I would always just re-use the paper bags until they fell apart and then I’d get a new one. Over time I’d “earn” a store branded bag on occasion that are made from recycled material. I’ve had one of them for over ten years.
In our area they’ve gone to thicker plastic bags that are eminently suitable for multiple uses.
Oh yes I would. I have seen much and am very cynical.
Was this in a promotion for the plastic bag industry?
I use mostly recycled plastic bags. I do have a couple of cotton totes (one is re-used denim) but none of my totes get trashed until they literally fall apart at the seams. I started acquiring them when I was at races in other cities/countries and needed to do some grocery shopping. So I would buy a bag. At 99p, they are a cheap way to remember where I’ve been and why I was there. Carrefour in Le Mans even started putting race cars on their bags. What a practical souvenir!
I must have dozens of them around the place. The 6 best live in the backseat. The rest hang from the garage wall. The study was a Danish one from 2019, I believe.
Thanks!
I accumulate shopping bags as promotions faster than I wear them out.
Cantonese and Mandarin have the same Chinese language base, but they are significantly different, even down to some grammatical differences. Cantonese, to a non-speaker, tends to sound like an argument whilst Mandarin sounds like a speech impediment.
Another interesting random fact related to this (which I might have already mentioned in this thread) – white cars were very uncommon back then, because a white pigment suitable for automotive use was difficult to produce, and therefore very expensive relative to other colors. If you wanted a light colored car you could get some colors that came pretty close, like a very pale yellow, but not true white. It wasn’t until DuPont perfected a process to mass produce a low cost white automotive paint in the early 1950s that white cars started appearing.
Moderating:
Please don’t be a jerk. Imagine what that post sounds like to a native speaker of Cantonese or Mandarin.
Apparently someone asked Randall Monroe if it were possible to cook a steak by dropping it from low Earth orbit, and in his first What If? book he ran some calculations and also said that if anyone wanted to put a steak in a hypersonic wind tunnel, he’d love to see the videos.
Two someones did. The short answer is, “no”, but the long answer is loads funnier.
London (UK) doesn’t (and never has) provided Underground and bus service on Christmas Day. Taxis and Uber are the only way to get around if you don’t want to walk or drive yourself.
Today I learned that tires for electric cars are different that tires for cars with gas engines, and that they can be hard to come by.
That had me scratching my head. Huh.
You know, this is how Avco Everett Labs got started (later bought by Textron, just before I went to work there). Not for cooking bsteaks, of course. The US Military wanted to know how to design nose cones for ICBMs and not have them ablate away to nothing. They envisioned a long and costly set of experiments, launching missiles up above the atmosphere and monitoring how the applied shields deteriorated. The story is that one officer was talking about this at a cocktail party at Cornell University and professor Arthur Kantrowitz said that he could do the work in under a year on the ground using Shock Tubes (the hypersonic wind tunnel that Munro mentions). This got their interest, and so they funded Kantrowitz, who founded the laboratory in Everett, Massachusetts (he liked to sail in nearby Boston Harbor, and to take advantage of talent from MIT, Harvard, and other Beantown schools). They got their answers in short order. (they still had blown-up images from the papers on the walls when I got there.)
Never heard that anyone ever tried cooking in one there, though. But it’d be the obvious way to test it out. Easier than shooting up beef-tipped missiles and monitoring the results.
In my random daily ruminations, it occurred to me that, in my mind, the words “Attorney” and “Lawyer” are 100% interchangeable. I found that to be an odd occurrence, why would two very dissimilar words mean the exact same thing in common speech? I wondered about similar pairs of interchangeable words in the English language. I considered starting a post about this phenomenon. But, instead I figured that before posting and exposing myself as an idiot, I had better check…
Lo and behold! “Attorney” and “Lawyer” are not 100% interchangeable!
“Lawyer” refers to someone who has graduated from Law School. “Attorney” refers to someone who has passed the State Bar Exam (evidently, one could do this without graduating from a Law School). Obviously there would be a great overlap in the populations of each, but there is a distinction.
Going back to common speech, I suspect that they are indeed used interchangeably, and only a language pendant would point out the error if someone used them incorrectly.
i.e. Any lawyer. Or attorney, for that matter. Pedantry is basically their job description.
You can “lawyer up” , but I’ve never heard someone “attorney up”.
There’s a joke about why legalese is written the way it is: because in most writing one can presume that the other party is trying to understand you, whereas in law the other party is frequently trying to deliberately misunderstand you.
I once did dictionaries at 20 paces with the CEO of the accounting firm, where I was employed. Part of my job was proofreading letters to the Internal Revenue Service. In his letter, Howard used the word “droth,” a word I hadn’t seen written in my lifetime before. I suggested he change it to “drought” which would be better understood. He pointed out to me that good understanding from the IRS was not his goal. Ah. I learned something that day. And his dictionary was from 1923, where as mine was current. 