I wanted to check something about "them's the breaks."

I used Ecosia.

It helpfully responded with a page of results that opens with a translation from English to English.

Thank you Ecosia. I did not already know that "them's the breaks" is expressed as "them's the breaks" in English.

#ecosia #translation #useless #unhelpful

Random Wikipedia #criticism (rant?)...

One of the things that bugs me about (English) #Wikipedia is how aspects of it are controlled by, for lack of a better word, #pedants, without consideration of the actual #readers - without considering the purpose of an encyclopedia.

One example of this is how, when an article features aspects of another language or dialect - for instance, something from Old English, or Arabic - where the reader will not be familiar with how to pronounce something presented transliterated to a modern Latin/English alphabet, or with a word shown in a non-Latin script entirely.

It used to be common in reference works to give a simple #pronunciation key that was at least close to the correct pronunciation, but was easily understood by a normal literate reader. You know; the stuff that looked like "ED-joo-KAY-shun" or "SHEH-joo-ull" or whatever.

Well, that's not good enough for Wikipedia most of the time. Instead, they give the pronunciation in International #Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so you get stuff like "æɪ" and "aʊ" and "/ɔː/".

These are absolutely more #accurate guides to how a word should sound. And they are absolutely, completely #useless and #uninformative to 99% of people reading the article.

You know who already knows and is completely comfortable reading #IPA?

#Linguists. Students of language.

You know, the people who *already know* how to #pronounce the words. The people who don't actually need it.

#FFS.

#pedant #unhelpful #rant

A 🔥 to the geniuses who have made commercial canned soup labels exasperating -- they post weight of the whole can of soup in grams, but then post "serving size" and #nutritional info in milliliters. C'mon 🙄

#deceptive
#unhelpful

And so... I've decided the conversion is not mathematical but pragmatic. I'll make the soup from scratch with reduced salt, sugar, fat. Healthier and cheaper.