quote:Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy: she says seement. Strange? ________________________________________ As long as she doesn't say, "semen -t." It's kinda sticky stuff, but it doesn't seem strong enough to hold most couples together. Rather, it often sows seeds of discontent. (Baaad pun, Asa, shame on you!)
Now there's weird, cyberninny let that one through !
At the Amberly Chalk Pits Museum there is an exhibition of concrete artifacts (the chalkpit used to make make lime). Amongst them is a concrete canoe which, apparently, floated and worked quite well.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
It's hard to see how they can shorten it further but I bet they'll find a way. -------------------------------- Although it does take more speech to say it, grammatically, "y'know" is shorter, and quite common hereabouts.
Oh, Jerry, my girlfriend ate my yogurt this morning. Whatever should I do now?
Can't believe Kallah's post regarding "SEE-ment" for cement has been up here so long without anyone mentioning "The Beverly Hillbillies." Their lavish swimming pool, as you'll undoubtedly recall, was referred to at the "SEE-ment pond."
I do believe, though, that this pronunciation was based on actual fact since it seems to me I had heard it pronounced this way before that show aired. Possibly common in the Appalachian area??
Kalleh, You asked if it's incorrect to say the building is made of cement. In some societies you would be considered "bookish" or "uppity" if you said ("correctly") that it's made of concrete, of which cement is an essential ingredient. Cement is also an ingredient of the mortar that masons use for binding bricks and stone together.
Professor Higgins said, "An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him ... " and I think the same is true of all languages and all dialects. If any one of the Beverly Hillbillies had spoken of the "concrete swimming pool" instead of the "SEE-ment pond," the others would probably have spoken of "puttin' on airs." [It sounds more like "SEE-mint" to me.]
Among the cowboys I used to associate with, saying "I saw him," instead of "I seen him" classified me as an outsider. Their dialect is Rural Western and mine is General American.
"Correct" and "incorrect" depend on audience.
Posts: 6708 | Location: Kehena Beach, Hawaii, U.S.A.
Not necessarily. Traditional lime mortar is not cement, nor need it contain it.
The reason why mortar is used to bond bricks rather than cement is because it's weaker. Why use a weaker bond? Very simple. If a wall moves and the bond is as strong as the bricks, then the bricks will crack and need to be replaced. If the mortar cracks then the crack can simply be filled.
The strength of a wall comes from its bond, not its mortar - which is why bricks are laid in the strange patterns they are. A properly bonded brick (or stone) wall will stand without mortar and non-load-bearing walls are still made this way in some parts of the world.
The main purpose of mortar is to spread the load. If bricks are laid without mortar then there will be very small contact areas and thus high point loadings. The bricks will then crack, putting greater greater loadings on other areas until eventually the structure will fail.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
I did a quick google on the two phrases and Kalleh's "The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!" gets 150 hits while Haberdasher's "the pellet with the poison's in the chalice from the palace. The flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true!" only gets 40 hits!
Posts: 1412 | Location: Buffalo, NY, United States
Shufitz now seems to think they're both used in the movie. I definitely remembered "flagan with the dragon", as well. We'll just have to watch the movie again!
He's right, Shu 'nuff. That's the whole point of the scene; the mnemonic for which-glass-has-the-poison keeps changing! If the Jester hadn't been addlepated before, he surely was afterwards.
I think it all was before he turned into a master swordsman at the snap of a finger...
In amateur the -eur is reduced to schwa for me: AM-a-ta. (Probably because it went there from French -teur, and never became English -ture.)
Normally I have -ch- in unstressed syllables (as in future FYU-cha), so AM-a-cha would be expected. In stressed syllables it's TYU in careful speech, CHU in casual speech: ma-TYUa, ma-CHUa.
I received a spam email which asked me to look at a site which had "all-new amatures" on it. As one who has an interest in electrical matters (and one who has, indeed, rewound an armature), I assumed that this was a misspelling.
Sadly, the "amatures" were not some new kind of electical gizmo but young(ish) ladies in various states of undress. I doubt that any one of them was an amateur in the accepted sense of the word!
At least, that's the explanation I gave my wife when she crept in with a cup of coffee while I was checking the "amatures" site.
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
Armature, they misspelt armature, it's a perfectly innocent hobbyist thing, dear. You know how these tyre people like to drape young women over them, but I was looking at the... er... front end.
