How long was Prince “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”?

For about seven years, and then he went back to calling himself Prince again.

Instead of store hours like this:

• Monday 6:00-18:00
• Tuesday 6:00-18:00
• Wednesday 8:00-18:00
• Thursday 6:00-18:00
• Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

• Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
• Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
• Wednesday 0:00-10:00
• Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
• Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

The Spanish Invasion (of privacy)?

The Spanish Inhibition

I think that electing someone as deranged as Trump — who basically would try anything and everything that a sane person wouldn’t risk out of self-preservation, we basically saw a speedrun of finding out all the weaknesses and exploits of our government, combined with proving that impeachment and removal is basically impossible as long as one party is in collusion with the president.

We might have gotten here anyway, but it might have been a decade or two rather than four short years.

And the Supreme Court wouldn’t look like it does and be doing what’s it’s doing, which is also now a speedrun of horror.

I’ll never forgive Americans for 2016.

If you mean that Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German and that Dutch and Deutsch share a common origin, then that is true.

It’s because Germany wasn’t a unified place until not that long ago, so different neighbors came up with their own way to refer to them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany

You’re saying that trying to motivate people positively to move on from meat is “push the blame away” behavior. But I think tut-tutting individuals who eat meat is pushing the blame away.

While there are some people who believe that eating meat is an absolute moral wrong no matter where or when it takes place in human history, a lot of people who feel eating meat is immoral feel this way because of what the meat industry does, both to the animals and to the planet. Five thousand years ago, people weren’t supporting the meat industry and all its wrongs by eating meat.

So considering it to be pathetic to try to effect real reduction in people’s meat consumption because the methods shift blame away from the individual meat eater seems really ironic to me, as well as completely counterproductive, if your goal is less meat consumption in the world.

Laughter can’t melt steel beams!

This thread is starting to remind me of this

In the latter half of the 90s it was popular with young people in general

I can say that having gendered nouns does add a little bit more information to communication. Like if we are talking about a man and a woman and we’re using pronouns, then “he spoke to her” is unambiguous as to who is doing what. Likewise, if all nouns have a gender, you encounter more situations where the gender adds some extra context and leads to marginally less ambiguity. So if you’re at a bakery and there are two adjacent items behind the counter, one with masculine gender and one with feminine gender, and you point and say “can I have her please”, there is no need for the baker to ask if you mean this one or that one, they know based on gender.

Not saying this makes gender “worth it”, but in an emergent system, small things like this might have given it enough of a foothold to exist.

It takes very little imagination to realize that this would not be an issue. “Tomorrow” would almost certainly be interpreted as roughly the next daylight period.

So when someone is doing this international meeting stuff they have to be very careful about saying “let’s look at this tomorrow” because in various places that can mean different things depending on when each person’s night is.

Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:

Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00

Wed 0:00 - 12:00

Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00

Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.

Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.

Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.

It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.

“Thinned to a line” makes it sound like it was an aesthetic change. The solid block means “a character will go in this spot, and if there is already something in this spot the new character will overwrite it”. And the line means “a character will go in between whatever is to the left and right of this line”. And you might switch between them for various reasons.

Did you record that? In that example, by doing a rapid version of “6:09”, you’ve pronounced both of the phrases with a schwa, and therefore neither of them with a full “oh” sound. So, exactly the opposite of what you claimed.

In any case, with “6:09” you could (and would certainly commonly hear others in your country) very naturally fully pronounce the “oh”, whereas with “o’clock” it would sound unnatural, like you are over-pronouncing it.

Look in any dictionary and see that the first syllable of “o’clock” is just /ə/, whereas the word “oh” is /oʊ/ or /əʊ/, or for an Australian dictionary maybe even /əʉ/ or /æʉ/. Whatever it is, it will not be the same as “o’clock”.

I feel like I’ve really patiently tried to explain this to you, even as you have been rude and insulting at every turn. At this point, if you actually care to understand, I suggest you google “vowel reduction” and sort it out for yourself.

No, it’s definitely reduced in Australian English.

I think the problem might be that you don’t understand what a schwa is. Here is an Australian saying “o’clock” and it’s clearly a schwa.

Unless you are hyperarticulating, you are never going to pronounce the first “o” in “6 o’clock” with a full “oh” sound.

Like a schwa, as I said.

Which country is it where that “o” is never reduced?

I’m sure you can sort it all out from the information I’ve given you already.

That “oh” does not stand for “o’clock”, it stands for zero. If you said “six-o-fifteen” (or any time without the leading zero for minutes) you’d be saying it wrong. We also don’t say the “oh” for zero the same way as the “o” in “o’clock” (the former rhymes with “owe” and the latter is a schwa).

In English we can often say “oh” for zero, when it is part of a string of numbers. So when giving telephone numbers or addresses, for example, in addition to the time.