to how their other words work, I would really hesitate to object.

All in all, then, while I can understand being frustrated our pronunciations are so needlessly divergent, saying educators are speaking wrong and should change strikes me as a very harsh prescriptivism, one that promotes an abstract principle and the expense of how English is actually used.

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Yet we still have molybdenum and platinum – and if you count other languages, the symbols for iron, gold, mercury, and lead go with Latin ferrum, aurum, hydrargyrum, and plumbum. It might be silly to be out of step with everyone now, seeing how both forms are used in English, but aluminum was the older name and aluminium an example of hypercorrection. (And kind of a clumsy one, since they could have made it alumium, as was originally considered.)

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Well, if you have a paleontological conference, do you want one person talking about Silesaurs, and another thinking of Coelosaurs, since the latter pronounces the words the same way?

And if you want an international conference pronunciation, what would be a better choice than classical pronunciation? Maybe Church Latin pronunciation would have comparable reach, but Traditional English pronunciation would not.

And if you have an international conference pronunciation, allowing for accent differences, why not use t more widely, so people get in the habit?

Obviously it’s more complicated when species are named after people or places which don’t follow the classical Latin standard.

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@chenille made just about all the points I wanted to make.

But . . . . driving on the left??? :grin:

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I don’t recall having a problem at international biomedical conferences I’ve been to, but maybe that’s just my (lack of) memory.

I do object to US physicians pronouncing “centimeter” as “sontimeter,” first syllable like French, second syllable like English. It sounds ridiculous.

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If it’s how an English speaker pronounces a V, then it’s an English V (although from what I remember from History of Language class I don’t think I’d agree with the original phonetic transcriptions). As opposed to a Dutch or German or Spanish V.

Having grown up with parents who neither spoke English as a first language nor had a first language in common with each other, I’ve always found the diversity rather fun – and an opportunity to learn about the speaker.

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And you won’t, because it’s never been expected.

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