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3 Children, 3 Women Missing After 10 Suspected Kuki Militants Killed In Encounter In Manipur's Jiribam - NDTV

  1. 3 Children, 3 Women Missing After 10 Suspected Kuki Militants Killed In Encounter In Manipur's Jiribam  NDTV
  2. Manipur on boil: 2 more bodies found, 6 missing  The Times of India
  3. Additional paramilitary forces rushed to Manipur amid spike in ethnic violence  Hindustan Times
  4. Letters to The Editor — November 13, 2024  The Hindu
  5. 2 men found dead, 6 of family missing day after militants killed in Manipur  India Today




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21 million bitcoins

Today on Married To The Sea: 21 million bitcoins


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!




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congratulations borned

Today on Married To The Sea: congratulations borned


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!




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second notice

Today on Married To The Sea: second notice


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!




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that could be us

Today on Married To The Sea: that could be us


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!




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if i can be honest cody

Today on Married To The Sea: if i can be honest cody


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!




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welcome to the magical lair

Today on Married To The Sea: welcome to the magical lair


This RSS feed is brought to you by Drew and Natalie's podcast Garbage Brain University. Our new series Everything Is Real explores the world of cryptids, aliens, quantum physics, the occult, and more. If you use this RSS feed, please consider supporting us by becoming a patron. Patronage includes membership to our private Discord server and other bonus material non-patrons never see!











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Convert Old Junk Bikes Into Race-Ready Fixed Gear Bikes in No Time!

EIGHTINCH shows us how to fix up old bikes using a fairly basic conversion kit. You'll need:

  • Amelia wheels with tires & tubes
  • 16t cog
  • lockring
  • Courier cranks
  • A bottom bracket
  • A KMC chain

More videos for both seasoned and amateur bike enthusiasts here!




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The Built-In Air Conditioning Just Wasn't Effective

Especially after someone put that giant wooden thing on top.




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These New Years Cycles Confuse Me

Fun Fact: No-So-Handy Andy was also born on the year of the Dragon.




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Donegal captain on comeback trail

Donegal captain Michael Murphy hopes he will be fit to play in next month's Ulster championship preliminary round tie against Cavan.




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Down fall to Cork in semi-final

Defending champions Cork beat Down 2-17 to 1-12 in the National League Division One semi-final at Croke Park.




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Tyrone hit by Coney injury blow

Tyrone forward Kyle Coney looks certain to be ruled out for the rest of this season after sustaining a groin injury.




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USC football placed on 1 year of probation, fined for coaching staff violations

Southern California’s football program has been fined $50,000 and placed on probation for one year by the NCAA because of multiple violations of coaching staff rules over two seasons




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Bev Priestman fired as Canada women's soccer coach after Olympic drone scandal

Canada women's soccer coach Bev Priestman has been fired after an independent review of a drone surveillance scandal at the Paris Olympics




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Deion Sanders compares Shedeur and Travis’ chemistry to Michael Irvin and Troy Aikman | Speak

Deion Sanders talks about the strong chemistry between Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter, comparing it to the connection Michael Irvin had with Troy Aikman during their playing days.




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Bensley Joseph finds Corey Floyd Jr. for a TOUGH ALLEY-OOP dunk as Providence leads 47-43 vs. Hampton

Providence Friars' Bensley Joseph found Corey Floyd Jr. for a tough alley-oop dunk against the Hampton Pirates.




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Michael Irvin asked Deion Sanders about coaching the Cowboys | Speak

Michael Irvin asks Deion Sanders about the possibility of coaching the Dallas Cowboys, sparking a funny moment and laughter.




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College Football Playoff Rankings: Oregon, Ohio State on top; Alabama enters top 10

The second set of College Football Playoff Predictions were released Tuesday night, with Oregon, Ohio State and Texas listed in the top three spots. See the complete rankings!




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John Hugley IV records a NASTY block to help Xavier hold on to 40-25 lead at halftime vs. Jackson State

John Hugley IV recodrded a NASTY block to help Xavier hold on to 40-25 lead at halftime vs. Jackson State




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Dailyn Swain takes it coast-to-coast for an UNREAL jam to extend Xavier's lead over Jackson State

Dailyn Swain took it coast-to-coast for an UNREAL jam to extend the Xavier Musketeers' lead over Jackson State. 




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College Football Playoff rankings takeaways: Colorado's path, Indiana undervalued

FOX Sports' RJ Young offers up three takeaways from the second set of College Football Playoff rankings, including Colorado's path to the CFP ... and the national title game.




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Британская модель Николь Нил (Nicole Neal)

Британская модель Николь Нил (Nicole Neal) уже в двадцать лет стала звездой таких мужских изданий, как FHM, Nuts, Front, Loaded, The Sun и многие другие. “В Британии ощущается недостаток горячих блондинок”, – утверждает Николь Нил. – “Если вы посмотрите вокруг, то увидите много брюнеток, нескольких рыженьких девушек и практически ни одной блондинки. Думаю, данный факт [...]




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what 'polite' means: Culpeper, O'Driscoll & Hardaker (2019)

I've studied the word please off and on for a few years now.* Currently, I'm trying to finish up a study that I started an embarrassing number of years ago. Now that I've returned to it, I have the pleasure of reading all the works that have been published on related topics in the meantime. They couldn't inform my study design, but they must now inform the paper I hope to publish. One of these is a chapter by Jonathan Culpeper, Jim O'Driscoll and Claire Hardaker: "Notions of Politeness in Britain and North America," published in the book in From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness, edited by Eva Ogiermann and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Cambridge UP, 2019). 

Their question, what does polite mean in the UK and US, was a research project on my to-do list. When I was a younger scholar, I'd have been (a) royally annoyed with those authors for getting to it first, (b) sad, sad, sad that I didn't get to do a fun piece of research, and (c) consumed with self-loathing for not being quick enough to do the project myself. It is both the blessing and curse of middle age that I now look at anything anyone else has done with gratitude. Good! Now I don't have to do it! 

Let's start with why it's interesting to ask about "notions of politeness" in the two countries. Here's a clue from an earlier post about use of please when ordering at restaurants. I asked:
So, how can it be that Americans think of themselves as polite when they fail to extend this common courtesy word?
I argued that Americans (subconsciously) find the lack of please in these contexts "more polite." In the comments section for that post, some people—mostly British people—could just not accept that a food order without a please could be described as polite. To them, to be polite includes saying please. If you're not using the word please, it's just not polite. 

Now, part of the reason for that disagreement is that I was using the word polite in linguistic-theory-laden ways. The distinction between how the word politeness is used in linguistic discussions and how it's used in everyday life has become such a problem for us linguists that we now talk about polite1 and polite2 to distinguish commonplace understandings of polite (1) from our theoretical uses (2). The failures of communication in my previous blogpost probably stemmed from having three understandings of politeness at play: the linguist's polite2, American polite1, and British polite1. 


Postcard from the How to be British series


 

Culpeper et al. set out to contrast British and American polite1. They point out that academic research on the topic of British/American politeness is "full of stereotypes that have largely gone unexamined." These stereotypes hold that British culture favo(u)rs maintaining social distance by using indirectness and avoidance in interaction, while Americans are more interested in creating interactional intimacy by being informal and open. The authors asked: how do AmE and BrE speakers use the word polite? If differences exist, then do they conform to the stereotypes, or do they tell us something new? To investigate this, the authors used two sets of data.


Part 1: clustering 'polite' words in the OEC

First, they searched the Oxford English Corpus, where they found thousands of instances of polite. In AmE, it occurs 6.8 times and in BrE 8.8 times per million words. They then used corpus-linguistic tools to determine which words polite was most likely to co-occur with in the two countries' data. They then used statistical tools to group these collocates into clusters that reflect how they behave linguistically. (I'll skip over the detail of the statistical methods they use, but it suffices to say: they know what they're doing.) For example in the British data, words like courteous, considerate, and respectful form a courteous cluster, while words like cheery, optimistic, and upbeat are in the cheerful cluster. 

The British and American datasets were similar in that polite co-occurred at similar rates with words that formed cheerful and friendly clusters. This seems to go with the common stereotype of American politeness as outgoing and inclusive, but contradicts the British stereotype of reserved behavio(u)r. 

The most notable difference was that British polite collocated with words in a sensible cluster, including: sensible, straightforward, reasonable, and fair. This cluster didn't figure in the American data. The British data also had a calm cluster (calm, quiet, generous, modest, etc.), which had little overlap with American collocates. British polite, then, seems to be associated with "calm rationality, rather than, say, spontaneous emotion." 

Other clusters seemed more complex. Courteous and charming came up as British clusters, while American had respectful, gracious, and thoughtful clusters. However, many of the words in those clusters were the same. For example, almost all the words in the British courteous cluster were in the American gracious cluster. That is, in American courteous and attentive were more closely associated with 'gracious' words like open-minded and appreciative, while British courteous and attentive didn't intersect with more 'gracious' words. Respectful is a particularly interesting case: it shows up in the courteous cluster for the British data, but has its own respectful cluster in American (with words like compassionate and humane). 
 
Looking at these clusters of patterns gives us a sense of the connotations of the words—that is to say, the associations those words bring up for us. Words live in webs of cultural assumptions. Pluck one word in one web, and others will reverberate. But it won't be the same words that would have reverberated if you'd plucked the same word in the other web. It's not that compassionate wasn't in the British data, for example—it's that its patterns did not land it in a cluster with respectful.  In American, respectful seems to have "a warmer flavour" with collocates relating to kindness and positive attitudes toward(s) others, while in the British data respectful has "older historic echoes of courtly, refined, well-mannered behaviour." 

Part 2: 'politeness' and sincerity on Twitter

Their second investigation involved analy{s/z}ing use of polite and its synonyms in a particular 36-hour period on Twitter. The data overall seemed to go against the stereotypes that American politeness is "friendly" and British is "formal", but once they looked at the data in more detail, they discovered why: US and UK words differed in (in)sincerity. In the British data, respectful seemed to "be used as a vehicle for irony, sarcasm and humour", while in the American data friendly "appears to have acquired a negative connotation" about 17% of the time, in which "friendly" people were accused of being untrustworthy or otherwise undesirable. This also underscores the idea that American respectful has a "warmer flavour" than British respectful. It's intriguing that each culture seems to be using words stereotypically associated with them (American–friendly; British–respectful) in ironic ways, while taking the less "typical of them" words more seriously.  

Yay for this study! 

I'm grateful to Culpeper, O'Driscoll and Hardaker for this very interesting paper, which demonstrates why it's difficult to have cross-cultural discussions of what's "polite" or "respectful" behavio(u)r. The more we're aware of these trends in how words are interpreted differently in different places, the better we can take care in our discussions of what's polite, acceptable, or rude. 


*If you're interested in the fruits of my please labo(u)rs so far, have a look at:




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second-guess


Image from here



At the Bavard Bar in St Leonard's a few months ago, a Bavardier asked me if I'd noticed the difference between the US and UK meanings of second-guess. I hadn't! She felt that the US meaning was overtaking the UK meaning, but whose meaning is really whose? 






Here's what Oxford Languages says: 


But more than the one meaning is North American. The Oxford English Dictionary lists it, in any meaning, as 'originally and chiefly North American', with evidence of the 'anticipate' sense form 1941 and of the 'judge' sense from 1946. 

It looks like only the first of those meanings ('anticipate by guesswork') initially went to the UK, while that meaning perhaps lost steam in the US. The American Merriam-Webster dictionary lists the 'criticize' meaning first

For me, 'judge with hindsight' doesn't capture how I use second-guess. Here's me using it in The Prodigal Tongue, talking about the acts of faith we need to take in communicating:

when you’re talking with people from other places, you cannot second-guess every noun and verb you utter.

If we use a substitution test to see which of the definitions above fits with it, it's not very satisfying. 

  1. you cannot anticipate every noun and verb you utter
  2. you cannot judge with hindsight every noun and verb you utter

Neither seems to me to capture what I meant, which was something more like:

  • you cannot spend time doubting and re-thinking every noun and verb you utter

This sense of 'doubt' seems to come through when second-guess is used with a reflexive (-self) pronoun, as in I spend too much time second-guessing myself and, it turns out, there are about 2.5 times more second-guessing of oneself in the American part of GloWbE corpus as in the British part:

Wiktionary's definition might be more in line with my intuitions of the meaning. 

  1. (idiomatic) to vet or evaluate; to criticize or correct, often by hindsight, by presuming to have a better ideamethod, etc. quotations ▼
    Please don't try to second-guess the procedure that we have already refined and adopted.
    Once she began listening to her instincts and didn't second-guess herself the entire time, her artwork improved noticeably.

Their use of the originally BrE verb to vet seems to capture what I meant in my sentence: 'One cannot vet every noun or verb for its dialect-appropriateness before it comes out of one's mouth.'  I'm betting this usage has arisen by 'contamination' from a similar, but centuries-older phrase: have second thoughts about.

That's not to say I always use it in the 'vetting' way. Here's an example from an email I sent, replying to a question of whether students would like to join the staff in a reading group:

I don't think we should second-guess whether students would want to do it; I think we should just invite them.  

This one has more the 'anticipate' sense. I don't think I picked that up in the UK. Rather, I think the phrase does more than one thing for AmE speakers. 

So, is my fellow Bavardier right that things are changing in the UK?  Let's look in the News on the Web corpus, since that covers the past 14 years, whereas the GloWbE data were from 2012.  Using the same search string as I used in GloWbE (second-guess* *self), there is still 2.5 times more in the US subcorpus than in the British subcorpus. If we just search for second-guess* (without the *self), it's 2.2 times more in the US. 

But we can see it really picking up in BrE since 2017:


So it feels kind of 'new' in BrE. But while it's older in AmE, there's certainly a great increase in its use in the past few years. Perhaps it's that increase in the US that's allowed it to be picked up in the UK:



Rather than me second-guessing your thoughts on this, why don't you just tell us in the comments?




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colo(u)rful sauces

In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing. 

red sauce

Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:

(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin; (b) adj. (attributiveU.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.

Wikipedia tells us:

Red sauce may refer to:

That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinara on Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.

An Australian ketchup
An American passata
As far as red sauce referring to ketchup in the UK, I have heard it, but not often. Ketchup is the most common word for it in both countries, though Britons are six times more likely than Americans to call it by the full tomato ketchup (six times more likely in the 2012–13 GloWbE corpus, eight times more likely in the more recent NOW corpus). You sometimes hear in BrE the more AusE tomato sauceIn AmE, that doesn't mean 'ketchup', but is the equivalent (more or less: see comments) of the stuff that in BrE is usually called passata.



brown sauce

The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.

Wikipedia's photo at brown sauce

In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:
a tangy sauce commonly served as a condiment for beef in the United States. Two of its major producers are British companies

That last bit was news to me. I import A.1. from the States because I love it so. (I find it spicier and less treacly than HP sauce. It's also much darker.) In the UK, I've only ever seen it in Fortnum and Mason (extremely chichi shop), where they charged in the double digits for a bottle, apparently imported from the US. But A.1. (in some formulation) may still be being made in the UK for export to Asia! (The most recent reference to this I've found is 2018.)

Back to brown sauce. The OED definition has not been updated since 1888, and it has only the French-cuisine inspired meaning, akin to gravy: "A brown-coloured savoury sauce, esp. one made with browned fat and flour." When I was a(n American) child in the 1970s–80s learning about cooking, I learned this among other sauce terms—though I can't say I've ever heard it in my adult life. 

But brown sauce was another bit of my mother's terminology that didn't help when travel(l)ing: she'd talk about her Chinese food preferences in terms of preferring brown sauce over white sauce, and British Spouse didn't understand what she meant. But, she knew what she was talking about. Goodcooking.com has a story about a sauce master at a Chinese restaurant which includes (with recipes): 

Two basic sauces are the brown sauce and white sauce. Brown sauce is mainly for meat dishes; beef, lamb, duck, yet he also used it in his Chendu Fish dish, to bind together moo shu and one of his tofu dishes. The white sauce was for fish and seafood, chicken and vegetable dishes. Other ingredients such as black beans, chili with garlic, preserved vegetable, ginger and garlic were added as items cooked and then his sauces were added, seconds before service to bind everything into a flavorful dish. 

From the spelling of flavorful, we can guess that this Chinese restaurant was in the US, and from a little knowledge of Chinese food in the anglosphere, I would guess that (a) this might be based in some specific regional Chinese cuisine, and (b) the term is not much used in British Chinese cuisine. Having had a lot of Chinese takeaways/takeout in the US, UK and South Africa, I can report that even if you're ordering a dish of the same name (chicken in garlic sauce, sweet-and-sour pork, General Tso's chicken etc.), they are very different in different places. (Let's just say: my English family always makes a point of having Chinese food when we're in the US.) Yummly.co.uk has many recipes for Chinese brown sauce, but, despite the 'uk' in its URL, all the brown-sauce recipes I checked there have American terminology (cornstarch, scallions, chicken broth/bouillon etc.). If there were any urge to call Chinese sauce base brown in British English, it would probaby be blocked by the clash with the breakfasty condiment. 

white sauce

White sauce has at least the following meanings: 
  • In (US, at least) Chinese cuisine, it's the opposite of brown sauce. (This site says it's typical of Cantonese cooking.)
  • A sauce base made of "roux of butter and flour combined with milk or cream" (OED). 
The OED's (2015 updated) entry includes only the last of these, which is often used in French cooking. It's also what my mother used as the opposite of red sauce in Italian cooking, so an Alfredo or similar. 

Speaking of white sauces in Italian cooking—I grew up hating (AmE) lasagna/(BrE) lasagne because I couldn't stand the ricotta cheese. Well, it turns out, British people don't make lasagne with ricotta (nor do many in Italy). Instead it has a béchamel sauce. Meanwhile, I've outgrown my hatred of ricotta. Still, lasagn{a/e} is the last thing I'd order on any pasta menu.



Finally,

for the fun of it, a Venn diagram of sauces by Zoe Laughlin,  recently discussed on BBC Radio 4 and pointed out to me by one of my writing group pals:







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conf(l)ab

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflabI can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:

I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.

Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old.  (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:


The OED marks conflab as 'chiefly U.S.', with its first citation being from Kansas in 1873:

Green marks it as American as well. His 1843 example is from a book published in Philadelphia. BUT before the 1873 Kansas citation, he has who British ones:


So is conflab an Americanism?  Well, whatever its origin, it is more British now.  

In the News on the Web Corpus, confab occurs 91 times in the BrE subcorpus (0.03 pmw) Conflab occurs 43 times (0.02 per million words)—so 1 out of 3 British conf(l)abs is conflab

Confab is a much more common word in AmE than in BrE in the NOW corpus, occurring 1,494 times (0.20 pmw). Apparently, it's a popular word among American journalists. Conflab only occurs 4 times (0.00 pmw). 

The Corpus of Global Web-Based English shows a similar situation, with confab far outnumbering conflab in AmE, but the L-ful form accounting for over 40% of BrE's conf(l)abs.




What's happened here?  
  • Hypothesis 1:  Conflab has always been more British than American.
  • Hypothesis 2: Conflab started in the US, and subsequently withered there, but not before it had been taken up in the UK. 
Hypothesis 1 is semi-supported by Green's early examples, but not much else. The only historical BrE corpus I have quick access to is Hansard, the parliamentary record. That's not going to have a lot of informal language in it. For what it's worth, here's what it has for conf(l)ab(s): a total of 18 without L and 3 with L. The L-less ones get going in the 1900s and the L-ful ones are all after 1950. But I don't think we can make a lot of conclusions based on this particular data. 




The Corpus of Historical American English has only one (1850s) example of conflab (and none of conflabs), but over 150 confab(s)

In other words, no matter where it started, conflab never really found its footing in AmE.

We've seen other cases before where something that started in the US was forgotten in AmE but retained in BrE. Of course, saying that, I now can't remember which ones we've said that for, except that it was true of quick-fire (link is to a Twitter/X post). If you remember others, remind me in the comments and I'll start a category tag for these! 


PS: Jonathon Green, he of the dictionary (aka Mister Slang), sent me this reply via BlueSky. A big thank-you to him!






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crochet, boondoggle, scoubidou

Before the school year started, the 16-year-old and I (BrE) had a day out at a "Learn to Crochet" course. Here's my first. slightly (BrE) wonky (orig AmE) granny square (which, according to this site were once called American crochet in Europe):





The instructor started by warning to always ascertain the provenance of a crochet pattern before embarking on it because the US and UK terminology differ in potentially disastrous ways. In the take-home materials, we were given two charts. One spells out the differences in names of stitches. What's called single crochet in AmE is double crochet in BrE—with (orig. BrE) knock-on effects for other stitches. So, AmE double is BrE treble, AmE half-double is BrE half-treble, and AmE triple treble is BrE double treble



Now the obvious question is: how can you get to double without having single first?  The answer (according to KnitPro) is that the BrE is describing the number of loops on one's hook during the stitch, and the AmE is describing the number of "yarnovers when pulling up your first loop". Yarn over (the site uses it as one word and two) is another difference according to that site: in BrE it's called yarn over hook. Yarnover is essentially how many actions you're doing to complete the stitch. That KnitPro page has more description. 

Let's just pause here and note that crochet is pronounced differently in the two countries because of the general rule that for two-syllable French borrowings, BrE stresses the first syllable and AmE the second one.  And then there's what happens when AI gets its hand on the pronunciation:





But back to the charts the instructor gave us. Just as there are differences in measurements for cooking, the measurements for crochet hooks are different in US and UK because of the "Americans haven't gone metric" problem. The US uses letter or number sizes, whereas the rest of the world uses more transparent millimeter measures. So, US size B = US size 1 = 2.25mm. From the chart below, it looks like no one knows what size N or P are.




While knitting stitches generally have the same names in US and UK, knitters have the same problem for knitting needle sizes.  You can find more info about these sizes and other conversion problems at the Craft Yarn Council website.  (In my experience, new crochet hooks are likely to have both kinds of size printed on them, and online retailers will indicate both. But if you're using older hooks, you will probably need a chart like this.)


Now, this class wasn't really my first crocheting—I'd done straight lines and zigzag crocheting as a child. Also big in my Girl-Scouting (UK Girl-Guiding) childhood was (AmE) boondoggle. Nowadays, this is an American word that can mean 'a wasteful or useless product or activity', often in reference to (more AmE) government/(more BrE) public spending. Originally, it meant 'a trivial thing', from which came to be used for a kind of twisted leather object that Boy Scouts used for fixing their kerchiefs (click link for picture). It then extended to the weaving of flat plastic cords that was a popular craft back when I was a kid.


And I thought of that this week when the Google Doodle in the UK was in hono(u)r of this craft (which has apparently had a revival), except it had the BrE name for it, borrowed from French: scoubidou. 


The Google Doodle was about "Celebrating Scoubidous". On first reading, scoubidous looked like an adjective to me (SCOUb'dous, that which is scoubi?). Part of the reason I read it wrong the first time (even though I knew the word scoubidou) is that I wasn't expecting it to be plurali{s/z}ed.  I use boondoggle as a mass noun, so for me the things in the photos are pieces of boondoggle (or something like that), rather than as boondoggles. I'm not sure if that's just me, and there's too much 'government spending' noise in the data for me to quickly check it. (Happy to hear from other former Girl Scouts on the matter.) 

Is scoubidou related to Scooby Doo? Not directly, I think. There was a song Scoubidou in the 1950s, and I suspect that the craft and the cartoon dog were separately named after it. But the dog's name was for some time spelled/spelt Scoubidou in France.







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You Could See Whole Other Galaxies




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12 Comics That Put Gender Discrimination Into Perspective





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This Bizarre Instagram Account Inserts Donald Trump Into Your Favorite Movies

Trump In Cinema is dedicated to displaying some of movie history's best moments with Donald Trump at the center of them. Some of these photoshops are too perfect. Others as just... troubling.






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Internet Reacts To Trump's Comments About Injecting Disinfectant To Cure COVID-19

The internet is reacting to comments made by Donald Trump during a COVID-19-related press briefing held yesterday. Trump claimed that the virus could be treated by bringing "light inside the body" or injecting a disinfectant. Thankfully medical professionals were quick to denounce these claims, and people on the internet have since been creating some excellent memes on the matter. 

This should go without saying, but please don't inject yourself with disinfectant, y'all.




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Confused Reporter Interviewing Trump Is Inspiring Some Top-Tier Memeage

On July 28th, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interviewed President Donald Trump on HBO about several topics including the staggering number of COVID-19 cases in the United States. His reactions to some of Trump's remarks are priceless, and needless to say, the memes have been top-tier. You can watch the interview here and garner your own reactions. Now on with the memes!




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Trump's 'Exploding Trees' Comment Has Memers Trolling Like Crazy

As wildfires continue to ravage the West Coast, President Trump has been quick to dismiss climate change as one of the root causes, stating that countries in Europe like Austria don't suffer from wildfires because Europeans live in "forest cities" that are "managed better" yet are "more explosive" than the trees in California.

We're not entirely sure what any of that means, and apparently neither do memers, so please enjoy the following memes about "forest cities" in Austria.




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Falco Pyramid

Falco Pyramid is a dynamic game where you have to protect your base from an advancing wave of multi-colored cubes. The playing field is a pyramid expanding towards you, in which new cubes appear and move towards you. Your task is to shoot multi-colored cubes from a cannon, creating combinations of three or more cubes of the same color. Explosions of cubes destroy them and stop the onslaught from the pyramid. The longer you hold off the onslaught of cubes, the more points you get. But be careful, because the pyramid is constantly expanding, and the cubes are moving faster and faster. Falco Pyramid is a game that requires quick reactions, logical thinking and precise goal setting. Test your skills and hold off the onslaught of cubes in Falco Pyramid!




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Falco Space Shooter

Experience the nostalgia of gaming's golden age with this classic primitive space arcade game. Perfect for collectors and enthusiasts, this game captures the essence of early arcade fun with its simple yet addictive gameplay and retro aesthetics. Classic Gameplay: Navigate your spaceship through waves of enemies. This game is a must-have for anyone looking to relive the excitement of early arcade gaming or add a piece of gaming history to their collection. Whether you're a seasoned gamer or new to the arcade scene, this game promises hours of fun and challenge. Don’t miss out on owning a piece of arcade history!