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7 votes
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UN's culture agency adds Nordic clinker boats to its list of traditions that represent the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
4 votes -
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen master, dies at 95
16 votes -
What words would you want to see 'reclaimed'?
Reclaiming a word means stripping it of it's negative baggage and giving it either a neutral or positive meaning. The most common example is the word Queer going from a slur to a descriptive term...
Reclaiming a word means stripping it of it's negative baggage and giving it either a neutral or positive meaning. The most common example is the word Queer going from a slur to a descriptive term for non cis-het people.
My personal pick would be returning the term "incel" to it's original meaning of "involuntary/involuntarily celibate" or someone who wants a relationship but doesn't have one, because the word is currently associated with the few tens of thousands of extremists who occasionally commit terrorist attacks, consider the redistribution of women reasonable and created the black-pill, but the amount of men (and realistically also women) who would consider themselves as wanting a relationship but not having one is much higher than a hundred thousand violent extremists, and if they could all describe themselves as incels, I think that would help steer the conversation about wanting a partner and not having one away from the extremists and to the much more numerous pool of mostly young people, seemingly mostly men who just want a partner and can't have one and usually mostly just feel bad about it to varying intensities. It wouldn't completely detach the term from cringe online right tropes as a lot of the dudes who can be described as incels often tend to fuel the kind of "women aren't real"/"Girls don't exist on the internet" culture that makes complaining about dating so 'lame'. (As in, the default reply is "just do basic self-improvement it'll put you ahead of most people lol".)
Another term I would reclaim if I could is the Red-pill/Blue-pill dichotomy with becoming red-pilled either being a joke about some vaguely red pill used to transition or as a shorthand for adopting leftist beliefs, mainly because the creators of The Matrix were Trans women who intended the movie to have a strong Trans subtext, and red is usually a leftist color instead of a conservative one, so becoming red-pilled meaning becoming a leftist is more intuitive in most places.
13 votes -
Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words
6 votes -
Maps Are Fun! (1946)
3 votes -
Scissor labels
6 votes -
No meaning without justification
6 votes -
From respair to cacklefart – the joy of reclaiming long-lost positive words
8 votes -
How ‘The Monster with 21 Faces’ terrorized Japan during the harrowing Glico Morinaga candy incident
10 votes -
Our ladies of the perpetual high
9 votes -
Christianity hasn’t failed in India. Conversion isn’t its only goal
3 votes -
A child calling Santa reached NORAD instead. Christmas Eve was never the same.
8 votes -
The illogic of logical positivism
4 votes -
The most powerful computers you've never heard of
6 votes -
The hubris of big data
4 votes -
Toxoplasma of rage
6 votes -
The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis
4 votes -
Denmark says it will take measures to protect teachers' freedom of expression and prevent the risks of self-censorship
8 votes -
On communicating accurately with Americans
11 votes -
The Gävle goat
9 votes -
The rise and fall of rationality in language
7 votes -
This wealthy Dallas church owns the most clergy homes in Texas — and it costs taxpayers six figures a year
11 votes -
Twitter, the intimacy machine
7 votes -
On progress and historical change
5 votes -
Supreme Court weighs mandating public funds for religious schools in Maine
8 votes -
Taming the Beast: The Inner Battle for Control
3 votes -
Tenement Museum virtual tour
7 votes -
Recycled Russian warheads fuel US power plants (2013)
6 votes -
Avenging Varus - The Roman Germanic Wars
2 votes -
Dancing mania
5 votes -
What to do when the KKK shoots and other lessons from Houston’s underground paper
2 votes -
Little-known Black history comes to light in new documentary series
2 votes -
The Eighteenth Elephant
6 votes -
Violence and protest
6 votes -
100 years of whatever this will be
12 votes -
Beware the fallacy bully
7 votes -
The town where holding fireworks over your head is a tradition
6 votes -
The melancholy decline of the semicolon
17 votes -
Pompeii still has buried secrets - The first major excavations in decades shed light on how ordinary citizens shopped and snacked—and where slaves slept
6 votes -
The surprisingly strange history of Thanksgiving (and other turkey day trivia)
4 votes -
How a New Hampshire libertarian utopia was foiled by bears
26 votes -
Disney’s FastPass: A complicated history
14 votes -
Longstanding discourse w/ my SO about the phrase "a couple of..."
#couple Defined as: noun: couple; plural noun: couples 1. two individuals of the same sort considered together. "a couple of girls were playing marbles" a pair of partners in a dance or game....
#couple
Defined as:noun:
couple;
plural noun: couples
1.
two individuals of the same sort considered together.
"a couple of girls were playing marbles"a pair of partners in a dance or game.
MECHANICS
a pair of equal and parallel forces acting in opposite directions, and tending to cause rotation about an axis perpendicular to the plane containing them.
2.
two people who are married, engaged, or otherwise closely associated romantically or sexually.
"in three weeks the couple fell in love and became engaged"3.
INFORMAL
an indefinite small number.
"he hoped she'd be better in a couple of days"
verb:
couple;
3rd person present:
couples
past tense:
coupled
past participle:
coupled
gerund or present participle:
coupling
1.
combine."a sense of hope is coupled with a palpable sense of loss"
join to form a pair.
"the beetles may couple up to form a pair"2.
mate or have sexual intercourse.
"as middle-class youth grew more tolerant of sex, they started to couple more often"
#Discourse of the use of the word/phrase in this particular case
You
"how many would you like?"
Them
"just a couple."
When someone requests 'a couple of...' I respond with something similar to: 'How many do you want specifically?', which leads to the discourse of, 'A couple is two, a few is >2, several is <x' and so on.
I agree with the first two clearly stated definitions of 'couple', but in the informal use of a couple (eg. a depiction of a quantity) is not specifically two...nor is 'a few' three. How many specifically is several..?
I understand the semantics within the conversation. But, the expectation of understanding that two, and only two, is implied in the use of the phrase 'a couple' in a request; is ambiguously stating what one party desires. I'm the asshole now, just tell me how many you want.
And now...your thoughts, please.
12 votes -
Where the humanities aren't in crisis
3 votes -
The ancient origins of glass
4 votes -
The Varangian Guard | Units of History
5 votes -
America's forgotten vampire panic
7 votes -
Search for Jimmy Hoffa leads the FBI to Jersey City landfill
8 votes -
Machine learning for moral judgments
3 votes