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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyztoMemes@sopuli.xyzVesuvius
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    10 days ago

    “Anglicized” is probably not the best way to think about it. The Latin letter “v” was pronounced “w” through the classical period, but had shifted to β or v (fricative) by the third century, long before English existed. V was pronounced v (voiced labiodental fricative) for many centuries. And though we do tend to give the classical period a lot of prestige, it was just one phase for Latin.





  • I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.



  • This is true. And in communities around the world where suicide is stigmatized, there is heavy pressure on authorities to record deaths as “accidental” rather than suicide. In fact, this is borne out by statistics in which you see higher rates of death attributed to accident in such communities, once you control for other variables. This is especially the case in societies in which there is social shunning of entire families who have lost someone to suicide. The coroner in these communities may worry with good reason about serious mistreatment of families if there is a public record of suicide. It’s also not unreasonable to think that this misreporting may play into the gender divide in suicides. If different sexes tend to use different methods, some of these methods are much more ambiguous and easier to record as an accident than others.