Words and phrases to cancel

shiels

shiels

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shakahislop said:
the dispersion of vocab and theories from US universities into everyday life is pretty fascinating i think. one of the key things that's going on with the internet is what it's doing to language, people increasingly modelling their speech on how things are written on the internet. the guardian front page this morning had a couple of things like that, i forget what.

there's the associated thing as well of concepts and terminology being totally unmoored from the reality of lives in a place. people in england ending up with these conceptual tools to think about their life and their world, when these tools are to a large extent a product not only of america, but of these weird liberal arts colleges in the middle of nowhere (there are caveats obviously, this is a generalisation, but this is one thread in the overall phenomenon. i've been through a fair number of these in upstate new york, new england, new jersey, attended one briefly, they are incredibly odd places, physically segregated from any other community, properly in the middle of nowhere, with what seems like a very market-based customer-client relationship between staff and students, and when they cost $60,000 a year in tuition fees obviously it's a very rich segment of US society who show up. and then out of that emerges concepts that like end up in the brains of people in i don't know, exeter or whatever.

i find a lot of those ways of thinking about things really unsuited to thinking about life in the UK, personally. there's a thing going on where people read american feminists for example and don't get that they're really talking about america, and that gender relations etc are structured a bit differently there. it's ripe for misunderstanding all of that i think. especially as the default way of thinking about the US from the UK is that it's pretty culturally similar to us, when really its really very different
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SO MUCH THIS. SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE FUCKING 'FOLKS' AT THE BACK
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
shiels said:
Bro, man and mate are still more common surely? Buddy is quite australian / NZ
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i use boss a lot. i've never worked out if it originated in south asia or if it originated in the UK. coz south asians love it, everyone from pakistan to bangladesh seems to use it. but its also fairly normal to hear from people in the uk without such roots. i reckon it's south asian.
 
shiels

shiels

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shakahislop said:
i use boss a lot. i've never worked out if it originated in south asia or if it originated in the UK. coz south asians love it, everyone from pakistan to bangladesh seems to use it. but its also fairly normal to hear from people in the uk without such roots. i reckon it's south asian.
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I do love the london use of boss for shop owners, bus drivers, elders
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Leo said:
the fatal flaw in this argument is the implicit claim that “new” equals better. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. oftentimes, it’s just different, and sometimes not even that different.
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This is unfortunately not aligned with the newest theories of natural selection. It appears the universe bends toward propagating patterns of greater generalized fitness, robustness, and complexity over time.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
suspended said:
This is unfortunately not aligned with the newest theories of natural selection. It appears the universe bends toward propagating patterns of greater generalized fitness, robustness, and complexity over time.
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If some weird teleological principle is leading the universe towards ever greater complexity, then how come bacteria are still by far the dominant form of life on Earth?
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
suspended said:
However, because these accusations come from the Old (both literally aged and figuratively past their cultural prime i.e. the Brits) I can only be flattered by my identification with the New—tomorrow's center of power, the conquering tide
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I agree with the first part, you are being unfairly linked with all the ills of the world - but US as coming centre of power? I don't think so, its pinnacle has already come and, in the blink of an eye, gone past, the US is waning just as surely as the UK and only slightly behind it. Hollowed out from the inside the empire has already started to collapse, slowly at first but with gathering momentum...
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
version said:
Something's always rubbed me the wrong way about referring to things as 'spaces'.
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I remember working as a temp years ago and my department was moved to a new office building - someone higher up came in and asked my boss if she liked her new space and it felt like fingernails being scraped down the blackboard.
 
shiels

shiels

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Mr. Tea said:
If some weird teleological principle is leading the universe towards ever greater complexity, then how come bacteria are still by far the dominant form of life on Earth?
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You’re both wrong. Bacteria as a group show the most metabolic diversity. Simplicity at the cellular level doesn’t mean simplicity at macro level and they’re operating on completely different time scales and recent research shows that they’re capable of long distance communication, a kind of memory and shit like that bro
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Mr. Tea said:
If some weird teleological principle is leading the universe towards ever greater complexity, then how come bacteria are still by far the dominant form of life on Earth?
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Mr Tea, the universe started as helium and hydrogen. I promise you it trends in the direction of complexity
 
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