This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

If you want to contact me, I’m at /u/lvxferre@mander.xyz

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • Most “rules of thumb” become awful advice when used indiscriminately.

    People assign slightly different meanings to the same words. You need to acknowledge this to understand what they say.

    Words also change meaning depending on the context.

    When you still don’t get what someone else said, it’s often more useful to think that you’re lacking a key piece of info than to assume that the other person does.

    Hell is paved with good intentions. This piece of advice is popular, but still not heard enough.

    Related to the above: if someone in your life is consistently rushing towards conclusions, based on little to no information, minimise the impact of that person in your life.

    Have at least one recipe using leftovers of other recipes. It’ll reduce waste.

    Alcohol vinegar is bland, boring, and awful for cooking. But it’s a great cleaning agent.

    Identify what you need to keep vs. throw away. Don’t “default” this indiscriminately, analyse it on a per case basis.

    The world does not revolve around your belly button and nature won’t “magically” change because of your feelings.

    You can cultivate herbs in a backyard. No backyard? Flower pots. No flower pots? Old margarine pot. (Check which herbs grow well where you live.)





  • Mine are “lol” and “lmao”. I get what they originally meant, and I get why most people use them nowadays. It’s just that they often signal “I have nothing to contribute, but still expect people to read my crap”.

    As a second (third?) place, “WYSIWYG”. If you’re going to coin such verbose acronym, might as well sub it with an actual word, like, dunno, “transparent”.

    EDIT - “lol” = “lots of laughs”, “lmao” = “laughing my arse off”, “WYSIWYG” = “what you see is what you get”.

    EDIT2: as another poster correctly pointed out, “lol” also originally meant “laughing out loud”. Perhaps even more than “lots of laughs”.





  • In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

    My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.



  • 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.


  • 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.