Adam, songwriters have been circumventing linguistic customs for the sake of making the song sound good since the dawn of lyrics. I still get mad over the lyrics to the third verse of The Sound of Silence. Sammy Hagar is not an obstacle.
…Evidently, we come from different linguistic schools, because my elementary English teacher was always on my case for saying “her and me” and constantly corrected me to “she and I”.
My problem in Sound of Silence is a matter of logistical continuity. The lines “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening” don’t work with each other. “Talking without speaking” makes sense, it means you’re communicating without making sound. But “hearing without listening” doesn’t flow, because “hearing” means “you’re aware of the sound”, and “listening” means “you’re paying attention to what’s being said” (i.e. if you’re ignoring your teacher’s lecture, you -hear- the sound, but he’ll tell you off for not -listening- to him). If you’re hearing without listening, you don’t know what the people who are talking without speaking are saying.
1. The lines aren’t meant to logically flow from one to another like a narrative. It’s a list of what the narrator is seeing people doing and not doing. Examples, not.
2. You’re misinterprenting “Talking without speaking”. It’s meaning is similar to the hearing/listening line: people are talking without saying anything. We’re living surrounded by our own white noise, willfully distracting ourselves from each other.
I’m all for the US finally doing what everyone else on Earth is doing but could you focus on switching your temperature units first? Converting miles to kilometers is easy, just multiply by 1.6. Converting Fahrenheit to sensible Celsius is much harder, especially on the go.
Its a bit roundabout to convert from kph to mph exactly only then to use that number to access some rough mental comfort scale. It’s better to have two such scales calibrated in both systems. For instance (labels added for convenience):
140 kph is what I call relaxed cruising speed (living in a country without general speed limits).
But then again, the last time we had friends from the US visit us and we were (legally) doing 180 kph (= 112.5 mph) on the highway, they *did* look a little pale^^
The precise Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion is: F = 1.8C + 32 But 1.8 is close to 2 so by changing 32 to 30 we have a really good approximation conversion that is easier to handle and provides reasonable results for most temperatures in the human experience:
So using F = 2C + 30 here are some examples:
Cold: -10C –> 10F (acutal is 14F)
Nippy: -5C –> 20F (actual is 23F)
Freezing: 0C –> 30F (actual is 32F)
Cool: 5C –> 40F (actual is 41F)
Warmish: 10C –> 50F (actual is really 50F)
Warmer: 15C –> 60F (actual is 59F)
Room temp: 20C –> 70F (actual is 68F)
Hottish: 25C –> 80F (actual is 77F)
Hot: 30C –> 90F (actual is 86F)
Body temp: 37C –> 104F (actual is 98.6F)
Hellish: 40C –> 110F (actual is 104F)
Water boils: 100C –> 230F (actual is 212F)
__________________________
Clearly the approximation gets warped the higher and lower you go on the scale, but still works reasonably well for general standard temperatures.
-10°C is not cold, you intolerant [ambiguous Angrish as I realize I don’t know any monikers that apply to Americans as a whole rather than Americans of a specific region]! If you need something from the store five blocks away, -10°C is the perfect weather to go for a walk with gloves on rather than wasting gas by starting your car!
Aze, I’ve heard that a quick approximation for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius is to subtract 30, then halve the result.
For example, water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. To convert to Celsius, we subtract 30 (which gives us 2) and we halve that (which gives us 1). So water freezes at 32 degrees F, or _about_ 1 degree C.
So you’re basically halving, but you gotta remove a good chunk of it (that is, 30) before you halve.
Metric system. Pennies and 1 dollar bills. Every time I visit the USA, it’s like visiting one of those historical reenactment villages where they demonstrate how things were done in the Olden Days.
Adam, songwriters have been circumventing linguistic customs for the sake of making the song sound good since the dawn of lyrics. I still get mad over the lyrics to the third verse of The Sound of Silence. Sammy Hagar is not an obstacle.
My cringe-moment is when I hear “Life Is a Highway” by Rascal Flatts.
To be grammatically correct, one line needs to be:
“There was a distance between you and me.”
But they use the word “I” instead of “me,” because “I” rhymes better with “eye.”
So whenever I hear that line, I roll my “mes.” … I mean “eyes.”
…Evidently, we come from different linguistic schools, because my elementary English teacher was always on my case for saying “her and me” and constantly corrected me to “she and I”.
My problem in Sound of Silence is a matter of logistical continuity. The lines “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening” don’t work with each other. “Talking without speaking” makes sense, it means you’re communicating without making sound. But “hearing without listening” doesn’t flow, because “hearing” means “you’re aware of the sound”, and “listening” means “you’re paying attention to what’s being said” (i.e. if you’re ignoring your teacher’s lecture, you -hear- the sound, but he’ll tell you off for not -listening- to him). If you’re hearing without listening, you don’t know what the people who are talking without speaking are saying.
“I” is for the subject of a sentence, “me” is for the object.
You and I had a distance between us.
There was a distance between you and me.
Two things:
1. The lines aren’t meant to logically flow from one to another like a narrative. It’s a list of what the narrator is seeing people doing and not doing. Examples, not.
2. You’re misinterprenting “Talking without speaking”. It’s meaning is similar to the hearing/listening line: people are talking without saying anything. We’re living surrounded by our own white noise, willfully distracting ourselves from each other.
I’m all for the US finally doing what everyone else on Earth is doing but could you focus on switching your temperature units first? Converting miles to kilometers is easy, just multiply by 1.6. Converting Fahrenheit to sensible Celsius is much harder, especially on the go.
Its a bit roundabout to convert from kph to mph exactly only then to use that number to access some rough mental comfort scale. It’s better to have two such scales calibrated in both systems. For instance (labels added for convenience):
30kph (20mph): crawl
50kph (30mph): trundle
70kph (45mph): scoot
90kph (55mph): cruise
120kph (75mph): tear
140kph (90mph): suicide
A similar exercise for F and C is left as an exercise to the reader.
______________
*(being half Dutch, my labels are “kruipen, hobbelen, kachelen, jakkeren, scheuren, zelfmoord”)
140 kph is what I call relaxed cruising speed (living in a country without general speed limits).
But then again, the last time we had friends from the US visit us and we were (legally) doing 180 kph (= 112.5 mph) on the highway, they *did* look a little pale^^
The precise Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion is: F = 1.8C + 32 But 1.8 is close to 2 so by changing 32 to 30 we have a really good approximation conversion that is easier to handle and provides reasonable results for most temperatures in the human experience:
So using F = 2C + 30 here are some examples:
Cold: -10C –> 10F (acutal is 14F)
Nippy: -5C –> 20F (actual is 23F)
Freezing: 0C –> 30F (actual is 32F)
Cool: 5C –> 40F (actual is 41F)
Warmish: 10C –> 50F (actual is really 50F)
Warmer: 15C –> 60F (actual is 59F)
Room temp: 20C –> 70F (actual is 68F)
Hottish: 25C –> 80F (actual is 77F)
Hot: 30C –> 90F (actual is 86F)
Body temp: 37C –> 104F (actual is 98.6F)
Hellish: 40C –> 110F (actual is 104F)
Water boils: 100C –> 230F (actual is 212F)
__________________________
Clearly the approximation gets warped the higher and lower you go on the scale, but still works reasonably well for general standard temperatures.
-10°C is not cold, you intolerant [ambiguous Angrish as I realize I don’t know any monikers that apply to Americans as a whole rather than Americans of a specific region]! If you need something from the store five blocks away, -10°C is the perfect weather to go for a walk with gloves on rather than wasting gas by starting your car!
Aze, I’ve heard that a quick approximation for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius is to subtract 30, then halve the result.
For example, water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. To convert to Celsius, we subtract 30 (which gives us 2) and we halve that (which gives us 1). So water freezes at 32 degrees F, or _about_ 1 degree C.
So you’re basically halving, but you gotta remove a good chunk of it (that is, 30) before you halve.
Metric system. Pennies and 1 dollar bills. Every time I visit the USA, it’s like visiting one of those historical reenactment villages where they demonstrate how things were done in the Olden Days.
Here’s a more comprehensive comic for this:
https://xkcd.com/526/
Yes! Please! Let’s go metric and never look back!
Pleease!
(I’ve worked with both, and let me tell you, metric is so much nicer.)
Our social distancing is closer than the rest of the world’s. For us, it’s 6 feet. For the rest of the world it’s 2 meters, which is about 6 1/2 feet.
Depends on where you are. Here it’s 1.5 meters, ~5 feet