maritime spectrum

This all happenes while the company was still on probation from blowing up a road in San Bruno in 2010, causing a fireball a thousand feet into the air, killing eight people and injuring another 58.

It's like if English had a language academy that said "don't say sushi; call it cold sliced fish". Of course the native replacements are going to be longer and more unwieldy than simply borrowing the word. I think this doesn't happen in English because we don't have a prescriptive language body—we just borrow words or invent new slang with impunity. And of course the French do that too, as much as the Académie française tries to stop them.

The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest recorded use of the word "weekend" in an 1879 issue of Notes and Queries, an English magazine. "In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week's work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance," the magazine citation goes, "he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so." This is obviously a definition, which suggests that the word had only recently come into use. [...] It's unlikely that the Saturday half-holiday would have spread as rapidly as it did if it had not been for the support of the factory owners. Factory owners had little to gain from insisting on a six-day week of workdays of up to twelve hours if on some days so few workers showed up that the factory had to be shut down anyway. The proposal for a Saturday half-holiday offered a way out, and factory owners supported it in return for a commitment to regular attendance on the part of their employees. Half Saturdays and shorter workdays became the pattern followed by all later labor negotiations, and by legislation governing the length of the workday.

Google ngrams doesn't seem to support "weekend" coming first, but I guess "fin de semaine" might be a calque from English also.

And before the invention of getting Saturday off, the the free space in the working week would be known simply as "Sunday"...

Everyone here loves that Brian Eno quote that goes, like, "whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"; it's that. When the language of magisterium is one that most people don't speak, the phonological features of that language are what we associate with power, and that's where you get pseudolatin incantations as a kind of huckster's business. A less-discussed effect of vernacularization of the language of authority is that it changes its topology of salience, it displaces the "essence" of power, in the mind of the public, onto the features that still stand out even to a fluent speaker.

The Room That Doesn't Exist

the kind of men who lurk in the woods looking for victims

Gradually they start mapping out which humans are most likely to just flat-out slap them, and figuring out how much of it is nature vs. nurture, start introducing the hardest slappers to each other, with a surprisingly good success rates as the kind of people who would be down to slap an alien life form are also the kind of people who are down shag somebody who would also do shit like that. While some people insist that these "breeding programs" are dehumanising and an insult to human dignity, the people who would slap an alien without hesitation are treating it like a free matchmaking service, that works better for them than Tinder anyway.

Eventually the descendants of the most powerful slappers have developed into a distinct new type of human, who have honed their slapping skills and capabilities to perfection, and any alien who isn't experienced with getting slapped by humans could no longer handle it, and one brisk smack would just make their head explode.

1933: Four powers pact, with France, Italy and the UK

1934: Hitler-Pilsudski pact (non-aggression with Poland)

1935: Anglo-German Naval Agreement. This treaty is of note because British diplomats have gone on record saying that the purpose of this treaty was for it to serve as a starting point for an eventual alliance with germany

1936: Anti-comintern pact, only joined by Japan, then Italy in 1937 and later just Axis countries during ww2. So much for horseshoe theory?

1938, september: Anglo-German non-aggression pact

1938, december: Franco-German non-aggression pact

1939, march: German-Romanian Economic Treaty

1939, march: German-Lithuanian non-aggression pact

1939, may: German-Danish non-aggression pact

1939, june: German-Estonian non-aggression pact

1939, july: German-Latvian non-aggression pact

1939, august: German-Soviet non-aggression pact

Everybody in Europe was getting in bed with the Nazis (not even mentioning the many territorial concessions given to Germany), and it seems the UK was especially eager. What was the ussr doing during this time? Trying to build their own alliances, with anyone but the fascists. There were many attempts at an anti-fascist alliance in Europe, and all of them were rejected. It was only at the very brink of war, barely a month before, that they signed their treaty with the germans. After everyone else in Europe, and after the greatest part of a decade trying not to have to do it.

Every single one of these liberals can tell you about Lebensraum, but it seems none of them actually think about what it meant at the time. Disregarding the constant rethoric coming from within Germany in the 30s, Mein Kampf had been published for almost 20 years, a book in which Hitler outlines his plans to either kill or enslave the slavs, some of which lived in the Balkans, and another good portion lived in the USSR. This was never said of the British or French, they never had a fascist rambling in their front door about how they would kill a hundred million of your people if they could.

And about the part of molotov-ribbentrop about "dividing Europe". It was the best option for the people in the states that were affected and nobody really talks about it. I'll admit it isn't good foreign policy to divide a country with another one. But in the case of Poland, would you rather have the germans conquer all of Poland and put even more jews plus belarussians and ukranians to the fascist genocide? would you rather have a much weaker USSR, a closer frontline to Moscow and an earlier war that could have caused a fascist victory in the USSR and therefore a much stronger defense against the invasions in France and Italy? Even ignoring that the Polish generals caught between Germany and the USSR greeted the soviets like liberators and didn't fight them. In the case of the Baltics, according to Anna Louise Strong's The Soviets Expected It, a recollection of first and second hand accounts, it was a known fact that Germany had been about to launch a coup/invasion into the Baltics right when the Soviets moved in. Would the critics of this pact rather have, again, a weaker USSR, a stronger Germany and even more minorities for them to genocide and use for slave labor?.

The 2~3 year respite for the invasion of the USSR meant the soviets were stronger and were able to push them back even before an allied boot step foot in France or Italy. It was the best the soviets could do to ensure a military victory after years of relentless rejection from the western democracies. To call this an alliance would necessarily imply France, the UK, Poland and the Baltics had an alliance with Germany

for example, when chatting with coworkers, i’ll often ask if they have any fun weekend plans. but let’s be real - we all feel like friendless losers when someone asks that question and we go “uhhhhh… no.” so instead, i phrase it as “so, do you have anything fun planned over the weekend, or are you just going to enjoy having some time to relax?”

phrased like this, there’s rarely any awkwardness. you’ve presented two options & given both equally positive connotations, so your conversational partner has an automatic “out,” so to speak

but it works for higher stakes conversations too!!!! my mom was saying this weekend how she and her neighbor both like walking around the neighborhood & that she wanted to suggest they take a walk together sometime, but was worried about how to approach the conversation

so i said “how about you just say ‘i’ve noticed we both like taking walks! would you be interested in going for one together, or do you use walks for some precious alone time?’”

now Walking Neighbor has an automatic “get out of jail free card” if she wants to say no!!!! which means my mom doesn’t have to worry about the conversation being uncomfortable, because she’s set it up to go smoothly