zompist bboard

pin (or possibly sowing pin if i had some reason to make a distinction) - i make no distinction between the ones with the little balls on top and the ones without drawing pin (though i'd know what someone meant if they refered to one of these as a thumbtack) saftey pin needle the other set is badge ...

Nope, it sounds perfectly fine IMD. But I think we're uncoupling causality and result phrases from each other show nuances, so eh. Anyhow, it could be written: Had my aunt had balls, she'd have been my uncle = unreal situation :> unreal result Had my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle = unreal situa...

From Moldbug, emphasis added: In any case, had Professor Huxley been born and educated in North Korea, he would have been the first to praise the Dear Leader. Had he been born and educated in 4th-century Byzantium, he would have been the first to perform the proskynesis before the Emperor Constanti...

Canepari wrote:It remains a /t/, but not a [t]. It's probably a glottal stop or somesuch.

*facepalms* i'm never going to get that right, am i?

äreo wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:Is /tl/ even allowed anywhere besides morpheme boundaries? ("exactly")

atlas.

i'm fairly sure the t rarely remains a /t/, however.

"bought (the) food for both of us" To me those have a different meaning - I don't think I'd interchange them. "He bought both our foods." = "He bought the two different types of food that we wanted/requested." "He bought food for both of us." = "He bought (any old) food for both of us." see, i woul...

I've recently started saying "upstairs/downstairs" to mean "up/down", regardless of whether there are stairs. For example, me and a friend hiked up a mountain on Saturday, and I referred to the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain as "downstairs"... sort of like how the concept of 'ground' esc...

native speaker of New Zealand English (more university than tradesman type speech, despite being neither) here. like in many other situations, i'd tend to solve this by avoiding it: "the car, which my sister and i own", or at some point having mentioned the ownership previously and then referring to...

i've heard a whole bunch of different ways to answer this question, but the usual response here abouts seems to be to simply not treat it as a yes/no question at all and give a more elaborate answer (though various 'yes' 'no' 'nooo' type things do still happen) personally i avoid asking question in ...

Astraios wrote:

Jetboy wrote:Trifling: used to describe someone who isn't serious, or just screwing around

That's not innovative.

i dunno, I've never come across it used quite that way before (as an adjective with quite that meaning, i mean.)
similar things, but not quite that.

i see 'or...?' and 'but...' quite a lot online. it's a sort of 'trail off and prompt the other person to supply an alternative if what you've presented doesn't seem right to them', or something... i don't hear it much in day to day conversation that I've noticed, though I'd put that down at least in...

But "isn't" is usually also described as having a schwa in it, so there's no difference there. Apparently in English unstressed vowels take less time and effort. IMD it's usually just [ɪ(d)nː] IMD, it's [ɪnʔ] or [ɪn]. Pah! No one speaks proper English anymore. :P I'm all for "ain't" instead of the ...

Of course, if 'am not' becomes 'amn't', dropping the vowel, only to Pronounce that you have to add a vowel back in to get amənt, net saving in time and effort equals... you don't have to include a space when you write it. ' replaces o when writting, ə replaces o when pronouncing, and while ə takes s...

finlay wrote:

Renaçido wrote:How is "amn't" pronounced?

how do you think it's pronounced?

I'm betting it's either got a schwa between the m and the n, or the n is dropped, personally. it's an awkward contraction of 'am not' after all. (what becomes of 'I'm not' when you drop the pronoun, i guess)

Astraios wrote:

Chargone wrote:'a whole nother thing' or 'an whole other thing'? one sounds wrong and the other's just awkward

The second one sounds awkward because you should have "a".

*facepalms* that too. though even thus corrected it's still not exactly great.

Also, I've caught myself using "an entire nother" before, and I've heard other people use it too. I use "nother" frequently too. Like how "a nadder" became "an adder", only in reverse. As do I in the phrase a whole nother , which seems to be quite common in North American English. "Whole nother" is...

It gets even sillier if you go the other way: what is "three times smaller than" 120? Indeed. this particular construction bugs me no end because it doesn't mean anything. 'times' is inherently Not Smaller Than if you're using whole numbers! seriously, three times smaller? what does that even Mean?...

i speak standard NZ English, at base, rather than southern, south Auckland, or Maori dialects (naming the major divisions loosely :D) 'course, my own speech has just enough South African to throw people (thanks to my mum, who's occasionally been mistaken for a South African by South Africans, thanks...