Like the previous week, nationally cases/day continue upward now at 14 day average of 8000/day. Serious cases show a slight upward trend and as a result the percentage of serious cases now plateaued at 0.07%.
State level: Georgia and Florida still doing fine but reaching the exponential flattening so we will not see any major decline. The other states reflect the upward trend. NH now has more cases than at any previous time, but deaths at half of previous high. Same with Colorado as cases continue a very steep upward trend and deaths at 50% of previous high water mark. NC, like the 2 other southern states doing well with cases and deaths in downward trend.
Expectd the next week’s data to be very “ragged” with the holiday disrupting data reporting between Thursday and Sunday.
I found the video very interesting. Thank.
Expectd the next week’s data to be very “ragged” with the holiday disrupting data reporting between Thursday and Sunday.
If it mirrors last year, we should see a significant dip in daily cases during both the Thanksgiving and Christmas period, followed by an immediate rebound the following week. It turns out that despite all the hand wringing about family gatherings being superspreader events, the (likely) effect of young people being away from college and families in general mostly staying within their immediate bubbles seems to significantly reduce transmission over the course of the holiday period.
Fascinating video. The History Channel had an episode on U.S. dialects that was interesting. There are maps of that.
The spelling quirks of English are often because English was once spelled how it sounded. People stopped talking that way, they no longer pronounce “knight” as “ku-nikht” or pronounce “two” as “twoah”.
(Most of the other spelling quirks are due to having imported so many non-English words with their own phonetic conventions, such as Norman French, Latin, and Greek. You could not really spell “fish” in English as “ghoti” for this reason: the “ti” pronunciation comes from Latin-derived words, and “gh” and “o” arrived at theirs in very different contexts. )
Very interesting! Thanks!
Synchronicity strikes me again. Just this morning I was reading Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” and stopped shortly after reading this passage on page 71.
“The English language was shaped by broad historical events that did not take place inside a single head. They include the Scandinavian and Norman invasions in medieval times, which infected it with non-Anglo-Saxon words; the Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth century, which scrambled the pronunciation of the long vowels and left its spelling system an irregular mess; the expansion of the British Empire, which budded off a variety of Englishes (American, Australian, Singaporean); and the development of global electronic media, which may rehomogenize the language as we all read the same web pages and watch the same television shows.”
“At the same time, none of these forces can be understood without taking into account the thought processes of flesh-and-blood people. They include the Britons who reanalyzed French words when they absorbed them into English, the children who failed to remember irregular past-tense forms like writhe-wrothe and crow-crew and converted them into regular verbs, the aristocrats who affected fussy pronunciations to differentiate themselves from the rabble, the mumblers who swallowed consonants to leave us made and had (originally maked and haved), and the clever speakers who first converted I had the house built to I had built the house and inadvertently gave English its perfect tense. Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.”
geoff, add to that list Hinglish, Hindi-English, as spoken across the Indian subcontinent.
Re: Covid…
physicsguy:
What’s your current big picture take?
I had hopes that the vaxx plus natural immunity would flatten the winter surge, but turns out the vaxx wasn’t the magic bullet…
Huxley,
I’m hoping that in a similar vein to the end of the alpha in May-June where there was an upswing in cases for about 5 weeks then a downturn, a same scenario plays out this time and we see a downturn in cases in about 2-3 weeks. Again I wish Neo would open up the ability to post images; pictures 1000 words etc. Deaths at the state level much less than during the alpha. Florida and Georgia deaths extremely low.
In June, there was already talk of the delta moving through the UK, but at least I haven’t heard anything about any new contagious variant on the horizon, which I assume is good news.
Natural immunity is going to have to take hold in my view. The vax was coded for the spike on the alpha so I can’t see it doing much for any new variant. That also explains why so many vaccinated are/were being infected with the delta. I see no reason for myself to get a booster that won’t work for the delta or any new variant. I hope someone is working on a vax in the more traditional sense which codes for more of the whole virus. The original mRNA vax was just too specific in my view. It worked fine against the alpha, but is useless against mutations. Maybe a biologist here has a different, better view.
You know what I think?
I think that many of us are getting the same YouTube interest suggestions. Rick Beato, and other music analysts, The Ozzie Man, and Russian car crash karma videos. Well, maybe not the latter.
But if I see Neo posting links to Bronze Age warfare, engineering comparisons of piston engine WWII fighter planes, and age of steel ship construction, then I’ll know it for sure.
Or maybe that is where the non-overlap comes in with regard to the Brothers Gibb and haute couture during the early modern era.
We already know who the GunBlue490 and Hickock45 viewers are.
Two other general viewing topics that are great are the restoration videos, cars, tools and other,
The evolution of language has long fascinated me. I read Bodmer’s “The Loom of Language” in my twenties because Malcolm X recommended it from his prison reading because he was fascinated too. Judging by Amazon reviews it’s still worthwhile.
John McWhorter’s more up-to-date “Language Families of the World” is quite good too.
Every now and then I listen to the Canterbury Tales Prolog with text just to luxuriate in the fine-lace sound of 13th Century English before the Great Vowel Shift.
I can sorta comprehend Chaucer in text, but the oral, no.
I am saddened that Chaucer is being thrown onto the ash heap of Dead White European Males.
Before I forget, Internet Archive.Org, has a fair selection of Roscoe Pound works, including the two most important ones from the perspective of our backgrounding needs: Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, and Administrative Law Its Growth, Procedure, and Significance.
Some of us, even we non-lawyers, may remember these books from our college days course work; especially the first. You could not get them for free 35 years ago!
Natural immunity is going to have to take hold in my view.
physicsguy:
That’s how I see it. We can’t keep trying to stop the world to stop the virus (unless it benefits our politics of course).
It’s sad that people die, but this ain’t the bubonic plague or smallpox and we should be counting our blessings that we have gotten off so easy.
Of course, I wouldn’t say no to a general Covid vaxx which would cover variants.
Would seem that, in fact, natural immunity IS the magic bullet.
Which would seem to point to the decision NOT to TREAT the virus (with HCQ/quercetin+zinc or ivermectin, etc.) but to wait for—and rely on—vaccines as the biggest blunder (rather, catastrophic/colossal mistake) in the fight against Covid.
I have a question about what was done in Sweden. I know that they basically didn’t lock down (i.e., they did, but far, far less); but does anyone know if the Swedish medical authorities encouraged the acquisition of natural immunity AND treatment (with HCQ, etc.)? Or did they also essentially wait for the vaccine and push vaccinations?
IOW, assuming that Sweden achieved herd immunity (though I’m not sure they did); and assuming, as some experts have said, that herd immunity CANNOT be achieved through vaccinations (i.e., more than one, with boosters), then how would Sweden have achieve herd immunity (assuming that they in fact did)?
(I suppose it could be posted under “Dance”—e.g., Crab Quadrille—or maybe under “Pro-Choice”…or something…)
Via Instapundit: Exposure to harmless coronaviruses boosts SARS-CoV-2 immunity. This is something I have suspected may have been the case for a while now. It may help explain some of the wide variation in immune responses from different people seen throughout the course of the pandemic.
Barry Meislin, so far as I know, Sweden kept schools and businesses open, made efforts to protect the elderly, but didn’t go the HCQ route.
For myself and my husband, age 72, we are not planning to get the Moderna booster. The long-term data on the original series was never done, because of the urgency of the epidemic, and there is now no data on the long-term effects of repeated doses. We plan to get the monoclonal antibodies if or when we catch COVID. We are fortunate to have no negative health conditions other than our age, and this factors into our decision.
Thanks Kate.
OTOH, I think they did try to isolate the elderly and weaker (or more potentially exposed) segments of the population. IIRC….
Now that we’ve gotten Old and Middle English out of the way (in a manner of speaking), it might just be the time to tackle Cornish…. https://tinyurl.com/k9jzaase
(The language, not the hens…)
Physics guy’s point about the folly of using the same vaccine that has efficacy against original Covid for Delta and other variants is sensible.
Yet, I don’t see it discussed.
Is there something we’re missing?
JimNorCal, that’s because science and evidence are not part of the discussion. Panic and lots of money for vaccine doses are on the table, and nothing else.
@Nonapod:
Re Exposure to harmless Coronaviruses boosting Covid Immunity:
Pretty sure that’s a contributing factor to lower death rates in China/TW along with more competent and finely targeted public health responses post initial Wuhan debacle. Western expats tend in normal times to catch more cold and flu-like infections in their first year or so out here. There’s just more weird and wonderful CVs and others doing the rounds because China below the Yangtze is a Ground Zero for these lovelies.
Hand-waving regardless, this winter we find out if Delta undoes all the containment work.
Very strange folk in New Zealand. The indigenes like to eat people and the Johnny Come Latelies are widely suspected of displaying Afghan Tendencies down at the Sheep Dip — else why do they have more sheep than people?
New Zealand English has undergone a recent (certainly within lifespan of all present Boomers here) vowel shift:
All very technical, but for us peasants, the most noticeable aspect of this is that the ‘i’ in words like six sounds like the ‘e’ in sex.
Easily verified: Google up their odious Covid Dominatrix Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaking.
Which brings us to Science Fection:
@Huxley: Finished 3BP last night and off ento The Dark Forest. Giddyup!
Could be something twisted and Freudian involving them all having learned this tongue twister in first grade maybe:
The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.
Anyway if they didn’t get CPTSD from that, they’ve gone and gotten it good and proper from Ms Ardern.
I’ll throw in a plug here for The History of English Podcast. Starting with Proto-Germanic, he’s worked his way up to the mid-1500s and just recently did a series on the Great Vowel Shift.
Zaphod,
Most of my exposure to NZ English was from watching the extras to The Lord of the Rings movies. IIRC it was the cinematographer who had the thickest accent: it took forever for me to realize that “talla sinny” meant “telecine”, or transfer from film to video.
From listening to English speakers from around the world, whether native or ESL, it seems like English is becoming more American worldwide: flatter vowels, more pronunciation of “r”, etc., much the same way that American regional accents are declining into Network Standard.
JimNorCal —
Is there something we’re missing?
Babylon Bee: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time
SHIREHOME on November 23, 2021 at 11:23 am said:
I found the video very interesting. Thank [you].
But then you would, wouldn’t you, Mr. “Sheer-hom-ee” 🙂
geoffb on November 23, 2021 at 12:34 pm:
“Synchronicity strikes … again.”
I also took up reading The Blank Slate a few weeks ago, but got distracted and put it aside after reaching page 101. I did not recall your extract until I rechecked for it just now.
Then again, out of Neo’s audience of several thousand (??), having 2 to 7 people reading the same (sort of) general interest book might not be such a coincidence after all. Except perhaps for this one being somewhat older, published in 2002.
Couple of new items in American English;
One is the glottal stop in, say, “impor ant. Previously, there was no discernible interval. It’s getting longer. Your name, sir? Mar in.
Then there’s opening, say, “fast” to “fahst”. And “have” to “hahve”
And “runneen” for “running” “runnin'” is okay. But “runneen” sounds pretty lame. I speak of any verb ending in “ing”, of course.
Started out with the younger folks, who are not so young any longer.
@Richard Aubrey:
Any idea if pronunciation ‘Sohder’ for SoLder in American English is a new thing or an old thing?
R2L,
Somebody, here I believe, mentioned the book, possibly Zaphod? It looked interesting so I bought a used copy. That’s one thing the internet has done, made old books findable/buyable. Spent a lot of my life hanging at libraries and used book stores. My wife’s degree and career was as a librarian. Together we probably have a couple thousand hardbacks and even more paperbacks.
One of my bookshelves got posted at the Ace-of-Spades book thread one time.
30 years of Analog! I’d take that over 30 years of National Geographics… Took me years to stop feeling the compulsion to buy the unattainable stuff they used to advertise in front and back of NG when I was a kid.
The bigger question is what comes in three hardcover volumes in the Everyman’s Library and has reddish-tan spines at a quarter of the way from the left on second shelf from the bottom?
Alexander to Actium — A Guitarist *and* a Classicist… Jack of all trades, that Peter Green. Wonder what else he’s been up to?
Zaphod,
Neal Stephenson The Baroque Cycle: 3 Volume Set. Though I prefer his earlier works “Snow Crash,” “The Diamond Age,” and “Cryptonomicon.”
Zaphod,
Correction, I’m tired I guess, you said left not right. The 3 volumes on the left are The Complete Works of Raymond Chandler, a gift from my wife who knows I love those mysteries.
@Geoffb:
Both answers are good!
Have you read Stephenson’s Anathem?
I liked The Diamond Age. Tribes / Phyles FTW.
Still a few Australians in Australia. Here’s the Chief Health Officer of the State of Victoria going out for a stroll amongst the citizenry:
The only conclusion? That there is NO data…(or if there IS, it’s not reliable, honest or true).
Other possible conclusions?
The FDA or Pfizer employees are lazy SOBs.
The FDA is so worn out by the vaccination campaign, it’ll take ’em 55 years to recover.
The FDA/Pfizer hound dawg ate the data and ran off and they just know it’ll take 55 years to find that darned dawg (not 53, not 54, but 55) and grill him about what he knows.
After 55 years, everyone will either have forgotten. Or be dead.
Everyone knows that data isn’t all that important anyway.
Etc…
Whatever the excuse, we must be grateful because deep down in our hearts we know that they are lying for OUR sakes and for the sake of our communities, our cities and our country. QED.
Zaphod, re: Anathem
Own it, cracked it and read the “Notes to a reader” and decided it was not something I wanted to get into at that time. I’ve been more into non-fiction for the past several years. I don’t seem to be able to escape reality with books as I once did. Aging mind perhaps, or just the times.
Richard Aubrey–
One is the glottal stop in, say, “impor ant. Previously, there was no discernible interval. It’s getting longer. Your name, sir? Mar in.
I first noticed that among East Coast Millennials about 15 years ago on one of those house buying shows: “we have to have a big bathtub, it’s really impor un”. ARRGH! For some reason that tic drives me nuts. And it’s spreading.
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Weekly covid report.
Like the previous week, nationally cases/day continue upward now at 14 day average of 8000/day. Serious cases show a slight upward trend and as a result the percentage of serious cases now plateaued at 0.07%.
State level: Georgia and Florida still doing fine but reaching the exponential flattening so we will not see any major decline. The other states reflect the upward trend. NH now has more cases than at any previous time, but deaths at half of previous high. Same with Colorado as cases continue a very steep upward trend and deaths at 50% of previous high water mark. NC, like the 2 other southern states doing well with cases and deaths in downward trend.
Expectd the next week’s data to be very “ragged” with the holiday disrupting data reporting between Thursday and Sunday.
I found the video very interesting. Thank.
Expectd the next week’s data to be very “ragged” with the holiday disrupting data reporting between Thursday and Sunday.
If it mirrors last year, we should see a significant dip in daily cases during both the Thanksgiving and Christmas period, followed by an immediate rebound the following week. It turns out that despite all the hand wringing about family gatherings being superspreader events, the (likely) effect of young people being away from college and families in general mostly staying within their immediate bubbles seems to significantly reduce transmission over the course of the holiday period.
Fascinating video. The History Channel had an episode on U.S. dialects that was interesting. There are maps of that.
The spelling quirks of English are often because English was once spelled how it sounded. People stopped talking that way, they no longer pronounce “knight” as “ku-nikht” or pronounce “two” as “twoah”.
(Most of the other spelling quirks are due to having imported so many non-English words with their own phonetic conventions, such as Norman French, Latin, and Greek. You could not really spell “fish” in English as “ghoti” for this reason: the “ti” pronunciation comes from Latin-derived words, and “gh” and “o” arrived at theirs in very different contexts. )
Very interesting! Thanks!
Synchronicity strikes me again. Just this morning I was reading Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” and stopped shortly after reading this passage on page 71.
“The English language was shaped by broad historical events that did not take place inside a single head. They include the Scandinavian and Norman invasions in medieval times, which infected it with non-Anglo-Saxon words; the Great Vowel Shift of the fifteenth century, which scrambled the pronunciation of the long vowels and left its spelling system an irregular mess; the expansion of the British Empire, which budded off a variety of Englishes (American, Australian, Singaporean); and the development of global electronic media, which may rehomogenize the language as we all read the same web pages and watch the same television shows.”
“At the same time, none of these forces can be understood without taking into account the thought processes of flesh-and-blood people. They include the Britons who reanalyzed French words when they absorbed them into English, the children who failed to remember irregular past-tense forms like writhe-wrothe and crow-crew and converted them into regular verbs, the aristocrats who affected fussy pronunciations to differentiate themselves from the rabble, the mumblers who swallowed consonants to leave us made and had (originally maked and haved), and the clever speakers who first converted I had the house built to I had built the house and inadvertently gave English its perfect tense. Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.”
geoff, add to that list Hinglish, Hindi-English, as spoken across the Indian subcontinent.
Re: Covid…
physicsguy:
What’s your current big picture take?
I had hopes that the vaxx plus natural immunity would flatten the winter surge, but turns out the vaxx wasn’t the magic bullet…
Huxley,
I’m hoping that in a similar vein to the end of the alpha in May-June where there was an upswing in cases for about 5 weeks then a downturn, a same scenario plays out this time and we see a downturn in cases in about 2-3 weeks. Again I wish Neo would open up the ability to post images; pictures 1000 words etc. Deaths at the state level much less than during the alpha. Florida and Georgia deaths extremely low.
In June, there was already talk of the delta moving through the UK, but at least I haven’t heard anything about any new contagious variant on the horizon, which I assume is good news.
Natural immunity is going to have to take hold in my view. The vax was coded for the spike on the alpha so I can’t see it doing much for any new variant. That also explains why so many vaccinated are/were being infected with the delta. I see no reason for myself to get a booster that won’t work for the delta or any new variant. I hope someone is working on a vax in the more traditional sense which codes for more of the whole virus. The original mRNA vax was just too specific in my view. It worked fine against the alpha, but is useless against mutations. Maybe a biologist here has a different, better view.
You know what I think?
I think that many of us are getting the same YouTube interest suggestions. Rick Beato, and other music analysts, The Ozzie Man, and Russian car crash karma videos. Well, maybe not the latter.
But if I see Neo posting links to Bronze Age warfare, engineering comparisons of piston engine WWII fighter planes, and age of steel ship construction, then I’ll know it for sure.
Or maybe that is where the non-overlap comes in with regard to the Brothers Gibb and haute couture during the early modern era.
We already know who the GunBlue490 and Hickock45 viewers are.
Two other general viewing topics that are great are the restoration videos, cars, tools and other,
Restoring an old drill press,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNl1B8iUSd4
… and the saw mill videos … of various kinds and … eh focus.
Here is a guy who does not have a female helper in yoga pants – Out of The Woods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXjbLqt6hhs
The evolution of language has long fascinated me. I read Bodmer’s “The Loom of Language” in my twenties because Malcolm X recommended it from his prison reading because he was fascinated too. Judging by Amazon reviews it’s still worthwhile.
John McWhorter’s more up-to-date “Language Families of the World” is quite good too.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of-the-world
Every now and then I listen to the Canterbury Tales Prolog with text just to luxuriate in the fine-lace sound of 13th Century English before the Great Vowel Shift.
–Geoffrey Chaucer, “Canterbury Tales General Prologue”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahuT-JwxIa8
I can sorta comprehend Chaucer in text, but the oral, no.
I am saddened that Chaucer is being thrown onto the ash heap of Dead White European Males.
Before I forget, Internet Archive.Org, has a fair selection of Roscoe Pound works, including the two most important ones from the perspective of our backgrounding needs: Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, and Administrative Law Its Growth, Procedure, and Significance.
Some of us, even we non-lawyers, may remember these books from our college days course work; especially the first. You could not get them for free 35 years ago!
Natural immunity is going to have to take hold in my view.
physicsguy:
That’s how I see it. We can’t keep trying to stop the world to stop the virus (unless it benefits our politics of course).
It’s sad that people die, but this ain’t the bubonic plague or smallpox and we should be counting our blessings that we have gotten off so easy.
Of course, I wouldn’t say no to a general Covid vaxx which would cover variants.
Would seem that, in fact, natural immunity IS the magic bullet.
Which would seem to point to the decision NOT to TREAT the virus (with HCQ/quercetin+zinc or ivermectin, etc.) but to wait for—and rely on—vaccines as the biggest blunder (rather, catastrophic/colossal mistake) in the fight against Covid.
I have a question about what was done in Sweden. I know that they basically didn’t lock down (i.e., they did, but far, far less); but does anyone know if the Swedish medical authorities encouraged the acquisition of natural immunity AND treatment (with HCQ, etc.)? Or did they also essentially wait for the vaccine and push vaccinations?
IOW, assuming that Sweden achieved herd immunity (though I’m not sure they did); and assuming, as some experts have said, that herd immunity CANNOT be achieved through vaccinations (i.e., more than one, with boosters), then how would Sweden have achieve herd immunity (assuming that they in fact did)?
Just curious, so if anyone does know, TIA…
DNW, there’s always the annual Christmas Island red crab migration…for something a bit off the beaten track:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10233185/Millions-red-crabs-create-traffic-jams-Christmas-Island-prepare-breed.html
(I suppose it could be posted under “Dance”—e.g., Crab Quadrille—or maybe under “Pro-Choice”…or something…)
Via Instapundit: Exposure to harmless coronaviruses boosts SARS-CoV-2 immunity. This is something I have suspected may have been the case for a while now. It may help explain some of the wide variation in immune responses from different people seen throughout the course of the pandemic.
Barry Meislin, so far as I know, Sweden kept schools and businesses open, made efforts to protect the elderly, but didn’t go the HCQ route.
For myself and my husband, age 72, we are not planning to get the Moderna booster. The long-term data on the original series was never done, because of the urgency of the epidemic, and there is now no data on the long-term effects of repeated doses. We plan to get the monoclonal antibodies if or when we catch COVID. We are fortunate to have no negative health conditions other than our age, and this factors into our decision.
Thanks Kate.
OTOH, I think they did try to isolate the elderly and weaker (or more potentially exposed) segments of the population. IIRC….
Now that we’ve gotten Old and Middle English out of the way (in a manner of speaking), it might just be the time to tackle Cornish….
https://tinyurl.com/k9jzaase
(The language, not the hens…)
Physics guy’s point about the folly of using the same vaccine that has efficacy against original Covid for Delta and other variants is sensible.
Yet, I don’t see it discussed.
Is there something we’re missing?
JimNorCal, that’s because science and evidence are not part of the discussion. Panic and lots of money for vaccine doses are on the table, and nothing else.
@Nonapod:
Re Exposure to harmless Coronaviruses boosting Covid Immunity:
Pretty sure that’s a contributing factor to lower death rates in China/TW along with more competent and finely targeted public health responses post initial Wuhan debacle. Western expats tend in normal times to catch more cold and flu-like infections in their first year or so out here. There’s just more weird and wonderful CVs and others doing the rounds because China below the Yangtze is a Ground Zero for these lovelies.
Hand-waving regardless, this winter we find out if Delta undoes all the containment work.
Very strange folk in New Zealand. The indigenes like to eat people and the Johnny Come Latelies are widely suspected of displaying Afghan Tendencies down at the Sheep Dip — else why do they have more sheep than people?
New Zealand English has undergone a recent (certainly within lifespan of all present Boomers here) vowel shift:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/vowel-change-as-systemic-optimisation-why-the-new-zealand-english-front-vowel-shift-is-not-a-good-example/7E9A1ABC818014663F792D6D6C07E5A8
All very technical, but for us peasants, the most noticeable aspect of this is that the ‘i’ in words like six sounds like the ‘e’ in sex.
Easily verified: Google up their odious Covid Dominatrix Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaking.
Which brings us to Science Fection:
@Huxley: Finished 3BP last night and off ento The Dark Forest. Giddyup!
Could be something twisted and Freudian involving them all having learned this tongue twister in first grade maybe:
The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.
Anyway if they didn’t get CPTSD from that, they’ve gone and gotten it good and proper from Ms Ardern.
I’ll throw in a plug here for The History of English Podcast. Starting with Proto-Germanic, he’s worked his way up to the mid-1500s and just recently did a series on the Great Vowel Shift.
Zaphod,
Most of my exposure to NZ English was from watching the extras to The Lord of the Rings movies. IIRC it was the cinematographer who had the thickest accent: it took forever for me to realize that “talla sinny” meant “telecine”, or transfer from film to video.
From listening to English speakers from around the world, whether native or ESL, it seems like English is becoming more American worldwide: flatter vowels, more pronunciation of “r”, etc., much the same way that American regional accents are declining into Network Standard.
JimNorCal —
Is there something we’re missing?
Babylon Bee: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time
SHIREHOME on November 23, 2021 at 11:23 am said:
I found the video very interesting. Thank [you].
But then you would, wouldn’t you, Mr. “Sheer-hom-ee” 🙂
geoffb on November 23, 2021 at 12:34 pm:
“Synchronicity strikes … again.”
I also took up reading The Blank Slate a few weeks ago, but got distracted and put it aside after reaching page 101. I did not recall your extract until I rechecked for it just now.
Then again, out of Neo’s audience of several thousand (??), having 2 to 7 people reading the same (sort of) general interest book might not be such a coincidence after all. Except perhaps for this one being somewhat older, published in 2002.
Couple of new items in American English;
One is the glottal stop in, say, “impor ant. Previously, there was no discernible interval. It’s getting longer. Your name, sir? Mar in.
Then there’s opening, say, “fast” to “fahst”. And “have” to “hahve”
And “runneen” for “running” “runnin'” is okay. But “runneen” sounds pretty lame. I speak of any verb ending in “ing”, of course.
Started out with the younger folks, who are not so young any longer.
@Richard Aubrey:
Any idea if pronunciation ‘Sohder’ for SoLder in American English is a new thing or an old thing?
R2L,
Somebody, here I believe, mentioned the book, possibly Zaphod? It looked interesting so I bought a used copy. That’s one thing the internet has done, made old books findable/buyable. Spent a lot of my life hanging at libraries and used book stores. My wife’s degree and career was as a librarian. Together we probably have a couple thousand hardbacks and even more paperbacks.
One of my bookshelves got posted at the Ace-of-Spades book thread one time.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/374041.php#374041
Geoffb:
Wasn’t me… although it would be in character!
30 years of Analog! I’d take that over 30 years of National Geographics… Took me years to stop feeling the compulsion to buy the unattainable stuff they used to advertise in front and back of NG when I was a kid.
The bigger question is what comes in three hardcover volumes in the Everyman’s Library and has reddish-tan spines at a quarter of the way from the left on second shelf from the bottom?
Alexander to Actium — A Guitarist *and* a Classicist… Jack of all trades, that Peter Green. Wonder what else he’s been up to?
Zaphod,
Neal Stephenson The Baroque Cycle: 3 Volume Set. Though I prefer his earlier works “Snow Crash,” “The Diamond Age,” and “Cryptonomicon.”
Zaphod,
Correction, I’m tired I guess, you said left not right. The 3 volumes on the left are The Complete Works of Raymond Chandler, a gift from my wife who knows I love those mysteries.
@Geoffb:
Both answers are good!
Have you read Stephenson’s Anathem?
I liked The Diamond Age. Tribes / Phyles FTW.
Still a few Australians in Australia. Here’s the Chief Health Officer of the State of Victoria going out for a stroll amongst the citizenry:
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/091/343/327/original/344230ab15aac9b3.mp4
You can feel the love.
“FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over vaccine data”
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants-55-years-process-foia-request-over-vaccine-data-2021-11-18/
The only conclusion? That there is NO data…(or if there IS, it’s not reliable, honest or true).
Other possible conclusions?
The FDA or Pfizer employees are lazy SOBs.
The FDA is so worn out by the vaccination campaign, it’ll take ’em 55 years to recover.
The FDA/Pfizer hound dawg ate the data and ran off and they just know it’ll take 55 years to find that darned dawg (not 53, not 54, but 55) and grill him about what he knows.
After 55 years, everyone will either have forgotten. Or be dead.
Everyone knows that data isn’t all that important anyway.
Etc…
Alas the “frog-and-scorpion” Democrats just can’t help themselves…as they simply can’t stop warring against the people they claim to represent (but in truth despise)!
“NYC council to vote on bill that could allow 800,000 non-citizens to vote in city elections”:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/nyc-council-vote-bill-could-allow-800000-non-citizens-vote-city-elections
Poor Dems. One could even call them “the victims of their own lies”!
Victims par excellence, in fact (since they’ve been lying so often and for so long that the poor psychotics just can’t get their lies straight…):
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/jan-6-panels-false-accusation-against-witness-hands-cudgel-gop
Whatever the excuse, we must be grateful because deep down in our hearts we know that they are lying for OUR sakes and for the sake of our communities, our cities and our country. QED.
Zaphod, re: Anathem
Own it, cracked it and read the “Notes to a reader” and decided it was not something I wanted to get into at that time. I’ve been more into non-fiction for the past several years. I don’t seem to be able to escape reality with books as I once did. Aging mind perhaps, or just the times.
Richard Aubrey–
One is the glottal stop in, say, “impor ant. Previously, there was no discernible interval. It’s getting longer. Your name, sir? Mar in.
I first noticed that among East Coast Millennials about 15 years ago on one of those house buying shows: “we have to have a big bathtub, it’s really impor un”. ARRGH! For some reason that tic drives me nuts. And it’s spreading.