Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@trinsec
There are supposed to be a bunch of rules about pronunciation in English. When the word ends in "e", the vowel in that last syllable is supposed to be long, which would make genuine rhyme with "wine". But there's another rule that says when two vowels appear next to each other, the first vowel is the one that dominates, so maybe that rule for "ui" effected the "e" rule.

In any case, those rules seem to have exceptions with half the words anyways, so they're not very useful. I use a good English dictionary with well-researched pronunciation guidance. For "genuine", it indicates that the "wine" pronunciation is occasional among educated speakers, but considered incorrect or substandard by most experts.

@itnewsbot

Must be a powerful force, to be able to detect it while the LHC is shutdown. #lol

@tripu @bonifartius

>"I’ll assume you’ve watched at least ten Hollywood films released in 2020"

I don't think I have. I tend to wait until they are available for free so I don't financially support that shit.

Did they even produce 10 films during the pandemic? Very atypical year, that's for sure.

In another recent thread related to this topic (https://qoto.org/@Pat/107112989948655788), I commented on how racial depictions in film wax and wane based on the social mood. I said, "Now following the BLM movement, there are better films just being released."

So, no. At this particular instant films may not be following the trend. However, if you picked 25 random films released during this century (20xx), I could find bias in 20 of them. I am sure of it.

>"Would you then concede that, in principle, nobody above twenty should need trigger warnings, advisories about “graphic” or “explicit” content, edited or softened versions of books/films/photographs/paintings, etc?"

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with Prof. Sheng needing to contextualize his film that had blackface in it. Here are a couple of hypotheticals:

1) An online film streaming company or film archive repository with 100's of titles has a few older films in their catalog that depict blackface. No, they have no obligation to provide any warnings or contextualizations about blackface.

2) A speaker giving a talk about opera, hand picks a film to illustrate some particular production technical aspect, and out of all the films available he picks one that has blackface. Is that a coincidence? Was he trying send a message? I think he is obligated to address the issue when the film is shown, preferably before hand.

>"The majority of the population today does not discriminate against blacks any more than they unconsciously discriminate against..."

In the US they do. Very much so. Prime example is in the selection of mates. Black/white interracial marriages are rare in the US. Up until very recently it was a virtual taboo to even depict this on the screen. And depiction of interracial relationships is one of areas where Hollywood gets particularly vicious in its bias, usually providing a narrative where bad things happen to the couple.

Think of all the RomComs out there. How many depict black/white leads? A random pairing of couples would yield many, many more. Even a random sampling of couples in the US would yield more.

So, yes, a majority of the population in the US does discriminate and segregate into black churches and white churches, white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, etc, etc, etc. But Hollywood films are even much worse than the general population when comes to bias. They perpetuate it.

@paulcray63

I lost all my money at the craps table. Can you help me get it back?

#ProbablySpamBot

@trinsec

Every person who saw this toot didn't know what it was. But, nobody asked except you! Good job!

@trinsec

It isn't anything. I just made it up. I wanted to if see if anybody was smart enough to ask what it was.

Congratulations! You were the only one who asked. This means you are very smart and curious and have probably learned a lot of things that others don't know because they are too afraid to ask.

I see so many terms here in the fediverse that I have no idea what they are talking about. Sometimes I ask, but there are so many of them that I usually don't have the time.

@undefined @trinsec I'll let you know later...

@louisrcouture @khird

Florescence is a more general form of inflorescence.

Here's an except from wikipedia... "An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches.[1] Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed. The modifications can involve the length and the nature of the internodes and the phyllotaxis, as well as variations in the proportions, compressions, swellings, adnations, connations and reduction of main and secondary axes. One can also define an inflorescence as the reproductive portion of a plant that bears a cluster of flowers in a specific pattern."

I stumbled upon the word "inflorescence" while doing some etymological research. When I looked it up and read the definition, I still didn't understand. I thought, "are they talking about glowing flowers?"

It was so funny I decided to put out this trick question. The image in this toot is particularly misleading. :)

@khird - You answered this pretty much the same way I would have. I was hoping for an answer like that. I hope I didn't freak you out!

@tripu @bonifartius

Thread continued... https://qoto.org/web/statuses/107128812553422948

@valleyforge

If it was a hot round there'd be other signs. It may just be a different form-fitting primer manufacturing technique. Pop out the primer and look at the inside. Then maybe you'll be able to tell more. I think you'd really need to see an unfired round to know for sure (unless someone else has seen this before and posts here).

"Genuine" doesn't rhyme with "wine".

#pronunciation #PetPeeves #English #SpeakersWhoShouldBetter

-Vietnam veteran
-Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command
-First black National Security Advisor
-Four-star general
-First black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
-First black Secretary of State
-Chairman of America's Promise Alliance
-Board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations
as well as the boards of private companies

-Served in three presidential administrations:
Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush

-Presidential Medal of Freedom (twice)
-Congressional Gold Medal
-Presidential Citizens Medal
-Secretary of State Distinguished Service Medal
among dozens of other government and civil medals and awards

-Author of the "Powell Doctrine"
-Oversaw the successful liberation of Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm
as well as more than two dozen other national crises

-Husband and father

#ColinPowell #USA #Presidential #Medal #of #Freedom #America #Reagan #Bush #Obama #Biden #veteran

@freemo @robryk

Thank you for the link.

I just remembered an episode of "Mythbusters" where this phenomenon came up. They were trying to see if peeing on electrified rails could cause electrocution, but the myth busted because the break-up of pee didn't allow for a completed circuit.

@freemo

Agree. It's mostly a terminology issue. Also, I think a few people conflate the political parties into it as the names of the parties are similar to those terms.

"Democratic republic" is the most proper terminology, but internationally that phrase has negative connotations because a lot of smaller autocratic governments adopt that phrasing to describe their governments, e.g., Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Democratic Republic of Vietnam, among many others. (As if that's going to fool anybody.)

I just puked...

https://www.c-span.org/video/?515364-2/washington-journal-news-headlines-viewer-calls&event=515364&playEvent

timecode: 39:40

(that didn't take long)

@tripu @bonifartius

I know that most actors self-identify as "progressive", whatever that means, but the above-the-line producers, directors, editors who decide what the final product looks like -- those guys are putting out racist content. I watch a lot films, and 8 out of 10 Hollywood films have racist content. Sometimes it's really subliminal, but it's there. And those filmmakers go to great pains over every minor detail in those films. In most cases, I believe they know exactly what they are doing when they produce that shit.
_____
Regarding the very narrow cases, we're almost splitting hairs. I think time will tell exactly where the line is on those, when the future looks back on it.
_____
As I said, college is supposed to teach those critical reasoning skills, so kids can learn to put those things into context themselves. But they come into college from a wide range of experiences. Read Westover's "Educated" for an indication of how widely those experiences can diverge.
______
Unfortunately, racism is not a historical artifact. It's ongoing today. People of color are still portrayed stereotypically in a lot of Hollywood films. It never went away, it just became more subliminal. Hopefully we can get to a place where an actor of any race can play any historical character of any race without having to even be concerned about it. But we're not there. Not even close.

@Acer

I don't understand. Is this an Easter egg for chrome?

In my head it works out to http//a/%300, or recursively to http://a/00

@bonifartius @tripu

(somehow I missed some of tripu's toots before I posted my previous toot, so addressing those and more...)

[Correction: Pat wrote, "That would mean he has some kind learning disability...".
It should read, "That would mean he has some kind of learning disability..." ]

There was contemporaneous criticism of Olivier's blackface portrayal when the film premiered in the 60s. Some audience members objected. I'm not surprised that Hollywood was tone-deaf to that criticism. Judging by the subliminally racist films that come out of Hollywood (even now well into the 21st century), those filmmakers are much more racist than the rest of society.
________
Yes, always assume good faith unless it's obviously intentional racism, like malicious use of epithets, etc.

[Note: These days malicious racism likes to hide behind ambiguity and (barely) plausible deniability, so good faith is often stretched to its limits. ]
________
I said, "...blackface in almost any context is inappropriate today...". There are some very narrow cases where it is appropriate (in my opinion), such as the depiction in Bewitched Season 7, Episode 13, "Sisters at Heart" where the main character, Samantha (the witch), changes a white racist man into a black man in order to help him become more "woke". (The episode was aired during the height of civil unrest during the civil rights movement in the 60s.)

Also, another reason why it is important for professors to contextualize things like Olivier's performance is because you cannot assume what kids know and what they don't, especially today with all these information silos. A freshman college student may not know about blackface or the civil rights movement at all. (A perfect case study of this is Tara Westover, "Educated")

> "Context matters. Painting your face in black (or in white, yellow, brown) to more closely resemble some historical figure, fiction character, etc may be as innocuous as..."

Yes, context matters. And not just the context of presentation, but the historical context. Historically, blackface was used to deny black people acting jobs and to represent them in a derogatory, stereotypical manner. The use of blackface today happens within the backdrop of that historical context. This is why it is so different than painting a face in some other colors.

@poemproducer

Your ideas in this toot are not "commie", they're Jeffersonian.

@khird @louisrcouture

Hint: There are no typos or misspellings in my toot.