Reminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s.
The Middle English spelling and phonetic shifts are what make it so painful to read. The words themselves though are mostly comprehensible with a bit of effort.
Go back another four hundred years to Old English and Beowulf and it becomes complete gobbledygook (to me at least).
Yep. If you hear Chaucer read aloud by someone who knows the phonetics and the meaning it's instantly like 75% comprehensible. If they give you a bit (like, half a class-period) more help, you'll get to ~90% without any more effort than that. Chaucer is more or less as incomprehensible as Glaswegian - that is to say, it's a bit tricky, and you won't know all the slang, but you can get used to it pretty quickly.
What's really fun is that if you keep the dialect in your head, and try reading it out loud with your best "Chaucer accent" it feels like slipping on a pair of glasses: you immediately "get" stuff that you'd have thought was impenetrable just looking at the page.
Source: my medieval lit classes, with a teacher who was really good.
Replying to myself to add that that last ~10% is an enormous time-sink. You'll have to look up every unfamiliar word, which isn't a big deal for a short text, but becomes one for something longer. Worse, though, is that you'll constantly be led astray by words whose meanings have drifted over time: your interpretation (often) won't align exactly with that of Chaucer or his audience. What I said above is good enough for casual / undergraduate use - the stories are still funny, and / or have enough depth for a good discussion - but there's a reason "medievalist" is an actual speciality: you'll spend a whole career trying to get to 100%.
Since spelling was not standardized at the time, I suppose there would be no real loss of meaning if someone were to rewrite these works using modern/standard English spelling? Why are high schoolers forced to read these archaic texts as written? It was just so tiring to try to read them; I could never get through any of them and resorted to Cliffs Notes.
English nerd (and former English teacher) here, and I think for high school students that's a good idea. It's not actually an impossible text, and an introduction to the real thing is useful and interesting, but forcing teenagers to go through everything in the original is too much of an obstacle for most students.
Also: only reading the "boring" bits. When I was in high school I was excused English classes (took English 101 at the local college instead - told you I was a nerd), but overheard my classmates hating their way through "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or "The Knight's Tale" - one of those - and introduced them (nerd!) to "The Miller's Tale" - broad scatalogical comedy - which they loved. Later I did something similar for them with Gulliver's Travels, by showing them the bit where he has fairly graphic sex with the giantess. (I think that's an actual kink, but I certainly didn't know that at the time!)
My father in law grew up in the Denver area. His father made his living as a handyman, and one of his regular customers was Molly Brown (the Titanic survivor known as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"). Every week he would go to her house to exchange her radio battery, then bring the old battery back to his workshop for charging.
There’s a great radio museum in Howth, Ireland, a waterfront town near Dublin. The founder was a lifelong radio enthusiast who grew up in a poor rural community and was mesmerized by the power of radio from an early age. I remember him telling me he had never heard a language other than English until radio came to town and he heard a broadcast in French. He also talked about using very basic acid batteries and having to go into town to change out the acid. I believe he said it was also a serious problem if you spilled any in the house because it would damage or dissolve anything it came in contact with.
Yes, in the old systems, you'd get about 90 volts AC down the line to ring the mechanical bell ringer. Once saw a guy nearly fall off a ladder, splicing phone lines with bare hands. He thought the relatively low voltage was safe enough, but then someone rang him in the middle of the job.
I had to refresh my memory about the hybrid use of AC and DC current in telephone networks.
The Alternating Current signals could be used over longer distances and were effective at making the bells ring, moving the clapper back and forth. This back-and-forth is exactly what makes AC so deadly in the body, should it cross through your cardiac muscles, for example, and set the muscles twitching at 50 or 60 times per second.
There’s nothing inherently deadly about AC nor anything inherently safe about DC. If there’s enough voltage available to drive current through your body, then electricity is deadly regardless of if it’s AC or DC.
In general AC tends to be a little safer than DC, because the voltage is constantly reversing, which means it’s constantly passing through 0V, creating moments where you don’t have current driving through your body and forcing all your muscles to contract. Those 0V crossings create moments where you can let go of whatever is electrocuting you. DC on the other hand has no such 0 crossings, if there’s enough voltage there to drive current through you, then all your muscles will be stuck contracting until either the power is turned off, or until they’re all so fried they’re not physically capable of contracting anymore.
Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
