Things you were shockingly old when you learned

'Ounce' is a cryptic crossword staple.

cf the Latin name pantera uncia (prev. uncia uncia, it's got a good beat to it)

fun (?) fact (?): smaller wildcat the oncilla's name is derived from "ounce", a little snow leopard, but the ocelot's name is apparently thought to come from the Aztec and thus be unrelated to oncilla, even though both the name and the cat look p. similar to me

I saw an oncilla last week (in a zoo, I'm afraid) and I <3 them all

To curry Favel.
as an act of obseqience to royalty people used to go off and groom a mythical horse apparently.
BUt the mythology behind Favel fell out of circulation so people replaced the name with the word favour.

that's a great one!

Is it too late to go back?

I discovered this recently but was just reminded that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a total Sherlock-head and wrote a latter-day Holmes novel.

Yes! My dad is also a Sherlock head and has commiserated with Kareem on several occasions.

kareem is an extremely interesting guy

He wrote one of the new Veronica Mars episodes.

elementary, my dear Colasanto

I only learned today, while crossing one of them, that there are two Severn Bridges.

Could perhaps as well be in the "puns you had missed" thread but

Darth Vader's second name is simply the Dutch word for "father".

(as written, not spoken obv)

To curry Favel.
as an act of obseqience to royalty people used to go off and groom a mythical horse apparently.
BUt the mythology behind Favel fell out of circulation so people replaced the name with the word favour.

lilith slept with niles? wtf

lol

ha ha

2+ tamales, 1 tamal.

"lousy" from louse/lice

just now, duh

traceable in the usage meaning "infested" i.e. "that place is just LOUSY with cops!"

well I guess you'd expect the s in a descriptive form of a given word to be soft. Maybe if it was pronounced more like loussy you'd get it clearer. Does adding a y to the end of a word tend to harden the letter before it, pronunciationwise?

I think it varies? Most people don’t say greasy to rhyme with easy eg

except in yeats

(xp) Not sure about that tbh.

Or to be more specific changing a word from noun to adjective does it harden an end syllable's soft letter.
Language pronunciation tends to change to what flows naturally off the tongue over time. & it can obscure etymological evolution, innit?

a good example of where changing a word from noun to adjective fails to harden the end syllable's soft letter is louse and lousy, which goes in exactly the opposite direction (except no doubt in the dialects where this doesn't happen)

id use both words either way tbh, tryin to think why/when and it may be depending on following consonant or somesuch

I might use a z sound for louse if I’m saying “louse up the joint”. Maybe. I’ve never said that I don’t think

I would very much see a soft s as in louse as not being a hard s which is more like zee in lousy.

what you're saying would be the noun would be louz and the adjective would be loussee. I haven't heard anybody talk like that.

So I'm wondering why you're making what appears to be a contrarian statement.

bcz to me the z sound is evidently a "soft s" and the SSSS sound is a hard s?

i mean this is a formulation you've more or less invented so you can define it how you like i guess

Prett sure there's no such thing as soft or hard 's' sound.

... there is however definitely a y at the end of prett.

well lol actually i was unfair to stevolende, as there *are* other ppl out in the world (including language teachers) (bad ones) who insisting on terming them soft and hard s in exactly this confusing way

linguists favour voiced (zzz) vs voiceless (sss): the difference being the sound made in the back of yr throat is the voicing of the zzz

Liza Minnelli to thread

Sean Connery and Ally McCoisht to thread.

ztfu everyone

There are no special IPA symbols for /s/ and /z/ - they are just /s/ and /z/ - dunno why we need to talk about 'soft' and 'hard' as it is always confusing.

is it or isnt it

Apologies for introducing the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative into the discussion for cheap laughs.

his work really fell off after live flesh

lol

blouse/blousy

I thought that US English changed a lot of what is represented by the letter s in English spelling to z precisely because of that differentiation.

& would have thought of the more liquid s sound as soft and the more curt z sound as hard but that could just be synaesthetic association.
& think there are several other letters that voiced/unvoiced differentiation is true of depending on what letters it is juxtaposed with.

An interesting one is "abuse", where the "s" becomes voiced when it goes from noun to verb, with no change in spelling.

blouse/blousy

blowze/blowzy

(early 17th century: from obsolete blowze ‘beggar's female companion’, of unknown origin.)

floss / floozy

thought 1: if you mean ise vs ize, the z form was not introduced by american spelling and is not present by reason of american usage (OED favours "ize" where relevant). it's there because the early root form of the relevant word is classical greek, and it began to be swapped out (in the UK) by printers tending followed the subsequent french versions of the root (which tended to convert the z to an s).

thought 2: it's possibly simply by association with soft c -- viz "soft c" is sss hence s pron.sss must be the "soft s")

thought 3: someone else can pick this one up

"Blousy" can also mean "like a blouse" but now that I'm slightly more awake, I think I do use a voiced consonant in "blouse" anyway, although my parents don't. This may change again after I drink coffee.

Thought 3: the grave iirc

as with grammar it's a bit of a clown's errand anyway trying to pin down reliable eng lang rules of pronunciation

such as there arertend to arrive in the form "i before e except after c, when the sound is eeee, or when sounded as *guido voice* "EEEY!" except in february alone each leap year, when the moon is in the second house, plus also there's when *dies*"

it is an irregular language with a great deal of valuably unruly regional variation