rvense

I obviously meant sewn by hand, using a sewing machine. Not by a robot. The fabric is cut and passed through a machine by a human.

I just don't see how it holds water at all to say that Christianity was what caused the abolition of slavery, when just as many Christians were in favour of it.

Yes, socks, but nothing else is: underwear, t-shirts, jeans... all sewn by hand.

But if these things are because of Christianity, and it is often implied that western modernity is present in it from its beginning, almost an unavoidable consequent of it... then why are they not universal in Christendom? Why can I point to just as many Christian movements who are anti-science, pro-slavery, anti-individual?

The interesting question is whether the West is succesful because of or inspite of our Christian base. There's no denying the place of Christianity in European history, but that doesn't mean that the good things about our societies are due to Christianity. Christianity has changed a lot since Roman times, and its place and expression in various societies have been affected by other ideological currents and reinterpretations.

I'm Danish, which while nominally Christian has been a fairly irreligious country for a few generations now, and it certainly seems to me that the less influence and visibility Christianity has had, the better off we've been. Most of the things that make this country a good place to live come from socialism/social democracy and feminism, whereas many strands of Christianity has mostly been a reactionary force (with some exceptions).

I wonder what this will cost to build and how often they break. I doubt it's going to be able to compete with the price of human labour anytime soon. So it's either for going places people can't go (rescue bot?), or doing things people really don't want to do, like walk towards gunfire.

Sounds low. None of the companies I've worked for would have existed without open source.

People like you are ruining the internet.

Brain drain means you have great politics, gotcher.

And that has happened again. Changing the colours is "improving UX".

It's not more complicated if you know the language.

Language is a tool. People will use their language for what they need it for. If there isn't a word they'll make one up or steal it. This is absolutely universal. I know you can dig up any number of texts that say English is special, but they're all wrong.

"Languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must express" as Roman Jakobson phrased it. (The "must express" refers to grammar - in some languages you need a subject, or to know the time something happened, or in which direction[0] it happened. Other languages don't care, but you can add that information if you need it.)

[0] E.g. Mam, spoken in Guatemala, marks all verbs for direction, even if they're abstract, then you add one based on convention or metaphor or maybe taste.

We know alot about how English has evolved. Word forms develop along certain paths, sound changes follow laws that linguists have described, and the "fuuuug" in refugee does not become "fugg".

Etymology is probably the subfield of the humanities that provides the closest thing we get to testable hypotheses and laws. This is just mashing shit together.

It also seems to have a tendency to just mash semantics together. As though having something resembling "pig" and something resembling "full" means "full AND piggish". But that's not how plain juxtaposition works in Germanic: it's specification, not conjunction. So "pigful" would mean a type of full, full of pigs. (This is language specific, by the way; as I recall in Vietnamese "mother-father" is the normal word for parents - but in Danish it means grandfather, your mother's father.)

I'm sure I could get WhateverGPT to hallucinate something that looks like those drawings chemists make of molecules to most laypeople. That would be about as interesting as this is.

Etymology is a science. This is random guesswork, and it's not even very precise (deriving refuggle from refugee is definitely objectively wrong).

Maybe I'm coloured by having spent half a decade of my life on a linguistics degree, though.

Fyllipig is derived from "fyllan" and "pigge" and means "descriptive of something that is both full/abundant and pig-like."

Terryjambled means "mixed up in a confused or disorderly state, and covered with or resembling terry cloth."

Refugglemander means to "to manipulate electoral district boundaries in a way that impacts refugees."

I'm sorry, OP. This just isn't very good.