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japanoise

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I would think of using 'Frenchie' to refer to a person as being affectionate banter. Like 'Yank' for Americans or 'Canuck' for Canadians. It's not incorrect, but would be inappropriate outside of an informal context.

French people have 'rosbif' to refer to the English and Australians have 'pom' or 'pommie'. You wouldn't call the prime minister that at a diplomatic event, but it's not offensive to call your friends that.

I'm using the words 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' in a linguistic sense; human languages are subtle and fluid, and one doesn't have to be far along the sliding scale between 'doesn't speak a word' and 'well-educated native speaker' to be understood. We speak of 'broken' English when somebody is able to be understood but hasn't fully grasped the language yet; using demonyms incorrectly is a subtler flavor of the same thing. For example 'no come here' -> 'no entering' -> 'no entry'

It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).

Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.

Edit: A sibling comment pointed out that 'an American' is grammatical, and thinking about it, I think the suffix -an is what makes bare demonyms grammatical - you can say 'an Angolan', 'a Laotian', 'a Peruvian', 'a Moroccan', etc, but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese', etc.

Switching to dvorak definitely helped me. I did as the author suggests, learned dvorak and switched to Emacs. Ever since, I've never struggled with RSI

Contrary to the other commenters, I see this as a huge improvement. Maybe I'm more used to languages like C rather than what, ml, python, pascal?

My impression of twitter was of an insular bizzaro-world where communities that are essentially invisible in meatspace become enormous and have outsized influence; k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending, but are barely known outside of their own circles elsewhere, not to mention all the incredibly granular political groups (the long and bloody trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash wars are so drawn out you'd be forgiven for not realising it's only 20 people per side, posting 24/7)

It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

If you must do religion, why not Christianity or Islam?

I'm amazed this aside isn't getting you downvoted. Have you been under a rock for the last 2000 years? The horrors of Abrahamic religion far outstrip anything Buddhism is responsible for.

To use computing slang to talk about music: this is just ricing. At best you'll sound out of tune with the rest of the band, at worst you'll run into wolf intervals and other issues with just intonation.

This touches on the biggest reason we stick with 12-tone equal temparament in the West: social reasons. Having a standard means we can play together, in groups or at jams, without having to negotiate which tuning system we use (an argument most working musicians I've met see as utter wank and a waste of time).

Disagree. Learning a codebase from scratch is tricky; it's better if you have someone to teach you. So if the one contributor gets bus'd, then it'll take time (=money) to get up to speed.

SuperDisk 7 years ago

Technology Connections is great. I love all those old-tech youtubers like 8-bit Guy, Techmoan, Perifractic and co. It feels like there's been a real explosion in that scene in the last few years.