when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter later that day, she burst into tears with laughter because i was saying “quiero abogado” which means “i want a lawyer.”
imagine a two year old repeatedly saying “i want a lawyer!” as an adult laughs at her.
Reminding me of also funny story: So my piano teacher of many years when I was a kid had a baby when I was in my teens. This little girl was super bright, and also bilingual in Mandarin and English from her first word.
I do not speak Mandarin. At all.
One day as I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up after the lesson, Baby Girl is playing in the kitchen and hears me sneeze! And she runs over and says, “You need [incomprehensible]?”
Now here’s the thing: I knew she was not speaking Mandarin. I don’t speak it, but my aunt and uncle both do, and a close family friend’s family growing up would code-switch quite comfortably around us. I was old enough and it was sufficiently different from English that because there was no formal teaching, I never derived anything from it? But I was very familiar with how it sounds to an uncomprehending ear.
What she said did not sound like Mandarin at all. It sounded like gibberish. Like English baby gibberish.
As I clearly didn’t understand, Baby Girl repeats, “You need [gibberish]!” and then, when I still don’t understand, she stamps her foot and makes Angry Noise at me, which attracts her mother’s attention.
Bewildered, I relate what’s going on. Her mother covers her face and says, “She wants to know if you want a kleenex.”
And then my piano teacher explained that Baby Girl had figured out that some people didn’t speak English and some people didn’t speak Mandarin and she needed to confine herself to one language around them.
But sometimes, as is very natural especially for quite young children, she’d run up against realizing she didn’t know the word for something – and sometimes she knew the word in one language, but not in the other!
And it seemed intuitive to her that the way to fix this was to say the word from the other language … with the right accent.
So what she’d been doing was taking the word for “tissue” or “kleenex” in Mandarin and saying it like an Anglophone would: no tone-change and different vowel shapes and all. And it made Baby Girl VERY FRUSTRATED when this did not solve the problem, and at that point she seemed to believe that the adults around her were being stupid on purpose.
Cats normally have five digits on the front paws and four on the rear. Polydactyl cats have more, and this is a moderately common condition, especially in certain cat populations. Polydactyly or polydactylism (from Greek polys, meaning “many”, and daktylos, meaning “finger”), also known as hyperdactyly, is a congenital physical anomaly in where individuals have supernumerary fingers or toes. In humans/animals this condition can present itself on one or both hands. The extra digit may be a small piece of soft tissue without bones, contain bone without joints or it may be a complete functioning digit. Polydactyly is associated with different mutations, either mutations in a gene itself or in a cis-regulatory element responsible for the expression of a specific gene.
Avocado comes from ahuacatl which means “the common fruit”. It does have a secondary definition that is “testicle”, but I’ve never seen it used in that context. All the Nahuatl words that use ahuacatl has a stem uses the first definition for words like “avocado tree” and “avocado orchard”. Guacamole does not ‘literally translate’ to “testicle sauce”. That’s completely absurd.
And if anyone wants to know what the word for testicle most commonly used in Nahuatl is, that would be atetl which has a literal definition of “water stone”. However, you can see the connection between the idea of “water stone” and the actual testicle.
Pee is stored in the balls…
No, urine is stored in the bladder. Semen is stored in the testes.
The connection between “water stone” and testicle is that the testicle (stone) resides in the scrotum surrounded by a lubricating fluid (water).
It doesn’t make us go crazy. We just don’t understand the why. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why bagged milk is better than milk in jugs.
There is no literal reason since the jugs we use are just as cheap as bags and with a bag you need to put it into something as soon as it’s opened because otherwise you’re crying over spilt milk
I don’t understand why y’all use jugs though. They’re so impractical.
No they’re not. You have a self contained stand able container.
With a bag you have one floppy boi
We have holders for that. There’s no real difference.
Wouldn’t it be crazy if there was a way you could hold milk without grabbing a separate holder? Some sort of solid plastic or cardboard container, that would be so cool.
Then there are Soviet milk pyramids. Those are the oddest milk containers of all but they’re really cool.
Thanks! That’s horrible! Curse you for sharing!
It looked like it, but confirmed that those are the original Tetra-Pak cartons. (With the company name coming from the tetrahedral shape.) Dairy products were the main thing they were developed for initially in Sweden, and some started being produced in the Soviet Union in 1959.
I’ve seen smaller individual portion-sized Tetra-Paks like that used for sour cream in the US more recently, but that’s the main thing I can think of offhand.
The Tetra-Brik shape which is mostly what you see now apparently wasn’t introduced until up into the ‘60s. Something that will stand up better does seem like more practical packaging for liquids.
Here’s how preparing your taxes could work: You sit down, review a prefilled filing from the government. If it’s accurate, you sign it. If it’s not, you fix it or ignore it altogether and prepare your return yourself. It’s your choice. You might not have to pay for an accountant, or fiddle for hours with complex software. It could all be over in minutes.
It’s already like that in parts of Europe. And it would not be particularly difficult to give U.S. taxpayers the same option. After all, the government already gets earnings information from employers.
But as ProPublica has detailed again and again, Intuit — the makers of TurboTax — and H&R Block have lobbied for years to derail any move toward such a system. And they continued in 2016.
Intuit spent more than $2 million lobbying last year, much of it spent on legislation that would permanently bar the government from offering taxpayers prefilled returns. H&R Block spent $3 million, also directing some of their efforts towards the bill. Among the 60 co-sponsors of the bipartisan bill: then congressman and now Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
The bill, called the Free File Act of 2016, looks on the surface to be consumer-friendly. It makes permanent a public-private partnership in which 13 private tax preparation companies — called the “Free File Alliance” — have offered free online tax filings to lower- and middle-income families. The Free File Alliance include both Intuit and H&R Block.
But the legislation would also permanently bar the IRS from offering its own free alternative.
Intuit has repeatedly warned investors about the prospect of government-prepared returns. “We anticipate that governmental encroachment at both the federal and state levels may present a continued competitive threat to our business for the foreseeable future,” Intuit said in its latest corporate filings.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., offered a bill last year that would have actually allowed the government to start offering prefill tax returns. While Intuit did not lobby against Warren’s bill — presumably because the legislation had little chance of success — tax giant H&R Block did. (H&R Block did not respond to a request for comment.)
Neither Warren’s bill nor the Free File Act made it out of committee…
Joseph Bankman, a law professor in tax law at Stanford Law School said arguments about government overreach are false. Participation is voluntary and actually gives taxpayers the upper hand, forcing the government to “show its hand.”
“Now you know what the government knows,” Bankman said, who added that there are multiple ways taxpayers could benefit. “If there’s a mistake that goes in your favor, maybe you don’t call attention to it.” Also, everyone would receive the returns — including the millions of Americans who are due tax refunds but don’t get them because they don’t file. In 2012 alone, the IRS said more than 1 million Americans did not receive their refunds — amounting to $950 million — because they did not file.
The authors of the federal Free File bill have repeatedly voiced fears of big-government interference. In an opinion piece for The Daily Caller and on his site, Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., said “making the tax collector also the tax preparer creates an inherent conflict of interest while forcing citizens to relinquish control of their taxes to the government.”
Since the 2008 election cycle, Roskam has taken in more than $32,000 in donations from Intuit’s political action committee and Intuit employees. He received a far smaller amount, $2,500, from H&R Block — all for the 2016 election cycle. Roskam’s office did not return a request for comment.
A really fascinating policy story that doesn’t get enough attention is the fact that we could actually dramatically simplify the process of doing taxes for most individuals, but the sheer complexity of the tax code has created a constituency to defend its complexity. Tax prep firms like H&R Block and Intuit make massive amounts of money from the tax code being so hard to manage that people need their help, and thus acquire the resources to ensure that the very problem which the exist to help with is not solved.
Another interesting twist to this story is that one of the easiest ways to simplify the tax code, something small government conservatives talk about frequently, is by giving the IRS more power.
In order to punish drivers and draw attention to poor driving habits, the man planned to throw bricks at all cars that ran red lights for one week, starting last Thursday, but police stopped him on the first night. The man was interviewed and later released without charge.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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