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dfyo3b | Why are Nordic countries (such as Iceland, Scandinavia, Finland, etc.) are widely considered to be the most egalitarian by mainstream social sciences? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because they actually are. They have very high taxes on the wealthy, which they use to virtually eliminate poverty. Also, most of their population are from the same ethnic and cultural background, which reduces the amount of racial tension and prejudice compared to places like England or the USA.",
"Because the numbers generally say they have no noticeable pay gap, low income inequality in general, and good representation for their people. Generally.",
"Because they don’t let their most wealthy people treat the rest of the population like a piggy bank."
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dfz2s4 | Why is it that it takes no effort at all to think of and use your first language, but you have to constantly think about it and translate for your second? | I'm taking a German class and despite knowing a solid bit of the language, I still have to constantly think to speak and understand it. Why is that? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think about how much language exposure you've had in English. Essentially the language centres if your brain are huge, efficient analysers and computers of English language. I'm talking the knowledge around individual words in terms of meaning, associations, grammar rules, level of formality/social use etc etc but also all the sound components for those words. You've also got the broader knowledge around how words are combined, due to such extensive exposure the language centre in your brain has learnt so many extensive rules on how you combine individual words and units of language to create infinite meaningful sentences. For example there's rules around how multiple adjectives are ordered based on what quality they describe, this isn't necessarily explicitly known by English speakers but generally followed as that is what 'sounds right'. Essentially to gain and portray meaning through German you are making sense of the words and sentences through mapping them to your established knowledge base of English. The way we combine words in a language is complex and alters meaning extensively. To really understand this you need to be exposed to so much of the language for your brain to essentiakly learn through statistics what is expected of a sentence and the different roles words play in a sentence across contexts. Language learning is easier for children because the system of their native language is still going through this development so they are less \"glued\" to the learnt rules of english and have higher neuroplasticity for laying down the pathway for learning these rules. It tends to be when people have high exposure and a deep understanding of the syntactic (grammar) rules of a new language they are able to produce and process the language as it's own with meaning. Although the dominant language is often relied on for a long time. TLDR; The language centre in your brain is so established with a shitload of knowledge on how to process and produce meaningful English language that your knowledge base of German cannot compare and you're therefore relying on the framework you have of how language works (in english) to understand German.",
"* When first using a language it takes considerable time and skill to learn to use it. * It literally takes years to being speaking and many more years to develop into a fully fluent human. * Once you learn a language that way, your brain relies on pattern recognition. * For example, when you read a sentence, you are reading each letter and putting them together one-by-one to figure out what the words are, you are seeing entire words as one symbol that represent a concept to your brain. * The different in learning a second language is that you very aware of the process involved as you have already developed cognition. * With the first language you are learning about the world and how it works right alongside learning the language.",
"Depends how you learn the language. The 'natural way' is the way you learn your mother tongue, by being completely immersed in the language itself without any other language to reference it off. When I was younger, my family moved to a country that spoke a different language. I eventually became fluent in that language and didn't have to translate in my head. I could just swap languages and my thoughts would be in the other language. Learning small parts a few times a week like you would do in class will just enable you to translate between languages, you don't *learn* it per se in the same way you do your own.",
"Offtopic: viel Erfolg beim Deutsch-lernen. Es ist nicht leicht, ABER es lohnt sich. Du kannst bald alle Philosophen und Psychologen und frühen Mathematiker und Politologen im original lesen. Nietzsche zum Beispiel! Schopenhauer. Marx. Freud. Gauss. Die Reisetagebücher von Alexander von Humboldt!! Goethe und Schiller. Fuck, selbst Bach, Mozart und Beethoven werden besser klingen. Halt die Ohren steif ;)",
"I believe you think in the language in which you learn about things. For example I've learned most basic things in my native language, so those things I do tend to have to translate, but I've learned my job using mostly english resources, forums and such and when I'm working I think in english, there name of concepts I don't even know in french and sometimes when I'm talking with co-workers I have issues just forming a sentence in a french way because I come up with the essence of the sentence in English. Compared that to for example numbers, which are like the first things that I learned when I discovered english, well for some reason these still make very little sense to me. You can have someone with a moderately thick accent talk about a specific subject and I'll follow along just fine, but have someone perfectly say $4.35 and I'll have to almost count on my fingers for some reason... Not that it answers the question though, but I always thought this was funny \\^\\^"
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dg0pjq | Why are so many successful companies and corporations willing to bend to the Chinese government? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because those companies need to expand to show growth. The market in China is almost four times larger than the United States. So it makes sense to sell products and services in that market. The problem is that to do so, they need to follow the guidelines of what is acceptable to the standards of the Chinese government. Most companies would rather follow those guidelines and sell in the Chinese market rather than stand up against the censors and lose out on the profits to a competitor willing to do so in its place. TL;DR: Money.",
"Money talks. The Chinese market is a huge market share and labor is so cheap, it makes sense to work with their government to utilize it for cheap operating costs and increased profits.",
"Money money money money money Money money money money money Money money money money money Money money money money money Money money money money money and MONEY!",
"Three big reasons. Which all come back to money. The first reason is just money. The Chinese economy is $15.54 trillion (US) - that's $15 540 000 000 *000* \\- and is second only to the US (which is $21.41 trillion). The entire world is about $80 trillion. This means that China is about 19% of the world. For small companies, there's enough business going somewhere else - but if you're a big company, not being in China might mean giving up 19% of your possible income. Which is a lot of money. The second reason is growth. The US economy isn't growing that fast - but China is. This means if you want to be a bigger company, the US won't help you there - but China will. The way we decide what makes a good business right now, growing matters - a business that is growing faster is better than one growing slower. China is a good place to grow. The third is unity. Most countries, if you fight with them them, might make things hard for you in their country. China will not let you do anything. The worst the US has ever done to a company is to split it up, or force it to do business through an American company. China has told companies they can not do business - at all - in China. Many times. Because of all of this, the Chinese government holds a lot of power when dealing with companies: they can say \"If you accept our way of doing things, you will get 20% more money, and more over time. If you don't, you will not do business in China. Ever.\" And for a long time, that's been a good deal. And if you, as one person, don't like it; there's not much you can do right now. Boycotts might work - but you're fighting against Chinese buyers. In order for a boycott to succeed, you would have to get enough people to match the number of Chinese people - which isn't easy. It will be interesting to see how the Blizzard \"Free Hong Kong Mei\" protests work, because that could cause China to block the game, cutting away some of the money Blizzard could make in China. But at least so far, nothing else has worked - because China holds a lot of money, and plays to win. Edit: fixed the amount - thank you [inflatablegenepool]( URL_0 ).",
"Public companies are only beholden to their shareholders, not their employees, customers, country of origin, or to any moral stance. This goes so far that the shareholders can sue the CEO if he / she acts outside their best interest. What is their best interest you ask? It's money. China is providing a lot of companies with cheap labor and access to its large market, and no matter what their employees, customers, or personal ethics may say, they're legally obligated to chase that filthy Chinese money."
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dh4hjz | Why are russian novels so long? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Much of it is because of translation issues - sometimes a concept that can be described by a single Russian word can't be translated directly word-to-word, and so the concept has to be explained, taking up more space. Another reason is serialization. *War and Peace*, a rather notable example of Russian novels being massive, was published as a serial, meaning Tolstoy got more money the longer he made it. Thus he was quite motivated to stretch it out."
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dhb7yl | Why is the drunk driving problem so big in U.S.A., when European countries have a much younger drinking age and not as high numbers? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We drive more. Euro cities have a walking/mass transit culture and we don't because we're huge. I'd wager drunk driving is much lower in a walking city such as new York. Nobody walks in a city like la. We are made up of suburbs and spread out cities and large expanses of rural areas.",
"Europeans have public transportation - and it’s culturally normal for the majority of citizens to use it regularly. Americans mostly either don’t have access to good public transport, or don’t want to use it. As a result we drive a LOT more miles in cars every day than Europeans do. That’s going to add up to a lot more drunk driving.",
"What source are you making this statement from, i never went to the USA but in my tiny country, Portugal, theres definitely a problem with drunk driving, most young and old people will pick up their cars after a heavy night of drinking. Also public transports are not open or are very limited during the night so its taxi or uber or sleep in the car until morning. We also have a lot of alcoholics that drive daily under the influence, so much so that its a common sight seeing old people ordering shots at 6 in the morning when the coffee shops open. We had 508 dead on the road in 2018 with a 10M population. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
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di16na | How do people have access to winter sports like luge and skeleton at a young enough age to become olympic level good? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They live near places where those sports are practiced (usually major ski areas) and have parents who can afford to buy them lessons and equipment.",
"Sled sports (luge, skeleton, etc.) a lot of times get their next crop of athletes by doing tryouts for young people in their area; almost always the kids doing the tryouts have never participated in any of these sports before. No one really independently gets into these sports or practices for them, its not really much of a public sport. The organizations for the sport will hold a variety of tryouts and offer to take some of the top performers on into the sport and their organization to start training from a young age. For athletes later in life, usually they are track athletes who didn't make it, and get hooked up into the sledding world and go through a rigorous training program after higher school or during/after college"
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dic2nq | Why is it I sometimes have a sudden urge to really focus and accomplish many tasks? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not an answer... But you can try some experimentation / documentation to try and find out what affects you personally. Keep a detailed journal of several factors and then judge how your focus levels are in relation to them. Items you may track: Sleep amount and quality, stress levels, outside stimulus (light, sound, environmental changes), work-load (energy consumption), food intake, including types and quality of food (things like how processed the food was, amount and types of sugar, proteins, fats), physical environment (home, work, bus, plane, etc), etc, etc, etc. For the subjective items, try to be consistent in how you rank them. Come up with a scale (1-10) and write down how you will define them so you don't drift or change over time. Something like: Stress level (1-10) 1 being perfectly calm, 5 being alert but not agitated, 10 being elevated heart rate, sweating, nervousness). Compile all of this data in tabular form (spreadsheet for example) where you can plot the data and try to find patterns. Are you exceptionally focused after a good night's sleep and quality food intake? Do you struggle when you have to travel alot or encounter outside stress? Patterns like these.",
"I don't agree with the ADD nonsense. I think you just had a moment of motivation and energy to focus and do those things. It happened to me last weekend when I decided to finally clean the crap out of my closet which has been a mess since I moved in 4 months ago. I am not even remotely close to having ADD. Never have. Sometimes you're just in the mood to do shit you didn't wanna do before. Everything isn't an issue or a disorder like others are making it seem. For me I realize when I get a lot accomplished throughout the day and fuel myself properly with good foods, I'm in a GREAT mood. Especially if I'm not sore or tired from training/lifting.",
"many books, many articles, many videos, many posts about getting in the ZONE or ZEN state People talk about ADD, Procrastination, having a fire lit up under your ass etc... How do you get yourself into the ZONE/ZEN state? < shrug > It is a magical place and if you figure it out that is great but I am not sure everything can be controlled/replicated, we are not machines. Me personally I have moments of greatness, I find them most often when under pressure or during discussion of complex things with multiple people I like to think it is my cycle.... I have times of contemplation/in-action and times of action Do I have ADD? maybe, do I procrastinate? Yes I'm 40 now and I am more often within 'in-action' time than 'action' time regardless of the deadline. I find I do my best work 'in the moment' and struggle and beat myself up when I am not in that moment. 'The work/action' phase is where you SEE all the progress/change/impact but without that 'in-action/contemplation' phase... I would think the 'action' phase would be less impactful I dont think I want to find myself always in that 'action' phase because I feel everything is cyclical and you need those highs and lows but the more important thing is to stay on a trajectory",
"Hormones. They effect men just as much as women and have a huge effect on focus and ambition levels. Most males do not realize they have a hormone cycle, just like women. The cycle and levels can get out of balance and cause binary mood changes from day to day. One day you will be lethargic and disinterested and the next you’ll be jumping out of bed ready to take on the world. Docs can check your testosterone levels, but many docs are hesitant to offer men hormone therapy, due to the current acceptability of demonizing masculinity. But if your hormone levels are off and it’s effecting your mood, it’s worth seeking a doctor willing to help.",
"One way to figure out how to harness it is to know where it is coming from. If I may ask you -- How long does it last for? Is in in periods of 4 days or more, feeling like that pretty consistently and other times not really at all? Or is it smaller bursts, like half a day or a few hours? When it happens do you feel very excitable, having racing thoughts like you cant keep up with them,have really high or elevated mood?"
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dicxi7 | Why does multiculturism work in canada, but fails in europe? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I dont agree with the statement that \"Canadian multicultural works\" It doesnt work if you are french, a native or an immigrant. You have huge split between french and english cultures, natives and minorities are enclined to isolate themselves in their communities. So I dont really see the unity you are speaking of.",
"Go to a big city in Europe. You'll see all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Everyone's getting along fine. White right wingers are just terrified little bitches. Once they grow up and get out of the house they'll realize people all just want the same thing."
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didmai | How do Animal Shelters get their animals? | I have a rescue pup that came from North Carolina. How did she get from North Carolina to a shelter in NJ? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lots get started as owner abandons or by the pound getting them. From there, lots of rescues work together shifting dogs around to try an even out numbers versus resources. A rescue i work with will go weeks or months, only taking in overflow dogs from other rescues. Then, one week, they will end up with 4 litters of puppies with the mom in a week. Simple answer, the rescues shift dogs around to prevent any single rescue from being overwhelmed."
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dilotm | Beyond ‘because it’s childish’ why is it that adults can’t have imaginary friends? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I mean, I guess that's what you do when you're thinking. You set up abstractions with different possible circumstances and play them out to their extremes. I wonder if a child's imaginary friend is an attempt at imitating social behaviors while alone?"
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disvmz | How does the talk show industry work? | Conan, Ellen, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Craig Ferguson, David Letterman, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Ed Sullivan etc. they all share one format but honestly I don´t get it, why are there so many of them, why do they all have a variaton of each other´s show name, and why does it seem to be so important for american culture? Is there a documentary or book in which i can learn about it? I´m very interested in it, from the aesthetic of these shows, to the history of the format | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There were other late-night talk shows before, but the modern shows can all basically trace their format and success to Johnny Carson and *The Tonight Show*, which ran from the early '60's until Carson retired in 1992. He sort of solidified the talk show format that's followed to this day - starting with a monologue based on current events with some quick one liners, then maybe a few recurring bits or sketches at the desk, and interviews with actors, politicians, authors, entertainers, etc., usually ending with a musical guest. It was designed to be a good variety show for people to watch at the end of the day - a little news, a little comedy, a little music, easy to sit around and doze to. But the reason there are so many shows now starts in the 80's, when David Letterman came onto the scene. Carson basically held a monopoly on the late-night format for decades - no competitor on another network ever had anywhere near his popularity and longevity. In the early 80's, along with some contract negotiations, Carson and his production team secured the timeslot that followed *The Tonight Show* and decided to have a similar late-night talk show to follow *Tonight* \\- the difference being that while *Tonight* still focused on appealing to adults of all ages, the following show, *Late Night* would focus towards young men, the age bracket that Johnny Carson didn't have as much appeal towards. David Letterman was hired to take on that slot, and his edgier, more biting style appealed to a younger audience than Johnny Carson and his \"safer\" approach. Those shows went together for about a decade, with everyone sort of understanding that Letterman would eventually succeed Carson when he retired, and take over the earlier show. Well come 1992 and Carson's retirement, that didn't exactly happen. NBC went with a \"safer\" choice - Jay Leno - to succeed Carson, instead of the edgier Letterman. Well, Letterman didn't take that so well, feeling cheated out of a job he'd been working towards for nearly a decade. So he moved to a competing network, CBS, and hosted a new show, *The Late Show*, which eventually got it's own later little sister show, *The Late Late Show.* Meanwhile, Leno took over *Tonight* and Conan O'Brien took over *Late Night*, expecting (as Letterman had) that he would succeed Leno eventually. Well, that didn't really happen either. Conan took over for Leno, Leno was given a new show immediately *before* Conan's timeslot, and ratings weren't the best. Eventually, after NBC suggested pushing his timeslot further back, Conan left the network for his own show on TBS, while Leno returned to *Tonight* and his eventual successor, Jimmy Fallon, took over *The Late Show*. And all of this showed other competing networks that the format worked, that there were a lot of comedians willing to cover a late-night desk, and that competition was possible. So ABC gave Jimmy Kimmel a show, Comedy Central competed pretty well with their more news-parody *Daily Show* and *Colbert Report* (Colbert eventually taking over for Letterman on CBS!) and a few other networks have their own late shows as well. Long story to get to my point, but the fact is: the networks all have their own shows because of a bunch of broken deals and a bunch of hosts moving channels, and because the format is cheap, easy to write for, and easy to watch. Several networks have two shows a night, with the later show geared towards a younger audience, and hosted by someone who's expected to succeed their predecessor on the earlier show - though history shows that isn't a guarantee. And if Fallon isn't your jam, you can tune in to his competitors who might be - Colbert, Kimmel, Conan, etc - or wait around to see if the later shows (like Seth Meyers and James Corden) are more your speed.",
"Most of them are on late at night, when not as many people are watching. It's a relatively cheap way to fill hours, as the host is typically the only expensive talent to pay and then other actors/celebrities are coming on for free (well, they have their travel/accommodations paid for) to promote their stuff. You don't need to be traveling all over the place shooting at different locations, so you can crank out a lot of episodes every year; most regular TV shows have like 10-20 episodes a year, whereas talk shows can have hundreds.",
"Talk shows in general. I lived with a woman who booked guests on talk shows and she said it’s all commercials. So every guest is selling something."
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dj5496 | The origin of drum names | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They were named by drummers and in my experience expecting anything a drummer does to make sense is about as pointless as expecting your drummer to show up sober to a gig. & #x200B; But I do know a couple of these:- & #x200B; Snare drums got their name from the wire that stretches around them that looks like a snare you would use to catch a rabbit, etc Hi-hats are called that because they are higher than the other drums and the way they lift looks like somebody lifting their hat Ride is a jazz term for keeping time - It got the name because the ride cymbal is used a lot to keep the time Bass drum should be pretty obvious - it plays the bass Tom-toms were apparently originally from asia where they were called tam-tams and at some point the name got changed. Crash cymbals I don't really know - I've always assumed it was just because you hit it harder.",
"Kick drum is colloquial. It's actually a Bass Drum. It's a bass drum because it has the deepest pitch like any bass instrument. & #x200B; A snare drum gets its name from the snares you stretch along the bottom of the drum. Its called a snare because they're little wires like you use in an snare to trap animals. A ride cymbal is a bigger/thicker cymbal used more for time keeping so its what you use to 'ride' along the beat. Crash cymbals are named for the noise they make. Same for smaller splash cymbals. There are are also China Cymbals which references being Chinese-style in their shape (inverted from what looks familiar to westerners). Hi-hats are an evolution of 'low boys' which is any cymbal you can hit with a foot pedal. It's 'high' in the sense that its raised up so you can hit it with your hands (like you never will hit a kick/bass drum with the stick) and the 'hat' comes from putting the two cymbals together and the pedal motion makes it look like tipping a hat. & #x200B; Supposedly 'Tom-tom' comes from India but a 'tam-tam' is a type of gong so something got lost in translation there. They are notable because they don't have snares like a snare drum. But are higher pitched than a bass drum."
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djtl52 | Why is the typed lower case "a" so different from the way we (at least in the USA) were taught to write it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both versions are one of many iterations of the letter \"Aleph\", which has been around for nearly 4000 years! In its earliest recognizable form it was what we would consider an upside down A, ∀. And if you squint enough, you can see it looks like a bulls head. In all that time, the letter has gotten stretched and rotated in different ways by different cultures, but mostly keeps the same form of a circle/triangle with 1 or 2 horns sticking out. The greeks used different fonts for different reasons, and had two common versions, \"A\" and \"a\" that you see on your screen. Those versions stuck around the best in western language. The \"a\" you actually write out is a latin version. It caught on because cursive highly prioritized letters that wrote from left to right in a single stroke. Cursive didn't really work well for printing presses and early typewriters, so the greek version stuck in print. So, like most things, the reason you write the latin version, and type the greek version, is because it's just easier that way.",
"What about the letter g? I know right now in this comment it's acting all normal but look at the title of this post",
"They are called the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The same applies to lowercase g or 𝑔 variations. The curve at the top likely comes from how you write the letter in cursive, dragging the pen up to the top of the letter and then back around again. seen here: 𝓰𝓪 You are right that the single story is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. It's simply a design choice, mostly because the \"single storey\" is easier and more natural to write, and the \"double storey\" helps differentiate \"a\" from lowercase \"o\" in tiny typesetting.",
"Partly it's fashion. Writing and typography both have fads and fashions just like everything else. There's also how we learn to handwrite and the tools we use. We use pencils and smooth flowing modern pens on smooth paper. Ye olde anciente pens like fountain pens, dip pens, and quills would often spatter if you turned them in a circle or run out of ink if you tried to make a longer mark; they were better at smaller curves and straighter lines. Chalk on slate was also rougher to write on than modern pens and paper. Fingers on tablets will also produce changes in letter shapes as we get more children learning to write like that. And so it goes",
"It has its roots in the early middle ages (and late roman era) There was one major form of script for educated scribes called \"uncial\" (which evolved into \"gothic\") was really popular in scriptoriums, because it was one of the fastest styles for a trained scribe to use when writing on pergament (very thin dried calf-skin). So this style was used a lot for important books, especially bibles. Since it was popular for bibles and important books it had a huge influence once printing became a thing. Meanwhile there were a couple of different cursive script for just handwritten letters and stuff. It was easier to learn and easier to tell apart when written by a sloppy (or poor) writer. These had their roots in roman handwriting, and when letterwriting became a popular pasttime during the early-modern era (17th century) the roman era was all the rage at the same time. So this script became influential for handwriting. Google \"uncial\" and \"new roman cursive\" to see how these styles looked.",
"Is it weird that I barely noticed this until now?",
"It’s simply the font choice. Some fonts use a double-storey ‘a’ (what you’re seeing) and others use a single storey ‘a’ like your handwriting example which is set in a font called Futura.",
"Uhhhhh, I'm almost 40, and I just had to click your link to remember what a lower case A looks like because I completely forgot. In my defense, I write in all capital letters, don't write by hand often or read handwritten things often. In fact, I think the only thing I've written by hand in the last year were checks.",
"I write capital J's with the line on top too! My mom, a school teacher, saw me do it and was like \"what the hell is that?\" Hahaha",
"[These are my \"a\"s throughout the years. Top one is the most recent. I unintentionally used the typed a when I was making my handwriting more \"rounded\"]( URL_0 )",
"I write the Greek style a - how it's typed. One of my elementary school teachers wrote them like that and I took note of how she did it when she wore on the chalk board."
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djvpgs | Where did the word "cosplay" come from, and why is it used in place of the word "costume" so frequently? Are they the same thing? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While most westerns use cosplays and costume in the same way, the origins are different. In Japan you not only dress as your favorite character, you behave like them as well - you play them. That's why it's a combination of costume and role play.",
"It comes from Japanese, who have a habit of shortening and connecting two words together - in this case costume + play - > cosplay.",
"It's a portmanteau of costume and roleplay. The original concept was to roleplay as the character rather than just bring yourself in a costume. But yeah, that meaning has been watered down over time, and these days people use it interchangeably with just costume."
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dkfmoq | What did Jean Paul Sartre mean by writing "Hell is other people"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"have you ever been around people? ever? that’s what he means Source: work in retail. hell is absolutely other people"
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dkr39k | Why did the Vietnamese War happen? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"France owned Vietnam from colonial era. France lost Vietnam to revolution during WWII. Commies started to infest Vietnam. Vietnam politically split between capitalism vs communism. America smelled the communist regime, and started a war!"
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dlhp0j | The Difference Between The Netherlands, Amsterdam, and Holland | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Amsterdam is a city, Holland is a region, and The Netherlands is a country. To give you some comparisons, Los Angeles is a city, California is a region (state), and the USA is a country. The name \"Holland\" is sometimes used to refer to the country as a whole.",
"The Netherlands: A country located in western Europe. Holland: a common name for the country, but more accuratly is used for two districts in netherlands: south Holland and North Holland. As most rhings that the Netherlands is famous for is usually in either of the two hollands most people associate them with the country as a whole. Imagine if the US was often called \"California\". Amsterdam: the capital of the netherlands."
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dljb6j | How do people decipher fictional languages with seemingly random and unfamiliar symbols? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If it's an actual language then the symbols aren't random. Most commonly, it will be based off of, or be very similar to an existing , real language. Once the association is made, you can use the known patterns of the real language to work on deciphering the fake one. If it is completely novel, or its connections to real languages are unknown, it will still have patterns that can be analyzed. Deciphering it would use the same tools and methods people use to decipher real languages that are currently unknown. It's mainly based on analyzing patterns and comparing them to things we know.",
"Conlangs or [constructed languages]( URL_2 ) are planned by an author or writers instead of having evolved naturally like our own languages. They may look random, but they’re anything but. They’re often created translation in mind. So keys and sometimes whole translation dictionaries exist. Many times the creators of Conlangs will borrow from existing symbols and [sounds]( URL_1 ) of other languages. [Klingon]( URL_0 ) is probably the best known example of a conlang. > Dr. Okrand did not base Klingon on any particular language, but drew on his knowledge of how language works to construct a wholly new language. During filming, he coached the actors on pronunciation, and then amended Klingon to match not only their mispronunciations, but also changes made to the subtitles after the lines were recorded. Dr. Okrand’s description of the language he created was published in 1985 as The Klingon Dictionary. > Most use the writing system that Dr. Okrand devised, but some use pIqaD, a writing system based on the glyphs used in set decoration."
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dlpta3 | Why is it attorneys general And not attorney generals? Brothers in law and not brother in laws? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Same reason we say \"green trees\" and not \"greens tree.\" In English, we only pluralize the noun, and not any adjectives (or adjective phrases) that modify it. The weird thing with the examples you picked - and what makes them sound a little strange - is that the modifiers come *after* the noun, which is pretty rare in English. But the rule isn't that the last thing gets pluralized, it's that the noun gets pluralized, wherever it sits. The Attorney General is an attorney, and \"General\" is the modifier saying that he is the attorney of the general public, or the government (rather than a noun meaning a military leader). So to pluralize we say Attorneys (more than one lawyer) General (modifying these attorneys' job). Same with brothers in law - they are my brothers, and we modify it by saying \"in-law\" to distinguish from a blood relationship. There aren't many phrases like that in English, but the ones that do exist follow that same rule. God Almighty is one (although I guess \"almighty God\" is used as well), but a polytheist might say \"gods almighty.\" I have two grandparents who taught at college and have since retired - they are \"professors emeritus\" rather than \"professor emerituses.\" It can be a little weird, but it's correct as far as the grammar goes.",
"Generally, you should make a plural of the thing you're pointing at. This is my brother, according to the law (we're related by marriage). This is my other brother, also according to the law. Together, they're brothers, according to the law, or brothers-in-law. The law shouldn't be pluralized, because it's not the thing you're pointing at, and there's only one law in question (the one that makes you all family). Similarly, the attorney is of the general type, and secretaries of state serve only one state (whether that state is part of one nation or not).",
"Because they are attorneys who have a general (I.e. overall, i.e. public) responsibility. And because they are brothers... English (unlike Spanish, French or Serbian) does not require adjectives to take the number (or gender or case) of the noun it modifies."
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dlwemu | Why are tips so important in America? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the 'states, servers are paid less than the minimum wage. The goal is to use tips to incentivize workers to be better to guests and *earn* tips. Unfortunately, the size of a tip depends much more on the quality of the guest than the quality of the worker.",
"Because our servers don’t get paid a living wage, or even minimum. Average rate of pay is around $2-3/hr and restaurants expect them to survive off tips to make a wage. It’s a shit system but one that won’t be changing soon without a lot of effort. Ultimately you’re not saying “this wasn’t exceptional” when you don’t tip, you’re saying “you don’t deserve to be paid”."
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dm1c1n | What was it about 60s-70s rock that made it so iconic? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That’s when rock music first became popular from tv and radio, then people showed their kids and such. Also it’s only the good songs that people remember. There are thousands of songs from that time which are terrible, but we only hear the best ones.",
"That baby boomers are driving a lot of that. This is their music, and they have deeply embedded it into society. Are the Beatles more iconic than U2? Or do they just have more fans? Technology also played a role. Long-playing, high fidelity records, 8-track and cassette tapes, FM radio, those technologies all came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s and made it easier to listen to high-quality music in more places. Finally, starting in the 1990s, music became available over the internet. No longer were you limited to what the radio thought was good, no longer did you have to drive to a record store and physically sift through records and plop down $15 on one song you like and a dozen others you have never heard before. This has fragmented the music market, people are exposed to more music, can listen before they buy and pick and choose what they like. Jayzee and Beyonce might be big, but they are not Elvis or Michael Jackson big, we will probably never see that sort of thing again.",
"The fact that almost every band brought something different, innovative or experimental. A lot of bands from the 60s/70s are still considered as highly influential: for example, King Crimson is still mentioned as one of the most influential bands for Prog Rock/Metal.",
"Is it iconic, or is it nostalgic? Or is it iconic *because* it's nostalgic?",
"Because people from that decade were the first to engage in a level of media saturation that was unknown before, so they set the standard. I am not saying the music was bad, I definitely love a lot of it, but they got to claim that the defining characteristics of that music is what makes music good. I think it is more up to debate for that, particularly in the case of 15 minute songs with five different solos.",
"It was innovative since the technology to create the sounds had only just occurred, there was a new audience for the music and the people creating the music were working for small companies which also had only recently been established so weren't relying upon formulas to create the \"pop\" music."
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dm5hig | Is there ever an actual benefit to signing away your 5th amendment rights and speaking to a detective? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. *If* you didn't do it and *if* the detective believes you and *if* you aren't guilty of any other crime and *if* the detective doesn't have to try to catch you being guilty of something to meet some quota it *might* save both you and the detective some time. The probability that it'll instead end up costing years of your life is too high to be worth it, statistically speaking."
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dm6gkg | Did people in the past really speak as formally as depicted in books from before the 20th century? Were educated people then much more adept at English language, or is this just the style of novels written at the time? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes and no. Educated folks would have taken \"elocution\" classes, and wealthy folks would have been brought up with etiquette and elocution as part of their education as well. Elocution is the art of speaking in a formal manner, and etiquette is the art of behaving formally. Unedecuated and poorer folks would have spoken much more simply, like how we do today. **However**, just the act of writing or receiving a letter was something of a formal event. People really did their best to write formally.",
"Language changes over time. We tend to treat older things as more formal and newer things as more casual. Older speech frequently sounds more formal because we base our idea of formal speech on how people used to talk. They didn’t have a better command of English, they just spoke a slightly different version of English. They certainly spoke that version better than we speak it, but the reciprocal is also clearly true.",
"I would probably add that what you are observing is a form of \"survivors bias\". Those with the ability and means to write and publish a book are more likely to be well educated and upper-class while those without means simply wouldnt have written and been published and/or the inferior voice and writing style would dictate publishers would cease publication and those volumes would be lost to entropy. I think the best example of folks not writing like this would be Dickens, especially compared to a contemporary like Bronte. Where Dickens had experience across the socio-economic landscape, using that knowledge to create such phenomenal works as \"great expectations\" works beloved by the wealthy and the poor alike Bronte's upper class upbringing limits her understanding of the lower classes, therefore members of the upper-classes are more likely to identify with the language."
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dm6szw | What did Nietzsche mean with "God is dead"? | I tried to look it up but never really under stood any of the explanations. Thank you in advance :) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To my understanding, it was essentially a statement on the consequences of the age of enlightenment. The age of enlightenment started a little before the 18th century and continued until the end of that period, and it was a time where high society placed great value on reason, logic, philosophy and the scientific method. Before then, religion had a strangle-hold grasp on Europe, and the Christian deity (the same one as in this quote) was central to life. The age of Enlightenment rapidly undercut religion, and advanced important concepts we take for granted today like separation of church and state, tolerance and liberty. Perhaps most importantly, the age of enlightenment transitioned the western world from a state of attributing most unexplainable things to the work of god to a state of applying the scientific method for the sake of determining more believable and realistic explanations. Nietzsche used the line \"God is dead\" to rather dramatically describe that religion, specifically Christianity, was no longer necessary. He believed that as a result of the age of enlightenment, the sheer concept of god would stop existing. Rather accurately, he predicted that as a result of the popularisation of science, religion's grasp on society would begin to wane. However, there was a greater context to this, which explains why he was quite so over the top about the whole thing. Nietzsche believed that morality only occurred due to religious indoctrination. He thought that as more and more people accepted the fact god didn't exist, it would lead to more and more people accepting that life is what you make of it, and in turn would result in nihilistic chaos. God is dead was therefore a warning. Although Nietzsche viewed the death of religion as a good thing, he decided that humans would need to continue with caution, so as to find an alternate source of morals. His final, uncompleted project was going to be 'the revaluation of values' - he seemed to have intended to write a new source book from which the evolved human - the overman in his terms - would draw its morals in a post-religion world. I found this dissertation on the whole topic, which is 158 pages long but seems like it'd make a really interesting read. URL_0",
"Modernity has killed religion. People no longer find meaning in god and have to create their own which we kind of suck at. Nietzsche predicted that the death of God would be followed by a never-ending Pendle of terror between fascism and nihilism and he predicted this around 40 years before WW1 we are currently at the ending of the first cycle of nihilism and we can only pray that whatever comes next will lose momentum instead of gaining it.",
"In the past religion or god was capable of giving life meaning to people. Religion was capable of justifying anything, which means as long as you have faith, life was justified. As humans started moving into the age of enlightenment religion lost its place. Even if religion still existed, society did not exist for its sake. Nietzsche is largely focused on the question of \"what now\". How do we move forward now that we destroyed the thing that justified our existence. We cant go back to religion. Empiricism and logic have already killed it. We cant find solace in those things though, because empirically our lives are meaningless. So what now, what sacred games will we have to invent?",
"My understanding was that he meant that Western civilization no longer conceives of itself as beholden to the ontological explanations of Western Christianity. In particular, stressing that Western Christianity in any case gives birth to that which brings its ruin. If you read The Gay Science he makes an allegory about stages in human self-imagination IIRC as a Lion, a Dragon, and a tiny child. The Lion is righteous and committed to what is good, the Dragon perverts that and the child is willing to shake it all off and create new fantasies.",
"Simplest answer is that humans outgrew the need for religious fairy tales to provide us answers about the world."
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dmx3z9 | I remember how amazing it felt as we went from the 80s to the 90s, and how newsworth it was entering the 00s from the 90s, but now, as we're entering the 20s it feels very lackluster. Is that just me, or does time just not matter as much to people anymore? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sort of guessing here... I don't think it's time specifically. I think it has to do with how novelty works. The first time we experience anything new, it tends to be very memorable (first love, first car, etc.) and the times after that not so much. If we've been through something too many times we can even start to develop a \"been there done that\" attitude toward it. I suspect younger people might consider entering the 20's as a big occasion just like the 90's felt for you."
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dn9o0r | What filmmaker, screenwriter, director, movie producer do exactly. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Screenwriter writes the script, or adapts an existing work into a script. Director is in charge of the creative vision of the film and calls the shots on most of the day to day stuff on set. Producer is in charge of the financial, legal and other logistical aspects of the movie. In a roundabout way you can think of a producer as the Emperor and the Director as Darth Vader."
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dna3yn | How does exploring space compare to exploring the depths of the oceans in terms of cost/benefit? If we could only explore one, which would be considered "better" to invest our resources in and why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Space has no limits. Even if we haven’t ruined the climate yet, it’ll only be another couple hundred years before we overcrowd the oceans."
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dnzk0o | - Why is ‘Colonel’ spelled that way, and pronounced so differently. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"*Colonel* entered the English language in the 16th century from the French word, *coronelle*, which itself came from the Italian word *colonnello*, which in turn came from the Latin word *columnella,* meaning a column of soldiers; so a *coronelle* was the commander of a **column** of soldiers. The French adapted the pronunciation of word for their language, and changed the \"L\" to an \"R\" making *colonello* into *coronel*. In time, the English shortened the pronunciation of the word from 3 syllables to 2, going from *co-ron-el to ker-nel,* but never changed the \"L\" to \"R\" when written, so spoken, it's *ker-nel,* but on paper, it's still *colonel.*"
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doncue | Why dont all states in the US share the same laws? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Constitution reserves certain powers as nation. Unnamed powers are left to the States to decide.",
"It’s right in the name: “The United States of America.” Many individual states joined together. Not one state then carved into provinces.",
"The U.S. As a whole has a lawmaking body, The Congress, laws they make are national laws. Each state also has their own lawmaking bodies, to address concerns unique to the state."
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doned4 | Why are some colors said to be "warm colors", while other colors are said to be "cool colors"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's all associations. When you imagine red or yellow, you think of fire, when you see blue you think of ice. Just like that.",
"your brain likes to categorize things and put them in boxes, so similar things become associated with each other, fire is hot, fire is also red/orange, snow is cold, snow is white/blue depending on lighting, so the color becomes associated with the temperature, so things like red/orange/yellow can be perceived as warmer and things like blues are cooler"
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dorgaq | Is someone willing to explain me the differences between Boomers,Millenials,Generation X and Generation Z? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Boomers were born between the end of World War II and the mid-sixties, which means they came of age during the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Television isn’t new to most of them (though the oldest Boomers remember when their family got their first TV), but the Internet is. The looming global threat for most of them was the Cold War, which they lived through. Desegregation isn’t entirely new to them, but our current level of diversity is. Boomers are named after the post-WWII “baby boom” following the return of American GIs. (A double-digit percentage of the population was born *before* the end of World War II, and they’re generally called the Silent Generation, or Silents. They came of age during desegregation, the beginning of the Cold War, and the transition from radio to television. Despite the name, they were arguably the generation that brought about most of the social change of the 1960s for which the Boomers received credit.) We GenX’ers were born between the mid-sixties and 1980, which means we came of age during the 1980s and 1990s. Television is an old medium to us, and we’re more-or-less unfazed by diversity, but we were the first generation to widely access the Internet as young adults. We were also the first generation to widely use cell phones as young adults, though not smartphones (and some of us remember pagers!). We saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but not the utopia that was supposed to follow. The term “Generation X” was coined in the early 1990s to describe the alleged societal alienation that inspired our music, fashion, art, etc. Millennials were born between 1980 and the mid-nineties, which means they came of age during the first decade of the 2000s (hence the name “millennial”). They were the first generation to grow up with the Internet. 9/11 was a formative event in almost every American millennial’s life, and about half of them are old enough to remember when the Berlin Wall fell, but they weren’t around for the scariest parts of the Cold War and diversity is normal for most of them. Generation Z is the term used to describe folks born from 1997 to the present day, and most of them haven’t come of age yet. The name comes from the fact that Millennials are sometimes called Generation Y, and that’s the next letter in the alphabet. They’re the first U.S. generation since colonization to be minority-white. My guess is that the current political environment will be what shapes their transition into adulthood, but climate change will be the real crisis they face. They’re also the first generation to grow up using broadband Internet and smart mobile devices. In the words of Louis Armstrong, “they’ll know much more than I’ll ever know.”"
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dour86 | Can somebody explain why the central-american civilizations shown in the post below didn't connect as much to each other, compared to their counterparts overseas? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There were actually [more connections]( URL_0 ) than the map implies. They controlled smaller areas, but I suspect that was because of terrain and not any other failings. All the big old world civs had easy water transport on rivers or the Med, didn't have to hack roads through jungle mountains, and had animals for bulk transport. In ancient Mesoamerica, if you want to go somewhere else, you're walking. EDIT: Fixed phone posting goofs.",
"Well, there's a couple issues. Meso-America and the Andean regions have rough, unforgiving terrain. High mountains, dense jungle, and rivers that were difficult to navigate. So civilizations tended to congregate around valleys and the coasts. Secondly, the only large, domesticated beast of burden they had was the llama. They're good at navigating the terrain, but they can't carry very much. Certainly not as much as camels, oxen, elephants, and horses used in the old world. Nor can you ride them. So all travel had to be done on foot. Use of llamas also never spread outside Andean regions. Hence the reason why the Inca Empire was so much larger than the others. Additionally, while they had invented the wheel, it was only used on a small scale, as a novelty toy. They never applied it to carts or carriages. Not that they had any animals to pull them. All this combined to make long distance travel difficult. North American native communities did have more contact with each other. The terrain was more forgiving and they had more navigable rivers available to them. A lot of long distance travel would have been done by boat rather than walking. Trade was common, with Mississippian cities like Cahokia having routes as far as the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico."
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doxwha | Why do women’s pants have a lack of real pockets? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This one is easy. The patriarchy and the fashion industry need us to buy more things to hold our stuff. Purses, back packs etc."
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doynmm | This USA culture joke by sheldon cooper on the big bang theory show | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I assume it has something to do with [blackface]( URL_0 )?"
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dozue0 | Why did Europeans have to go to the East to get spices? Wasn't there anything they could preserve their food with? Didn't they have salt and sugar? | How did they manage to preserve their food before they got their hands on Asian spices? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One, the spices they wanted are all native to Asia and two, Europeans didn't want spices solely (or even primarily) to preserve their food. They mainly wanted spices for their flavor and supposed (and sometimes actual) health benefits. And no, they did not have sugar. Sugarcane is also native to India.",
"Spices is not there to preserve the food they are there to make it taste better. So your second question is based on a mistaken premise. Salt could be extracted in Europe and you could grow sugar canes in warm location but not in most part of Europe. There is a reson that a lot of it was grow in the Caribbean in and exported to Europe but you could grow it in other warm places would work too. Today a lot of sugar is grown in Europe as sugar beet. Sugar fas firs exacted from them in 1747 and large scale growing started in the 19th century. So large amount of European sugar is lager then the age of exploration. Do you use other spices then salt and sugar? If you do you have the answer why the was imported. There is other spices that you can grow in Europe but not black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and other then popular spices that was imported from the east. Initially spices was not something for the common man but a luxury product that rich people used in food in large part to show to other that that they could afford it. You can compare it to luxury cars, expensive cloth brands and other stuff that people use to show there wealth to impress other people. People was not different in the past.",
"Spices are not used do preserve food. Salt is. Spices are used to increase the flavor of foods. They primarily grow in tropical climates, and many are specifically native plants to Asia that were domesticated there. None of Europe is tropical and only the Mediterranean is sub tropical. So it have very few spices that could grow natively, and to grow them at all domestically would require greenhouses. As for Sugar, that is a plant not native to Europe. It is also a tropical plant, and so was not available for Europeans natively. The ability to produce it from things like Sugar Beats did not exist yet and before trade with tropical regions for sugar was not available. During that period they use things like Birch Sap, honey, and fruits to sweeten things."
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dp5rnw | Why do people say "quote unquote [the quote]" rather than "quote [the quote] unquote?" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think it allows the listener to understand that \"everything I say next belong in the quote\", rather than listening intently just to hear the 'endquote' in order to then process what the quote was."
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dphyzp | How does an organization like the MLB enforce a lifetime ban placed on a fan? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The primary purpose of bans like this, whether it is a sports league or your local liquor store, isn't to prevent someone from coming back. The purpose is to make it a crime to come back. All they really want to is for people not to make trouble...if you come back and behave, mission accomplished, they don't really care. But if they do make trouble, they are facing criminal charges just for being there, on top of anything else they might have been doing.",
"Basically... the don't really actively enforce it, because catching someone that really wants to get in can be near impossible. However, when you get kicked out and banned, if you try to come back and do get caught, you may face some serious legal issues, as part of getting kicked out you agree and sign paperwork that says if you do come back its not gonna turn out well. In practicality, it apparently works good enough for people not to attempt to sneak in it appears There's lots of articles on this as well, it seems to come up ever once in a while when there is some notable ban, here's one below URL_0",
"Also, MLB operate a large quantity of robotic mosquitoes that systematically sample the blood of every visitor and then form a DNA profile. They share this with NFL and NBA and between them they hold the largest such database in the US apart from the one the Illuminati have from all the microchips embedded in pumpkin-spiced latté cups.",
"I worked security at a few venues that enforced bans on some of the more colorful locals. Generally it just means that they've been made aware they are banned, and security has their picture. If they get caught in the venue again, they'll end up with a trespassing citation. Mostly nobody tries *that* hard to keep people out. Troublemakers always make more trouble if they come back, and when you catch them again you can hand them off to the cops for a fat fine."
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dpj2yw | Why is the color blue typically designated for males and pink for females? Is this biological or something humans designated many generations ago? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just cultural trends. 100 years ago it was the opposite. With the same logic. Pink for boys and blue for girls.",
"Very much cultural. Prior to WWII, pink was actually considered a manly colour and blue was for girls. Then Hitler decided he was going to brand gay people with pink triangles and we decided pink was too girly for boys.",
"Pink was considered a suitable colour for baby boys because it was a softer version of the obviously ‘manly’ colour of red. Blue was considered a suitable colour for girls because it symbolised purity with its association with the Virgin Mary."
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dptvbu | Why can't government pay health care providers' annual operating cost direct and solve healthcare crisis? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They can. Many countries do, in various ways. In the US they can't because of politics. Also I believe the rules of this reddit ban loaded questions and not being nice, so I can't really give a more detailed explanation.",
"What you're describing is called universal healthcare. It already exists in some form or another in almost every country on Earth. Assuming you're talking about the United States, several candidates in the Democratic presidential primary are proposing some version of this very thing.",
"They can. This would basically be a nationalized system, and is similar to how the U.K NHS works. The NHS is slightly different because the Hospitals are actually owned by the government, but in a practical sense they are the same."
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dqa114 | Who were the freemasons and what did they do? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is an organization that exists to this day. It was founded in the 14th or 15th century based on a tradecraft known as *stonemasonry* (which is based on designing and building structures, buildings, sculptures, etc. using stone as the main material). Like other trades, stonemasonry has different levels of mastery (Apprentice, Journeyman, Master). Freemasons, dating back to the 14th or 15th century, saw a sort of religious or mythological symbolism to this trade and developed this sort of religious free thought movement based on that along with other religious scripture. The levels of mastery (Apprentice, Journeyman, Master) sort of became their own ranks of enlightment/status level within the Freemason Lodges. It only allows men (it is a *fraternal* organization), and traditionally members were not allowed to discuss religion or politics at the meetings, though they do have to confess belief in a *Supreme Being* to become members. There is another movement, called *Continental Freemasonry* that has kind of made its own rules - some of these Continental Freemason lodges do not have those restrictions on political discussion, for instance. Even though it has a lot of rituals and a sort of religious dogma to it, the members are not necessarily Christian, Muslim, etc. The \"Supreme Being\" is not the god of any one religion, though it *could* be. Because of that, a lot of mainstream churches, especially the Catholic Church, condemns the Freemason Society. What do they do? Well, it's sort of a combination of a social club for men to get together and discuss and solve issues, and a charity organization, though charity is *not* their number one goal. Their whole philosophy revolves around studying morality and ethics and then using those lessons to make their members better people. They focus on improvement - beginning with the individual (the member who joins), which in turn can result in improvement of society as a whole. As an example, many lodges have invested money into improving their communities, providing scholarships to students, help fund drug rehabilitation programs, etc.",
"Freemasonry is a fraternal organization which operates like a service club. I like to say that they're kind of a less showy Rotary club. The most prominent group of Masons are the Shriners, who run children hospitals all over the world.",
"r/freemasonry is a good place to ask, too.",
"As a side note, we don’t recruit, which is why you often don’t hear much considering how old the fraternity is. I don’t know if any of the previous commenters are Masons, but I am, if you have any more specific questions. Someone above mentioned some lodged allowing female members. No recognized lodge will admit women as members, however, as someone mentioned above, there is the Order of the Eastern Star, and they do accept women and men. The lodges that do accept women are considered “irregular” lodges, and members not recognized by the majority of the fraternity."
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dqg05e | Why do different languages each have their own version of the same names? | Why is Joseph not Joseph everywhere? When did he become Giuseppe? Who decided that Guillaume should be William? When hearing a new name, why does a culture make its own version of it instead of letting every name stay at its root? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Names begin as a single name in a parent language like Latin and will be spread throughout the geographical area where that language is spoken (in the case of Latin, most of Western Europe.) However, languages change gradually over time, with speakers slowly but surely changing the pronunciation rules of individual letters/sounds. The interesting thing about those changes is that they tend to occur consistently across the entire language, instead of in small pockets. The names end up being pronounced differently because the descendent languages have changed how they pronounce the original sounds of the name. Often spelling used to change to match pronunciation, which introduces another way for names to drift. As far as names adopted from other languages: remember that languages do not share the same sounds as each other. Many languages employ sounds that speakers of other languages simply cannot say correctly. Thus, many names couldn’t be adopted directly even if the adoptive speakers wanted to do so. As to the idea of “why don’t they keep it the same?” — that’s treating a language like it’s a conscious entity. It’s not: a language is simply the sum total of everyone who speaks it. If everyone hears a certain pronunciation, they will follow suit. There is no overarching control over how the language changes.",
"Have you ever been to a foreign country and had someone mispronounce your name? It's not that they all sit down and decide on how to mispronounce it, they pronounce it as well as they can, with the sounds their language uses. Not all languages use every combination of sounds, and something like a name gets a regional version that sounds good and pronouncable to the locals. This is so pronounced with names because many names are very old, old enough that the language you speak sounded very, very different when the name got popularized by, for instance, the bible. In the time since then, languages have changed a lot, and the names with them. Joseph or Michael were not originally pronounced the way you think of as the \"right\" way, the reason you think so is that that's how they are pronounced in your own region.",
"Because languages were spoken rather than written for most people in most of history. You will see languages undergo various sound changes, rather consistently, over time. So if you take English, French, and Spanish, and take Latin root words, you will see a consistent pattern. You can do the same with German as well, leading to other differences (especially in French vs English, where the ruling classes spoke Germanic languages initially in northern France but quickly adopted French while retaining their own pronunciation quirks). So, as a simple example, the English word “stranger”. It’s etranger in French, and extranjero in Spanish (the x is a similar sound to an s, though not the same; that’s another change). English keeps the s but not the e, French keeps the e but not the s, and Spanish keeps both. Stephen/Etienne/Esteban (Stephanus). Strangle/etrangler/estrangular (strangulare). Is/etre/estar (esse, but drawing from third person singular est). Guard/ward and Guillaume/William are northern French/Germanic pairs, and Johann/John/~~Iago~~Juan/Ian/Jean are all different variations of the same thing in German, English, Spanish, Scots, and French (from Latin Iohannes). Once you see this, it becomes obvious that there are patterns. Not perfect maps, but patterns nonetheless."
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dqhs6x | why are Wales, Scotland and England considered 'nations'? Are they not just areas of the UK? | If areas of the UK are considered nations, should the same not apply to US States, Swiss cantons or Italian regions? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Things like this depend on how exactly they came to be setup. I dont know how the canton system works, i know its very devolved, high administrative autonomy. The US states were formed intentionaly and with somewhat arbitrary borders to be administrative units of the emerging USA. My detailed knowledge of this is lacking. The difference with England, Wales and Scotland (and Eire too for that matter) is that these were fully independant kingdoms for a long time before unification. Looking back maybe 1500 years here to the early middle ages. They had their own crowns and thrones. Speaking of the Scotland/England unification this was only politically possible because the same guy inherited both crowns and combined the lines. (1603) The kingdoms officially unified a little later and the crowns were merged but the kingdoms remain, just combined under 1 throne. By 1700 we were the Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged the kingdoms of Scotland and England.(which had already absorbed Wales). By 1800 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 1922 we became just United Kingdom with the departure of Ireland (South). (UK perspective)",
"The words \"nation\" and \"country\" don't have strict definitions. Generally speaking, the concept of a \"nation\" is like a shared identity. The concept is closely related to that of a country or state because so many countries are \"nation-states\", that is states which have formed around a national identity, or national identities which have formed around a state. But sometimes other things are called nations despite not exactly being nation-states. The Kurdish nation for example is a nation because it's a people group with a common identity, but they don't have a state. Or perhaps the Native American nations in the US and Canada, which have some autonomy in some cases but don't have independent states. The UK has overlapping ideas of nation-hood. I'd say that most people identify primarily as being English, Scottish or Welsh more so than being British. Most people consider those to be their national identities (there are statistics to back this up from the 2011 census). Then there's Northern Ireland which is even more complicated when it comes to national identity, basically split between Irish, Northern Irish and British. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also legally distinct, with different laws and different governments involved in their administration. Yes, in other countries subdivisions like that might be called states, provinces, regions, etc, but the UK calls its subdivisions nations or countries. There isn't a consistent international convention for what countries call their subdivisions, so as confusing as it can be sometimes, there's nothing stopping the UK from calling it's main subdivisions countries/nations in addition to the UK being a country/nation in the sense of being a sovereign state.",
"The word nation does not have a universal, single definition, and it doesn't imply sovereignty. A nation is community of people organized on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, and culture. A nation and a state can be the same, but they don't have to be. There's also no single, universal definition for a state or canton or province or region or whatever. The definition rests in the relationship between the sovereign state and its parts. The relationship between the Swiss Federal government and the Swiss cantons is unique to Switzerland and is not comparable to the relationship between Germany and the German States or Spain and Spain's autonomous regions. There's also a big difference between unitary states, devolved states, and federal states. The U.S. and Switzerland are federal states, meaning their constitution explicit grant some degree of sovereignty to the cantons and states, respectively, and the relationship between them and the federal governments are spelled out. Unitary states and devolved states don't have this. Their political subdivisions only have autonomy, if any, because the central government allows it, and they can usually revoke it if they want. The United Kingdom is a sovereign nation state. Native American tribes in the U.S. are nations, but they are only semi-sovereign. The Kurds are a nation, but they have no state at all, and instead are spread around several different countries. England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a sovereign, independent state. England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are not."
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dqi3q5 | What is it that makes the pitch similar in both Celtic and Arabic music, and why is this pitch unusual in other western music? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not quite sure of the similarities you are noticing in Celtic and Arabic music. However, I can answer how Arabic music is different than western music and it has to do with how we organize sound. In Western music we organize an octave (the distance between two pitches of halved or doubled wavelengths, like A 440 hz and A 880 hz) into 12 chromatic pitches. We then organize them into a series of half steps (one chromatic step away) and whole steps (two chromatic steps away) called a scale, most often a scale with 8 tones including the note an octave above the root note. In arabic music, the octave is divided into what we call 'quarter tones'. Meaning their octave instead of having 12 half steps, has 24 quarter steps. The results in having far more notes to work with and more combinations of notes to use to create melodies. Arabic scales known as maqams also utilize different sequences of quarter, half, and whole steps to create interesting tonal sequences which we hear as oddly chromatic and mysterious due to our much more rigid system of notation. I hope this helps.",
"I'm not exactly an expert, but nobody else seems to be answering here, so... The only thing I can think of that really unites traditional Arabic music and Celtic folk music is that both heavily rely on drones--where a unharmonized melody plays over a sustained pedal, either a single tone or a perfect interval. Think bagpipes, where you get a lilting melody over that sustained bwahh sound. But as far as pitch goes, they're not very similar. Celtic folk music developed alongside sacred church music since Christianity first hit the British isles, and as far as I know has used \"western\" scales for as long as musical notation has existed. Celtic folk music is more likely to use [modes]( URL_1 ) other than major or minor (in particular dorian and mixolydian), which gives it a less \"classical\" and more \"folky\" sound, but it's still using western scales and tuning. Arabic music, on the other hand, doesn't use western scales, but [maqams]( URL_0 ) that use intervals and tuning systems very different from the western 12-tone chromatic scale. They contain perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves like western scales, but everything else is very different.",
"I'm from Ireland, And i had always heard the Celtic nations Ireland,Scotland, Wales Breton Cornwall where left relatively untouched from Roman formations, The origin the Celtic nations in Ireland spread eastward along the African Mediterranean coast and north through the Iberian peninsula and across the channel to the isles, The argument is the music is a relic from the cradle of the western civilisations which is now the Arab world. & #x200B; Here is a link to a documentary on the topic [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"One of the earliest styles of Irish singing is Sean nós singing Wiki URL_0 Example URL_2 This may help answer some of your questions URL_3 For a comparison against a Yemeni female singer URL_1",
"Just to make it explicit since the top answers haven't yet done so: \"pitch\" most commonly refers to the frequency of a note, i.e. 440Hz A. The pitch of a song then refers to the fundamental note of the scale used by the song, i.e. C major (the pitch is C and the scale is the major scale) What you probably meant to ask about is \"scale\", which refers to the relative distance between the notes. I'm not sure this applies to Celtic music, but certain Western scales have notes very close together in positions that are similar to Arabic scales, which can give the temporary impression that you are listening to Arabic music. Arabic scales, as others have explained, have a lot more notes in an Octave and therefore those notes are closer together. (Note when I talk about distance and \"close together\" I'm referring to pitch).",
"Ancient people from the middle east made it all the way to Ireland. Some people say the celtic peoples were middle eastern, while others say they just traded. For example: URL_0 I've always assumed that accounts for the music similarities.",
"Some have explained in really good detail, the simple answer is they use notes that would be inbetween our notes.",
"Slightly related but off topic question: why are Arabic fonts on various websites so tiny compared to English? Don't they have a hard time to read? I've seen this everywhere on mobile as well as PC.",
"I remember a bagpipe presenter come to my middle school. He told us the bagpipe originally came from Jordan. I thought that was really cool. The bagpipe was like one of those white instruments but then I learned it’s origins were in Arab. Not an answer to your question but similar"
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dqrdzp | Survivorship Bias and how to apply it | I hear about survivorship bias, and I hear examples like "Bill Gates dropping out of college is survivorship bias". I don't really know how they correlate, or how to think of things with that in mind. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Survivorship bias is coming to conclusions based on what limited data survived or only on examples of people who succeeded. If you look at a collection of arrowheads you would think that every arrowhead was made from stone, but the dominance of stone arrowheads in our collections isn't due to stone arrowheads being the only type. There are a few examples of wooden arrowheads but wood decays over time so very few have *survived* for us to find. For things like \"these traits make people successful\" they often list traits that successful people have as though those traits are what lead to the success, but that ignores that there are far more people with those traits who have failed. The vast majority of new businesses will fail within 5 years, and those that survive may have done something right but are more likely to have just been lucky. If you look at a bunch of lucky samples and try to find a trend you'll draw bad conclusions because you've ignored the identical samples that didn't turn out the same and aren't around for you to study.",
"Survivorship bias is the idea that if we only look at the remaining subjects, it may skew our data. For instance, when armoring planes in WW2, the RAF (I think it was the RAF anyway) always added armor onto their airplanes in places where they found bullet holes. This did their planes very little good. Why? Because the airplanes that they were looking at were the survivors. If an airplane lands with a bullet hole in the wing, then that hole must not have done too much damage. If no airplanes land with bullet holes in the fuel tank, then the fuel tank is likely a critical component that needs armor.",
"It means that you only hear about the ones that got lucky. If someone tells you that motorcycle helmets are overrated because he has been riding for 30 years without one and that he has never had a problem, that may be true, but all the motorcycle riders that died because they weren't wearing a helmet are no longer around to say otherwise. When evaluating a certain dangerous behavior you have to make sure that you don't just pay attention to the few lucky examples that made it, but also to the ones that have perished. Another classic example is the story of the (now) successful business owner that had to mortgage his house, max out his credit cards and borrow money from friends to keep his company going, and now he's a millionaire. There are enough of those stories around, so people may get the impression that this is a winning strategy. But chances are that for every success story like this, there are many more people who did the same, failed, went bankrupt and they're now delivering pizza for a living. That's because the media is only doing profiles on the ones that became successful, not the ones who failed.",
"Survivorship bias is basically looking at something successful and assuming that the success is because of successful strategy, without taking into account how likely the strategy is to be successful. If you only talk to lottery winners you might get the idea that spending your entire salary on lottery tickets is a great idea, but if you talk to everyone who buys a lottery ticket you will realize that most of them don't win. If you look at bill gates you might get the idea that dropping out of college is a good strategy for success, but if you talk to most college dropouts you will quickly realize that so is not the case."
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dqxnff | Why does the age of consent tend to increase in more modern societies and vice versa? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The age of consent is 15 in sweden and 18 in Somalia. It is too simple to think of it as just being a factor of how modern a country is. Views on sex in general, the rights of young people, the role of marriage in society, the influence of religion can all play a part, but the topic is pretty complex.",
"The key part is modern. Like it or not, it really requires around 12 years of basic education (generally speaking, there are many exceptions) to become a somewhat productive member of society. Many people aspire to 16 years of education for a basic college degree. Most modern societies have average lifespans into the 70s meaning at least 40 years of active economic participation. There is a lot of value to society and to the individuals to foster a system that reduces early pregnancy/family. A hundred and fifty years ago, average lifespans was probably in the late 40s. And education beyond basic literacy was not useful for most of the needed occupations (farming mostly) Also, children were considered mostly free labor. So starting families early and larger families benefited society and the individuals more."
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dqxnkv | Why or how do English translations or poems or songs still rhyme? | Particularly asking as I'm reading passages from the Iliad, originally written in ancient Greek but every line rhymes in English. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm a translator. My job is to make stuff that rhymes in the source text, rhyme in the target text. It's not very difficult when you have an extensive vocabulary and an ear for rhythm and rhyme :)",
"Usually because they can find a way to make it rhyme and still mean the same thing, by rearranging a sentence here or adding a word there. The balance is how they keep the meaning but also make it rhyme. Often a more direct translation will retain the nuances and meanings of small phrases, metaphors and double meanings that give extra depth to the overall meaning, however these more direct translations usually don't rhyme as well as one translated more carefully with rhyming in mind, potentially at the cost of some depth of meaning. I am by no means a translator of poetry though :)"
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dqxxd5 | What is the process of a Catholic confession, from walking through the church doors, to walking out afterwards? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"when I was younger the confessionals were located in the back of my church. There was certain times that the priest held confession. The confessional was a booth separated by a screen you could do it anonymously or looking at the priest. I don't remember if he said my child. So you go in and start the confession with bless me father for I have sinned, these are my sins. You list your sins and the priest will counsel you or say this is your penance ie say 10 hail Mary's etc. Also the priest is bound by an oath not to discuss your confession with anyone and he cannot be forced to tell anyone what you confessed not even by court order. hope that helps"
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dr4kgg | Why are ancient names like those belonged to the Pharaohs so different, where do they come from, and what do they mean? | Tutankhamun sounds alien to me | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Probably most Ancient Egyptian names would sound alien to us, as they are from a language that evolved over a nearly 2,000 year span which predates most modern languages and which is only now used in very, very limited Coptic religious circles. In reality, the word \"Tutankhamun\" is nothing too foreign - it means \"Living image of Amun\". His birth name was actually Tutankhaten - the living image of Aten. Lots of Egyptian names were spiritual like this, or sometimes even just adjectives (like \"Neferet\" means \"beautiful woman\").",
"They are just name in the Egyptian language. Thy might sound different but that is because you are not used to the language. Egyptian is in the Afroasiatic languages family that also include Arabic you compare to that to for similar language you are more used to. Speaking ancient Egyptian [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 ) Another example of a language is Navajo where native speaker was used for radio communication by the US in WWII for encrypted radio communication because it and other languages native to the new world is not that closely related to languages of the old world and it was not well documented at the time especially outside the US. The Japanese never manage to understand it. It will likely also sound strange to you [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 ) & #x200B; For what it mena just look at Wikipedia for: where Aten and Amun is deity in the Egyptian mythology. > His names; *Tutankhaten* and *Tutankhamun* are thought to mean; \"Living image of Aten\" and \"Living image of Amun\", with [Aten]( URL_4 ) replaced by [Amun]( URL_3 ) after Akhenaten's death. There are Egyptologists that believe the translation may be more like; \"The-life-of-Aten-is-pleasing\" or \"One-perfect-of-life-is-Aten\".",
"They evolved from their own mythology and local history, with meanings that are completely reasonable. Look at Emanuel, which can also be spelled Immanuel or Immanu'el. The ' is a hebrew letter. Meaning: \"God with us\". God as in the the god El, which came to mean the hebrew God. Makes no sense in a language and culture not influenced by judaism/christianity. But completely normal in english, or why not the Spanish \"Manuel\"? The only thing making them different is because we do not share the culture and language. Örjan and George, Karl and Charles. One is Swedish, a Northern germanic language, the other is English, a Northern germanic language. But a bit different even though being close in both geography speaking and language speaking. Then introduce a whole different language. Even if you go a bit east to Russia and you get Yuri instead of Örjan and George.",
"Most names you know come from the languages around you and its cultural influences. You would not expect that for example a Japanese name by as familiar as a standard english name. King Tut's name held meaning in the language in which it was given. It contained a reference to the Egyptian God Amun. With some languages like those found among the natives in North America, the names sometimes are translated like \"Sitting Bull\" whose actual name was something more like \"Tatanka Iyotake\". Many names common in English today come from the Bible and a few are nearly as old as King Tut's name, but they are modified to fit into the English language. The most stereotypical name in English is John and it has its roots in ancient Hebrew (referencing their god) and was distributed around the world with Christianity and the Bible. It turned into John, Juan, Ivan, Sean, Hans, Jean, Giovanni, Evan and many others. If King Tut's name was passed on to today it would have undergone similar transformations and the results would not feel alien to you because you are used to them."
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dr4rs0 | Why was Shakespeare such a big deal? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He invented a crap ton of words and shaped how we speak today. URL_0"
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dr87l1 | Why do billionaires like Bezos buy mega-mansions? What are they actually used for? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're to hoard wealth. Massive mansions are status symbols and certain ones will appreciate in value.",
"They're status symbols for impressing your rich friends, and competing in the \"I have shinier things\" game. At a certain point cost just doesn't matter to these people. They can by whoever or whatever they want, any time they want it. It just turns into a status game where they do increasingly outrageous things to one-up each other."
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drf66d | why are silent letters kept in the word's spelling? Why can't it be just Jango in place of Django? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I pronounce those two different, but that might be just me. When I pronounce Dj my tongue is more to the front of my mouth.",
"Django is French. In English we pronounce all our j’s “dj” so this seems redundant to us. An example of the J sound in French would be in the name Jacques. You don’t pronounce it “jock” with the dj sound"
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drhe40 | Why do humans enjoy music so much? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The theory is that the brain is a pattern recognition organ that seeks “familiar surprises“. This oxymoron surmised that our brains are pattern-recognition based prediction machines, and comfortable around things we’re familiar with. Hence the genre of music, food we like, etc are baked in as our brains develop. This was also a survival mechanism anything unfamiliar was *ipso facto* unsafe, hence our comfort around familiar food, people, places, etc. Music is a special sensation since it offers minor variations around brain predictions with a rhythm. So a mix of repetition and variation the brain rewards itself with shots of dopamine. It’s the same sensation when you solve a problem, get a joke, read poetry, etc. Read “The Telltale Brain “ by VS Ramachandran & #x200B; edit: grammar & formatting",
"From [this article]( URL_0 ) it says \"When we 1) anticipate and then 2) actually experience a pleasurable response while listening to music, our brain reacts in distinct and specific ways to release the \"feel-good\" chemical dopamine.\""
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drupqk | Why are punctuation marks of so many major languages so similar? | I mean, I understand English and say, German is similar but a question mark means an end of a question in Devnagri (the script in which Sanskrit derived languages are written ie Hindi) as well - which is no way connected to western languages. Is there a specific duration in history where this got common? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Punctuation is actually a fairly modern invention. Latin for example was originally written without spaces punctuation marks or differences in capitalization. Just a single block of letters without anything to tell you where one word, phrase sentence or idea ended and a new one began. When other languages began using the Latin alphabet to write stuff down they copied this style of writing. Some ways to make stuff easier to read were added here and there but the idea of punctuation didn't really take of until the introduction of the moveable type printing press in Europe. This created a much larger audience for books to read and also brought with it the need for standardization. Punctuation marks became common and since different languages were printed using the same machines printers began reusing the same marks across different languages. Not all European languages use the same marks the same way, but stuff like periods are pretty universal. From Europe the punctuation marks were introduced to all the other cultures that had writing systems without any easy to use punctuation marks of their own. Later thanks to typewriters and computers the use of punctuation has become extremely standardized, both within countries and across the world."
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drw22y | I don’t understand the Native American joke ”If you have a nose bleed, you’re out of the tribe.” | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"> but why a nose bleed? Because it has to be something, and a nose bleed is what it is. People generally bleed a noticeable amount from a nose bleed but it is a fairly harmless wound, while people don't often bleed at all from a paper cut."
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ds4vy2 | Why is whistling fun to do but annoying to hear? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A lot of things are like that. When you're in control and know what to expect it's less irritating then when it's coming from an outside source"
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dsgf07 | Americans wore hats all day, every day up until the 1960’s. Now no one wears a hat as part of their daily attire. Why? What changed? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hat wear was at its peak around the 20s, long before the 60's. The decline was due to many things, one of them the increase in cars and public transportation. People simply didn't need them as much when traveling in closed-top transportation. When a piece of clothing stops being a functional necessity and starts being ornamental it doesn't generally last, at least not among working and lower middle class.",
"Even suits are slowly going out now. Most places I’ve had to work are classified as business casual which is basically me wearing the new, good versions of my typical clothes :P",
"People used to be outside a lot more, whether for work, travel or entertainment. Most of that is done with roofs over our head now.",
"While some might cite \"Cause John F. Kennedy didn't wear one to his inauguration\", beware, as this is absoultely false: URL_0 The more likely reason is that many men, after serving in WWII and wearing a hat every day for service, were sick of them when they returned and simply chose to not don a daily hat, beginning a decline in the trend, and thus a decline in the industry. I actually live near a once-very-famous Hat Manufacturing city, so it's part of the lore of the area surrounding why certain industrial areas declined after hat manufacturing declined, and I hear the Kennedy rumor a few times every year by people, though as I mentioned above, they're very wrong.",
"Formal dress attitudes were a thing passed on from Victorian culture. Wearing hats, suits, overcoats, vests, etc were the standard when you stepped out in public. This was not just for going to work; it was for any time you went in public. It all has to do with attitudes that what you wear is a reflection of yourself. And if you didnt dress formally, you were a vagabond or vagrant who could be disregarded.",
"Plenty people wear hats as a daily attire today. Including my boyfriend. The hats are snapbacks though",
"Some pretty good answers, but even in the 30s, 40, and the 50s, hats were still very much a part of daily attire. Decades after covered transportation was common.",
"What the hell happened to powdered wigs? That's what I want to know!",
"I think redditors are losing sight of what “Explain like I’m 5” is meant to be used for. You are asking a question about wearing hats, not nuclear fission.",
"I used to be a Park Ranger for the NPS and got to wear the cool hat. Mine was an actual Stetson made of Beaver felt. It was alright at first but it quickly becomes a hassle. You need a place to put the hat when you take it off. You have to be careful on windy days cause that thing would catch the wind. If it landed in a puddle, it was done. Time to get a new hat. You couldn't wear it in the rain without putting a plastic cover on it. If you needed to run while wearing the hat there was the tendency to hold it on. Overall, it's a pain in the ass.",
"I wore a hat for a short period in my twenties. Yes, a fedora, but not the trilbys or porkpies that people mistakenly call fedoras sometimes now. It's a pain to get in and out of cars with a hat, and if you have a long torso, as I do, you basically can't wear it while you're sitting in the car seat because it gets crushed against the roof. You have to take it off while you drive and put it on again when you get out. It know it's not this way for everyone, but it was for me. It's useless when you're driving except when the sun is directly in your eyes, and then it's actually pretty helpful, but a ballcap does exactly the same thing with less \"overhead\". (pun intended) I bike a lot in the city, and you can't really practically wear a fedora while biking. My thinking is that's it's very practical when you're walking around all day, but when most people are taking public transit, biking or driving, it's not practical at all. In fact, it gets in the way. So it becomes solely a fashion statement. Neck ties are somewhat awkward and also a vestigal holdover from practical clothing that kept your throat warm for giving commands or being able to pull up over your face (see cravat), but they don't actually get in the way (as such) when you wear them. I think people wearing them day-to-day just weigh the practical vs. the impractical and decided against them. As fashion and cultural trends made baseball caps more acceptable daily wear (instead of part of a uniform or solely for work) the people who really needed a hat to keep sun out of their eyes and off their face in their daily lives started wearing them instead. Everyone else just... didn't need them any more.",
"I wear a hat every single day. What's with this \"no one\" business?"
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dsix75 | the whole apartheid situation in south africa aka what it is, why people were for/against it | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"South Africa was colonized centuries ago by two groups of European settlers. The first ones came from the Netherlands, the second ones came from Britain. The people who descended from the Dutch settlers call themselves Afrikaners, and they speak a language called Afrikaans - it's reasonably similar to Dutch, other than normal linguistic evolution. After WW2, the main Afrikaner political party - The National Party - was elected into office. They enacted a series of policies to limit the rights of non-white citizens. All citizens were classified as either White, Black, Asian, or Coloured. Whites had the most rights, then Asians, then Coloureds, and finally Blacks. There were all sorts of laws in place - Blacks were forced to live in certain areas, and weren't allowed to leave those areas after dark. Marriage was prohibited between Blacks and members of other races. It was pretty much wildly opposed by all civilized societies, including the United Nations and most Western countries, because it was such a human rights disaster. Apartheid ended in the early 1990's, and in 1994 South Africa had their first elections where every citizen was allowed to vote. Nelson Mandela, who had been a leading anti-Apartheid activist, was elected President.",
"Apartheid was based on the racial policies of the Dutch, and later British colonizers. During British rule there was some informal segregation between white South Africans and the native South Africans. As Britain began granting independence to its colonies, South Africa also became independent. When it did, the white government passed laws that primarily kept economic and social rights for only the white population of the country (less than 20%). During this period of segregation, whites enjoyed legitimate democratic government and economic prosperity on par with the rest of the West. However, the Africans were completely disenfranchised."
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dtcrb8 | Gen Z, Gen X, Boomers | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Boomers are children of the WW2 vets. Gen X are children born in the 70's who came of age in the 80's and early 90's. Gen Y/Millennials were born from the early 80's to the 90's. Gen Z are children of Gen X.",
"These answers are all correct, but the newly coined “Ok Boomer”, it’s meme and many sarcastic references on the internet to “Boomer”, especially lately, are not directed to true Baby Boomers necessarily. It’s the new “insult” by Gen Z kids to call anyone who is an adult “old and out of touch”. Setting my stopwatch to see how long it takes for someone to say “Ok Boomer” to my comment."
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dtsvfv | How does the phrase 'trust but verify' not directly contradict itself? | Because if you trusted somebody, why would there be a need to verify them? Wouldn't verifying only be done if you didn't trust them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's consistent because it is to say I trust that an operation was undertaken in good faith with pure motives, I'm just going to make sure there weren't any unnoticed mistakes and nothing has changed or was miscommunicated.",
"It's similar to the use of \"we never negotiate with terrorists\" or \"innocent until proven guilty\". If we always doubt people coming with new findings, it is likely that we will be Selective of which information we actually accept. Let's say something controversial was found, \"racists are generally more likable than other people\" I would instinctively be quick to dismiss it. However, it is very important that I, let's say I was a scientist, actually accept the finding. However, I should also make sure to test objectively to see if my dismissive hunch was correct. The point of the phrase is actually to make sure that two vital but contradictive actions Both always happen. \"always verify\" would close us to new findings, but \"always trust\" would of course make us accept blindly things that are wrong. We need both, thus the saying."
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du64uy | What is the difference between simplified and traditional Chinese and why do both exist? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"f729x54"
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"text": [
"Simplified Chinese characters are, as their name implies, simplified versions of traditional Chinese characters. In general, the characters require less strokes to write and use less complicated symbols. There are also fewer characters total. The reason behind the simplification was to make the written language easier to learn and to improve literacy. The reason traditional Chinese still remains is that the simplification was officially promulgated by the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s. The Republic of China (Taiwan) never made the change, and continues to use traditional Chinese. Among other states where Chinese is an official language, Singapore and Malaysia also made the switch to simplified Chinese, but Hong Kong and Macau (now part of the PRC but formerly European colonies) still use traditional Chinese."
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dudc27 | How do actors "act" sex scenes? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f74ht3i"
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"text": [
"Actors often just grind on each other and their genitals aren't typically exposed to each other during the scene. It involves a lot of awkward grinding (sometimes) and fake expressions."
],
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dudyg6 | Why do some country's use different date formats like MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"f74palv"
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"text": [
"because traditions and culture and gov mandate. US uses MM/DD/YYYY. DD-MM-YYYY is in most of EU. whereas YYYY-MM-DD is used both in ANSI standards as well as some countries like Canada, China & #x200B; [ URL_0 ]( URL_1 )"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\\_format\\_by\\_country",
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duhxqo | what are baby boomers, millennials, x y generation?? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"These are members of different \"generations\". A \"Generation\" is a time span of about 15-20 years (could be a little longer or a little shorter), where the people who were born during that time have a lot of things in common (like the historical events they lived through, values that they generally share, political views they might have, stuff like that). \"Baby Boomers\" is the generation that started right after World War 2 (usually put at 1946 - 1964). They are called that because the war ended, the economy was doing really well and men were returning home from being overseas and people were having a lot of kids. \"Generation X\" came next (usually around 1965 to 1980). Called Generation X because of the math variable X - it was kind of hard to define them. Because people used \"Generation X\", \"Generation Y\" followed - that's what is most commonly called the Millenials now. The birth range for this is about 1981 - 1995, but less popular sources extend that to even the early 2000s. Generation Z is the later generation, and now we're living in the time period of the even newest generation. Generation Z will probably get a new name (I've seen 'iGeneration', for instance) with time. Generation naming and identifying is a pretty new thing that only started a few decades ago, and it is not an exact science."
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duntmp | What is a meme? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The official definition is somthing like \"an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means\". This makes it the opposite of a gene, which is passed on by reproduction. The meaning you are looking for is probably the new definition. \"an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.\" That's a meme when talking about the internet."
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durhjg | Why is swearing considered bad but gaining popularity? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f77suuo"
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"text": [
"Swearing is related to profanity so also tied in with both religion and culture, the acceptability of swear words does change over time, but as swear words lose their impact they are replaced with others which are apparently even more shocking to create the same impact."
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dvn5lr | How did we learn to cook and prepare foods and beverages that took multiple processes to make? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Wheat into flour may be more intuitive than you think. You smash the wheat seed to get at the good bits inside. Then you mix the smashed bits with water and either make bread or a gruel. Leave the wheat-water out for too long and the natural yeasts start to ferment it and the dough starts to leaven and tastes way better when you cook it. So you try again and find out that it's even better if you smash the wheat up really finely first",
"I'm not sure what's not intuitive about baking. You literally set something on a rock in a campfire and it starts baking. Seeing that, it's pretty easy to figure out you could build the walls of your fire pit up higher and cover it to hold the heat in. The yeast for bread and brewing is found wildly and probably (I say probably, because obviously there's no record of these first occurrences) just blew into some smashed up grain that had been left out. Someone went to cook or consume it and was pleased with the result. I also don't understand why you \"can't even imagine how ancient people figured out how to make flour from wheat\". This is some of the simplest, most obvious, processing there is. You can pick pretty much any food in pretty much an place ever and people have smashed it up. Native Americans did it with acorns and corn, they've done with rice in Asia forever, pretty much all grains or other staples everywhere. Literally all you need is two rocks. Smashing things up (and mixing them with liquid) is literally what your teeth do. If you have something, and you want to do something else to make it easier or safer to eat, or stretch out, or make it taste better, smashing it up and mixing it is the first thing that will come to mind. If you ever have eaten wheat grains straight out the field, the steps that need to be done to eat it in any significant quantity are pretty obvious; then it's just a matter of figuring out the methods to accomplish those steps. Rennet, a cheese enzyme, is found in the stomachs of milk producing livestock. People mix animals organs and milk to make stew. Fermentation happens naturally all the time. Even monkeys get drunk off fermented fruit off forest floors. Literally all invention involves some element of chance."
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dvygnq | What does it mean when someone says "it's politics" in an office/work setting? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That pleasing their boss or coworker is more important than what makes sense from your point of view in that moment.",
"\"That might not make sense, but we can't do it any differently because of the people involved. If we did it differently, the they might make problems for us.\""
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dwgnj9 | How are some abstract paintings considered high art, such as splashes of paint on a canvas, but the splattering of a 5 year old isn't? What does it take for something to be considered 'art' in the sense that it is widely known and famous? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hard to explain. But, since you mentioned \"splashes of paint\", let's think about Jackson Pollack. His paintings may come across as \"splatters\". but there is a distinct method to them. First, they are quite large. There is a sense of depth and layer, and a certain sense of dynamic movement. You look at them, and realize there is nothing random to it. There is movement, flow, and different layers of energy. As for it being worth millions, well, someone paid that.",
"It's probably best explained as a conversation. There was a time when recreating objective reality was the highest art. Film didn't exist yet and it took exceptional skill to paint with perfect accuracy at a time when even paint to practice with was valuable and precious. The age has long gone. In part it's because film made perfect recreation \"obsolete\" but more than that, the entire art world is a conversation. Think of a perfectly timed, perfectly delivered punchline or retort in a conversation. Alone, it has no meaning, but *as part of a story or conversation*, it has meaning. A lot of conceptual art is a rebuttal, follow-up, or reply to something else some other artist did. Alone, it's just some splattering on canvas, but if you study what came before it and what came after it, it makes sense. And that's ultimately what high art is in a modern sense: it's art *for the art world*, not for the general public. In contrast, pop art, by definition, is for popular consumption. That might sound elitist, but it's not really any different from /r/dankmemes or /r/deepfriedmemes or even just a reply 10 minutes into a small private WhatsApp group. It's like an inside joke.",
"Artwork is only worth what you think it is. Some people pay millions for a piece that others wouldnt spend a dime on.",
"There's no process in pricing modern art. It's all bs snobbery and nothing more. It often take almost no exceptional skill to make either. More often than not, high priced art is really just an easy method of laundering money. You could take a child's or a hobo's fingerpainting, put it in a nice frame, create some bs backstory about the \"artist\", and have it sold by a gallery for way more money than it's worth ($0) simply because some art snob in a gallery sold it. That mostly applies to modern art. Antique art, like from the 1800's and earlier, that is often a piece of history, but the price is merely based on what the previous buyer paid. Obviously older art depicting a historically significant event or idea is going to be worth more based upon the value of the uncensored knowledge it conveys from that time. But again, it takes someone who cares about that history/knowledge/people to value it enough to pay for it in the first place.",
"Money laundering and snobbery In al seriousness, Demand. Fashion suffers from it too. But art is entirely based on demand. A lot of people are into art, and what’s to stop me from getting a real Rothko if they are only 1000$? Another reason is you have a bunch of billionaires lined up at Sotheby’s… the way they market and auction is unlike anywhere else. I wager the price of art would not be near what it is if not for art dealers."
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dwx3p7 | Why are American motorsports (like Nascar, Indy500 etc.) hosted on oval tracks whilst popular motorsports in other countries (like f1, touring cars, motogp, etc) performed on more complex tracks? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"European racing predominantly began on public roads - Spa, Reims and the like for example. Inevitably this meant corners, altitude changes, cambers and so on. They raced on what was available. Whilst there are \"road circuits\" in the US, Indycar and NASCAR were spectator sports, an oval provides the ability to let spectators see the entire track and the entire race, instead of just a car speeding by on a straight.",
"There are plenty of “complex” tracks in America. And lots of racing other than just oval tracks. Its just the ones that become more popular than others in America. Driving in an oval isn’t easy when youre doing 180mph+"
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dxexow | how did we as a society discovered (or established) that bad words were bad words? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most bad words deal with taboo subjects like sex, human waste, and private body parts. Because these subjects are taboo, the words relating to them are taboo.",
"All words are made up. Their meaning can shift over time. Those with power/control over society set the rules. Words are so old we have to go quite far back to find who had the most influence over semantic standards. The oldest powers in the world are religious institutions. Their preferences; desire to control spirituality/sexuality meant classifying a bunch of bad words ('Fuck'; a delightful activity) as 'deviant'.",
"Typically things to do with religion, sex, or excrement all can be swear words when used correctly. \"God damn/nit\" would be taking the *lords* name in vain which is taboo for some religions. Son of a bitch! Is really just a fancy way of calling Someone a dog. Asshole, dick, fucker and such can be part of the sex/excrement (poop) category. Just take anything people find revolting or taboo and say it in anger and BAM! There's a swear word."
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dxkuhq | Why does anti-Semitism exist? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Jews were those who killed Jesus and are not the same religion. (According to Christians) Because of this they weren't allowed to do some jobs, so they stuck with financial services etc.. and this turned out to be really profitable. And because of that some of them became rich. And what you do, if someone is richer than you? Hate him and blame every your fault on him. Jews are one of the most hated religion/nationality across the history",
"According to URL_0 , it may have started because the ancient Jewish people resisted adopting the customs of their conquerors. They basically made efforts to keep their culture."
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dy6tjm | Why does any modern 1st world country (e.g. England) sustain a Royal Family? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Having a royal family tends to boost tourism. People go to see the palaces, travel to see the coronations and weddings, buy merchandise in a way that they don't for duly elected officials. In the case of the British Royals, the tourism money they bring in is more than the government spends on keeping them around, though part of that is balanced with the fact that the British Royal Family owns a lot of land, and thus gets money that way as well. On a legal level, the Queen is more or less a figure head with no real power.",
"In the UK, the Queen is largely just a figurehead. While she does still technically have some decent powers (technically she can dissolve the UK parliament if she wanted to), if she actually used them to any real extent the UK would likely see massive riots/protests or even civil war. The real power lies with the elected officials. In some other places, such as Saudi Arabia, the King is a true king who wields life-and-death power over his subjects. He control the money. He controls the military. So long as he keeps his army generals happy, who is going to stop him?"
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dy9dr2 | How do nicknames like Dick, Billy and Chuck come from Richard, William and Charles? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Around the early 1900's it was popular for people to have nicknames where a letter was swapped for some reason. So: Richard - > Ric - > Rick - > Dick William - > Will - > Bill - > Billy Not sure about the Charles - > Chuck thing"
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dycpea | how come we call airport roads tarmac? Not asphalt or concrete like most roads. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hmm I didn't know myself so I searched and found this gem: I'd say **tarmac is just a term to mean any surface on which an aircraft sits that's not a taxiway or runway**. Sure it may not be literal anymore, but the term itself has lived on. Kind of like Coke, there's no cocaine in it anymore, but they still call it Coke And just so you know Tarmacadam is a road surfacing material made by combining macadam surfaces, tar, and sand, patented by Welsh inventor Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1902. The terms \"tarmacadam\" and tarmac are also used for a variety of other materials, including tar-grouted macadam, bituminous surface treatments, and modern asphalt concrete. The term is also often used to describe airport aprons (also referred to as \"ramps\"), taxiways, and runways regardless of the surface. & #x200B; Most airports are concrete now. Thus - it is just an old shortening of a type of road surfacing that used to be common place - and even though these areas are no longer even made with Tarmacadam - the nickname stuck around from when it was.",
"I know this topic is about airport roads but for information, tarmac is the standard term for a typical road surface in the UK. Pavement is what we call the sidewalk. And no-one uses asphalt.",
"'Macadam' is a road surface made of compacted layers of crushed stone. Adding tar and sand to hold everything together and create a safer surface with no dust results in 'tar macadam'. 'Tar macadam' was contracted to 'tarmac', which was a registered trademark of Tar Macadam Syndicate Ltd. In time 'tarmac' was also used to refer to the road/ramp/etc that is covered by tarmac - \"the taxi is waiting out on the tarmac\" - and through that usage can also refer to road surfaces that are not actually made of tarmac. Nowadays this is used more in English English, less in American English.",
"Pilot here. Tarmac is an old phrase hardly used anymore. Like others said it’s what the over surfaces were made of. Officially: A Runway is where planes takeoff and land. A Taxiway is where planes drive to the runway. And an “Apron” is where planes park.",
"Tarmac is no longer made as coal tar products are mostly banned for safety reasons. The name is historical as tar was resistant to jet fuel and was used around airplanes. Nowadays, big planes park on concrete as they have a massive weight that rests on small wheels and this can cause divots to form on asphalt pavements (kind of like woman’s high heels that exert several tons a square inch) The taxi ways and runways are still asphalt products as they are flexible and will take a lot more stress before cracking and they are easier to repair",
"The proper term for that is ramp or taxiway (depending on if it's for parking or moving). Tarmac is an genericized product term for a paved surface (sort of like calling tissues Kleenex, or) originating in the UK, but somehow got carried over to the USA, but only used in airports.",
"I agree with the other answers. Most airport runways and taxiways are made of concrete or with an asphalt topping these days, not of tarmac. Nowadays those of us in the airport design biz just call it the “Apron”. Enjoy your new tidbit to annoy friends and family!",
"Because newscasters don't know anything about aviation. Nowhere on an airport is called the \"tarmac\" The area where the planes operate are divided into three areas: Runway, taxiway, ramp/apron."
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dz4c1i | Why do men’s and women’s clothes button up on different sides? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Men's buttons are designed to be put on by the individual (and since most people are right handed, that's the side that is used). High class women would be dressed by servants so having the buttons on the opposite side made it work better for the servants. The tradition just stuck."
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dzj176 | why do languages die? How do we know that experts in dead languages are actually speaking them correctly? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A dead language is a language that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use in other contexts. Latin for example isn’t a native language in modern times but it is still in use in academia and in Vatican City. Latin eventually evolved/branched off into various Greek languages, and gradually was no longer used. As far as people knowing they are using them correctly it gets into passing it down to the next generation in your family and that combined with linguists and history is how they know they are being spoken correctly. Generally you don’t speak dead languages, although some are/can be spoken, they are normally used for reading/writing.",
"A \"dead\" language simply means it is no longer the native language of anyone alive today. I don't know if you've ever learned or studied another language, but there's nothing stopping you from picking up Spanish, or Hindi, or Japanese, or Russian, or Arabic, or Swahili right now. And you could talk to millions of people around the world in any of those tongues, but you are presumably a native English speaker. That is the language you speak at home, and thus it was the first language you would of learned, and you continue to use it in your daily life. Now depending on how things go, your children or grandchildren might be brought up in a different culture, and thus learn a different language. Say you moved to South Korea and started a family there. They would probably grow up learning Korean and eventually if they assimilated into Korean society it would be their primary medium of communication so that in a couple generations it would be their native tongue. Conversely, there have been examples of warfare, invasion and outright genocide where huge portions of the population were lost, or where they were outright banned from speaking their own language, as was the case with many Native American languages, Kurdish languages, or even Finnish at various points in history. Schools have often been used to force a language onto a population. Just because a language is no longer spoken by a people as a \"living language\" doesn't necessarily mean its lost. Hebrew ceased being spoken as a living language during the second century AD, having gradually been replaced by Aramaic, but was still used as a religious language by the Jewish world and was revived starting in the 1880s. Today modern Hebrew is an official language of Israel. Is it the same as classical or Mishnaic Hebrew? No of course not. There weren't even words for many inventions that came about since the 19th/early 20th century, so new words and ideas had to be imported whole cloth, but today there are some 5 million or so people who speak it as their mother tongue. On the other hand, you also have languages that are pretty firmly dead, as is the case of languages like Ona or Jangil which were barely recorded by anyone before they died out. There are also moribund languages, which are languages on their way to dying out, being only spoken by a handful of people, with their children having learned other languages instead and barely understanding the languages of their parents or grandparents."
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dzqqm5 | How come a typical heart symbol is nothing like an actual heart, and how did it grow into that? | Inspired by another posts about stars. Is there any logic behind this development? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Romantic story tells it is two human hearts posed right next to each other, symbolizing union, which does in fact have the shape of the symbol we’re used to URL_0",
"There's some thought that it was related to Roman depictions of testicles, related to signage for brothels, and got flipped upside-down . Another related idea is that the shape comes from the leaves of a family of plants used as contraceptives. Both of these are probably apocryphal, but entertaining. [ URL_0 ]( URL_2 ) [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 )",
"The theory I like best is the seed pod of the Silphium is heart shaped. It was the best natural form of birth control, so good that the romans drove it to extinction before the fall of their empire. The shape was printed on the currency of Cyrene, and if you look at one of those coins, you can tell it's...flat out a heart.",
"There are many stories about where the heart shape came from, I'm sure it's impossible to know for sure which is true. One story I heard and quite like is: The bond between two swans in love is so strong that they mate for life and apparently do not attempt to find new love if one of the two dies. The sight of two swans in love often shows the heart shape we commonly see today. [Example]( URL_0 )"
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e0d8y5 | During WW2 , how did the Nazi's know who was jewish, why didn't people who were jewish just lie and say they weren't? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Jewish people belonged to a specific ethnic group, making it easy to see who they were. That, and records stolen from synagogues, combined with people getting rewards for turning in suspected Jews meant most Jews got captured.",
"Many people were pressured via propaganda to turn people in for being Jewish, as much as Hitler was evil, he was extremely great at convincing people. He also had a task force - similar to the Boy Scouts - that would rat out people who were in hiding, or knew of people who knew people in hiding, even if it were their parents. For your second part, I honestly remember it as them really not caring. Many people had things that could prove them as being Jewish, but it was pretty hard to prove that you were not Jewish."
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e0lmj2 | Why hasn't the crisis in Flint, MI been solved yet? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Due to serious mistakes by the Flint Municipal Water Department, they need to replace ALL of the waterlines in the entire city, as they have all become contaminated with lead. But the problems is that Flint is broke, which is why they got into this problem in the first place, trying to be cheap and not treating the water properly. So they are reliant on the federal and state governments for handouts to fix their problem *which they created*. Replacing their entire water supply infrastructure will take years and cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions by the time it's all completed. So that's why it's not fixed."
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e18jyp | Why are the Greek gods considered “mythology” but other religions not considered as such? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally speaking, when a religion dies (it has no major sect of followers) we start to call it mythology. Mythology more specifically is the **stories** and **lore** surrounding a religion, whereas religion includes **rituals** and **beliefs**. It isn't incorrect to use terms like \"Christian mythology\" or \"Jewish mythology\", so long as you're just talking about the stories contained in their various religion documents and not the belief system or practice of those religions. & #x200B; EDIT: Please, remember to be civil in the discussion of this topic on this board. It is a very sensitive topic that can upset quite literally more than half of the planet.",
"So religion is a bit broader term than mythology. Religion includes mythology but also includes things like rituals and worship. So there's ancient greek mythology which is the stories about the gods and everything else. And the ancient greek religion which is the stories AND things like how they worshiped and how the people interacted with the mythology. So Athena is mythology, but her priests and temples made it religion. Similarly, looking at christianity (although you can do this with any other religion) we can make this distinction as well. The story of genesis, mary, christ and all that stuff would be considered the mythology. Things like christmas, easter, church, praying, sermons make it a religion when it's added to the stories. In terms of mainstream use, the big difference is that a large amount of people actively practice \"religions\" and not many people practice the \"mythology\". So the stuff that's considered religion is where we're getting a lot of active practitioners performing rituals where with mythology we only really get the stores. My exposure to sikhism was through friends going to their temple for worship and the community having religious festivals. My exposure to greek mythology was a book of stories in the library.",
"Life cycle of a belief system. New with few followers: cult Mature with many followers: religion Old with few followers: mythology",
"In common parlance, it’s just whether or not it’s a living faith. It would be disrespectful to refer to somebody’s personally held beliefs as myth because, to most people, myth = false. But for people who study these things for a living, there is no such distinction. One of my professors is an expert in Icelandic culture before and after conversion to Christianity, and he refers to both the Pagan and Christian narratives as myth.",
"Mythology is part of religion. There was a Greek religious practice and most of what we know about it today is its mythology. Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and Islam have religious practices that are more familiar to us but also have a robust mythology. Common to many of the worlds religions, for example, is the mythology of, “The Great Flood.” Meaning and religious education are tied to myths in very different ways but it is a thread that runs through most religions we know of throughout history. Humans are quite prolific myth makers.",
"Common usage of the term Mythology: When a religion no longer has active followers of a reasonable number (there is no hard number) they transition into being mythology. In the academic sense of the term: Mythology is the stories of a religion. So all religions are/have mythology at all times.",
"Because you are being lied too. Only the religions with live practicioners can keep perpetuating the lie",
"When I took a college class on mythology they included christianity as a myth. That was 20 years ago in the bible belt.",
"Why is Christianity and the like not considered to be superstitious when it’s based on the supernatural and Catholics even reference the Holy Ghost"
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e1sgmd | How did we first attempt to completely and elaborately translate one language to another? | Was it done by those who were born biracial or multiracial with complete knowledge of both parents' languages? Or was it done after learning the other language word by word while getting tp understand the | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neither. There was no single moment when someone said \"OK, I'm now perfectly suited to translate one entire language into another one and vice versa. Here we go....\" Rather, over vast swaths of time, as explorers, merchants and just people living on the fringes of their tribes' (or whatever group) geographic ranges came into contact with others more and more, multi-lingual people came to exist. At some point, likely when it became beneficial for trade or travel purposes (i.e., when someone could make money from it), translation guides were developed, and these were formalized more and more over time as connections between the two (or more) groups grew. Now in some modern/recent academic and cultural preservation projects, there have been translation projects, but those are aimed mostly at preserving \"dying\" languages."
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e2pmtz | Why do people hate on Greta Thunberg? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's no good answer. I think people are threatened by her - they find her message scary, and the fact that she can motivate herself to do something about it when they just want to ignore it makes them feel inferior. Like, \"This teenager figured out how to get noticed by the UN to try and save humanity without her parents' support, and I can't even get myself to do anything greater than my dead-end 9-to-5.\" It's easier to believe she's some kind of propoganda puppet. At least, that's what it looks like to me.",
"All our scientists agree that we need to stop taking things out of the ground and dumping pollution into our air and water because it changes our weather in ways that make us suffer (and the problem is going to get much worse). Greta Thunberg is saying that people need to listen to the scientists and that \"compromise\" solutions won't work. The rich people who benefit from the things causing climate change know that they can't say \"Greta is wrong when she says we should listen to the scientists,\" so they try to say things like \"Greta is rich so why does she care about poor people\" or \"look at this picture of Greta eating a salad in a plastic container\" to change what people are arguing about. Those same rich people used some of their money to start blogs, TV networks, websites, and YouTube channels. They hired writers and presenters to try and convince working people that the best thing for them was making sure rich people can keep making lots of money. Some working people bought into this idea, and now they like to go online to make fun of Greta Thunberg."
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e3arh9 | What is thanksgiving and why do Americans celebrate it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's not related to Christmas. The Pilgrims who came across from Europe originally shared a meal with the Native Americans and that was the first Thanksgiving. People coming together to be thankful for the things they have. I'm sure there's factual inaccuracies in that story, but that's the plain and simple version.",
"Thanksgiving is an American version of a harvest festival. It is a feast at the end of Fall. The story is the first Thanksgiving was a shared meal between the Native Americans and the Pilgrims after the Native Americans had helped teach the Pilgrims how to farm and hunt in the new world."
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|
e3auqo | Why are we not allowed to smile in passport photos? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Facial recognition. Passport photos get integrated into national facial recognition databases (and facial recognition is used to detect/prevent passport fraud), and certain expressions can screw up the algorithms that determine what your face looks like to a machine. According to the State Department, a \"natural smile\" is okay, but places like your state Department of Motor Vehicles (for license photos) or places like Walgreens/CVS (who can take passport photos) will tell you not to smile just because of the chance that, if you have a wide, toothy smile, it could interfere with facial recognition.",
"Even before electronic facial recognition smiles weren’t allowed. The smile/frown/other facial expressions distort the face and exaggerate specific features. Humans aren’t great at all xtracting 3d information from 2d Images so it’s always been restricted. With the rise of electronic recognition a computer forms, mostly, pentagons to relate facial features into a suite of polygons that allow direct comparison between 2d photographs and live camera capture so it’s even more tightly controlled.",
"You’re allowed to smile, but you’re discouraged rom using “toothy smiles.” This is because non-neutral or exaggerated expressions distort other features. For example, when you give a big smile that exposes your teeth, your eyes will close partially. Passport photos are a form of identification, and don’t serve their function if no one can match the picture to your face IRL."
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|
e3cfm6 | Why are most houses in the U.S made of wood? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The idea that brick houses are stronger than wood houses is a myth. Unreinforced brick is the flimsiest building material you can build out. *Anything* will cause it to collapse in on itself. Brick used to be widespread in the US, but you don't see unreinforced brick buildings anywhere because the whole of the continental US is seismically active. Only the west coast sees regular, large earthquakes but small earthquakes of magnitude 3-4 are relatively common throughout the country. Earthquakes that small can cause severe damage to brick buildings and as a result all of the old brick buildings in the US have either been retrofitted or they've collapsed. Hurricanes and tornadoes are the same - brick buildings will collapse in minor hurricanes or from being in the general vicinity of a tornado. Well built wood buildings will survive severe earthquakes and hold up fairly well to high winds. It is possible to build reinforced brick buildings that are stronger than wood buildings. But despite the name, reinforced brick buildings don't use the brick as a structural component - the brick is decorative and is typically bolted onto reinforced concrete or heavy steel pillars. Building reinforced brick is extremely expensive, and its not what you're seeing when you see brick buildings get built in your country. What you're seeing are brick buildings with some cheap re bar running through them. The re bar adds a tiny amount of strength, but not enough to matter in the case of a natural disaster. Its mostly there to make up for the low quality brick work that results from using cheap, unskilled labor to lay the brick. Which is ultimately why some countries build with unreinforced brick - its cheap and doesn't require carpenters or any other skilled construction tradespeople to build. That being said, there are places in the world where its relatively safe to build unreinforced brick buildings and so they're somewhat common. Most of Europe and parts of Africa just don't experience natural disasters, for example. And I think thats ultimately where the myth comes from - brick buildings don't decay whereas wood buildings do. So in those parts of the world there are some very old brick buildings, but wood buildings don't last so long. That gives people a sense that the reason the brick buildings has survived is because they're strong. But that's not true, the brick has just survived because its chemically inert whereas wood is not. In the Americas, however, where physical strength is more important than chemical resilience, unreinforced brick buildings are coffins that are waiting to collapse on their occupants.",
"You build with what's available. If there are clay beds nearby, brick will be common. If not timber will be used. After the trend is there, cultural inertia carries it along."
],
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|
e3qa6w | Serious. How do police officers handcuff a one-armed suspect? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f94gsap",
"f94gwgc"
],
"text": [
"I worked in a prison, and we put a chain around the waist that has a long piece that goes through one of the links. We put one cuff on the one wrist, and the other cuff on piece of the chain that keeps it in place. If we needed to handcuff a one-armed inmate in an emergency and didn't have the waist-chain, I would have just put the other cuff through a belt-loop on their pants.",
"Generally speaking, you get creative. I've attached an end to belt loops on pants, but I used flexcuffs to minimize the chance of them being able to rip the belt loop off and it's less of a danger if they do."
],
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7,
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|
e3qqtt | What’s with this recent trend of celebrities putting their phone numbers in their social media profiles, then encouraging people to text them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f94i2lh"
],
"text": [
"No, its not their personal phone numbers. Its a phone number for that dedicated, sole purpose. I dont think there's any direct financial benefit, unless they're shilling a specific phone for a manufacturer or retailer, but its marketing, same as doing an AMA or podcast interview or whatever. You might not be specifically compensated for doing x, but you're drumming up publicity, connecting with fans, cultivating a presence."
],
"score": [
6
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|
e41j6b | why do some place names have the definite article? | The Hague. The Congo. I realise the second one has changed, but in general, why the 'the'? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f96jlp9"
],
"text": [
"Here you go: URL_0 Short answer: It just evolved that way. The Hague means the “Counts’ Hedge” or a hunting place for the nobility. As time passed and it got translated to English it stuck. The District of Columbia is the closest example I can think of in the United States. Maybe someone else can think of a better example in the U.S."
],
"score": [
6
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[
"https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/10/why-do-we-use-definite-articles-for-some-place-names-like-the-hague.html"
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} | [
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e45iwr | How do we know what old English sounds like? | I was watching a documentary on old languages. They had a mini instruction on how to pronounce certain words. How do we know how those words were pronounced if no one ever recorded them? This question also goes for any extinct old language, not just old English. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f971e5x",
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],
"text": [
"We look at old poems a lot for instruction on how things sound. We can follow a poem's form to determine which words are supposed to rhyme, and then we make guesses about that. We can also follow the great vowel shift backward to help out, and we can look at where the words come from and which dialects were likely to intermingle during that timeframe. Basically, there are a whole lot of little clues that add up to pretty sound reasoning, but in the end it's just statistically probable estimations.",
"Old English is a variant of the Germanic/Norse languages. The best way to know what Old English sounds like would be to listen to how [Icelandic]( URL_0 ) sounds like, since Icelandic is the less altered Nordic language."
],
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"http://www.pagef30.com/2010/03/comparing-old-english-with-modern.html"
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e4ww17 | What is the psychology behind why we never see McDonald's/Burger King/KFC/Wendy's/etc and the other big chain trade names being built, and instead we always see them finished and ready to take our order? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The reality of it is that the building shells only take 3-4 days to complete and those type of projects work 7 days a week. I guess that the psychology behind it is that a construction site looks like, well, a construction site. Wood, piles of brick, nondescript guys like me wearing hard hats, maybe a couple pieces of dirty equipment. You could ask 100 people to draw a construction site and those key elements would be in every picture. The same holds for fast food restaurants. Each chain has a standard building type. They'll have a certain roof style, the windows will be the same size and shape, etc. Tl;dr version: they go from the basic recognizable shape of a construction site to the basic recognizable shape of a fast food joint over the course of a couple days, and most people don't register the minor changes into their memories.",
"You're probably over thinking it. I think you've just never seen one being built! I can recall seeing at least 2-3",
"I rember a mcdonalds being built that I passed everyday by train. Even had a huge sign ‘new mcdonalds opening soon!’. Took a couple of months.",
"I live very close to two McDonald's and a KFC, I saw them being built and have seen them be refurbished a few times."
],
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e4zy36 | Why does Portugal Portuguese sound similar to Russian and Brazilian Portuguese sound Similar to Spanish? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9gg94g",
"f9gf0z6"
],
"text": [
"For me both language sounds slavic (which also includes russian). It's because both have some consonants that are often perceived by English speakers as sounding russian-ish: /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. Unlike in French though, they are very common and can be found in the plural iirc.",
"I can't tell you about Portugal as I've never been there, but Brazilian was a language developed by the slaves who learnt portuguese listening to their masters. The following years, interactions with the rest of South American further mixed both languages. In fact, the southern region of Brazil limits with east Paraguay and North Argentina, so people in those regions speak what's commonly called \"Portuñol\" (Portugues + Español), and it's really easy to communicate in any language. Again, never been to Portugal, but I'm not sure it acc sounds like Russian. Both Spanish and Portuguese are languages developed from Latin, and Spain is the only country limiting with Portugal."
],
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|
e54op3 | Why so women have the option of Mrs. and Ms and Miss whereas men have the 1 option of Mr? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"f9hmp8o",
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"text": [
"They don’t have one option. The others have just fallen out of use. Instead of Miss, Master was used.",
"You're asking about English Honorifics. This subject has a history of evolution, so the way we use these terms now does not reflect how they were always used. For example, Mrs was a direct parallel to Mr, and indicated a mature woman of status and prominence, perhaps a woman of business. It didn't necessarily indicate the woman was married. And the diminutive title of Miss simply meant an adolescent girl. The parallel for adolescent boys or young men of inferior social status was Master. Ms didn't show up on the scene until 1901, and was suggested as a neutral title in-between Miss and Mrs, but at this point, the interpretation of the two terms strongly suggested marriage, and it's usage had also grown. The common folk tend to follow trends of the rich, famous, and the aristocracy. So these were originally terms of status, and women without status were simply referred to by their names. But since everyone wants to have status, the common usage was eventually widely adopted. This sort of behavior continues in other forms - for example, baby names trend after the aristocracy; as the wealthy pick names for their babies that stand out from what's popular, so do the common folk begin to use those names. But I digress. Getting to the root of the issue, honorifics are used to indicate social status, and not really anything else. You can be married and still a Miss, single and a Misses, you can reject both and go with Ms, no matter the honorific you choose to adopt or not, everyone is going to interpret the meaning differently based on their cultural foundations, so there's a good chance that no matter what you pick, someone is going to get it wrong. Frankly, it doesn't matter.",
"Mrs. as in Missus means you’re married to Mr. Ms/Miss means you’re unmarried and this is your own last name. Mr. doesn’t distinguish between your marital status, but your last name isn’t going to change if you are married or not.",
"The honorifics indicate status to some degree. An adult married (also includes divorced and widowed) woman is Mistress (Mrs.). An unmarried girl and teen are Miss. Ms was developed in the 1900s (mostly) to refer to unmarried adult women. The honorifics for men are Mister (Mr.) for married men, and Master for unmarried men and boys. Over time Mister started to be used for all adult men regardless of marriage status (outside of Bruce Wayne), and then the honorific \"Master\" stopping being used by most people even for boys. Men's honorifics were just lost and Mr. was used for all males."
],
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|
e5dntu | Why is it that some things were so universal way back when, even among very different countries and cultures? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9j77x9"
],
"text": [
"We have biological and emotional traits which transcend our individual cultural ones. You’d mentioned the hanging of pleasing images upon the walls of our shelters. Another shared trait is music. Another may be some form of religion, which is at root an aspiration to be humble before our observed beauty at existence. It means that we worship art. Because art is an expression of how it feels to be a human. Art takes many forms but all of them are an expression of how we feel, whether it is a picture upon a wall which comforts us in our homes, the steady beating of a drum, or another human figure in dance. This post is a craft of words. It too is therefore a human attempt to create art."
],
"score": [
3
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|
e5hxj1 | How do Chinese language usernames work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9jvbqp"
],
"text": [
"What do you mean? How data is stored? The system is called Unicode. Instead of describing the character from a fixed set like ASCII, which works for alphabet based languages, Unicode describes how to write the character."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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|
e5njlv | how/why are countries named their names? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9kue9q"
],
"text": [
"It varies greatly based on which country you're talking about, when the country was formed, etc., so this is a pretty wide topic. However, going off a few of your examples: Korea comes from \"Goryeo\", the name of an ancient kingdom in the region (etymology beyond that is more than a simple Google search can give). France comes from Latin \"Francia\", or the \"Land of the Franks,\" which were a Germanic people in the region. America in general is named for Amerigo Vespucci. The United States took its name because when the colonies broke off from England, they saw themselves as autonomous nations (or \"states\"), choosing to band together against a common foe. Technically, our use of \"states\" nowadays is incorrect (our \"states\" are really provinces), but it's a historical name, so it sticks."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
e5xkbk | Why did politics become that radical everywhere lately? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9mgj00",
"f9mjer4"
],
"text": [
"The internet has given voice to the more radical views in society which would not normally be tolerated in a normal discussion, these individuals then found others with similar views and became noisy, both on the internet and in reality, this then persuaded politicians that there were votes in radical views.",
"Hold the phone, it's very important to note that all answers here will be speculation, discussion or simply a part of the whole answer. Nevertheless, here are some of the main THEORIES around this. Internet and global media - the increase of global media coverage is probably a factor in this. At no point in history has one person or a group been able to influence so many people so easily. Ideas of nationalism, radicalism etc. Spread like a virus, if it is open somewhere to have these opinions, it's open everywhere. Shifting responsibility - one of the most infections ideas is the idea of \"we shouldn't be doing more than anyone else\". Climate change and migration are major questions in this. Brexit was based on this idea, they started feeling the negative consequences of mass migration (as did everyone, at least in Europe due to wars etc). Thus: \"we don't want more migration\", resulting in more migration in all other EU countries, and the process repeats. Same goes for the cost of sustainable energy shift etc. This is of course oversimplification, but the principles hold worldwide. If everyone needs to pick up more of the slack of other countries, this is increased \"I want what they have\" - seeing how other countries work has been massively increased due to cheap flights and internet/media. People tolerate much less when they see other people have what they want. This has partially caused a massive drop in municipal confidence world wide. People believe alot less in their governments to solve anything, meaning everything becomes much harder for governments to implement, and the spiral continues downwards. Worth to mention that voting attendance is extremely low world wide, also giving more power to radical voters. Global crisis - many global crisis puts a larger strain on international cooperation, which is never perfectly fair. This causes more nationalistic views, \"we protect ourselves\". Hope this makes sense!"
],
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|
e5yet4 | One of the most spoken languages of the past, now an abandoned one; how did the Latin language "die?" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9mk3gl",
"f9mka5r",
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],
"text": [
"Didn’t die. With the fall of the Roman Empire, and the isolation of the “dark ages”/late antiquity, the local “common” Latin (aka: vulgate) morphed and evolved into the various Romance languages. Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, French, Catalan... these are all Latin today.",
"It didn't really die, it evolved. The Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese etc.) all came from Latin. It's similar to how Old English is incomprehensible to a modern English speaker. Once there wasn't a centralizing power determining what standard Latin was (i.e. after the fall of Rome), the language started to change, each country developing their own dialect.",
"You see accents of the English language? With the \"English\" of some places being almost unrecognizable pronunciation-wise? That's partly because pronunciation evolve with time, and evolves differently in different places. Vocabulary and expressions also changes from places to places, though since there is easy worldwide communication, new words tend to propagate worldwide rather than remaining exclusive to one place. (Same for the grammar, it can also change but such a change take a lot more time to happen) Now, imagine a world where there is no internet, no printing press, not a lot of long distance travel, ... In such a world, spelling would also evolve differently in different places, as mistakes become rules, and as sometimes peoples decide the old spelling no longer correspond to the pronunciation so the spelling should be changed. The pronunciation change, the vocabulary change, sometimes the grammar too, the spelling change, ... At some point, so many things changed from Latin that it was no longer Latin. And things changed differently at different places in Europe, so we gave different names to each of the variations (French, Spanish,...) But the Latin was still used by the administration and aristocracy. As those communicated a lot through Europe, and read the Latin Bible, this \"administrative Latin\" evolved homogeneously in Europe. For a long period of time, the elite was still speaking what they though was the original Latin (even though it did change quite a bit), while the remaining of the population was speaking the local variation of Latin that didn't look like Latin anymore."
],
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|
e6bqr5 | Why does Japanese sometimes use English characters? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9p4067"
],
"text": [
"Because the Japanese find English to be cool. They wear T-shirts with English on it and like throwing English words and phrases into everything, because it makes everything cooler. Just one of the many bits of our culture that they like to borrow."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
e6tgul | what's the difference between having a type and fetishizing? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"f9t1ri6",
"f9t383a"
],
"text": [
"It’s not a good black and white distinction, but generally, having a type is just kind of a subconscious preference for certain traits. Fetishization goes far beyond that. Realizing that you have a preference for redheads is one thing. Being attracted to people purely on the basis of their red hair and nothing else is more fetishization.",
"There's a clinical definition of fetish, and that is to not be able to derive sexual pleasure or gratification without that fetish element. Like if you have a foot fetish, you need feet to become sexually stimulated, it's not just going to be an element you happen to enjoy. Lots of people might have opinions about feet, and find, for example, a woman in high heels to be attractive. But a foot fetishist is not going to be attracted to a woman without the element of feet. Also, a fetish involves a non-sexual aspect as causing sexual gratification. Like getting a hard on from seeing an amputated limb or from seeing a dead person. The aspect of them being dead is the fetish, the appearance of them while dead (clothing, hair color) is the type."
],
"score": [
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7
],
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|
e7teqc | what exactly will the person who bought the $120,000 'banana duct taped to a wall' receive? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"fa4yq05",
"fa5691m"
],
"text": [
"It's basically money laundering. They make up prices to clean their money and funnel it through art museums.",
"There really wasn’t an original banana, they got switched at least once a week regardless and multiple copies were for sale. The exact details of how the piece gets installed in the buyers home is uncleared and varied. In theory however, they’re mostly buying the right to say I have a piece by this artist. Like an earlier poster said it does sound a lot like money laundering in which case no art is being delivered. It may be a front for drugs or other illegal products."
],
"score": [
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3
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} | [
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