Stupid Questions: The Triumphant Return

[Ded As Ned]

How many calories are in a booger?

[Astromech]

32 minutes ago, Ded As Ned said:

How many calories are in a booger?

http://www.howtobeadad.com/2011/4728/booger-nutrition-facts

[Ded As Ned]

30 minutes ago, Astromech said:

http://www.howtobeadad.com/2011/4728/booger-nutrition-facts

 

[Lily Valley]

ZOMG Ned.

:busts:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I was going to suggest stillsuits so you wouldn't have to worry about it.  Astromech for the win.

In all seriousness, does anyone have a favorite inventory program?  I am trying to keep track of lab equipment and it (finally) dawned on me that people in retail weren't paid enough to deal with the horrible spreadsheet I've created.  

[Iskaral Pust]

On May 2, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Ramsay Blow said:

What about tips for take-out? The places where you order online or by phone and they bring the food out to your car. I usually tip like $3 and I have no idea if anyone else tips more or at all.

I usually tip 10%, or $5 if greater.  Those drivers definitely need tips. 

Uber is harder to fathom because they set it up as an all-in cost, and tipping by cash would be really difficult -- we're practically cashless, and I definitely don't have small bills.  But I get the feeling the drivers want a tip system. 

[Iskaral Pust]

On May 3, 2016 at 9:22 AM, Dr. Pepper said:

Holy shit, just googled and I've been saying it wrong for like three decades.  Thankfully, so has everyone else.  I say and always here the EN-YOU-EYE version.  All the dictionaries I've consulted say it's AHN-WEE.  I don't think I've ever heard AHN-WEE, though if I had I probably didn't notice what word it actually was.

Same here.  I'm floored.  Why have I never heard a single person pronounce this correctly or correct my mispronunciation?

[Jo498]

Never been around speakers of French maybe?

It's obviously French so even the worst garbling would hardly make that last "i"  pronounced as "eye" (such garbling probably explains how the word "annoy" came into existence). But I also tend to pronounce it wrong by not making the first syllable nasal enough.

The different pronounciations of e.g. "valet" in AE and BE is an interesting question, though. I don't know but it could be that the French-style pronounciation was common 200 years ago and stuck in America (I think there are some similar cases, Quebecois is also supposedly more "conservative" than European French).

[Ramsay B.]

1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I usually tip 10%, or $5 if greater.  Those drivers definitely need tips. 

I actually meant the places where I go to and the workers just run the food out to my car and collect the money. Somebody said 10% here but I've talked to people that don't tip them at all.

[all swedes are racist]

5 hours ago, Ramsay Blow said:

I actually meant the places where I go to and the workers just run the food out to my car and collect the money. Somebody said 10% here but I've talked to people that don't tip them at all.

What, like on roller skate and shit? 

[Iskaral Pust]

5 hours ago, Ramsay Blow said:

I actually meant the places where I go to and the workers just run the food out to my car and collect the money. Somebody said 10% here but I've talked to people that don't tip them at all.

That sounds like it's worth only a couple of dollars.  

[Ramsay B.]

3 hours ago, R'hllors Red Lobster said:

What, like on roller skate and shit? 

No, like normal restaurants that have a take-out option(texas roadhouse, outback, ruby tuesdays etc.). 

 

2 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

That sounds like it's worth only a couple of dollars.  

Yeah, I usually throw them like $3. 

[Datepalm]

Every loosely open thread eventually becomes a tipping thread. I'm coming to the serious conclusion that this is the great Question of our time. Other eras had the Woman Question and the Empire Question and the like....we've got tipping.

Seriously, I guess it somehow implicitly touches on things that must be moral and intellectual contentions which are touchstones of the age from both sides, tipper and tipped and the fluidities between them - labour and wage issues, income inequalities, cost of living, globalization, personal ethics in consumer behaviours and economic choices, service and servitude and the shifting definitions of (middle) class and what it entails...other stuff....

The Tipping Question.

[Dr. Pepper]

15 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Same here.  I'm floored.  Why have I never heard a single person pronounce this correctly or correct my mispronunciation?

I've now heard the correct pronunciation several times on different tv shows.  As expected, I never even noticed what word it was when I was hearing it in the past.  You might start hearing it all over the place now.

Someone I work with is an absolute jerk.  One of those men who corrects everyone's speech and grammar, even via text. He'll act like he doesn't understand what you're talking about if you use a poor grammatical structure.  He's an asshole in a lot of other ways, too.  On Friday, he said En-You-Eye, and it was soooo hard for me not to snarkily correct him with a long drawn out shame session of  "I'm sorry, what do you mean, that's not even a word.  OHHHH, you mean EN-WEE."  

[Buckwheat]

Wait, people actually use the word "ennui" in everyday communication? It sounds like such a fancy word that I thought it was only used in literature.

[Dr. Pepper]

23 minutes ago, Buckwheat said:

Wait, people actually use the word "ennui" in everyday communication? It sounds like such a fancy word that I thought it was only used in literature.

I'm hearing it a lot because I'm on the lookout for it.  It's mostly just be on tv shows, maybe one or two.  One conversation I had recently was about boredom and it came up several times there.  The man I described above is just a jackass and always tries to use words bigger than his brain can handle.  

[Jo498]

It probably depends. There are people who use lots of fancy words in everyday communication. There might also be regions/social bubbles where some such words are not considered fancy. ("ennui" is probably not worse than "ipso facto", "raison d'etre", "hoi polloi", "weltschmerz" or a lot of words appearing in postings by sologdin)

E.g. in German there were/are quite a few French loanwords that are not considered fancy (often they are pronounced in a somewhat garbled way) and they used to be even more common in earlier times. My grandma who did not speak or read any foreign language and usually did not even speak high German but a local dialect used "trottoir" and "chaiselongue" as standard words for "sidewalk" and "couch". Or in the German speaking regions of Switzerland they use hundreds of French words where in Germany one would use a German one.

[LongRider]

[polishgenius]

17 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Every loosely open thread eventually becomes a tipping thread. I'm coming to the serious conclusion that this is the great Question of our time. Other eras had the Woman Question and the Empire Question and the like....we've got tipping.

 

And somehow it always eventually comes back to American tipping, even if you're in a country that has completely different labour laws and whatever and are talking with no Americans whatsoever.

I blame Reservoir Dogs.

[Datepalm]

Doesn't mean French isn't dying out as a globally useful language...

Where the hell is the bouncing sheepish hiding emoticon?

[Jo498]

I think English overtook French only around WW II as the most useful/common international language. But regardless of that, pronouncing stuff like "ennui" properly would grant more distinction if French becomes less common.

tbh both English and French are very flawed as international languages. English is easy enough on some level slightly above pidgin, but hard at high levels because of a huge vocab, hardly any logical correlation between pronunciation and spelling, teeming with idiomatic expressions etc. French is a nightmare in spelling and pronunciation for speakers of many other languages, has somewhat logical but rather involved grammar and lots of other hard stuff. Italian, Spanish, Latin would all be far preferable as international languages, if only for simple spelling and pronounciation. I guess we should blame King Philip of Spain for failing...