Wapsi Square Forum

ShneekeyTheLost wrote: which is always pronounced very differently from how it is spelled due to an alphabetical translation which is... the best one can do considering it was primarily a spoken rather than written language.

I swear, the systems for writing several languages in the Roman alphabet were devised by people who couldn't read in any language that already used that alphabet.

Most Celtic languages are among those several, but they definitely aren't the only ones. Seriously, how did anyone ever think that the name of China's capitol city should begin with a P?

Dave wrote:Fairly often I find myself waking up at four in the morning with an "Oh sh*t, you idiot!" realization, where the back-side of my brain throws up an image into my awareness, with my big fat mistake glowing in neon colors. The workings of the not-entirely-conscious parts of the mind are mysterious, but I've come to respect them a lot (mostly by being slapped around by myself whenever I don't!)

Writers describe it differently... my entirely-imaginary characters whack me across the back of the head and point out what's wrong with what I'm planning for them.

(And one of them has CLAWS like you'd expect on a 40-pound cat!)

I remember that rash of rollovers quite well . . . they also weren't separating off-road rollovers from highway rollovers, and the owners were sticking extended jacked-up suspensions under the vehicles . . . and frequently poorly engineered suspensions at that.

--FreeFlier

Warrl wrote:Seriously, how did anyone ever think that the name of China's capitol city should begin with a P?

According to Wiki, the various P- names (Peking, Peiping, Pequin, Pechinum) may reflect the pronunciations in the Nanjing dialect, and/or in various Southern Chinese dialects that were used in the port cities visited by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Remember, "Chinese" is not a single spoken language. It's a family of dozens of separate but related dialects, often with very different spoken vocabularies and pronunciations, which share a single common symbolic (non-phonetic) written language which contains a huge number of symbols.

The classic example of this is Cantonese vs. Mandarin. Native speakers of these two dialects generally cannot communicate verbally to a useful extent... but (assuming they're literate in Chinese) they can write out their messages to one another and be understood perfectly well.

I ran across http://www.chinese-lessons.com/conversi ... ndarin.htm which shows some of the sound correspondences between these two dialects. They're definitely not 1-to-1.

It looks as if most of the Mandarin sounds with begin with the voiced "b", can sometimes have as their closest equivalent a Cantonese sound which starts with an unvoiced "p". Similarly, Mandarin sounds beginning with "p" may sometimes map to a Cantonese sound starting with a voiced "b".

Add to this, the fact that the city now known most popularly as "Beijing" has had at least a dozen different names over the course of its history, and things get even more confusing. Also, these names often bear political meanings: "Beijing" means "Northern capital" (which the Communist government stressed as a symbol of its political legitimacy) while the Western governments tended to insist on "Peiping" (which means "Northern peace" or "Northern plains") as a sideways method of asserting that the Communist-ruled city wasn't really the capital of China (they were backing the Taiwanese government as being the rightful government body, albeit displaced by rebels).

So, the city may be pronounced "Smith", but it's actually spelled "Mangrove Throat-Warbler".

All right, just read the latest installment.
*clears throat*
BWAHAHAHAHAA!!
*dies laughing*
That was perfect. I take my hat off to you both.

All of which, is absolute proof that The Paranormal Actually Exists.

I really don't think that any crowd of humans could have pulled that off, without somebody beginning to giggle during the big "setup" and giving away the whole scam. It took absolutely super-human restraint, for all of the people involved to keep straight faces during the "ladling out of the PINK." (or, maybe, stark fear of the Sargent-Major?)

From the way it was described, it sounds like That Truck could have been seen clear from orbit... at night... right through the roof.... under heavy cloud cover. Eeech.

And, fortunately, since Cindy did the Pink Prank first, she can't be too upset about being thoroughly pranked back in the same way. This may be enough to save Al and Daisy from a thoroughly dreadful re-pranking at some point in the future.

Or, maybe, not. They say you should always be kind to your children, because they're the ones who select your end-of-life care facility and deal with the staff. It would be horrible for Al if his last days were spent in a hospital bed, in a room decorated entirely in Pepto-Bismol-colored floofy flock. Just for old time's sake, you understand.

Dave wrote:All of which, is absolute proof that The Paranormal Actually Exists.
Or, maybe, not. They say you should always be kind to your children, because they're the ones who select your end-of-life care facility and deal with the staff. It would be horrible for Al if his last days were spent in a hospital bed, in a room decorated entirely in Pepto-Bismol-colored floofy flock. Just for old time's sake, you understand.

Not happening. Al has a gun....and his stepchildren know it.

There's obviously only one thing for Cinnamon to do . . .

Up the ante!



The repercussions from this will go on for years!




But . . .

They should have had a Pink Gorilla Suit!

--FreeFlier

FreeFlier wrote:
They should have had a Pink Gorilla Suit!

--FreeFlier

You have NO idea what demented gods you have released. Watch this space. Not now, not soon, but watch this space.

Dave wrote:All of which, is absolute proof that The Paranormal Actually Exists.

I really don't think that any crowd of humans could have pulled that off, without somebody beginning to giggle during the big "setup" and giving away the whole scam. It took absolutely super-human restraint, for all of the people involved to keep straight faces during the "ladling out of the PINK." (or, maybe, stark fear of the Sargent-Major?)

Anyone who queered that pitch in any way was going to disappear. Considering everyone there was actually in on it in one way or another (having been carefully briefed and walked through their parts) one would hope that rehearsal had removed the giggle factor. When I walked the boards lo these many years ago one of the things the director did to us was force us to run lines to each other at double speed - this removed any trendency to lose it in actual performance.

From the way it was described, it sounds like That Truck could have been seen clear from orbit... at night... right through the roof.... under heavy cloud cover. Eeech.

You have NO idea.... I actually dug around the Web and came up with things like it to find a suitably heinous colour - and it was on an Audi that some truly twisted person had done up as a Hello Kittly car. I very nearly barfed my toenails over it.

And, fortunately, since Cindy did the Pink Prank first, she can't be too upset about being thoroughly pranked back in the same way. This may be enough to save Al and Daisy from a thoroughly dreadful re-pranking at some point in the future.

Only if the silly filly knows what's good for her.

Yow.

Just Old Al wrote:

FreeFlier wrote: . . . They should have had a Pink Gorilla Suit!

You have NO idea what demented gods you have released. Watch this space. Not now, not soon, but watch this space.

/chuckles evilly/ Oh, it's worse than that . . .

Wolf-who-watches wrote:

. . . I do know.



And I did it with malice aforethought.

Wolf-who-watches wrote: One notes that.

Two notes that one approved.

Wolf-who-watches wrote: )()()()()()()()( )()()()()()()()( )()()()()()()()(

--FreeFlier

Nitpicks:

Ch. 14 author's note refers to "she" but does not identify.

Ch. 14 If it didn’t sear her eyeballs out first, she thought glumly. --- Shouldn't that be "my"? (I really understand this one - in another storyworld I keep switching between present tense and past tense.) And maybe "doesn't" rather than "didn't"?

Ch. 15 “The basic vehicle is a 1990 90 my boss found in the UK. Honestly, very little of the original vehicle other than the body and axles was used – it was pretty tired when we got it. --- I think this para is supposed to be in italics

Just Old Al wrote:

Dave wrote:

The sides were a trompe d'oeuil picture

Is that a valid term? I've always seen it as "trompe l'oeuil".

You may be right - I derived it from the French instead of looking it up. I will revise.

I am here to confirm, it is "trompe l'œil". Please note that it is an "L", not a "D", and that, furthermore, there is no "U" in "œil"... Please also note that the "O" and the "E" are joined: "œ" (I forget what that's called...)

I can just see the recruiting/training pamphlet:

Congratulations! So you've just learned you have "the gift", and you're on your way to become a mage. I'm sure, by now, you have plenty of questions: "What's going to happen to me?" "Will I still be 'me'?" "Am I now a danger to those who surround me?" "Is my head going to explode?" "Do I have to wear a pointy hat, now?" and so on.

Don't worry, it will all be explained in due time.

But hey, look on the bright side: you'll never have to worry about wearing out the batteries for your remote control again!

I bet Uncle Fergus would get a real kick out of the recruitment pamphlet...

And Al, Sterling, Daisy, Flashburn, and Cinnamon would have a blast writing it...

(Feel free to form your own crew to write it. Those five would be my choice.)

lake_wrangler wrote:Please also note that the "O" and the "E" are joined: "œ" (I forget what that's called...)

e dans l'o or o et e collés in French, apparently. I've never heard that it has a specific name in English - it's not commonly used, and I've only ever seen it written out as a ligature in pre-20th-century texts and literature.

Apparently it's a bit of an orphan these days:

Wikipedia wrote:In Unicode, the characters are encoded at U+0152 Œ LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE (HTML Œ · Œ) and U+0153 œ LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE (HTML œ · œ). In ISO-8859-15, Œ is 0xBC and œ 0xBD. In Windows-1252, at positions 0x8C and 0x9C. In Mac-Roman, they are at positions 0xCE and 0xCF.

Œ and œ were omitted from ISO-8859-1 (as well as derived standards, such as IBM code page 850), which are still widespread in internet protocols and applications. Œ is the only character in modern French that is not included in ISO-8859-1, and this has led to it becoming replaced by 'oe' in many computer-assisted publications (including printed magazines and newspapers). This was due, in part, to the lack of available characters in the French ISO/IEC 646 version that was used earlier for computing. Another reason is that œ is absent from most French keyboards, and as a result, few people know how to input it.

Dave wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:Please also note that the "O" and the "E" are joined: "œ" (I forget what that's called...)

e dans l'o or o et e collés in French, apparently. I've never heard that it has a specific name in English - it's not commonly used, and I've only ever seen it written out as a ligature in pre-20th-century texts and literature.

I actually never looked it up to see if it had a name. Interesting.

Wikipedia wrote:Another reason is that œ is absent from most French keyboards, and as a result, few people know how to input it.

That, I knew. But Libre Office will either auto-correct (if you set it up for it), or at least underline as a mistake, if you use a word with "oe" instead of "œ", which you can then correct. Provided you specified that the text you were writing was in French, of course.

It is only since running Linux, that I've learned how to type it straight in (when I remember to do so), via the, what's it called... Super(?) key (Windows users call it the Window key, I think...) Under Linux, using that key allows you to compound two characters to form a third one, like "Super, o, e" (one at a time) to form "œ", or "Super, o, o", to form the degree symbol "°" (as in, "Water freezes at 32°F", for instance), or even fractions "Super, 3, 5" to make "⅗", and so on.

Not the windows key . . . at least not on this version.

--FreeFlier

Hmmm. On my Linux laptop (running Debian, the Xfce desktop environment, and Firefox) the "Windows" key works just as lake_wrangler suggested. ½ and 32°F and so forth.

This is apparently configurable, in this window environment at least. The Settings / Keyboard panel has a "Layout" tab, and in that there's a pulldown menu which lets you choose what key (or key combination) activates the "Compose" feature. On mine it's set to "Left Win".

It can apparently be set via /etc/default/keyboard (the settings are rather arcane; "locate xorg.lst" to at least get a list of the available options).