Oh, really?
“He has aids.”
Which one am I referring to?
Dang!
Because I’m sure I’m not the only one who didn’t know, from m-w:
I especially identify with #2.
:dubious:
It’s funny that I specifically referred to contextual cues and you offer an example devoid of them.
I can do that too
Hand me that sheet. (bed covering or stationery?)
That’s a light shirt. (color or weight?)
That’s a ruler. (political leader or measuring device?)
That’s a bill. (list of charges or part of a cap?)
Furthermore, the capitalization bit only works in writing – aids and AIDS and Aids are all actually pronounced the same. What would you do with “He has aids” in a non-written circumstance?
But, hey, I’ll work with this one. How often do you tell someone that “X has aides (assistants)” without context? If you’re just blurting out “X has aids,” then it’s likely you’re talking about the disease. And even if that’s an incorrect assumption in your rather unlikely scenario, English speakers do deal with such small misunderstandings routinely.
“A meaningless word coined by a psychotic.” I like it! You learn something new every day.
See maybe Bill the Cat for an excellent example.
I pretty much agree with everything you’ve said, as it bears out my points - fuzzbusters are no proof against a ticket, and in order to get any use out of a fuzzbuster you have to get a really expensive one and spend a lot of time learning how to use it. You have very clearly spent much time researching and experiencing yours 
I hope my post didn’t come across as criticism of your hobby. I really enjoyed your other thread. I’ve seen a lot of the behavior you describe from inside the cop car - it’s fun to see someone develop a behavior model for cops through passive monitoring of radar systems.
When you look at stuff like this, you can see that radar is probably going to disappear within a few years anyway. I bet it already has in some locales.
See the rest of the thread for VASCAR, Laser speed guns, “Instant On”, and some of the strategy I mention that the MSP uses. Then keep in mind that my information is ten years out of date The cops have undoubtedly gotten better and trickier in the intervening years.
No offense taken, I admit it’s a rather strange hobby, but I enjoy the game of “Radar-Hunting”, it’s always a little exciting when you hear the “Bra-Brap” of the detector alerting, and then start “hunting” to figure out where the source of the radar is, detecting the cruiser long before it finds you…
heck, since I don’t deliberately speed (accidental, sure…) I have to get some use out of my V1, I’m still hoping to encounter the mythical “rabbit-kill” at some point…
(I detect a radar/laser signal, slow down to 5 under PSL, and the driver that’s tailgating me goes to pass me at well above the limit, into the waiting maw of a speed-check trap…)
Yeah, LTI products are pretty darned cool, heck, I’d like to own a radar or laser gun just to have one, as they’re definitely cool gadgets, and as a tech, I love gadgets, besides, with my evil sense of humor, I’d love to find a way to stealth-install a radar gun inside the Ion, just so I could mess with people’s heads, some moron tailgating me, pop 'em with the radar gun, idiot passes me well over the speed limit, pop 'em with the radar gun, if anything, I’d be helping the police enforce speed limits…
hmm, one of my uncles is Police Chief of Eliot, Me, I wonder if he’d be interested in selling me one of their old, outdated radar guns…
Oh and as far as new Radar gun technology, watch out for MPH Systems “Bee” series of “POP” radar, they “pop” a radar burst so fast that almost no detector can alert to the beam, problem is, POP is EXTREMELY error prone, and in fact, cannot be used to write speeding tickets, it requires a follow-up shot of conventional IO or CO, this fact is stated in the Bee series owners manual, in fact
You are aware that “AIDS” and “Aides” have two completely different pronunciations, right?
On the subject of Radar Detectors, they’re illegal to use here in Queensland (as has been pointed out), but it’s not illegal to own one.
My experiences with them in New Zealand (where they were legal) was that they were completely useless- I couldn’t think of a single time that the Radar Detector went off before I saw the police car.
I refer you back to my earlier post wherein you’ll find no mention whatsoever of the word “aides.” Besides, we’re talking about printed matter–hence the discussion about capitalization–so pronunciation is irrelevant, anyway.
Um, no one bothers worrying about capitalization when speaking, right? You’ve just provided a bit of a straw-stuffed man.
I’m not. How do you pronounce them?
-FrL-
In my dialect, “AIDS” and “aides” are homophones. Dictionary.com has the same pronunciation for the two words, so I’m not sure what this “completely different” pronunciation is. It’s apparently so “completely” different that neither American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, nor Cambridge have taken note of it.
No, It was suggested that there’s some huge difference between aids and AIDS such that it would interfere with understanding. I’m pointing out that our ability to deal with the ambiguity in spoken language is evidence that we can deal with it in written communication just fine.
I’ve only ever heard “Aides” pronounced something like “Eyeds” (that’s as close a phonetic rendering as I can get), thus differentiating it from Aids.
The entire “Joke” of the South Park episode Jared has Aides was thus completely lost on me, since the words have- in my experience- completely different pronunciations. Must be a regional thing, I guess.
LOL/lol: I have heard this said as individual letters (of course) but recently I encountered two people who both insisted that it is now pronounced in a single syallable.
FAQ/FAQs/faq/faqs: I have definitely heard this as both individual letters and a single syllable.
With a long “i” sound you mean? Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that pronunciation before. Maybe it’s an antipodean thing.
I thought that [aI] (as in American I) was the standard Australian pronunciation of the vowel in aid.
It is. Aide is a French word originally, though (cf Aide de Campe), and has a long “I”, at least IME with the word.
I’ve never heard that pronunciation, not even from a French speaker. The French pronunciation, so far as I am aware, would more or less rhyme with the English name “Ed.” But in English, I’ve only heard it as identical to aid.
For me, there’s also the business of how an agency prefers to refer to itself; IMO it’s not unlike a person telling you how they want their own name pronounced. So, we have NASA and UNICEF. The Guardian’s style guide is therefore kind of stupid to me in insisting on Nasa, etc., and it would annoy me enough not to read that publication.
Going all lowercase for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome doesn’t seem right to me either (and note the capitalization on the UNICEF page). Why would you go all lower case when no one does for SIDS or SARS? Or would some of you argue that writing sids or sars would also be immediately understandable from context?
Radar and laser are different to me in that they started as abbreviations for long, wordy technical descriptions, and their usage has expanded beyond the original technical object (“I’ve been trying to stay below Jeff’s radar this week”). That’s not so for acronyms for disease names, which AFAIK are used only to refer to the disease itself. Obviously, YMMV.
I’m sorry, but that just sounds like someone speaking Strine to me. Either that, or you’ve been hearing the pronunciation from someone who themselves didn’t know the correct pronunciation.