No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn’t exist makes me feel stupid.

PEBKAC

Every time that I see this acronym I’m tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember “ah, it isn’t Cyrillic”.

I believe that it’s more used in dialects spoken in Brazil than elsewhere, but even in Brazil it’s considered poor grammar. Specially given that both nós conjugations¹ and the synthetic future² are falling into disuse, so it sounds like trying to speak fancy and failing hard at it.

EDIT: now it clicked me why you likely said so; it’s common in European dialects to use “a enviar” (gerundive infinitive) instead of “enviando” (traditional gerund)³. The phenomenon that I’m talking about can be used with either, e.g. “estaremos a enviar”; for me it’s the same issue, people would say “estaremos a enviar” instead of “enviaremos” to throw the event into a distant future that might never happen.

1. They’re still fairly used by older people in speech, but there’s a clear gen gap with younger folks using “a gente” almost exclusively.
2. almost completely replaced by conjugated ir + infinitive.
3. Note that “enviando” is still fairly used in Alentejo and the Algarve.

Portuguese also shows something similar, but the words being confused are different: há (there is) vs. a (the) vs. à (to the).

The one that @flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz mentioned is practically identical though - haver (there be, have) vs. a ver (to see).

Technically not an error but still annoying is to append an apostrophe and an s to a name to indicate the genitive.

Even technically I’d consider it an error - the genitive/“possessive” apostrophe in English highlights that you’re dealing with a clitic, attached to the end of the noun phrase; e.g. the dog**'s** food` → the dog and the cat**'s** food. In German however it doesn’t behave like a clitic, it’s a plain declension; e.g. das Futter des Hundes → das Futter des Hundes und der Katze - you’re switching words, not moving them.

I wonder if that’s because most people nowadays use von+Dative instead.

It’s completely off-topic but Compose is amazing. Specially as you can actually customise it for your usage, with a .XCompose file. For me it’s the only think that makes phonetic transcription flow, otherwise you got to shift layouts back and forth to write something like “[tɾɐ̃skɾi’sɜ̃ʊ̯] ⟨transcrição⟩”.

Here’s mine, if anyone is interested.

Yeah, if copia sputata is so old there’s no way that it’s from those machines.

Digging further on the expression it seems to be old in English too, attested in 1689. And the only explanation that I’ve seen to account to Italian and English both having it is religious in nature - while not biblical it seems common the idea that God spat into the clay to create Adam.

Speaking on Italian: people (often native speakers) messing with the apostrophe bug me a bit, it’s a good example for this thread. Specially un’ followed by a masculine word; e.g. *un’altro for un altro. It tilts the autocompletion inside my brain, expecting a word and getting another in place. I’m not native speaker though so this likely plays a role.

we will be sending

This. I was struggling to convey the aspect, but you got it right IMO. And, pragmatically, it’s more like “we might be sending”, with that might highlighting that it probably won’t.

I think that there is some semantic association between spitting and copying, that all three languages are using. (I wonder how modern it is; photocopy machines spitting copies come to my mind.)

However in Portuguese it might be also because most people don’t know the reference of the original saying (the marble sculptures of that Tuscan city), so they parse it as a phonetically similar saying. And in quick speech they do sound similar, e.g. for me:

• esculpido em Carrara - [(e)skʊ(w).'pi.dẽ.kɐ̥.'hä.ɾɐ]
• [cópia] cuspida e escarrada - [kʊs.'pi.des.kɐ̥.'hä.dɐ]

Due to Linguistics I spend more time trying to analyse the feature than judging it.

That said, two things that grind my gears, when it comes to Portuguese:

• Usage of the gerund for the future tense; e.g. *estaremos enviando (roughly, “we will send”) instead of “vamos enviar” or “enviaremos”. My issue here is not grammatical, but that this construction usually marks lack of commitment.
• “Cuspido e escarrado” (spat and coughed up) to highlight the striking resemblance between two things or people. When the saying is supposed to be “esculpido em Carrara” (sculpted in Carrara).

The first thing is basic organisation of the problem and of its solution. The board is a mess, it’s hard to track which line leads to which, and yet this is essential to follow the reasoning. You can train that into your students with simpler problems, but requesting them to go thoroughly with them, in an ordered way; it’s also a great way to introduce new concepts so you don’t lose time.

This is important because, a lot of the times, students have a good grasp of the underlying concepts but struggle to chain them into a logical reasoning (it’s fine if it’s idiosyncratic, as long as it is there). And 5min later they don’t follow what they just did.

A lot of the students will suck major balls on the maths necessary to ground the physical concepts. That will take a huge time, so work in conjunction with the maths teacher to drill them in that. I remember Chemistry uni students not being able to calculate pKa because of fucking Baskhara, of all things.

Notation matters, you want to avoid ambiguity like a plague. A t is not a +, and the fraction in the second-to-bottom line is ambiguous (is it supposed to represent [80/(2t+1)] / 2, or 80 / [(2t+1)/2]?

Include the units into the maths, and encourage your students to do the same. Sometimes which formula you need to use becomes obvious from that alone; e.g. if you want distance and you got v=80, t=4, you’ll need to remember that s=vt; but if you were to list v=80m/s, t=4s instead, by the simple fact that distance is measured in metres you already know “well, I can cancel 1/s with s, so maybe I just need to multiply v by t, no?”

Most likely. They’re bound to appear everywhere where you got human beings.

With a difference: in Reddit, if the admins were to push some specific agenda and try to manipulate you, you won’t be able to avoid it, because they control the place. In Lemmy however no group controls the whole of the Lemmyverse, so if you wish to avoid some specific shill/group of shills, you can do it by hopping into another instance.

In addition to what other users said: quality matters. 90% of the content of any subreddit is trash, and bots are unable to sieve the 10% of good stuff from that trash. As such, most [all?] bots automatically bringing content from Reddit are bound to litter Lemmy and make it worse, not better.

The same applies to most users there, too. There are a few rational people there, and we should attract them to Lemmy if/when possible, but most redditors are dead weight and trash, and do a great favour to Lemmy if they stay in Reddit.

In the case of those dwarf elephants it’s because they were smaller, so they got a bigger surface area per weight, and lost heat faster. Perhaps also because, while Sicily is hot in comparison with continental Europe, it’s still colder than Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

[I know that you’re joking, sorry for the serious answer.]

Without taking into account the environmental impact and viability: Sicilian dwarf elephants. Come on, 1m short elephants, hairier (i.e. fluffier) than their African and Asian counterparts? I want it!

Bonus points: capybaras are native where I live, and a common occurrence in parks. Now imagine those small elephants, plus some capybaras: chilling under the grey sky, taking a bath in the lake in warmer days, gathering together in colder days… come on, it’s cuteness overload!

Did you even read the post you’re responding to?

I did.

I’m addressing mostly OP’s comments across this thread because it’s the stuff that I can actually give advice for, based on life experience; I’m no woman but I’m bipolar, so I wouldn’t be surprised if OP’s experiences in this regard were similar to mine. And if they are, I’m old enough to know shit that worked and shit that did not.

Let me guess. People expect you to behave consistently, bipolar disorder prevents you from doing so, you got dumped a few times because the cheerful/moody woman suddenly became moody/cheerful, and now you feel like starting out a relationship is walking on eggs. Is this correct?

If it is, frame it another way - it’s a painful blessing disguised as curse, you’re filtering out the morons who wouldn’t be able to hold into a decent relationship to begin with.

Past that: stop overthinking. At the end of the day this shit boils down to

1. Show interest.
2. Check if the other side is interested. If he is, go on; if not, move on.
3. Get to know each other better. If it’s worth, go on; if not, move on.
4. Repeat as needed.

I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t go to pubs or bars. The only place I see men is at gyms. I see so many every day. There’s prolonged eye contact, hungry glances, I get scared and look away and continue my workout. This avoidance is becoming unbearable.

Plus if you date lots of people over booze you’ll get a disproportionate amount of alcoholic folks to deal with. (I know from experience, most of my ex-gfs were met over some beer.)

What about jogging in the park? You’re still doing some physical activity and you can capitalise on probably being fit. You’ll find men doing random stuff - walking their dogs, jogging like you, writing, etc. I feel like it would be a tiny bit outside your comfort zone (the gym), but not by much.

Good luck.

It is, but I only use it for online identities that I don’t mind associating. Plus the username is a bigger concern in this regard.

Also, often I use other smoking chimp pics, although this one started it out for me.

I could bullshit that the smoking chimp is a comment on human nature or whatever, but the truth is: someone sent me this pic, pointing out that he holds his cig the same way that I do when I’m drinking in a photo. And that was right when I was looking for online avatars, since I didn’t want to use devils any more (too “edgy teenager”).

More than a decade later, here I am, still with smoking chimp avatars.

Frankly? I’d rather stick to a normal package manager too, if available. But the alias trick is useful in a pinch, if you must use a flatpak.