I would just like to point out to everyone that a thread called "Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know" turns out to be all about penises. Carry on.
This took a turn into odd. So is the perfect (and safest) way to mix the two, when you are having sex and playing COD at the same time?
To bring things back to a more serious note (I think I may be to blame for the weiner derail), and maybe it doesn’t count because it was something I knew academically, but something I learned during the aftermath of the hurricane was that “simple life” is anything but simple. It’s exhausting and your day is quite full. I totally understand why people were “early to bed, early to rise” back in the day. And it wasn’t just that once the sun set the light was gone. I was dead tired. So if your story takes place in a rustic setting with no mod cons and your characters have oodles of time to do what they like, think again.
This is why all those people in British historical novels lived in huge manor houses with servants. Staffs and staffs of servants. Butlers. Cooks. Chambermaids. Gardeners. Coachmen. Maids. Nannies. Baristas. Bookmakers. Bail bondsmen. Ladies of the evening. Fluffers. Superheroes. Etc. They freed up time for the dukes and duchesses to get on with the important work of writing poems, playing cards, taking opium, sleeping during the day, sleeping during the night, and generating heirs. Of course, in the twenty-first century, much of this work has been undertaken by cellphones and internal-combustion engines. Alas.
Definitely - a lot of my friends are smallholders, and anyone who thinks its an easy life has been reading too much rural idyll stuff . I mean they like it and by and large its fun if you like that sort of thing, but its getting up early feeding, bedding, mucking out etc every day of the year... I've only got chickens and vegetables so its reasonably easy for me, but those with pigs, goats, sheep,cattle work themselves into the ground
Late to the party due to time zones, but anything short of the detail and accuracy found in Moby Dick (and here we are with the dicks again)(I know a whaler isn't a tall ship) and I'm out, no matter who's having the sexy times or how they're having them.
I didn't know how many types of bullets there were. I thought I knew enough, but research has shown that I know diddly.
I used to be a gun nut, and I still get surprised by whole calibers, not to mention bullet types, so don't feel bad.
Me too. Doing research for a war story you get to learn/choose caliber sizes. Not to mention mortar size, then the mass of artillery calibers. It gets a little insane with the amount of options to pick from.
Wait a second, so this means that the crude slang word Spoiler: a crude slang word for female anatomy "cock holster" is actually etymologically pretty spot on? Mind blown.
Ah, here're two more. 1. You can have a language barrier even when you are proficient in the language (This was especially a revelation to me because I realised this was happening between me and my parents.) 2. Some Czech vowel sounds are entirely different to English vowel sounds, even though the vowel letters look the same. Would seem like this should be obvious since they are two different languages, but when they both share basically the same set of letters, you just assume things... 3. While grammar obviously differs from language to language, somehow I never knew they could differ on the basic subject, adjectives kinda level as in like, where you would need a noun in English, you would actually an adjective in Czech. I realised I ended up with 3 instead...
Yes. I recently learned that one, too. You can even have a language barrier without language . I didn't/don't know diddly shit about this topic (even though I'm learning), so for me it's actually easy: I don't get to be surprised by anything. All of this is nuts and I'm in over my head. Assumptions/expectations don't exist for me
Actually war is reasonably easy - there's a hell of a lot of calibres and bullet types but most of them don't get used on the battle field because armies want soldiers to be able to use each others ammo in an emergency - everyone carrying a different type of gun is Hollywood fantasy. Assault/battle rifles in the Nato countries nearly all fire 5.56mm (some older ones fire 7.62 but Nato standardised on 5.56 for reasons of weight) Soviet block AK47s and similar fire 7.62 short (that is the same calibre but they won't fit in a Nato 7.62) Machine guns mostly fire either 5.56 or 7.62 unless they are a 50cal (The soviet heavy machine guns like the DShke fire 12.5 which is essentially 50 cal) Pistols are mostly 9mm or .45 , and sub machine guns are mostly 9mm Sniper rifles are mostly either .308 or .338 Mortars come in 51, 82 and 120mm Obviously there are exceptions but as a quick and dirty guide you can't go wrong with those Also if you are writing fantasy or Scifi the easiest thing is to just construct your own standardised round like 5mm caseless* or nanobotself constructing or something that doesn't really exist so you don't have to worry about real world accuracy so long as it logically consistent (yes I know 4.7mm caseless exists, H&K made it for the G11 but its not exactly in common usage)
If I remember my research properly, 7.62 is pretty much the same as .30 cal. which was pretty much the standard for long arms ammunition since the advent of the smokeless cartridge.
Yes and no (see below) the bullet in a 7.62 Nato is .308. There was a big hoo ha between the British and the Americans after WW2 because the british wanted to standardise on .303 which they'd used for ages, whereas the Americans wanted .308. As the major super power America got their way and Nato went to 7.62 x51mm (Soviet rounds are either 7.62mm x39 (short) or 7.62x54 (long) ) Round about the vietnam era it became clear that 7.62 was too heavy if you were fighting a light infantry war so the standardisation for rifles swapped to 5.56 . Although machineguns stayed at 7.62 for a long while - it was only really the introduction of the Minimi in the 90s which made 5.56mm light machine guns a thing. Incidentally one thing that always confuses people is that you can't just use a metric to imperial converter as some rounds are measured on the projectile, others on the case, and others on the barrel they are supposed to fit - by conversion 7.62 is .30 But in a Nato 7.62 the number comes from the measurement at the edge of the rifling lands (the raised bits of the spiral) the bullet its self is a nominal 7.82 ie .308 , where as soviet bullets are a nominal 7.91 ie .311
I used to have an old Nagant that took 7.62x54 (though the casings were stamped 7.62x59) and my dad had an old Model 94 Winchester that took 30-30 rounds. It was always fun when you finally got to the back bush and couldn't figure out why you couldn't get a round properly chambered. It actually wasn't that hard to figure out, just really annoying.
Nerf still part of NATO, I assume, ranges anything from 19.99 up to 100 if you have the potatoes/calibre on the market.
Moose shot matt repeatedly with a Nerf retaliator ... die you bastahd. As the spring locked back on an empty mag, Moose swore. Wolfs were tough. Dropping his useless nerf blaster Moose seized the 12 bore from the safe and loaded with two carts of buck shot... "now we'll see wolfy," he muttered with an evil cackle
'No, don't shoot me @Moose, we can share the pyjamas. Here, have the bottoms, I'll just wear the top half, I love you, baby, no.' EDIT @Mat placed the stuffed toy/the squirrel/& snoopy/& the hooligan boy into the sack. He hurled the sack into the freezing lake. 'I should have saved the dog,' he said. [tbc]
Spanish has something mildly similar. In English you can turn a past participle into a noun only under certain conditions and in pat phrases like the accused may rise or the injured were taken to hospital. In Spanish you can do this with pretty much any past participle that can serve as a descriptor. Once you’ve established the antecedent of the past-participle-serving-as-noun, you can forgo using the noun again. Had a police report not long ago where the crime scene described two people having been thrown behind a bed (deceased). Thereinafter they were only referred to as “the thrown” in Spanish (los tirados). The strange/fascinating part for me is that in English this sounds distractingly broken, but in Spanish I don’t even notice it until the moment where using this construction obfuscates the biological sex of the person in reference. You can’t refer to people as “it” in English and there are only so many impersonal construction workarounds one can employ.
Something I learn over the summer when I dove deep into Metrical theory, is that while English doesn't change the spelling for words depending on if it is being used as a verb or a noun (example the word 'Object' can be used as a verb or a noun) it does, however, change what syllable receives the Stress depending on what part of speech it is being used as. Actually, I learned more about how word stress and syllables work over the last 6 month than I thought was possible to know about the subject. ( now I have to practice putting all this wonderful knowledge I learned into my works).
Does English ALWAYS do that, and is the change always in the same direction? Like, is the emphasis always on the second syllable for verbs and always on the first for nouns? Assuming there are two syllables. Like, "aim" is the same pronunciation whether verb or noun, right? And "influence" doesn't change. Always for two syllable words? I'm trying to think of another two syllable example, but I'm drawing a blank... ETA: Found a list! (http://www.enchantedlearning.com/wordlist/nounandverb.shtml). Looks like sometimes we change, but usually we don't.
