Friday, January 21, 2022

Random Notes from a Crank

There's a word "uncouth." But does anyone ever give someone a compliment about how "couth" they are?

Here's some interesting factoids from this month's Harper's Index:

  • Percentage increase in number of yachts sold last year: 14
  • Percentage increase in the wealth of U.S. billionaires since the start of the pandemic: 70
  • Portion of adults who believe that U.S. crime has increased in the past year: 3/5
  • Of regular Fox News viewers who believe so: 3/4
  • Percentage change in the number of major crimes in the United States in the past year: -5
  • Percentage by which more men died from police encounters than from testicular cancer: 135
  • Minimum number of times Chevron has aired TV ads since June 2020 promoting itself as green or sustainable: 26,400
  • Maximum percentage of Chevron's budget spent on green technologies in the past decade: 1
  • Percentage of people worldwide who are "not too concerned" about climate change: 27
  • Who are unwilling to make significant changes to their lives to reduce its effects: 19
  • Factor by which someone born in 2020 will likely experience more river floods and droughts than someone born in 1960: 3
  • By which they will likely experience more heat waves: 7

Since I follow the Premier League pretty heavily and I just got done watching season three of After Life, I've noticed some fun lexical differences/tendencies between English spoken and written in Great Britain and English spoken and written in the US. 

One is the use of "whilst" instead of while. I'm not a fan. 

Another is the phrase "going mental" meaning losing one's mind or going crazy. I like that phrase, and I think I'm going to start using it. 

Some people use the word "brilliant" ironically to mean that something is poorly done or something said is stupid, particularly Ricky Gervais. I'll be adopting that word in that way. 

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