When I complain about struggling with vague language, people often tell me 'you know what I mean'. This always makes me think about the South Park episode called Starvin' Marvin in Space (season 3, episode 13), and the language 'Marklar'. On the planet Marklar, everyone is called 'Marklar'. The language ('Marklar') is …

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Stepping Stones: rocks to step on, to avoid the surrounding mud or water. When crossing a river, the more stepping stones it has, the better. Walking across six stepping stones feels much better than hopping across three, and hopping across three is better than jumping to one stepping stone in the middle of a river, …

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GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is better than good, it's necessary. But the gpg UI inflicts more pain than 100 Microsoft Office licences combined. The Autocomplete Options Typing gpg<TAB>, I get this nonsense: 1gpg gpg-wks-client gpgsm 2gpg-agent gpg-wks-server gpgsplit 3gpg-card gpgconf gpgtar 4gpg-connect-agent gpgparsemail …

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Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the 'Jew party'. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn't see why. She'd invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What's the problem? Her native language is Slavic, and …

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Some American made a video on Balkan history which flipped between saying that the Balkans has many cultures, then mentioned some war or similar catastrophe, then went on repeat. The video asserted bluntly (if not explicitly) that multiple cultures coexisting created all the strife in the Balkans. I commented: It looks …

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When learning computer languages, order matters a lot, and I think I got lucky by learning them in roughly the best possible order. Just like a linguistic ladder, it's better to take many small steps than a couple of big steps. bash Bash is a great first language because you can start instantly, and do regular things …

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Reading Plato's various Dialogues, I've come across a few very strange choices from the translators. Firstly, a pig could be dedicated as a 'sacrifice' to a god. I've read that people would then eat the 'sacrifice', and initially thought this was a cop-out - if you eat the meal, then you're not really sacrificing …

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My basic education included 11 years of French classes, and I don't know any more French than 'le chat'. Those lessons could hardly have failed harder in Britain's schools. I recall the counting in Maths, and most people can square something, and understand what, roughly, Maths can do. I still read well, so evidently …

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When you're eating bacon... I don't each bacon. Right, but when someone eats bacon... I find this sort of thing happening routinely. I suspect everyone else feels more comfortable with waiting for the meaning of a sentence to emerge later. Whatever happened to saying 'one', as short for 'someone'? It sounds …

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Native English speakers commonly muck-up every sentence thrown at them in a way one doesn't normally find with Spaniards, Serbs, Finnish, or Germans. This cannot come from the same reasons that few Europeans can pronounce Cantonese words - that we simply don't have those sounds. We have 'con', but cannot say 'pivo'. …

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