Temperature: Somewhere in the teens

[conuly]

Me: Okay, I can handle that!
Wind chill: HAHAHAHA LET'S BRING THAT DOWN TO THE NEGATIVE NUMBERS!
Me: Uh, okay, well at least Eva shoveled!
Porch: Not me :(
USPS: Not snow, nor rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night - but we draw the line at unshoveled porch steps, because that's a hazard.
Me again: Damn.
Wind chill: Mwa ha ha ha ha.

***************

Parking for Gold

27 fascinating maps that show how Americans speak English differently across the US (You've probably seen these before. Interestingly, I say "pecan" differently depending on whether or not it's appended to the word "pie". Of course, there's a reason for that - we always had pecans in the house before my father died, and when referring to them that way I say it the way they do in Texas, where he was from. But I wasn't introduced to pecan pie until well after he died, and I just tend to say the phrase "pecan pie" as one unit, pronounced the way that people say it in NYC where I actually live.)

How Australian Nicknaming Conventions Turn an Afternoon Into an ‘Arvo’

A new class of soft, electrically activated devices mimics the expansion and contraction of natural muscles

What Kids Eat Around the World (Photos)

It's so cold in Florida, iguanas are falling from trees (But they're invasive, so just let them fall.)

Training For The Olympics Is Hard Enough. Try Doing That While Earning A Degree

Student Life at the World’s First Medical School for Women

Rare color photos cast new light on World War II

A Story With Zombies

Sorry, sci-fi fans: star's oddness not due to alien mega-structure

Girls' social camouflage skills may delay or prevent autism diagnosis (No shit, really!?)

Before the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade, Africans lived freely in Tudor England.

Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction

Female professors asked for favors more than male professors

Treating Disease by Nudging the Microbes Inside Us

How Childhoods Spent in Chinese Laundries Tell the Story of America

Keen Islamic prayer activists bring a new dawn to Gaza

Aversion to holes driven by disgust, not fear, study finds (By law, I must follow that link with this mildly squicky article. Click at your own risk.)

Florida’s 1.5 Million Missing Voters

School Closures Loom In Puerto Rico As Enrollment Shrinks After Maria

How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

Inspector general says mishandling of sexual harassment complaints at Justice Department is a ‘systemic’ problem

A House for Women Leaving Prison Sits Empty

California 'sanctuary state' law leads ICE to increase presence, director says

Trump weakens safeguards created after Deepwater Horizon crisis

Washington's growing obsession: The 25th Amendment

White House: It's 'disgraceful and laughable' to question Trump's mental fitness ("It's disgraceful and laughable. If he was unfit, he probably wouldn't be sitting there, wouldn't have defeated the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen," Sanders said, before praising Trump as an "incredibly strong" leader. Clearly, Sanders didn't live through the same miserable election season as the rest of us. Listen, honey. He doesn't respect you any more than he respected Spicer. But you can still show some self-respect and stop lying for him.)

Protests put spotlight on Iran's vast and shadowy Syria war

Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand What’s Happening in Iran

Suspected diphtheria cases in Yemen near 500: WHO

"Everyone Has Parents But Us"

Comments

[hudebnik]

This might actually be "the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen" if you count TOTAL qualifications rather than AVERAGE qualifications -- after all, there were sixteen of them with name recognition, and who knows how many more declared candidates we never heard about.

Although seriously, one doesn't go to a Sanders news briefing to learn facts; one goes to get pithy quotes that one can then juxtapose with the demonstrable facts that contradict them.

[conuly]

I feel the same way about her as I did about Spicer - I know I shouldn't pity them, but I really, really do.

[thewayne]

Yup. For us, FedEx won't deliver on our street if there's snow, whereas a UPS truck actually backed down our street to deliver my monthly antibody meds to avoid the nasty turn at our end! Mega kudos to the dude. We don't get street delivery of our mail in our village, gotta go in to town and pick it up at the post office.

[conuly]

Good job, UPS driver!

[thewayne]

I happened to be out, perhaps clearing the driveway with the neighbor's snow blower, I don't recall, and saw him backing down the street.  VERY impressive.  The short street that we're next to is a very steep descent, and when the snow is thick, it pretty much cannot be driven on safely.  Doesn't matter if you have snow tires and all-wheel drive.  Take your time and drive two blocks out of your way to gentler grades!  Much better than ending up with even longer delays, bent sheet metal, and a possible ambulance ride.

[calimac]

The USPS once refused to deliver mail to our house because the lawn sprinkler was on.

I was in Cajun country in western Louisiana with a local telling us about local food. The couple from New Jersey who were his other auditors took even longer than I did to figure out what the "pea-corn" he referred to was.

[gatheringrivers]

what IS "pea-corn"?

(Oh, never mind, must be "pecan"...)

[conuly]

The sprinkler!? FFS.

[conuly]

Also... you've got a non-rhotic dialect there?

[gatheringrivers]

USPS: Not snow, nor rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night - but we draw the line at unshoveled porch steps, because that's a hazard.

We got one postal deliveryman several years back who was an utter unmitigated ASSHOLE about that.

So since my arthritis at the time was just getting worse and not better, we moved the mailbox.

Down to where the house/front walk meets the public sidewalk. No more delivery excuses. :)

[conuly]

I'd like to move the mailbox, but my mother has this idea that if we move it, we can't ever move it back....

[gatheringrivers]

Once it solves the mail delivery problem, why would you WANT to? :)

(For us it also solved the other problem - the mailbox pinned to the railing was TEEEEENYYYYY and only held like 6 letter size envelopes. A regular mailbox holds more.)

[conuly]

Because house value. Which, seriously, even if we planned to sell any time in the next 30 years, that's not the issue with the value of this house.

[cactuswatcher]

the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen,

Well, she wouldn't have that job if she were adverse to generously fibbing.

Personally I doubt Trump would do well on a proper test for dementia.

[conuly]

I feel like all that lying has to do something to your self-esteem after a while.

Personally I doubt Trump would do well on a proper test for dementia.

Personally, I doubt Trump would do well on a proper drug test.

[alchemia]

Those language maps are fascinating. I wonder if 'subs' were always widely popular, or if the word became so due to subway restaurants?

[conuly]

Excellent question.

[cactuswatcher]

I'm originally from St. Louis and long ago my family used to call them hero sandwiches, but I never actually had one when we were calling them that. The first ones I had were in the early 1960s at Boy Scout camp and at school and at both places they were calling them submarine sandwiches or subs. From then on I really never heard the term hero sandwich in St. Louis, 'hoagie' once in a while, but not 'hero' any more.

Subway shops didn't come along till the mid 1960s when subs were already something of a craze.

[alchemia]

That's another interesting question, when we say 'my family said....', but was that tyoucal for the area, or just one's family, or maybe a localised small area of ppl of similar backgrounds.

For example, half the typical chicagian words on those kinds if maps are familiar to me ('gangway' is usually a giveaway to time in chicago)... But half are not, that's because we're a euro immigrant family, my family learned uk English first before moving here and Chicago was very divided into ethnic communities, so I didn't get 'corrected' until after I was older and spellings/terms were ingrained. I used to get made fun of as a kid when we moved for using words like 'tap(water)', 'boot,bonnet,tyre', flat', or words like 'paczki' for filled doughnuts although the last is getting better known elsewhere at least seasonally

[conuly]

This is the sort of thing that makes our own idiolects so interesting!

[calimac]

I think it's pretty well established that the sandwich is called a submarine because of its physical resemblance to the naval vessel. Sub for short, obviously, and as the original Subway sandwich shops were not near underground rapid transit, the name must have been merely a pun on the word "subway".

[conuly]

Yes, but I think she's asking if the chain restaurant spread the use of the word "sub" for that sandwich.
\

[calimac]

I must have misread it, then. I thought she was asking if they're called that at all due to the name of the restaurant.

To respond to the other question, then: it may have popularized the name further, but it was already a popular name for the sandwich long before the shops became ubiquitous. The shop didn't become common on the West Coast until the 1980s, but "sub" was already the standard name for the sandwich out here. "Hero" or "hoagie" were occasionally heard, but not often.

[alchemia]

yes, conuly cleared it up, ... But the west coast had actual submarines before the sandwwich shop.... I'm thinking of places like landlocked midwestern ones.

[alchemia]

It likely did start that way... But across north America, or just along coastal naval areas where ppl were more familiar w submarines, and the sandwich shop helped speed it to areas where words like heros or hoagies may previously been used....

Would be interesting to see these language maps for a single word over time to see if/how words migrated and what those migrations might have been caused by.... Be it speed of a chain store or migration of (sub)cultures, etc.

[conuly]

I've been told - but don't quote me! - that those sandwiches were called "heroes" after the heroes who crewed submarines.

However, google suggests that there are other putative etymologies.

[hudebnik]

I always assumed "hero" sandwich was the result of an English-speaker hearing a Greek-speaker say "gyro".

[conuly]

This is considered unlikely, as gyros weren't well-known at all at the time of the earliest citations of "hero".

[hudebnik]

That's the great thing about "assumptions": they don't need to be consistent with actual facts :-) Thanks for the latter.

[wpadmirer]

I like the language article. It explains why Pat and I say the word pecan so differently! Though it also shows where I've lost some of the differences I had as a child because of my family moving from Kentucky to Florida!

The story about the refugees from Burma is heartbreaking. The people of Burma have a lot to answer for with that.

[conuly]

What pisses me off about the Rohingya crisis is how some people in the West respond.

If one Muslim somewhere kills a handful of people, they say that's proof that all Muslims everywhere are evil, "it's their culture". (Two billion people do not all share the same culture wtf.) But with this crisis, it's... also taken as proof that all Muslims are horrible, after all, why would Buddhists kill them?

It's the only thing that could make the crisis even more awful.

[wpadmirer]

Buddhists are not immune from having bigots any more than Christians are.

THAT'S the problem. Bigotry.

[conuly]

I know...!

(And there are other groups of ethnic Muslims in Myanmar who aren't being persecuted, so.)

[zesty_pinto]

I haven't checked the climate in the tri-state, but I guess for the sake of every shoveler I hope it's warm enough for the snow to stick. I prefer colder weather because it means it's powder and easy to clean, but in terms of driveways it probably also means someone's getting an alley full of snow dunes...

[conuly]

Yeah, but if it's that warm then the snow is heavier on the shovel.

[hudebnik]

When I shoveled out the car yesterday morning, I was VERY glad it was cold, dry powder. Even the stuff kicked up by the snowplow wasn't particularly icy.

[conuly]

Yeah, I definitely prefer it to the wet stuff. Even footprints come up with a bit of shoveling.

[zesty_pinto]

This is why I'm not looking forward to this week. Transitional weather (mid 30s) is my enemy.

[dhampyresa]

Thank you for the links! (Not just this post, but in general as well.)

[conuly]

Thank you so much! ♥

[greghousesgf]

I pronounce "mayonnaise" with three syllables if I'm sober and two if I'm drunk.
I pronounce "caramel" as CARE-uh-muhl. Not CARE-uh-MELL or CAR-muhl. I've been told the way I pronounce it sounds British (I'm American.)
Some people from Chicago say "grinder" as opposed to "submarine" or "hero", etc. (I used to live in New York and say "hero".)

[greghousesgf]

oh, and what the article with the pics of what kids eat didn't bother mentioning is the definition of obesity has changed a lot in forty years.

[conuly]

Oh, articles never mention that, have you noticed? Just like they only very begrudgingly admit that we've dramatically changed the diagnostic criteria of autism.

[greghousesgf]

I have Asperger's and I'm not sure who pisses me off more, the people who think it isn't real or the ones who can't tell the difference between me and those screaming little boys on TV.