May I recommend TierZoo’s videos? He uses the eyewitness theme as his intro song. He knows the way.

<To the tune of “House of the Rising Sun”, by the Animals. A poem for your sprog.>

There is… A bot… With GPT…

THEY CALL a “rising sun”…

AND IT’S BEEN… The ruin… Of many a project…

And god… I know… Mine’s one.

MY MOTHER WAS a coder…

She used three Emacs themes… (“It’s for my workflow, son”)

But my father liked that AI gen…

When he made all his memes.

Now the only things a vibe coder needs…

Are an ENTER KEY and a thumb…

And the ONLY time he is satisfied…

Is when his code’s a dump.

I’ve got one eye on the chatlog…

The other eye on my commits…

I’m going back to spaghetti code,

So you can’t tell where it’s shit.

So momma, tell your children…

NOT TO DO… What I… Have done…

Spending your life in sin and misery,

Praying to the 0 and 1.

“Mexico” is one of only two cases where I don’t follow the “correct” pronunciation as often as possible (the other being ‘axolotl’, because if I pronounce it with the correct Nahuatl ‘sh’ sound, nobody knows what I’m talking about). If the topic is brought up, I wait to see how someone else says it. If I’m speaking to my largely-latina students, many of whom are from mexico, then I’m obviously going to pronounce it as an ‘h’/‘j’. However, many of them also pronounce it with an x when speaking in English, so I just tend to go with ‘correct’ unless one of my interlocutors says it the american way first. I don’t feel particularly bad about this, since the word “Mexico” also comes from Nahuatl, but nobody actually pronounces it the original way in mexico, so I go with whatever my interlocutor goes with first. (For the same reason I’m not going to call Germany “Deutschland” unless I’m speaking to someone whom I know to be German.)

In general, I try to pronounce loan words the correct way in their mother tongue, whether they be Maori, Xhosa, or French. And yes, I know this makes me sound like a pretentious dickwad when I say "Kwah-sahn’ ", rather than “cruh-sahnt”, and I’ll take sounding like a pretentious dickwad over giving in to my American exceptionalism any day.

A fair criticism. Consider: what keyboard do you think they’re using to type all those thorns? Are they putting in the Unicode for it each time? Copy pasting it? I’d be willing to bet that they’re using an Icelandic keyboard, and then they’re just ignoring the fact that they are using it wrong. There is only one language on earth that still uses the thorn, and that language doesn’t use it voiced. So no, I maintain that they are using it wrong, objectively, because the only living language that does still use it doesn’t use it that way. It irks me in the same way that I am incensed by stupid Americans pronouncing Central American or Chinese names containing the letter “x” as if it’s in the word “mix”. If it’s from Mayan or related languages, or in Chinese, that shit is pronounced “sh”. It’s just offensive, as someone who studies languages, to see these graphemes being tortured.

Can jou imagine if someone just kept insisting on tjping in Englisj, but tjej replaced everj instance of “h” witj “j”, because “tjat’s jow it is in Spanisj”, but tjen tjej would ALSO use “j” instead of “y”, because “tjat’s jow it’s used in Icelandic”, even wjen tjose letters aren’t being used to represent tjose sounds?

Wouldn’t jou tjink tjat person was a bit of a prick, and probablj just doing it to grab attention, and, oj jeaj, definitivelj wrong?

Indeed. There was a time period when people decided that they didn’t need to make the distinction anymore, then they started using “th” entirely. However, my issue is that, as someone who reads both old English and old Norse texts regularly, in both of these languages the eth represents voiced, the thorn voiceless. It churns my guts every time I see them torturing the thorn like that, and so I downvote.

Indeed. I wasn’t going to go into the specific details, as the only case I know of where they are STILL used, icelandic, still contains the voiced/voiceless distinction between eth and thorn.

I have tried to tell you, the only reason I keep down voting your comments is that you’re using the thorn to represent the voiced dental fricative, which should rightly be rendered as an ‘eth’: ð

I would personally stop downvoting you if you just made it correct. Ðen, at least, you would be presenting legible þoughts. It hurts my brain, which has spent so many hours reading the þorn used correctly in actual manuscripts, to see it so þoroughly tortured in words like “ðen”, “ðan”, or “ðough”, all of which contain the voiced dental fricative in modern English. It similarly hurts when you use it in “ðe”, because nobody has said “the” with a voiceless fricative in 500 years.

As I keep trying to tell everyone, this is not how you actually use a thorn.

The thorn is voiceless, and EVERY SINGLE CASE here in the TLC is voiced (as in the ‘th’ in ‘the’). As such, they should ACTUALLY be using the letter ‘eth’: ð

This represents the voiced dental fricative.

If you are going to make some ridiculous philological point, you should at least be correct about it, especially when you’re coming at it from a sense of traditionalist purity.

Æfter all, ðe æctual ƿay to ƿrite þings using old englisc spelling rules is nearly incomprehensible to ðe modern reader, hƿat ƿiþ all ðe changes æfter 1066. It just makes you seem ecgy and ƿyrd

(Note that I’m actually being fairly lax with the previous paragraph to make it slightly more comprehensible)

Let the record reflect that that is NOT how it’s used. The thorn is voiceless, and EVERY SINGLE CASE here in the TLC (and your own comment) is voiced (as in the ‘th’ in ‘then’). As such, they should ACTUALLY be using the letter ‘eth’: ð

This represents the voiced dental fricative.

Let the record reflect that that is NOT how it’s used. The thorn is voiceless, and EVERY SINGLE CASE here in the TLC is voiced (as in the ‘the’ in ‘the’). As such, they should ACTUALLY be using the letter ‘eth’: ð

This represents the voiced dental fricative.

Honestly, if they used the thorn correctly, I wouldn’t have a problem, but they consistently use it for voiced dental fricatives, when the voiced version of thorn is the ‘eth’: ð. (Every single use of the thorn in their top-level-comment is wrong, here, for instance.)

Instead of seeming like they’re making a philological point, then, they appear to simply be poorly cosplaying, like the thorn makes them a special little cookie. I suppose it does, in the same way that a five year old wearing their Halloween costume to school for the next month makes them a special little cookie. Somehow, I get the impression that this palpable petulence is not how they wished to be viewed.

Inb4 the next Ramanujan sidles up onto YouTube and breaks the entire concept of mathematics

I feel like this misses the mark slightly: Microsoft owns Github now, in precisely the same way that Melon Husk owns Xitter. Microsoft didn’t “fail upwards” with github, they used the power of unforgivably offensive amounts of capital to make a purchase of an already-extremely-profitable company, in order to ensure that all of Microsoft’s other software dingleberries, hanging from the fetid prolapse that is their own company, continue to hang on and accomplish the only two things they care about:

1. that the girth of their proverbial ass does not decrease (and thus continue to keep every market they can firmly under its weight)

And

2. that its stench continues poisoning the well for anything that could potentially compete with them.

With these two feats accomplished, they can keep their monopoly going.

Also, even if it does nucleate, it only freezes if enough heat is removed from it to allow for the phase change to occur.

I disagree with the claim that they are, as a rule, universally applicable, though I certainly do not disagree that this is highly US-normative. There is a significant subset of comics specifically about US issues, stretching back all the way to the very beginning. I can, upon request, provide examples.

1:

known mostly for

[Citation Needed]. You clearly are not a regular reader if you haven’t seen his near-constant references to US politics, electoral systems and why the US’ sucks, or literally one of the first and most oft-quoted XKCD comics of all time, which only makes sense from the perspective of a country where, even in the 2000’s, literalist interpretations of religious texts and anti-science narratives are not just ever-present, but were already one of the primary voting issues for the entire country

2: You are not entitled to an “excuse” for Randall Munroe daring, nay, displaying the absolute temerity to make a comic about pizza. For someone supposedly calling out US-Normativity, you certainly seem awfully clueless about the implicit assumptions you make.

3: I’m sorry that you feel entitled to an apology for an american comic artist drawing a comic about something quintessentially american. I am more sorry, however, for whoever failed to teach you that expecting other people to conform to your normative beliefs when they do something for themselves is a bad thing. He never once said that he would make it non-“US centric”. The only promise he has ever made about it is that it is “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” This comic is both sarcastic and related to the semantics of language. That you feel it is too “US-Centric” is your own concern. As a resident of Ameristan, I can say with confidence that you making that normative expectation is the most american thing you could do. Unless, of course, you were eating a weird slice of “pizza” while doing it.

To be fair, the comic artist is from Boston. This comic strip has been around for almost 20 years, and this community is solely focused on the comic. This is like saying to ich_iel “God, this community is so German!”

You know what, you’re right, the preceding sentence is supposed to be critical of the listener, so they are actually misusing “straight fire”, which would imply something good.

Yep

This has always happened. It’s just the story of Rock and Roll all over again. And funk. And hip-hop. And rap. Also the story of “american” food.

Now, as a cishet, rather privileged white guy in america, I can understand the appropriative nature of all of this. We do it to every culture we see. It’s what we’ve done with anime and Japanese culture and cuisine. It’s what we’ve done with Mexican food, Indian food, and every possible form of East Asian spiritualism. It seems to me, from the inside, like the white american identity is basically just “I see this, and I think it would look/sound/taste really good on my wall/radio/plate, but it needs to be tailored to my preferences”

But I do wonder, as a genuine question:
Wouldn’t that be more okay, from the perspective of those whose contributions to world heritage have been appropriated, if the white person didn’t immediately turn around and say “I made this”?

Like, I am in my 30s, and it wasn’t until I first watched a Madea movie last year that I realized that “finna” was not a modern intentional misspelling of “gonna” courtesy of the snapgramheads, but literally an elision of AAVE “fixin’ to”, which I’ve been hearing my whole life. I agree that people should know from where they get their sayings, whether they’re saying “finna” or <fakes british accent> “please sir, can I have some more?” (A student quoted this yesterday in an after-school club and I bet another teacher that the student didn’t even know the context of the quote, let alone what they were quoting. If we had been betting money, I would have left a dollar richer)

But I’d be interested to hear your take on how best to educate people on the origins of these terms. I’ve had to talk to my spanish-speaking students several times about how saying “mongolo” for ‘idiot’ is SUPER offensive, because it’s derived from a double slur against people with down syndrome and people of Asian descent. How can I, as a teacher, or we, as citizens of the internet, properly assign understanding, credit, or significance to the words these kids are spewing without any concept of what they actually mean, let alone where they came from?