Darkoshi

In German, many words that refer to people have an extra suffix ("in" for singular; "innen" for plural) when used to refer to women. To refer to both men and women with that word, you can't use only the masculine term; you need to use both.

So for example, the German word for "teacher" (masculine singular and plural) is "Lehrer". The feminine singular form is "Lehrerin"; the feminine plural is "Lehrerinnen". To refer to both male and female teachers in speech you would use "Lehrer und Lehrerinnen".

Based on the linked site, you can also put the feminine form first, ie. "Lehrerinnen und Lehrer", but this sounds quite awkward to me. My knowledge of the German language is mostly from my childhood however, not from the past 30 years, so perhaps the latter form has become more common nowadays.

To simplify this kind of expression in writing, various short forms have been devised, as shown on the above (www.genderator.app) website. Some of these short forms are inclusive of non-binary genders too. Here I have listed the nominative case forms from that site:

Paarform (unabbreviated):
👤 die Lehrerin bzw. der Lehrer
👥 die Lehrerinnen und Lehrer

Schrägstrichschreibung (using slashes):
👤 der/die Lehrer/-in
👥 die Lehrer/-innen

Klammerform (using parentheses):
👤 der/die Lehrer(in)
👥 die Lehrer(innen)

Binnenmajuskel (using internal capitalization):
👤 der/die LehrerIn
👥 die LehrerInnen

Gendersternchen / Genderstar (nicht binär) (using asterisks; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der*die Lehrer*in
👥 die Lehrer*innen

Genderdoppelpunkt (nicht binär) (using colons; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der:die Lehrer:in
👥 die Lehrer:innen

Gendergap (nicht binär) (using underscores; inclusive of non-binary):
👤 der_die Lehrer_in
👥 die Lehrer_innen

Today I came across some job postings on a German website. The advertised jobs include:
- eine(n) Schlussredakteur(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Software-Tester(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Systemadministrator(in)(mwd)
- eine(n) Postmaster(in) (m/w/d)

I wasn't familiar with the (mwd) abbreviation.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/mwd-meaning

https://fashionunited.info/news/business/q-a-about-m-w-d-german-gender-regulations/20190725147

It stands for "männlich, weiblich oder divers" - "male, female or diverse".
The 2nd page explains about the legal reasons for including this in the job postings.

In November 2017, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) ruled that civil status law must allow a third gender option, besides "female" or "male". The changes are aimed at all those who can not or do not want to be assigned to any gender within the so-called binary gender system and protect their “right to personality”.

This means, for example, that birth certificates cannot have blank gender entries for intersex and/or nonbinary people and as of mid-2018, they need to provide a third option. The deadline for the Federal Government to improve the civil law accordingly was 31 December 2018. As of 2019 employers and recruiters should comply with the same rule, by not excluding non-binary people and offering gender-neutral job advertisements.
...
In Germany, according to the General Equal Treatment Act from 2006, employers are not allowed to discriminate against an applicant on grounds of gender. The gender identities of people are diverse. This must be considered also in recruitment circumstances, job postings included so that no gender is discriminated against.

Another interesting German-language topic:
“Freundin“ means both friend and girlfriend. How do you differentiate between the two in conversation?

I like the short Exercise with Smart Cat segments on PBS that are shown between some children's programs.
I can do that! It's fun, easy, *and* good for me, yay! It gets me up from my chair whenever it comes on.
I have the TV on to drown out the sound of the neighbor dog who is barking.

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I've got a headache but no fever, which isn't unusual for me.
I worked in my yard for several hours today.
The back of my neck is achy. It may be exacerbated by stooping down to pull weeds, which I did Wednesday and today. It was bad enough yesterday that I started considering getting one of those neck braces like the pharmicist lady on the Doc Martin TV series was always wearing. Maybe those things support the head, taking stress off of the neck? Or maybe they prevent you from turning your head... I'll have to read up on it.

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Heard on TV: "The moose is on the loose!" hahah

I tried something out, using dandelions as an artistic tool. Coming soon to a universe near you! Maybe.

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I'm trying to clean off my table. It is taking very long and I'm only making small inroads.
Oh that's right, I wanted to try out the new Wyze sensors that are sitting there in that box.
And I also wanted to buy a raspberry PI to see if that makes the old sensors work more reliably especially as I wasn't able to get their bridge to reconnect after it had a problem last week.

There's the folder with my tax docs. I can put that away now; I've already gotten my tax refunds by direct deposit, as well as this year's stimulus payment too.
There, that is done.

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You know how in some commercials they have the legal stuff spoken very quickly at the end?
You know how, to a native English speaker, Spanish sounds like it is spoken very quickly?

Well, I saw a commercial on a Spanish-language TV channel, and the legal stuff that was spoken at the end of it sounded even more blisteringly fast than the English-language ones.

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A note I wrote on a paper on the table:

"My hands look old.
My skin is dry and textured."

They don't look quite as old to me today as they did then.

Starting in December I went 4 months without any significant menstruation, only minor spotting. It was great. Last month I got a period again. Maybe the note was from the dry period, an unwelcome side effect.

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On Thursday, I had saved a short audio recording... it was after my laptop microphone hadn't been working, but then it worked again. In it, I said:

"Testing One Two Three... NOW why is it working!!??.. But fine, it's working, right?"

I was idly playing around with that recording. I selected short clips of it and played them back several times in a row. Then I reversed one of those selections ("NOW why...") to see what it sounded like backwards. I did NOT expect it to same the same backwards as it did forwards, but it DID, which blew my mind.

forwards
backwards

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I saw this beginning clip of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" on TV the other night, and it made me laugh so good! I happened to be laying on the floor while watching it to begin with, so it was really a ROTFLOL moment.



I didn't end up watching the whole episode, as I had to finish up my work, but I need to watch the full thing (again? not sure if I've seen it before) one of these days.

A layer of fog persisted here past noon today. It felt quiet and muted and calm, like after a snowfall.

An Austrian radio station mentioned a "Schneeflockdown". Schneeflocke is German for 'snowflake'. So Schneeflockdown is a cute bilingual way of saying "snowed in".

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While debugging, I came across this comment in angular.js:

// Insanity Warning: scope depth-first traversal
// yes, this code is a bit crazy, but it works and we have tests to prove it!

(I didn't write down what version of the file we are using, so am not able to find it online right now.)

This is the code that followed the comment. After that comment, I didn't bother trying to make sense of it. It wasn't related to what I was debugging anyway:

   if (!(next = ((current.$$watchersCount && current.$$childHead) ||
         (current !== target && current.$$nextSibling)))) {
       while (current !== target && !(next = current.$$nextSibling)) {
         current = current.$parent;
       }
     }
   } while ((current = next));

random thought:
It must be horrible to be intubated and not even able to communicate something as simple as "I am very cold, please give me blankets".

It would be good to learn to finger-spell the alphabet signs, so one would still have a way to communicate that didn't require pen&paper or keyboard, etc.
But then again, I wonder how many medical professionals are able to recognize and understand it?

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And then again, if they had to strap down your hands to keep you from pulling out the tube like they did with Qiao after his car accident, that wouldn't help much. At least they keep you mostly in a daze so maybe you don't even feel things like being cold.

Composing an email to a work colleague, I wrote, "I just wanted to make sure we're not biting ourselves in the foot".

Something didn't sound quite right about that, so I looked up the expression. Oh, it's usually "shooting", not "biting". That makes more sense. But then I didn't feel like mentioning shooting in the email, and I was copying an Indian colleague who might not be familiar with the expression anyway, so I changed it to a plainer sounding "not causing ourselves potential future problems".

Something else in a recent work email made me smile. The email mentioned "the Metallicize value", and I wondered what that meant, until I looked at the pasted code block and saw a "maxTableSize" variable highlighted.

Wait a minute... is "house shoes" a common American/English synonym for slippers, or not?

Do I only think it is, because it's the common German term, and it's pronounced basically the same in German (Hausschuhe) and English, and because my German mom may have used the term with me when I was growing up?

(Similarly, I used to think "short-armed" and "long-armed" (shirts) was a normal thing to say, until I learned that the correct English term was "short-sleeved" and "long-sleeved".)

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For some reason, today the German word "Schiess-stoff" came to mind. I thought it was the word for gunpowder, but there's another word, Schiesspulver for the latter. Stoff means material.

https://www.spektrum.de/lexikon/chemie/schiessstoffe/8229
That page says that Shiess-stoff is a general term for both gunpowder and rocket fuel.

Anyway, I was thinking about how hard that word would be for an American to pronounce.
Sh - ee - ss - sht - off

Sort of like the "She sells seashells" phrase, except the middle of the work is an S sound followed immediately by a SH sound, and then a T sound.

("St" at the beginning of a word is pronounced "sht" in German. And since Schiess-stoff is a compound word, it is pronounced that way in there too.)

You can click the "listen" icon on the Google translate page to hear it:
https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=schiessstoff

Hum. "Strumpf" and "Strumpfhosen" must also be hard for Americans to pronounce.
Sh-t-r and m-p-f-h
https://translate.google.com/?hl=en#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=strumpfhosen
But the English word triumph is similar.

It occurred to me that "vlog" may be the first word (non-person-name, non-place-name) in the English language to start with the "vl" sound. I checked my paper dictionary, and indeed there were no other such VL words. Now I checked online, and there is one other:

vlei: a grassy or marshy wetland.
The etymology of this word is from Afrikaans and Dutch, and its most common pronunciation is actually with "FL" rather than "VL", which makes sense as German, which is related to Dutch, also pronounces V as F.

Zweifel = doubt
bezweifelt = doubtful
verzweifelt = despairing, desperate, frantic

bedrückt = depressed (drucken = to press!)

schlummernd = slumbering
dösen = to doze (dösten = dozed)

Zwielicht = twilight
zwielichtig = shady (as in character)

innehalten (hielt inne) = to pause

gering = low, small, slight
geringer = less, lesser, smaller
geringerer = (komparativ. See: declensions)

schlicht = simple
schlichtweg = simply

While thinking about the pronunciation of words starting with 'kn', I realized that in English the 'k' is always or nearly always silent. Whereas in German, both the 'k' and 'n' are spoken.

Then I thought about words starting with 'gn'. Again, in English the 'g' is nearly always silent (the GNU software term being an exception). Whereas in German, both the 'g' and 'n' are spoken.

And I was thinking, maybe that is why I always want to pronounce the 'g' in the English word 'gnome'.

Tonight I found a website that provides both British and American pronunciations of words.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnome

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnu

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnocchi

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnomic

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/british/gnawing

British, like German, seems to generally be spoken with a higher pitch than American English (or maybe it seems that way due to its vowels being spoken higher in the throat?).

I started mimicking the online pronunciations. You know, how when you say the same word over and over again, it gets funny?

Gnome. Gn^oem. Gnoume. Gneoum. Gnome. Nu. N^u Nu N^u... Nocky! Nokey. Nocky! No Key. No Key.
Nong. Noing. Nong. Noing!

Zorro didn't like it. She left the room.

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A few days ago while walking to my car, I realized that people's names and faces were coming very easily to my mind. I tested myself, thinking of more and more coworkers, even from long ago. There were only a few I couldn't easily name. It seemed quite surprising to me, as usually there's a significant pause between me thinking of someone and remembering their name (if I'm able to come up with a name at all).

A couple days later I tried again, but my memory seemed back to normal, ie. not easily remembering many names.

So I wonder, what could cause memory changes like that?

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Something else I've wondered: Where do slugs go in the daytime?
Google? Ah, ok. So I'm not the only one who has wondered that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio

and a lot more info on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet