Posts by Lyndon Hood
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Turn Sad Men Gay With Zeal
Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
Somewhere between Men and Gay?
And to think these days we can't tell the difference.
I think I can at least hear the differences mentioned even if I'm not sure I practise them (31). I did do speech lessons. I was taught "The black pen is not much good" and "He saw her last move" for the long and short monothongs (which I think leaves me with one fewer than your list). The "near" we're after is, as widely noted, a diphthong ('zeal' plus whichever one the neutral vowel is?).
I had a schoolteacher once who went to the opposite extreme. I can't remember the word, but she used to deliberately mangle it so it sounded different enought. Coincidentally, I end up changing schools because of her.
For the uninitiated: monothong, diphthong, tripthong = 1, 2 or 3 different vowel sounds connected up into one 'vowel'.
I'm guess, but I'm not sure it's not being able to distinguish so much as not bother - a change in pronunciation rather than phonetic capability.
I realised my development psych lessons about learning to seperate out consonants were true listening to a baby babble recently; but (surely*) we still use all the basic vowel sounds so the question of how they're put together isn't a hard-wiring thing.
*Shirley?
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I've recently come to realise, if not appreciate, what you might call the PR aspects of the justice system; the way the public demands satisfaction in a way that's not directly reflected by more higheaded interpretations.
A vaguely relevant story is something I read about James I when I was researching a Shakespeare play.
It interpreted arbitrary pardons as a kind of quid pro quo for an arbitrary justice system: surely, lots of innocent people got condemned and people got extreme punishments, but sometimes guilty people got off.
There's a sense in which that balances out.
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Does anybody know what happens to people who are 17 and a half and finished high school?
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Oh, and you can hear Björk's name pronounced on her WIkipedia entry.
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Philistine.
Strangely enough, the WIkipedia article on the Ö character, the 'oe' substitution is only mentioned as a possibility in German. It's specifically exculded for Swedish, Finnish, Karelian, Estonian, Hungarian, Azeri, Turkish and Crimean Tatar alphabets, where you would use 'o'. It doesn't specifically mention what one does in connection with Icelandic; perhaps up until Björk nobody ever tried but I'll wager it's 'o'.
Philistine.
That said, we don't have a limited character set - in principle we could learn to use our unicode capabilities.
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I did wonder at the time exactly what the man meant by "a flick on the ear". Between the logitics of giving an uncooperative child a flick on the ear, and the way "a clip around the ear" is hitting someone in the head, I thought there might be more to that one.
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I think educations systems, between the teachers and the children, more or universally teach you to
* do what you're told and
* avoid failure rather than risk doing something different.I don't know if that stereotype about the highly-educated being employees rather than entrepeneurs holds true, but if it does, that might be why.
On the tag clouds it's striking (but on reflection, not surprising) the Key uses "labour" more the Clark does.
Might Scoops RSS feed be of assistance in your enterprise?
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It did strike me as strange that Key's speech seemed to suggest he'd make his 'Fresh Start' programme up himself. It sure doesn't sound very like anything it was based on. Given what happened to the criminogenic programmes earlier in the year (they turned out slightly worse than doing nothing despite the successful UK pilot) I'd be disinclined to make a novel programme part of my headline policy.
It was also interested to hear Judge Bicroft (I think) saying the age group he's proposing extending youth justice down to is the only age group where the relevant starts are improving (the most deterioration was in the 55+ bracket).
Though he also noted that, while the option of sending youth on supervised prorammes apparently already exists in the family court, such programmes are hard to come by.
I didn't hear much of Key on morning report but I feel like he used the phrase "boundaries and [something]" (as in, thats what they need [right as far as it goes]/what they will get) three times in one sentence.
More broady - though I'm not sure if this field is the perfect test - it seems more like old fashioned conservatism than neoliberalism, no?
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This backgrounder http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/0801/Backgrounder.pdf might make the sort of the Key is talking about clearer.
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Titus: *invisible hand*
I wish everyone could find that as hilarious as I did.
On (other) topic, I'll just say that while I feel a lot less firm on the legal definition of murder (and sometimes when I hear reports of arguments run past juries I'm sure they don't match), I can say that prior intent is not required.It would be 'interesting' if he ran a provocation defence based on the tagging. Which might get that one finally abolished if he succeeded.