ever feel like you've been being lied to?

[solarbird]

So I was poking around for new LED decorative bulbs - specifically, clear bulbs, because the selection there has been a problem for a while, and no frosted bulb looks good in a ceiling fan. Just for example. And I stumbled across something on Amazon, or more specifically, two somethings, both made by the same company originally: LED filament bulbs,

Comments

[caladri]

This is very cool! I hate CFLs and am glad that there are obviously-fraudulent alternatives which are nonetheless so imperceptibly-fraudulent as to be indistinguishable from the real thing! :)

Also, I think that "meter" as a thing which is used to measure other things is always "meter", never "metre".

[solarbird]

That is quite possible, I am actually a terrible speller and only appear literate with the aid of spellcheck and Anna.

[solarbird]

I mean, I've asked Anna how to spell three words this morning because I could not spell them well enough to look them up.

[solarbird]

I note this is only a problem in English. I spell pretty well in Japanese because there are no characters which mean "insert random vowel noise here, maybe" unlike in English, where all these characters have that meaning:

• a
• e
• i
• o
• u

English is a terrible, terrible language.

[peristaltor]

Not terrible, just a bastard from a bunch of different fathers and mothers. The History of English Podcast is now giving me the run-down on just how multi-sourced our tongue really is.

One fun factoid: Did you know "isle" and "island" are not cognate?!! Seriously, what the hell?

[solarbird]

English is a very silly language, with terrible, terrible spelling.

[quen_elf]

Fun fact: when I was doing my MA in computer speech and language processing, I saw a poster from a PhD student who'd been experimenting with whether they could improve speech recognition accuracy across a range of user accents, if they literally considered all the vowel sounds to be the same, i.e. only one vowel sound instead of 10 or however many it is.

(It improved for users with 'non-standard' accents but worsened for the 'standard british' accent that the systems were normally designed for.)

Personally I like the way English has stupid spellings and whatever. But that may be because I already know it. :)

[solarbird]

I'VE BEEN RIGHT ALL THESE YEARS!

XD

I don't actually hate English, I just think it's a terrible, terrible language. But it's kind of adorable that way too. But goddamn, spelling, what.