Misc. comments 4

[redbird]

To brisingamen:

So far as I can see, all this does is to give the sea more ammunition to hurl further up the beach in other places, but I don't quite understand the complexities of refusing to accept the inevitability of longshore drift, so I am undoubtedly wrong about this.

Having studied this somewhat at university--it was a major interest of the professor who taught one general undergraduate intro at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies--I can tell you that you're basically right. In eastern North America, it's not longshore drift, it's that barrier beaches are trying to move inland (because the sea level is rising). This has been going on for millennia, but in the last several decades, it's been impeded by roads and ocean-view homes and a general human refusal to admit that we have built our houses upon sand.

Piling extra sand on beaches is essentially harmless but expensive, and has almost no long-term effect, because the currents carry the sand where they will. Everything else that's been tried to prevent barrier beach erosion makes things worse: it doesn't solve the problem locally, and it stops the beachs down-current from being naturally replenished. Spend enough money and you can turn a delightful sandy barrier beach into a rocky shoreline.

[Herewith ends the rant; also available, discussions of craters left by American bombing in Vietnam; and the pleasures of being on a beach on a pleasant cool day in April, when almost nobody else is.]

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In customers_suck, in response to someone who suggested that their employer shouldn't have hired mentally retarded people because those employees might make some customers uncomfortable:

If another employee can't deal with a (mentally or physically) disabled person, the employee who can't deal is free to look for another job.

Similarly, your customers are entitled not to be harassed. That doesn't mean they are entitled not to see people they aren't comfortable with. If an employee makes people uncomfortable by hassling them, touching them inappropriately, or the like, they need to be retrained, reassigned, or fired. Any employee. If s/he's just doing the job, and a customer is uncomfortable because the customer has never met a mentally retarded person, or a person of a particular ethnicity, before, the customer needs to take a deep breath and go on about their shopping.

If companies don't hire disabled people (or whites, blacks, women, Christians, non-Christians, fill in the blank) because they're afraid people won't have previous experience with the disabled, how are the temporarily able-bodied going to get that experience?

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To noelfigart:
I read the pagan names post, and looked at my username, and smiled. I'm not very pagan these days, but my more-or-less-totem bird is a brightly singing seed-eater.

I've given up on guessing whether people's names were chosen by themselves or by someone else: how, unless you know them well enough to be told, can you be sure, in a world where people hand innocent children names like "Prince" and "River Phoenix"? It seems kinder to assume, when someone has a boastful name, that they are burdened by foolish parents rather than excessive arrogance.

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To ladysisyphus, who was commenting on a man who wants to restore the primacy of the 19th-century meaning of "gay":

I'd be more sympathetic to this cause if most of the other words with similar meanings hadn't also been chased out of common usage by "happy". "Merry" is barely allowed out in public without "Christmas", "joy" is rare, "cheerful" almost a stereotype, and when's the last time you heard a person (other than Santa Claus) or event called "jolly"?

At least we still have "glee" and "pleasure".

Comments

restoring the meaning of "gay"

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

nicely said.

and we still have "content", "glad", "lucky", "delighted", "gratified", "fortunate", "jovial", "pleased", "blissful", "elated", "euphoric", "ecstatic", "exuberant", "thrilled", "radiant", and a host of idioms -- not exactly a shortfall of terms related to the old meaning of "gay". i'll accept it if somebody would like to restore "gay" if i see their conversation peppered with an exuberance of terms indicating happiness, otherwise i smell sour grapes.

as to jolly -- does the jolly green giant count? *grin*. "jolly" seems still occasionally applied to overweight, but as yet uncowed by this oh-so-very-sad state men, i think. maybe it's a briticism, for he's a jolly good fellow? jolly good, i say.

(it was fun to think of associated meanings for "happy", *grin*, and all without using a thesaurus!)

Re: restoring the meaning of "gay"

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Well, while all of this is true, I don't think the related words capture the meaning of 'gay' -- which I think is a combination of jolly and carefree. But you know, words change, get over it, and so on; we have to use the vocabulary as it's available to us.

I think I use synonyms for 'happy' relatively often, in fact. There are various people in the thread saying that 'jolly', 'merry', 'glad' and so on aren't used much; they're all common in my spoken vocabulary -- the first two for gatherings. (Events are merry rather than jolly if everyone is pissed rather than only a few people being).

jollification

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I've not recently heard "jolly" used as an adjective, as opposed to an intensifier. Both senses used here (http://www.maths.otago.ac.nz/~rbarker/Cool/Jolly.htm)

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

It seems kinder to assume, when someone has a boastful name, that they are burdened by foolish parents rather than excessive arrogance.

Moira <-------------- so did not pick this name, and if I ever do pick a whacky name for a child of mine, I will try to make sure it is one the majority of people know how to pronounce

//offtopic// How did you get those Gr characters to work?

[redbird]

I had a friend in grade school named Moira, and it was just a name. Then I discovered that the identical word, in Greek, means "fate", an unfortunate coincidence but another reason to be careful of the name in cultures where Irish isn't the default.

I entered the Greek characters as HTML entities, slowly and painfully, in the Semagic client, then cut and pasted them into the userinfo page (because the username space isn't long enough for that many HTML entities). It looked like &Pi;&epsilon;...&omega; when I first typed it in.

Do not try using Microsoft Word and a Greek font, it won't render usefully.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Then I discovered that the identical word, in Greek, means "fate", an unfortunate coincidence but another reason to be careful of the name in cultures where Irish isn't the default.

Yes, it's especially amusing when you go to a school where you study Greek for the first year. Heh. Heh. It was my nickname for a while, til I threatened to curse people.

I entered the Greek characters as HTML entities, slowly and painfully, in the Semagic client

Aha, gotcha....I think whenever I've tried to render Greek online, most of it comes out as those little blank boxes.

[kiya]

At least we still have "glee" and "pleasure".

*exclaims "!"*

*adds "holy glee" to her LJ interests list*

[acrobatty.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, I was convinced we were spiraling down to the point described by TH White where the only value-judgment words we had were "good" and "not good" (or maybe "doubleplusungood"). We seemed to be down to 'good,' 'happy,' 'cute,' 'cool,' and one slang word that kept changing. But lately vocabularies seem to be increasing, and I notice that recent songs actually have lyrics again. My guess is that the internet really is having the effect that paper correspondence used to.

Now if they'd only start listening to each other.

Or at LEAST to me! :)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

We have a family of stuffed animals who are, collectively, the Jolly Family--Mr. Bouncy (tiger), Largess (cow), and Junior Bouncy (tiger). No other word quite captures their mood as well as "jolly" does.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

I assume planting grasses on the beachfront doesn't work as a means of controlling erosion? I vaguely remember a scene from The Power Broker in which Robert Moses had gangs of men on hands and knees, planting sorme type of beach grass (I'd have to look up the exact variety) in an attempt to prevent such erosion.