Hey fedizens  

Bit of an odd linguistic query for anybody with knowledge of English, in any and all forms, regions, dialects, etc.

Is there a simple, true neutral (realistic) alternative for the verb to hope, and maybe even a true negative (pessimistic form)?

We've thought and posted a fair bit about the concept of hope recently-ish, particularly in this post after watching a John Green video.

On the back of this, we've realised that hope is a word that has a positive, optimistic connotation inherently within it, at least as we understand and use it.

When somebody says that they hope that something will happen, they are simultaneously communicating that:

• they want this thing to happen;
• they recognise that it may not happen;
• they nonetheless believe that it could happen, and are somewhat biased towards it happening.

We've seen underhope and overhope suggested on Wiktionary, but never read, heard, or otherwise seen these in real world usage, and overhope is what most people seem to mean when they use variants of hope like hopeful.

The closest we've found is wish, but it doesn't work as a verb replacement. You can use it as a noun to some extent, but it sounds anachronistic and clunky.

e.g.,

• I hope that you are doing okay.
• It is my fondest wish that you are doing okay.

We're curious about all the other forms and variants, but it's the verb that we cannot find in-use realistic or pessimistic forms for.

For the realistic (true neutral) form, we're looking for a verb that conveys that:

• you want this thing to happen;
• you know it technically could happen, from a statistical point of view;
• you cannot be hopeful, as you have decent grasp of the situation, the challenges, and so on.

For the pessimistic (true negative) form, we're looking for a verb that conveys that:

• you want this thing to happen;
• you recognise that it could happen, theoretically;
• you do not believe there's any realistic prospect of this happening.

Any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions within the broad scope of all English variants?

Genuinely asking, but -- as per usual -- no reply guys please 🫶

Boosts and friendly quotes welcome  

In the meantime, where hope is the defacto optimistic form, all we feel like we can say to folks is something like:

We wish we could hope that...

#AskFedi #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuys #English #linguistics #hope

Hey folks  

This is a query targeted at any folks who experience any kind of neuropathic pain for any reason(s), to any degree, and with any frequency, and who've found meds and/or treatment options to reduce, manage, or otherwise cope with the pain.

Please note that we're not asking for ourselves, but for friends who have various forms of this and seem to be having no luck getting decent or timely care through official medical routes 🥺😔

Our own experience of pain has been very different, so we cannot extrapolate anything that has worked for our own issues to neuropathic pain. Relatively-speaking, we've been very fortunate.

We are aware of what the medical organisations say, but we'd much rather hear from folks with personal experiences of any kind, particularly atypical ones that work where others have failed.

As we understand it, commonly-prescribed meds like duloxetine (or any similar SNRI) and gabapentin are often ineffective in many folks, though please correct us if we're wrong there.

We don't have any insight on things like:

• Using a TCA like amitriptyline or nortriptyline.
• Using pregabalin.
• Combining a TCA with a gabapentinoid like pregabalin or gabapentin.
• Using an opioid like tramadol.
• Stronger opioids.
• Lidocaine patches.
• Some form of cannabinoid (or a mix of different ones) in various forms.
• Non-prescription methods.

Thank you in advance for any answers 🫶  

#NeuropathicPain #disability #disabled #ChronicPain #AskFedi #healthcare #TCA #SNRI #gabapentinoids #gabapentin #pregabalin #neuralgia #meds #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuys

Hey fedizens  

Anybody know a decent, modern replacement for Tag&Rename?

It used to be our favourite tag editor, but development seemingly stopped back in 2018.

We're ideally looking for something that's:

• Cross-platform (at least Windows and Linux).
• Has a user-friendly UI.

It must:

• Have a dark mode option.
• Be compatible with modern tags, particularly lyrics ones, which we're apparently way out of date on 😅
  • We think the newer Vorbis tag is UNSYNCEDLYRICS, based on some downloaded FLAC files, versus the older LYRICS tag we're used to.

For context, we primarily use WACUP on desktop or Poweramp on Android.

Not sure if it's a thing, but if there's some kind of new option for synced lyrics that's compatible with both of the above, that would be amazing!

#AskFedi #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuys #WACUP #Poweramp #Tag&Rename #music #FLAC #DarkMode

Hey fedizens  

Anybody know a trusted script¹ or extention² to automatically replace "smart" (aka "curly") quotation marks and apostrophes with straight ones?

• Double quotation marks -- replacing “ and ” with ".
• Single quotation marks -- replacing ‘ and ’ with '.
• Apostrophe - replacing ’ with '.

Genuinely asking, but no reply guys please 🫶

Thanks 🩷

#AskFedi #punctuation #PunctuationMarks #QuotationMarks #apostrophe #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuys

Edit: Apologies for any confusion caused. We're looking only for something basic and trusted that can replace certain characters or text strings with another. So long as we can easily configure it to replace the above, it doesn't matter if it's a more-general script or extension for replacing text.

Edit 2: We found an extention that could automagically do it for us. It's called FoxReplace. Took us a few moments to work out how it worked, but we ended up creating a rule for text only (ignoring URLs) to apply the desired substitutions automatically to the text output on any rendered web page on a page load/reload.

¹ Compatible with violentmonkey.
² Compatible with Firefox or Firefox-based browsers.

Ventor es el mejor batería del mundo y PUNTO. #NoReplyGuys.

Enemy of God - Kreator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4d727CcYGI