Now I can forgive school kids for not knowing how to make a paper snowflake six-sided (though not their teachers- they could easily look up how). But now better than half the depictions of snowflakes you see during the Christmas season are eight-sided, four-sided or even five sided :smack: . Is this sheer ignorance or is it some deliberate artistic pretense? I have visions of an entire generation of children not learning until high school that water in it’s frozen state has hexagonal symmetry.
Mild irritation about the symmetry of children’s crafts belongs in MPSIMS, not the Pit. (Actually, it probably doesn’t belong anywhere, but I’ll let it die a natural death by disinterest in MPSIMS.)
And they’re always so HUGE! Not in the correct scale at ALL! And they’re in the classroon at, what, 68 degrees for hours and what happens? Nothing! They keep their crystalline form. Ridiculous. Someone shoud retest these peoples’ credentials. Heh.
My life really sucked until I was taught that water in it’s frozen state has hexagonal symmetry. I could barely survive.
I didn’t learn it until I went to COLLEGE. Stupid public schools!! I am surprised they even let me in to college!
In all seriousness, Only Mostly Missus was just complaining about this on Saturday, when she was pinning a snowflake brooch to her coat, a pentagonal brooch. Amusingly, the earrings that came with it are hexagonal.
You found a kindred spirit.
I have visions of an entire generation of children failing, amazingly, to learn the correct placement of an apostrophe at any time throughout their lives. Truly horrifying.
Hey, I’ve done my bit. Just last night I was showing a colleague how to fold paper to get six-sided snowflakes.
Really.
Posted by Giraffe (apparently a mod of some sort):
Never mind snowflakes; I’m really tired of seeing the word “disinterest” used in this way. I know it’s an accepted alternate definition, but it dilutes the usefulness of the word in its more standard meaning.
There’s no excuse for non-hexagonal snowflake art in schools. Like the Straight Dope, they supposedly exist to fight ignorance.
It’s become a serious problem.
Personally, I’m doing my part by lobbying the Educational Testing Service to add a Crystalline Structures of Common Materials to the SAT. They say there’s not enough room, but I say, fuck it, we need the Analogies section like a porcupine needs an easter egg basket.
Well, I’d recommend that you lobby the College Board, owner of the SAT, rather than ETS, which merely develops and administers it, but there’s no need: the SAT no longer contains analogies after successful lobbying by Richard C. Atkinson, President of the University of California, who always had trouble with analogies when he was in school. He argued that analogies on standardized tests were like eleven-sided snowflakes on store display windows.
Dude, you don’t seem to realise just how much that porquepine needs that easter egg basket. He really needs it.
Ooh, I’ve always been good at these!
porcupine : easter egg basket ::
a) cat : fake ID
b) opossum : rich creamery butter
c) hi : Opal!
d) gerbil : yarmulke
Hmm, this is a tough one. I’ll have to get back to you.
That one is easy! The answer is d) gerbil : yarmulke
See, both the gerbil and the porcupine are animals, and the easter egg basket and yaurmulke can both be worn as hats. Nuttin’ to it.
Oh Doctor Jackson, that’s a load of rich creamery butter.
Your “hexagonal symmetry” is one theory, but it’s equally important that children should learn that God can make snowflakes any shape he wants, but happens to find six-sided ones particularly pretty.
Let’s fight it, then. There’s no meaningful definition for the term “alternate definition” versus “standard definition.” Most words in English, as a matter of fact, have multiple definitions. In the case of disinterest, one look at the morphology of the word (dis- + interest) should be a sufficient clue to its origins. Since you seem not to have done the math here, though, I’ll spell it out: disinterest was first attested for quite some time meaning, well, “lack of interest.” The definition you erroneously call the “standard” is a far newer one, and it’s quite obvious that you can’t really “dilute” a new definition of a word, since before that definition developed, it was well and thoroughly diluted by the existing definition of the word.
Honestly, it makes no sense to throw fits about the fact that words have multiple meanings; most words do, of course. You’re perfectly within your rights to only use a word with one of its accepted senses, but understand that when you’re doing it, you’re inventing an arbitrary rule and then asking other people to adhere to it.
If people had an ounce of sense or knowledge about language (I blame the schools for your ignorance; it’s not your fault), they wouldn’t fall for ridiculous claims like the claim that “unbiased” is somehow the true definition of “disinterested”. After all, a quick look at the word gives plenty of evidence as to its origins. While I’m on the subject, the original meaning of enormity was “large size”; the use of the term to express moral outrage is a far more recent invention. It’s completely false to claim that the “moral outrage” meaning is the only one or the correct one, since the “large size” meaning is older and has existed since the word’s coining. Once again, this false belief ought to be easily fixed by a simple examination of the word. But for some reason people who are willing to criticize others’ word choices are oddly unwilling to do even a moment’s worth of intellectual labor in order to see if what they’re claiming is even plausible.
When people go around telling others that “enormity” really means “moral outrageousness” and not “large size”, they’re telling a falsehood, albeit one they probably believe. Essentially, then, people are telling urban legends about language. This is the equivalent of those emails you get saying, “The ACLU and Hillary Clinton are working to ban Jesus and have all Christians deported! Email this to at least 7.8 million people or God will smite you!” So many people on the SDMB get pissed when people send out these emails without even pausing to think about whether they make sense; well, when you hear some claim about a word that doesn’t make sense, don’t go around spreading the ignorance; exercise some common sense and consider even doing some research to determine if the claim is accurate. A quick check to the OED would be plenty to contradict the myths told about “disinterest” and “enormity”.