peanutbutterandjamzee replied to your post: (Also it’s just occurred to me to wonder why so…
I wouldn’t think so. I’ve been drawing dwarves with roundish big noses ever since I learned what a dwarf was. I mostly associate it with stoutness, sternness, general dwarfiness. Not greed or money or anything like that.
Ah, okay, I’m not familiar with depictions of dwarves so I didn’t know they were often done line that.
What puzzles me about the phrase ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is the ‘in the same room’ bit.
Does it add evidential value? If someone has seen two people together outdoors, is that insufficient proof that they aren’t the same person? What if they were together in a car?
Hmm.
—·—
(NB: This isn’t, and shouldn’t be used as, a criticism of people who use that phrase. There are expressions people use because they’re already well established as having a particular meaning and particular implications, and the actual combination of words doesn’t really matter because the point is that I say it and you know what I mean by it and stuff. It’s just funny how sometimes arbitrary and slightly nonsensical assumptions seem to get embedded in these expressions. And stuff.)
It strikes me that you may be thinking too literally. It’s an example of whatsit. Synecdoche? Yes. “A specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class”. YES THAT’S EXACTLY IT
This phrase is synecdoche. Using the specific class of thing (“room”) to refer to a larger, more general class (“places where two people might be together”). It’s not literally and only referring to rooms.
I disagree that it’s an example of synecdoche, but even if it is, my point was precisely that the inclusion of ‘in the same room’ is nonsensical if you consider it literally. Which is why I was considering it literally. Obviously when we use that phrase we don’t mean it literally, as I noted in the last paragraph. (Except Sister Magpie, who apparently does mean it literally but uses the expression in a different way entirely.)
(via tiny-puppy-teeth)
Alex submitted:
Q: Why did the bike store raise the price of their tires?
A: Inflation.
Q: Why did the finance minister’s hair start getting thin at the front?
A: Recession.
[Image is a moving gif of someone making ‘my head is exploding’ type gestures overlaid with explosions and fireworks.]
So it seems like $what-you-owe-mum + $what-you-owe-dad + $the-money-you’ve-got-left should = $100, because $100 is what you borrowed from your parents originally. But it doesn’t. And that’s okay: it shouldn’t. It should = $99, as it does in the story above.
A mathematician could probably see the problem really quickly and explain it very simply, but I’m pretty bad at maths so here’s how I (after some heavy thinking) worked it through.
What’s confusing here is that we have two numbers in play that are very close to each other: $100 (the total you originally borrow from your parents) and £97 (the cost of the shirt). Make it less confusing by imagining that, in stead of borrowing $50 from each parent, you borrow $500 from each parent. Now you have $1,000. You buy the shirt and get $903 change. You give $451 to each parent and you keep $1 for yourself. So now you still owe your mum $500 - $451 = $49, and the same to your dad. $49 + $49 + your $1 = $99. So $what-you-owe-mum + $what-you-owe-dad + $the-money-you’ve-got-left = $99 again.
It’s the same if you originally borrow $54 from each parent, or $67, or $86,914,037. As long as you buy the shirt, keep $1 of the change for yourself, and then pay half of the rest back to each of your parents, you will still always end up owing them $98, which added to your $1 always comes to $99. It’s nothing to do with what you borrow from them: it’s all to do with the price of the shirt.
The shirt costs $97. You start the story with $0. You end the story with the shirt (worth $97) and $1 cash. So you’re up $98. No matter how much you originally borrow from your parents, if you repay all of it except $1, you end the story with $97 of shirt + $1 = $98. And that’s why you always owe your parents $98. Effectively it’s the same as if you just asked your parents to buy the shirt for you and also give you $1. That’s where the $98 comes from.
But where does the $99 come from? Well, this is where the riddle plays its trick. It asks you to add $what-you-owe-mum + $what-you-owe-dad + $the-money-you’ve-got-leftwithout actually telling you why you’d ever want to do that sum. You wouldn’t. It’s a silly sum to do. Because the $1 comes out of what you borrowed. It’s part of what you owe. So why would you add it to the $98, which is already the whole of what you owe? It isn’t a sum you’d never do. If you wanted to work out what you owe your parents, you’d just do $what-you-originally-borrowed-from-mum + $what-you-originally-borrowed-from-dad - $the-money-you’ve-already-paid-back, which is $50 + $50 - $2 = $98. The $1 is already included in that, you don’t have to add it separately. On the other hand, if you wanted to work out what’s happened to the original $100, you’d do a completely different sum. You’d do $what-you-spent-on-the-shirt + $the-money-you’ve-already-paid-back + $the-money-you’ve-got-left, which is $97 + $2 + $1 = $100. There’s no reason ever to do the sum in the riddle.
Does that make sense?
(via tiny-puppy-teeth)
[Original post contains a picture of a block of text, reading: ‘“Quite”: an adverbial modifier that shades the meaning of a statement. Americans use “quite” to amplify their enthusiasm for the adjective, in the way they would use “really”, “very” or “totally”. By contrast, if a Brit volunteers that a visitor is “quite attractive”, they’re only saying “fairly” or “sort of attractive”. This ambiguous intensifier bestows a “damning with faint praise” effect on any word with which it is teamed.’
And that’s terrible.: shiphassailed: tigerpellets: I NEVER KNEW THISI NEVER KNEW THAT WAS…
I NEVER KNEW THIS
I NEVER KNEW THAT WAS WHAT AMERICANS MEANT WHEN THEY SAID “QUITE”
WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME
SUDDENLY THAT ONE SONG THAT GOES “HELLO I MISS YOU QUITE TERRIBLY” MAKES LIKE A MILLION TIMES MORE SENSE
are you serious british…
How can you all not know this? That’s QUITE terrible!
What the hell??? I didn’t know this was a thing that differed between brits and americans. W OWWww.
okay you know what
JAMIE, IS THIS TRUE?
A bit true. In my experience (dialects and registers vary, of course), ‘quite’ generally adds little to what it modifies. To say someone is ‘quite attractive’ is not necessarily higher praise than saying they are ‘attractive’, nor is it necessarily (or even usually) ‘damning with faint praise’. It’s quite* context-sensitive.
Consider the following exchange:
I’d interpret that to mean that person 2 doesn’t radically disagree but wants to add a note of moderation. They’re not really prepared to go as far as ‘really attractive’, but I wouldn’t assume that they find him unattractive.
On the other hand:
Here 2 is clearly disagreeing with 1. The word ‘quite’ adds little except perhaps to convey that 2 acknowledges that Bale is not the most attractive person in the world and there could be scope for disagreement about his attractiveness. Nonetheless the ‘quite’ clearly indicates that Bale is attractive to a degree that is by no means to be sneezed at. He’s more than ‘sort of’ attractive.
So it’s a rather unhelpful adverb, really, or at least a very subtle one. But I think it’s fair to say that it’s very rarely a significant intensifier and can’t readily be exchanged for ‘very’, let alone ‘totally’.
The exception is in old-fashioned British English. If you go back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, and to a certain somewhat posh way of speaking, ‘quite’ means ‘entirely’ or ‘completely’ (or, more loosely, ‘very’). For example, ‘Oh Geoffrey, it was quite ghastly!’ — this means that it was entirely ghastly, with no element of non-ghastliness. Or, ‘Dash it, I had quite forgotten!’ — meaning that the speaker had completely failed to remember.
If you go back further, you find this sense as standard, e.g. ‘The commons hath he pill’d with grievous taxes, / And quite lost their hearts: the nobles hath he fin’d / For ancient quarrels and quite lost their hearts’ (Richard II 2.1). You still get hints of it today, when ‘quite’ is used to modify adjectives that are quantifiable, e.g. ‘I’m not quite sure’ (meaning ‘I’m not completely sure’) would still be a perfectly normal thing to say, though it would perhaps be more usual to say ‘I’m not completely sure’ or something like that.
You also get a whiff of this old meaning in certain well-established phrases like ‘quite enough’ (e.g. ‘that’s quite enough of that, thank you’ — a stern and slightly old-fashioned way of saying ‘stop that’), or when ‘quite’ is used on its own as a way of indicating ‘what you have said is exactly right’ with a slight connotation of ‘what you have said is even more true than you realize’ or ‘you have unintentionally said something extremely apposite’, e.g.:
________
* (My use of ‘quite’ here means ‘I don’t want to commit to saying something as categorical as “it’s context-sensitive” because I’m not sure that’s always true’. You could substitute ‘fairly’. It’s perhaps a bit stronger than ‘somewhat’.)
(Source: tigerfeel, via tiny-puppy-teeth)
![Summary: I get picky about Latin. Press J to skip down or K to skip up.
· • ·
peanutbutterandjamzee:
waterloggedtomorrow:
peanutbutterandjamzee:
waterloggedtomorrow:
peanutbutterandjamzee:
waterloggedtomorrow:
[Text: 100. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. When you have their full attention their hearts and minds will follow.]
whatdiscworldtaughtme:
100. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
that’s… not actually… what this says…
That’s the point.
Um, at this point in the book, the great god Om, trapped in the body of a tortoise, is directing the eagle carrying him by clamping its testicles in his jaws. And then he mentions this maxim, and translates it thusly, and it’s sort of amusing in its halfhearted attempts at being non-vulgar.
Small Gods. By Terry Pratchett. Explains it much better than I ever could.
but
but it’s wrong
it’s not even “he who has balls has heart and brain”
because “habes” and “habeas” is singular 2nd person
so it’s he who you have balls
which doesn’t make
any sense
IMPROPER LATIN UPSETS ME
But cuius is genitive. So:
“[He] whose testicles you have, you will have [his] heart and mind.”
Which is a poor translation. But yeah?
Ohhhhh you are correct and I’m a silly. <3
Hope you don’t mind my interrupting, but bad Latin irks me a bit too, and this Latin is pretty bad. Yes, ‘cujus’ is genitive, no objection to that. But the switch from indicative to subjunctive (‘habés’ to ‘habeás’) makes no sense. If the point is to make a prediction — if you have the balls, you will definitely acquire the hearts and minds — you would use the future indicative (‘habébis’). Using the present subjunctive makes it into a wish — if you have the balls, may you acquire the hearts and minds — which rather implies that having the balls is not at all a sufficient condition for getting the hearts and minds but in fact there’s a distinct possibility it might not happen. You could even use the present indicative again to imply that if you have the balls then you necessarily already have the hearts and minds. But not the subjunctive.
I also suspect one really needs another preposition to make it clear that the hearts and minds belong to the same person as the balls: ‘cujus testiculós habés, ejus cardia et cerebellum habébis’ (verb at the end is more usual). I think as it is it reads more like ‘The one whose balls you have, may you also have some unspecified hearts and mind’. And yes, ‘hearts and mind’ is not a typo: ‘cerebellum’ is singular and ‘cardia’ must be plural, so we seem to be talking about a Time Lord or an octopus here.
Also ‘cerebellum’ is a very rare word for ‘mind’ or, more literally, ‘brain’. The more common word for ‘brain’ is ‘cerebrum’, but if you want to say ‘mind’ you’d generally use ‘méns’ or ‘animus’. ’Testiculus’ is slightly non-standard too, but not so much as to really raise an eyebrow. But ‘cardia’ is, frankly, the nadir of this whole business because it is not a Latin word. It’s a transliteration of the ancient Greek word for ‘hearts’, and while Latin-speakers from ancient Rome to today have sometimes borrowed Greek words when they couldn’t lay their hands on suitable Latin ones, there has always been a perfectly serviceable Latin word for ‘heart’, which is ‘cor’ (or ‘corda’ if we’re dead set on this person having more than one heart).
It’s been a long time since I read Small gods and I can’t remember the context — perhaps it’s meant to be bad Latin and we’re meant to have a chuckle at how bad it is. But whether deliberately so or not, it’s definitely bad.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltfe5807ld1r38cgto1_500.jpg)
Summary: I get picky about Latin. Press J to skip down or K to skip up.
· • ·
[Text: 100. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. When you have their full attention their hearts and minds will follow.]100. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum.
that’s… not actually… what this says…
That’s the point.
Um, at this point in the book, the great god Om, trapped in the body of a tortoise, is directing the eagle carrying him by clamping its testicles in his jaws. And then he mentions this maxim, and translates it thusly, and it’s sort of amusing in its halfhearted attempts at being non-vulgar.
Small Gods. By Terry Pratchett. Explains it much better than I ever could.
but
but it’s wrong
it’s not even “he who has balls has heart and brain”
because “habes” and “habeas” is singular 2nd person
so it’s he who you have balls
which doesn’t make
any sense
IMPROPER LATIN UPSETS ME
But cuius is genitive. So:
“[He] whose testicles you have, you will have [his] heart and mind.”
Which is a poor translation. But yeah?
Ohhhhh you are correct and I’m a silly. <3
Hope you don’t mind my interrupting, but bad Latin irks me a bit too, and this Latin is pretty bad. Yes, ‘cujus’ is genitive, no objection to that. But the switch from indicative to subjunctive (‘habés’ to ‘habeás’) makes no sense. If the point is to make a prediction — if you have the balls, you will definitely acquire the hearts and minds — you would use the future indicative (‘habébis’). Using the present subjunctive makes it into a wish — if you have the balls, may you acquire the hearts and minds — which rather implies that having the balls is not at all a sufficient condition for getting the hearts and minds but in fact there’s a distinct possibility it might not happen. You could even use the present indicative again to imply that if you have the balls then you necessarily already have the hearts and minds. But not the subjunctive.
I also suspect one really needs another preposition to make it clear that the hearts and minds belong to the same person as the balls: ‘cujus testiculós habés, ejus cardia et cerebellum habébis’ (verb at the end is more usual). I think as it is it reads more like ‘The one whose balls you have, may you also have some unspecified hearts and mind’. And yes, ‘hearts and mind’ is not a typo: ‘cerebellum’ is singular and ‘cardia’ must be plural, so we seem to be talking about a Time Lord or an octopus here.
Also ‘cerebellum’ is a very rare word for ‘mind’ or, more literally, ‘brain’. The more common word for ‘brain’ is ‘cerebrum’, but if you want to say ‘mind’ you’d generally use ‘méns’ or ‘animus’. ’Testiculus’ is slightly non-standard too, but not so much as to really raise an eyebrow. But ‘cardia’ is, frankly, the nadir of this whole business because it is not a Latin word. It’s a transliteration of the ancient Greek word for ‘hearts’, and while Latin-speakers from ancient Rome to today have sometimes borrowed Greek words when they couldn’t lay their hands on suitable Latin ones, there has always been a perfectly serviceable Latin word for ‘heart’, which is ‘cor’ (or ‘corda’ if we’re dead set on this person having more than one heart).
It’s been a long time since I read Small gods and I can’t remember the context — perhaps it’s meant to be bad Latin and we’re meant to have a chuckle at how bad it is. But whether deliberately so or not, it’s definitely bad.
(via tiny-puppy-teeth)
