Getting the names of things wrong.
You walked into this building. The gorram letters on the front of it are two gorram feet tall. How can you not know the name of the building?
And this one from earlier today: It’s Microsoft Word. I just told you the name of the program. Stop calling it Words before I beat you to death with the mouse.
when people say “mano a mano” and mean man to man, not “hand to hand” which is different (and correct)
Many people who ought to know better (like educators and education students and education professors) constantly get their behavioral theory terminology wrong.
Specifically, “negative reinforcement”. Most will correctly identify rewarding good behavior as “positive reinforcement” (although, I suspect, for entirely the wrong reasons), but will then go and identify punishing bad behavior as “negative reinforcement”. It’s not. It’s punishment. Negative reinforcement is when you reinforce a behavior by taking something away from the situation: e.g. a night off from chores for a good grade. Positive reinforcement is reinforcing a behavior by adding something: e.g. praise for good behavior. Positive and negative are entirely mathematical and have nothing to do with the subjective assessment of either the behavior or the consequent. You can positively reinforce bad behavior: e.g. yelling at a kid who is acting out to gain adult attention is giving him exactly what he wants; that’s positive reinforcement.
While it may be true that reinforcing good behavior is more effective than punishing bad behavior, there is nothing inherently wrong with “negative” reinforcement, and I really wish that people who are supposed to know these things would get this right.
(I should note that whether a consequent is reinforcement or punishment (or neither) is entirely dependent upon future changes in behavior, so you can’t even really judge what an action is in the moment anyway. That’s getting a bit far afield, though.)
BMW was running radio ads that said that for a while. I was screaming at the radio.
Wow, are you me? This makes me insane.
I only wish on stars in remote galaxies that I can’t see, but I’m very, very weird.
(ugh, I’m trying to find more but the search function has crapped out on me twice in a row now after waiting 5 minutes between searches)
I’m not saying it’s not a little ridiculous, I think it is too, but common usage in the U.S. uses the terms African-American and black interchangeably. I’m just being a descriptivist.
This is what I got from the “Why Things Are” books. Could you give a better view?
Try here.
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I can grab hold (properly isolated, of course) of a Van de Graf generator and be just fine (10,000 volts). If I grab a current source of just a few milli-amps I’m dead, regardless of the voltage.
High voltage, low current = no problem.
High current, regardless of voltage = big problem.
A. Common usage in the US centers on black people in the US, who can usually be fairly described with that word.
B. Common usage doesn’t make something right.
Two more:
Wouldn’t tht depend on the context? If Megatron is threatening the inhabitants of the continent north of the Panama canal with annihilation unless we hand over Megan Fox, he may well say: “Peoples of North America–hear now and obey!” Because, you see, the Canadians are a people, and so are the Americans, and so are the Mexicans, and so forth
On the other hand, if I and the rest of the training staff go out to lunch together, there are 5 *persons *in our party.
From your own cite (bolding mine):
Apparently at least some of the subjects had transmittable syphilis.
Another historical error that I’ve heard way more times than I can recount:
The reason the Americans won the Revolutionary War was because the British marched in a horizontal line wearing bright red coats while Americans hid behind rocks and trees and picked them off using geurilla tactics. Utter rubbish: the British had been fighting wars in North America for more than a century by this time and that horizontal line, which was not used in every battle, was actually one of the deadliest fighting maneuvers of its day.
Similar: The Nazis lost against the Soviets because they were unprepared for a Russian winter.
Truth: The Nazis were better equipped for the Russian winter than the Soviet army was in terms of supplies and clothing (it wasn’t like “Russia gets really really cold and snowy” was a secret to them). They lost mostly due to a combination of very bad generalship (going all the way up the chain to Hitler) and because the Soviets fought like hell (partly from fear of Hitler partly from fear of Stalin).
OTOH, in defense of America, I had a history prof in an upper level undergrad course who swore that by the time America entered WW2 the Germans had already been fought to a standstill and the war was a waiting game. While it’s very true that the French and British hadn’t been running around crying “Oh mercy me whatever will we do?” for 2.5 years, it’s also unarguable that without America joining the fray the war would have taken a WHHHOOOOLE lot longer and could easily have been won by Hitler.
And then there’s the popular one down here: Rome fell due to immorality (drugs, homosexuality, weird sex in general, incest, etc.). Yep, you’re right- it’s quite that simple: no need to look at any kind of climate or economic or military or sociological or trade or disease or any other kinds of trends, it was the degenerates purely and simply (never mind that Caligula and Nero and Eliogabalus and the other “REALLY out there” degenerate rulers had been dead for centuries by the time it fell).
Countless?
As a parent, I can assure you that I have performed numerous empirical studies on this, and my study results trump your countless others.
Someone once pointed me to a study that said that a one year old should be able to, unassisted, drink from an open topped cup without spilling. I’ve been alive for nearly 40 years and I have NEVER seen one who could do this.
You want reasons for why people don’t beleive that Autism is caused by vaccines? This is one of them…studies that take something people have observed time and time again, such as the effects of sugar on kids, and tell people it doesn’t happen. You might as well put out a study saying that the earth is flat.
In another thread, I saw two references to “Tinkers to Evers to Chance”. The shortstop in that double-play combination of yore was Joe Tinker.
While I bemoan extraneous apostrophes, one place where the possessive mark of punctuation should appear is in the name of a certain Tennessee whiskey. Since the founder of the distillery was Jack Daniel, the spirit is Jack Daniel’s, not Jack Daniels.
True, and your jeans are Levi’s, not Levis.
Sorry but until you show me the language divinities’ decree, I’m going with language as being a descriptivist and not a prescriptivist endeavor.
I tend toward the descriptivist model myself, but few things are absolute. When a particular usage of a term is either self-contradictor or so at odds with the reality its meant to be describing, then that usage should be abandoned. Often they’re not, because of stupid people–and yes, I’m looking at you, Katie Couric!
Or whover the NCB newscaster I heard refer to someone as Kenya as “African-American.” It may well been Campbell Brown, but I’m not about to insult HER, so Katite gets the ire.