Interesting Links for 23-09-2015

[andrewducker]

• 5 charts that show what the public really thinks about piggate
  • (tags: pigs davidcameron politics polls )
• What the British are really laughing about
  • (tags: politics society conservatives )
• Plotting self-esteem vs age for men and women
  • (tags: self-esteem visualisation age )
• From Motorcycles To Robots, Honda Animates 70 Years Of Automotive History
  • (tags

Comments

[gonzo21]

I have never heard any of those words for snow before.

I'm astonished so few people care about the Prime Minister being blackmailed by a senior donator to the party. Absolutely astonished.

[ggreig]

I might use "snaw" - how marked my Scots speech is depends on who I'm talking to - and I would know what was meant if someone said "snaw-pouther" or "spitters". I only know "skelf" as a word for "splinter", and wouldn't easily adjust to it meaning "a large snowflake", though context might help.

It's a "Historical Thesaurus of Scots" that's being compiled though; so it'll include a lot of words that may not be in current usage.

[gonzo21]

'Snaw' to me is just 'snow' pronounced with a certain scottish accent though. I don't think it qualifies as a whole new word on its own.

And yeah, skelf to me is a splinter.

[ggreig]

That way lies a huge argument over the difference between Scots (the language) and Scottish English (dialects of English) - which argument, I hasten to say, I'm not looking to have and would be unqualified to do so anyway.

However, if you accept that Scots exists as a language and that the context is a Scots thesaurus then I think it's OK to say that "snaw" is a Scots word. We wouldn't disqualify "brave" from being a French word on the grounds that it's just the English "brave" pronounced with a French accent. :-)

[chess]

Numbers of Tory respondents in the piggate survey were very low - and I would expect 'population of Conservatives who do YouGov surveys' to correspond pretty well with 'more Libertarian-side Tories who couldn't care less what you do with your penis and inanimate objects' whereas your more social-conservative Tories are less likely to be filling in surveys on the internet...

[alextfish]

YouGov are generally fairly good at weighting their survey responses to take account of that kind of thing. But that article does seem to talk about raw numbers of respondents. YouGov do also try to distribute the people they invite to answer certain questions across a range of demographics etc, so... I don't know.

[momentsmusicaux]

I really want to believe that graph, but surely that's a sample of people across different ages, rather than trajectories. So while that doesn't discount it, we have to consider the world that different generations have grown up in. Current 60somethings have been living in a world that's got better and better for them, for instance.

[apostle_of_eris]

Why is the pig thing about one guy and not about Oxbridge? It's not like he invented the thing.
(sidebar on what a foul creature Thatcher was)