So I'm trying to figure out the pronunciations of certain Navajo words for a novel of mine that has Navajo characters in it, and I'm getting a little confused by some of the things this site is saying. Here's one:

I/i - Like the i in hit or the i in police.

What the FRACK? The I in hit and the I in police are TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SOUNDS! The first is IH, while the second is EE. What is this person trying to say? At first I thought they were pronouncing "police" as "poh-lyse" rather than "poh-lease" (which would be hilarious, comparing police to little blood-sucking parasites), but given that the name of the Navajo people is Diné and I know for a fact that that is pronounced dean-AY, this means the site writer pronounces the English word "hit" as "heat." WTF???

Then there's this letter: ł . The site I'm on says this:

"This sound is a lateral fricative that doesn't really exist in English. The Navajo pronunciation sounds like the "ll" in the Welsh name "Llewellyn." Some English speakers can pronounce it well if they try to pronounce the "breathy l" in the word clue without the c in front of it."

What the FRACK does any of that even MEAN? The LL in Llewellyn is just a fracking L! I even checked with other sites that provide spoken pronunciations of words to verify that the LL in Llwellyn is just an L.

And what does "breathy L" even mean??? Also, I try saying "clue" without the C, and it's just "loo." To add to the confusion, another site said the word "Łizhin" is pronounced clih-djihn, meaning ł is said like cl, which contradicts the above. So... what the fraggedy frack? (Oh, and if the I in Navajo words is EE, shouldn't that be clee-djeen?)

Oh and I have no fracking idea how nasal vowels are supposed to work. Their explanation doesn't help me, their examples, French words with nasal vowels, all end in consonants, I don't know how to remove the consonants to say the vowels.

“The trust-building measures led to the signing of the trade agreement in 2000, and the economic assistance agreement, the next year, in 2001.” (In 2000 the trade agreement was signed; in 2001 the assistance agreement was signed.) Both "the next year" and 2001 sjpi;d be present in the phrase, for emphasis. Many thanks!

Запись сделана с помощью m.livejournal.com.

Hoare had never heard of a Captain Kent. "A bit of a jump for him, isn't it?"
"Yes. He was slated for Eager, 28, but Their Lordships at the Admiralty had to give her to Plummer. Then Kent's uncle, Featherstonehaugh, put up such a row in the House that they gave him Vantage instead to keep him quiet."
"A Plummer for Kent, eh?" he whispered. Hoare surprised himself at the words. He could not remember the last time he had uttered an impromptu joke.
-------
Year 1805, talking of royal navy officers

Dictionaries give me various words for baskets and small baskets and shopping baskets but I very specifically need something that would translate to "handbasket". Any help? Thanks.

"The words of Luke 12:25 are important as they are perhaps echoed in Brueghel’s overall conclusion; the merry spirit and intrinsic beauty of his painting leads one away from morose reflections on mortality and JUDGMENT to an affirmation of the essential joy of life, which prevails in a world ruled by Good, despite the challenges of the human condition". (Caps Lock is mine)

(Luke 12:25 ‘And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the measure of his life?’)

What does JUDGMENT mean in this context? Many thanks!

The passage from a description of Lucas Cranach’s “Golgotha”:
“Against a jigsaw of jagged-edged clouds, rising ever denser into a thunderous mass of gloom, hangs the crucified Christ, flanked on either side by a thief in three-quarter profile. Beneath them crowd an impossible arrangement of figures, lovers, loathers, and the merely curious. In their amorphous arrangement Cranach manifests a blatant disregard for visual perspective, indeed of any understanding of space whatsoever; his interest, instead, lies in the attainment of the greatest possible visual impact. Thus piled on top, and squashed up against, one another are a cacophony of moustachioed and bearded onlookers, families and soldiers clad in armour, their spears and axes breaking the horizon formed by the tops of the myriad of heads, hats and helmets. As an exercise in perspective it is a peculiarity that works neither from below nor above but which achieves the effect of an uproarious denouement of shock, anger, gloating and motherly anguish.

        The formula, in fact, varies little from that of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Crucifixion of 1538 in the Art Institute, Chicago (see M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London, 1978, pp. 144-145, no. 377, illustrated), which itself is the culmination of over twenty years’ worth of compositional evolution, starting with the Düreresque 1503 Crucifixion in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich which SHOWS THE SCENE SIDE ON (op. cit., p. 66, no. 5).” 

I understand everything but “shows the scene side on”. What does it mean in the context? Many thanks!

"The Stadt- und Pfarrkirche St. Marien zu Wittenberg (Town and Parish Church of St. Mary's) is the civic church of the German town of Lutherstadt Wittenberg". Thanks to all who care to reply!

"Next year, a French trading house built in Muscovy a compound for its merchants - doings therein were governed by French laws alone". That is, not by Russian laws, as anywhere beyond the compound, but by French ones. Does the phrase sound grammatically OK?

☆ On the genesis "Adam's apple in Russian

***

Одно из самых смешных слов в турецком для меня - "кыкырдак", кадык, kıkırdak.

Но происхождение его в русском для меня неясно. Может быть, это всё таки трансформация исконного слова "горло"?
По-польски горло - "гардло". И может быть оно упростилось до "гардло" - *гардлык - *гардык - *кардык - кадык ?

★ Для сравнения - это же слово в других европейских языках :

( Read more...Collapse )

I'm not sure I've understood correctly.

Irving Finkel is talking about distracting Lamashtu by giving her some "feminine things", like comb or hair pins, but at the very beginning of that list he says something that sounds like "a sandwich box". Which would be very strange in ancient Mesopotamia, so he's either joking or saying something else.



if embedding doesn't work, it's at about 5:10 in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOT75GB64Hw

Is it OK to say that "the exhibition scored XXX visitors" (meaning wow, that was a success!), instead of just "the exhibition was attend by XXX visitors"? Thanks!

Dear linguaphiles,

Linguistics needs your help! Well... I need your help. ;) I am currently writing a paper on word-finding difficulties in older adults - arguably one of the most common complaints when older people talk about their language abilities. I am doing a behavioral study on whether older adults experience more or fewer word-finding problems when the words they had to produce or recognize were related to specific movements that you perform when you interact with them or when you perform the action they describe.
Of course, in addition to my old people who have to process these words, I also need independent people who tell me whether they consider these words to be related to motor skills or not. Could you help me with that?

There are three different questionnaires, depending on your native language:
English: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/?q=base06
German: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/
Dutch: https://www.soscisurvey.de/motor/?q=base07


I would be very grateful if you could help me out with this! :) (And if you do, please make sure to read the instructions and examples carefully because in the past I've had people misunderstand what I mean when I say "movements" - my mistake, not theirs, so I clarified this a bit.)

Thanks so much in advance!

From Agatha Christy's "The Double Clue". EDIT: eeep! her name was Christie...

Poirot and Hastings have just left Mr Hardman's house.

‘See you, my friend,’ said Poirot to me, as we left the house together, ‘he has one law for the titled, and another law for the plain, this Mr Hardman. Me, I have not yet been ennobled, so I am on the side of the plain. I have sympathy for this young man. The whole thing was a little curious, was it not? There was Hardman suspecting Lady Runcorn; there was I, suspecting the Countess and Johnston; and all the time, the obscure Mr Parker was our man.’

Why does Poirot say 'see you' instead of 'you see'? It seems he's talking to Hastings, meaning 'you know, you understand', and not saying goodbye to Hardman.

This is a presentation of new linguistic community in Russian LiveJournal.

***
Это сообщество не претендует на опровержение автора лучшего пока этимологического словаря русского языка Фасмера, хотя и названо ★ anti_fasmer .
Фасмер точен в 95% своих этимологий.

Но он не икона в золотом окладе.
Поэтому здесь можно писать на любые темы связанные с любым языком.

Предвижу, что будет и явное лингво-фричество, но пусть будет.
Пусть каждый имеет возможность высказаться.

Классические толкования будут по тегу : ☆
Альтернативные гипотезы : ★

Правило пока одно: 1 пост от участника в сутки


Welcome to anti_fasmer !

.

Запись сделана с помощью m.livejournal.com.

A coworker gave my dad this bottle of vodka (it has grass in it!), and I'm dying to know what the text says. Can anyone help?

.............. a good thing that the teacher didn't see you.

According to Pearson "That's" is not correct in this sentence. Could anyone tell me why?

A question: how would you call this mythological being in one word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domovoi

I've been playing Tabikaeru for a while despite having no knowledge of Japanese, but today a message appeared in the game and it stayed rather than disappearing after I clicked out. Can someone please translate?

English-Thai translator needed to translate a text containing 934 words. Please kinldy PM me with your rates and email. Thanks in advance.

Do these phrases denote more or less the same thing (in the context of natural resources development) or there are meaningful differences? Thanks a lot!

I'm trying to resolve a problem with a package that was sent to Russia three months ago (an eBay sale) and has been returned unopened with a label saying it "wasn't collected". Basically, what I want to know is if the address was the person's home or a Post Office box.

the address was

(name of person)
KIMa 9 xx (xx is a two digit number)
Sant-Petersburg,
199155
Russian Federation

It's a bit of a mystery since he has never made any claim for a missing item, or given me any reason to suspect it hadn't arrived. I want to get my facts straight before I contact him.

solved - it's a flat number - I think that they must have tried to deliver it but failed, then he didn't collect it from the post office or something. That helps a lot, many thanks to everyone who responded. I've now contacted the buyer and am waiting to hear back from him on ways to sort this out.

I've been thinking recently about the following phenomenon that I am reluctant to call a coincidence.

It seems that when Jews were scattered away from Palestine, for a while they were readily adapting local languages as their vernaculars. In Spain it was Spanish-based Ladino, in Germany Germanic Yiddish, in Persia Fors (Farsi, later to be called Bukhari)). Later on, the same Jews would move to other countries, but now they would shlep their newly created languages along with them. Thus, in Poland and Russia they would keep Yiddish for many centuries, in Bulgaria or Greece, Ladino, in Uzbekistan, Fors.

Any thought as to why such a (suddenly acquired) conservatism?

☆ The language of the tribe of the Piraha (Pirahã) , living in the Amazonias is
considered one of the simplest on the Earth.

It has only 8 consonants and 3 vowels. At present, a full body of all texts in the language of the piraha is compiled. Translated and glossed texts, direct
and reverse piraha-English dictionaries indicating the frequency of use,
as well as video recording of the text on a pirate with subtitles - here:

https://rus-sumer.livejournal.com/60210.html ★

Work on the corpus of
texts continues, But it is already possible to draw some preliminary
conclusions.
. # 1 Phonetics: In the piraha 8 consonant phonemes. In
the orthography of Everett, they are transcribed as p - [p] b - [mp],
prenasalized (nasal) [p] t - [t] s - [s] k - [k] g - [ng], prenasalized [g] [ŋ] x
- [ʔ], glottal stop & h - [h]

Prenasalized [mp] and [ng] are clearly audible in
the video on site "b" and "g", which confirms the linguistic universal
about the presence of nasal sounds in any language. The vowels "a-i-o"
are phonetically closer to the classical "triangle" A-I-U, but are slightly
more biased towards the center, that is, they are realized as [ɪ-ʊ-ɐ].

# 2
Raising and lowering the tone can fall on any vowel in the root of the
word, or absent at all. Therefore, we can say that the piraha is not a
tone language.

# 3 In the piraha, the category of past tense is clearly
identified, expressed by the suffix "-s, -sa, -sai", which does not allow
talking about it as a language "without time".

# 4 The presence of a
large number of identical translations (up to 20 or more, as in the case
of "do", "go", etc.) for words of a pirate with different roots, as is
evident from the above glossaries, makes a more thorough analysis of
the presented dictionary .
☆☆☆ If to say it is easier - not everything
written in Wikipedia about the language of the piraha, which was made
an icon of "uniqueness" in linguistics, corresponds to the truth.


☆ Язык племени пираха, живущего в Амазонии считается
одним из простейших.на земле.
В нём всего 8 согласных звуков и 3 гласные.
В настоящее время составляется полный корпус всех
текстов на языке пираха.
Переведённые и глоссированные тексты, прямой и обратный
пираха-английский словари с указанием частоты
употреблений, а также видеозапись текста на пираха с
субтитрами - здесь:
https://rus-sumer.livejournal.com/60210.html
★
Работа над корпусом текстов продолжается, но уже можно
сделать некоторые предварительные выводы.
#1 Фонетика:
В пираха 8 согласных фонем. В орфографии Эверетта они
транскрибируются как
p - [p]
b - [mp] , преназализованное (носовое) [p]
t - [t]
s - [s]
k - [k]
g - [ng] , преназализованное [g] , [ŋ]
x - [ʔ] , глоттальный стоп
h - [h]
Преназализованные [mp] и [ng] отчётливо слышны на
видеозаписи на месте "b" и "g", что подтверждает
лингвистическую универсалию о наличии носовых звуков в
любом языке.
Гласные "a-i-o" фонетически более близки к классическому
"треугольнику" A-I-U, но немного более смещены к центру, то
есть реализуются как [ ɪ - ʊ - ɐ ].
#2 Повышение и понижение тона могут падать на любой
гласный в корне слова, либо отсутствовать вообще.
Поэтому можно говорить о том, что пираха не является
тоновым языком.
#3 В пираха отчётливо выявляется категория прошедшего
времени, выраженная суффиксом "-s , -sa, -sai" , что не
позволяет говорить о нём как о языке "без времён".
#4 Наличие большого количества одинаковых переводов (до
20 и больше, как в случае с "do", "go", и так далее) для слов
пираха с разными корнями, как это видно из приведённых
глоссариев, заставляет провести более тщательный анализ
представленного словаря.

☆☆☆
Если сказать проще - не всё написанное в Википедии о языке пираха, который сделали иконой "уникальности" в лингвистике, соответствует истине.

Two questions for speakers of Swedish:

- Trygghet: I've seen it translated as "security, safety, confidence, certainty, trust".  Wiktionary also describes it as "all the comforts and securities we have grown used to back in Sweden".

So, to me it sounds like the kind of security people feel about their daily lives, e.g., about their employment, about health care.  But can you use "trygghet" to denote a profound feeling of safety and comfort instilled in you by a certain experience, such as being around certain people or in a particular environment, or even just a visual or auditory stimulus - something that makes you feel safe, like when you were a child?

- Gökotta: I've seen it translated on the web as "waking up early to hear the first birds sing", but the Swedish Wikipedia says (in Google's translation):

"Gökotta is a Swedish tradition to go out on bird watching and picnics at the time of spring and morning when the cuckoo begins to go out. In parts of Sweden, it has been common to celebrate gökotta, especially on the day of Christ's heavenly journey, and earlier also the day of treason and the days before Midsummer."

Is modern-day gökotta mainly a religious activity in Sweden?  Or can someone who is not religious just wake up early on any random day during spring or summer and go bird watching (and perhaps have a little "fika" along the way), and still call it "gökotta"?

Thanks!

Is there a difference between 諦める and 諦めがつく?

These are from a novel from Philip Roth. I'm sure the author doesn't speak Arabic, so presumably he had somebody to translate and transliterate those. He gives the pronunciation and the English translation.

I need to know if the English translation and transliteration are accurate.(I tried to Google-translate them and the results were rather dissappointing)

1\ Ad-daroori lih achkaam. ‘Necessity has its own rules.’

2/'the shifting sands'--ramal mutaharrika

I am having trouble understanding what "グズグズ" means in this sentence: あのグズグズだった頃の俺の心がお前となぁなぁになる事をまだ許していないのは確かだ

Could someone explain?

I wonder, is there a rule of thumb explaining how to form an adjective from a name? We say Kafkaesque, but Shavian, Marxist, but Trotskyite, Ptolemaic but Tolstoyan. And it is not that there is no system at all: recently, I needed to use an adjective derived from Putin, and only Putinesque sounded right (an not only to me).

While we are at that, a more specific question: what would be the antonym of Keynesian? Monetarist, monetarian? Fridmanian? Chicagoan? Somehow, only monetarist sounds right...

Hi everybody,

When it is said, that a person has depression stored in his/her software, what does it exactly mean? Pent-up, or deep seated, or long existed?

Thank you in advance.

Abkhazian and Abazin languages ​​are considered as "record
holders" for "economy", which are "dispensed" by two vowels: A and Y [ә].

In Russian, for example, there are 6 of them: A E I O U and Y [ә] .

The same pair of vowels (A, Y) with the addition of a long "A" cost
Kabardino-Circassian, Adyghe and Ubykh languages. And there is a
suspicion that all three vowels of these Caucasian languages ​​are only
variants of a single phoneme [ә].

* Are there languages ​​with a single vowel sound?

☆
[Нынишняя арфаграфия в рускам языке слишкам слажна и ни атражаит саврименава звучяния слоф.
Как вы щитаите, настала время привисти её в саатвецтвие с риальным праизнашэнием] ?


Нынешняя орфография в русском языке слишком сложна и не отражает современного звучания слов. Как вы считаете, настало время привести её в соответствие с реальным произношением?

★ [Dhe karent oothogrefi in Inglish iz tuu kompleks aend daz not riflekt dhe saundz ov weedz.
Du juu think its taim tu bring it intu lain widh dhe riel prenansieishen] ?


The current orthography in English is too complex and does not reflect the
sound of words. Do you think it's time to bring it into line with the real
pronunciation?

Dear community past and present,

this used to be the most awesome community on the internet for someone who is interested in languages.
Native speakers from every corner of the earth conversing about language in an educated manner. Heaven.
I never contributed a lot but learnt so much here.
Just wanted to say this before there's nobody left to say it to.

Also - are there any other good language communities out there??

Love, anicca_anicca

The word appeared in sexual scene so I'll use a cut to be safe.( Read more...Collapse )

What is the right pronunciation: [wine stine] or [wine stin]?

Dear community, I’m struggling with the translation of a passage from a last will from Russian into English (which is not my native language). It is a part of a text focused on art matters, so it will be read mostly by art lovers, not lawyers, and still some sort of legalese and legal clarity should be present in the fragment.

The hard facts: a woman wants that after her death her artist husband lives on her estate (land plus house) until his death but the estate should be owned by an institution (the School), which after the husband’s death should arrange her dear husband’s museum on the estate.

And here is the English text in my translation:

“I hereby bequeath my plot of land in [the village], with its house and outbuildings, to the professor of the School and painter Ilya R., so that he would hold a life tenancy of it, and to the said School, so that it would own it and after Ilya R.’s death arrange in it a museum called ‘Ilya R.’s Little House’… I also bequeath to the School a capital to be expended on the upkeep [maintenance] of Ilya R.’s Little House”.

I'm confused by this sentence「イイ顔になってら」because I've never seen ら used like this before. Could you explain what the ら means?

Looking at words for "weather" in different IE languages that use familiar scripts, it appears that quite a few stem from PIE *we-dhro-, "weather", from root *we- "to blow", same as "wind"; and quite a few are homonyms of "time", or stem from words with the meaning "time" or "a period of time".

Two notable exceptions are Latin "Status caeli" (state of the sky) and Belarusian "Надвор'е" which can be translated as "state of the yard".

What other etymologies exist for words for "weather"?

Hi all! Is "It's not the end of the world" to mean "It's totally fine" an example of litotes? If not, what IS the rhetorical device that this example demonstrates?

Hey all,

I have been looking up my middle name for years with no luck. I am half-Korean but do not speak or read/write the language. My mom told me that my name is older and therefore spelled in hanja, but she needs to "figure it out" and isn't too sure how to write it in hanja. I googled hanja names and stumbled across this community. I'm hoping you guys can help me out!

My name is spelled "Yae Ja" in English, and my mom told me that it means "artistic". My mom wrote my name in hangul as "예자". I found the name "Ae Ja" which sounds very similar to my name. I don't know if it's the same name just spelled differently, or if they're different names.

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to spell my name in hanja, and if anyone knows if Ae Ja and Yae Ja are the same name (minus a difference in English spelling). And if it truly does mean "artistic" or if it means something else.

Thanks in advance :D

I'd like to ask you what would a French soldier say, after he receives an order, before he goes away. I believe in English it's simply "Yes, sir!"

Can someone help transcript this song, please? I really like this band but being ESL, I can hardly understand what they are singing about.

https://mandateofheaven.bandcamp.com/track/baby-electron

Or here
https://www.jamendo.com/track/1073719/baby-electron

(I think the bandcamp version has slightly higher quality but you get interrupted with "open your wallet!" thingy after a few replays)

Thank you beforehand!

Hi, I have a question for any native British or UK folks.

The following is a quote from a piece of writing that I am editing for a friend:
___________
Gwen elbows him in what he is sure she believes to be a subtle manner. “What we’re trying to say,” she continues, “Is that we want to make sure that you’re alright. You’ve been sort of….erm….wound.”
“I’m fine.”
“No,” she shakes her head and a few curls fall out of her ponytail. “You aren’t. I...I don’t know what you’re going through, but you haven’t been fine since….well. In a while.”
___________

Now, the question I have concerns the end of the first line of dialogue. My writer tells me that she intends 'wound' to mean 'wound tight' not wounded/hurt/injured. She and I both recognise that there are times in the English language where words are dropped from the end of sentences, if it is well implied what the speaker means. Question: is this an appropriate phrase where a dropped word might occur for a British English speaker? Or is there some entire other way a native Brit would tell their friend that they look wound tight/stressed out?

(To make this a little more complicated, and the reason why I brought this to the comm, the character in question is actually also injured with a black eye... which has made him a bit 'wound tight'; so I feel that simply leaving 'wound' is too ambiguous, in this context.)

I do appreciate any help or insight you all can provide.

Thanks, Anna

Would a native Hebrew speaker mind confirming some spelling for a calligraphy piece please?

So we have the first part of Psalm 31:15 with nikud: בְּיָדְךָ עִתֹּתָי
How would this be written without the nikud? Do I add a extra yud and a vav to עִתֹּתָי? So בידך עיתותי?
Thanks for your help!

Hi, could you please help me understand the structure of the sentence in bold (and the meaning too ;) )?
[John used to have a good life and successful career, when an accident made it impossible for him to return to his professional field. After a long period of troubles and failing attempts to find other job, his brother who just bought a car and was pleased by the ambience at the dealership tells him to try to get a job there. John has no idea of this business and not a hint of desire to work in it, but in despair decides to follow the advice. At the dealership, they first take him for a rich potential buyer, but then he says to the owner that he is actually interested in work]
"Work? What kind of work?"
"Well, my brother said this is a place that I might be able to sell some cars."
An internal cringe as I show off my detective skills.
"Your brother? Who's your brother?"

First, I don't understand who's having a cringe, John or the boss?
Second, what does "show off" mean here, and what it has to do with "detective skills"?
And finally, I can't understand the logic and the structure of the sentence. :((
Thanks for any help :)

How would you call the items below - jugs, pitchers, decanters, anything else?

How would you call the bead-shaped pieces of stained glass stuck to the base? Or just call it like that? Many thanks in advance!

Hi,
could you please help me to understand the use of "a dash of" here?

A guy is trying to build an artistic career. His first small steps were successful, so he decides for a bigger one, and with lots of bravado and a dash of one-hundred-percent real confidence, he goes on to audition for the new play.

I think I understand the words :), yet I feel like something eludes from me in this sentence. I'd appreciate any explanations, comments on the nuances etc.
Thanks for any help :)

.
I'm working on a submission to an academic journal with a research buddy - I'm in the UK, he's Canadian, we communicate by email and generally have a pretty relaxed relationship with a reasonable amount of humour.

Today I made some rather clumsy (ie possibly less than tactful) comments about his first draft for the abstract, and it was fairly obvious he wasn't too pleased. I then put together a first draft of my own for the abstract, and braced myself for an angry rejection.

I got this back:

"I quite liked your opening sentence but I made a minor change to the second one - I hope that's OK."

Now, if that had been written by a British person I would take it to mean

"I can just about bring myself to be polite about your opening sentence because after all you have to pick your battles, but the second sentence was so bad I had to take it apart before I could agree to have my name under it."

I may exaggerate slightly, but only in degree, not direction.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Americans use "quite" in a very different way from us, and I'm wondering if that applies to Canadians as well.

So my question is: did he actually like my opening sentence (after all, he didn't change it) or was he being barely polite?

Unfortunately I don't like what he's done to the second sentence at all, so I really need a bit of a steer on this before I respond!

Edit: I'm still not getting notifications from LiveJournal, so my apologies in advance if there is a delay in replying to your comment.

If anyone is interested in what I've said here about some of our British speech habits, you might like to have a look at @VeryBritishProblems, which contains scarily accurate insights into the British psyche as well as laughing (at ourselves) at the way we phrase things.