@Merkwurdichliebe posted mostly very low quality, nasty comments. There was rarely anything of substance. It was a good decision.

the horror! — Tzeentch

You can be anti-left, for example, if you do it reasonably.

Happy new year!

You’ve opened a can of worms.

Now that you've set things out, I understand the distinction you're making between chocolate bars and candy bars, and I apologize. You're right: I've been focusing on what you're calling candy bars. The trouble is, we don't use the word "candy" in the UK so anything covered in chocolate is a chocolate bar by default.

I really hope I haven’t broken any rules in this post by the way :/ Please excuse me if I have, as I am new to this site. — Beverley

No you haven't broken any rules. The only thing I'd say is that you should put a blank line between paragraphs to make it more readable.

Welcome, Beverley. :smile:

Yes, there was something about it I didn't like. Maybe in those days my nut love had not moved beyond peanuts out to hazelnuts, I don't know.

That's interesting: I don't remember the Cabana at all, even though according to Wikipedia it was around in the 80s, which was my main chocolate bar decade. I don't like coconut or cherry flavour sweets, so I would have avoided it.

:grin:

True, my compatriots would hang me, if only they could catch me. But note that I’m mainly Scottish, which is not a form of English.

I do like some Cadbury’s chocolate. The Chomp, for example.

Incidentally and in case you don’t know, there’s some connection between Quakers and chocolate. Cadbury and a few other English chocolate makers like Rowntree and Fry were Quakers.

Yeah, travelling students must be a minority. My experience is that in France, Spain, Italy, and Russia, English is only spoken in the touristy parts of big cities and holiday resorts. But in the Netherlands and Scandinavia I suspect most people do speak English.

every country in Europe, they all speak English at least up to daily conversational level — Corvus

Not that it matters much, but this is not remotely the case, unless you just mean that all European countries have significant numbers of English-speakers.

You do you, of course, but I can’t help but think less of you.

Sickly sweet with an unpleasant, sticky texture.

Feel free to discuss the topic, but if you have any more complaints about me, take them to Feedback.

Ok, you have the twix.

I’d have eaten you first.

I would eat one to prevent death from starvation at the very last minute.

Twix — universeness

It’s a bad bar. Toffee Crisps are fine but not great.

That’s my kind of chocolate bar. Looks a bit like two British ones, which happen to be among the best British chocolate bars: Lion Bar and Picnic. @universeness resides in the UK and yet didn’t mention them :chin:

The other best UK chocolate bar is the humble yet perfect Chomp.

When I crack open my own on Christmas Eve I'll drink to you and your crappy chocolate bars.

The Double Decker was one of my fav's but I also loved crunchies, bounty bars, mars bars, marathon bars, milky ways, yorkies and most other chocolate bars that have ever existed. — universeness

I can't take your whisky chat seriously, knowing that you have so little chocolate bar discernment. Mars bars indeed.

My edgy opinion is that grown-up chocolate bars, rather like single malt whisky, are a triumph of marketing over substance, and that the confectionery aimed at kids is more inventive and tasty. I won't deny that Lindt is good chocolate, but it's like eating a raw ingredient.

So if this response I'm now providing could have been stated before, why did others (myself included) throw a little ridicule your way? It's twofold I guess. The first is that the debate wasn't taken seriously by those who already knew the answer, but who would have only taken it seriously if there were someone somewhere taking seriously the thesis you're advancing, which could have only been shown by citing to some article or some new school of thought on the issue. The second is that posters (including myself) are not always arriving with an educational temperment when we post, but instead arrive with a combative, adversarial approach, which is understandable as well, as the bulk of us are ornery middle aged men overly connected to our computers. — Hanover

Personally, I treated it with derision partly because I'm in a scraptious mood, and also because I'm upset by the stupidity that surrounds me: bigotry, stereotypes, conspiracy theories, the paranormal, and the brazen lack of interest in learning. Folk linguistics is in the same ballpark. I believe in shutting down this stupidity instead of exposing it, because the latter is too much work.

Note that @I like sushi is no more interested in the polite, friendly, and calm objections from @Baden or from you than aggressive interlocutors like me. That's because it was a Lounge discussion from the start and Sushi had no intention of thinking.

But it may well be the case that my approach is a bad one, and, Merry Christmas.

their taste is like savoring the harvest. Ew! — javi2541997

"Savouring the harvest" to me sounds deliciously evocatively delicious.

That makes me think of my Siberian tea, which isn't really tea. It looks like somebody went in to a forest and just swept up whatever was on the ground. Leaves, needles, cones, sticks, etc. I say it's like drinking a forest, and I mean it as a good thing. I savour the forest.

Before anyone thinks I'm one of those tea people, I'm not. Coffee is my drink, but I drink tea when I have infections of the upper respiratory system, as I do now.

I had Valor chocolate a few times when I was in Spain but was not blown away. I don't think I tried Huesitos. Kit-Kats are crap.

but chocolate mixed with nuts? Ew! — javi2541997

You've been living under a rock if you're shocked and surprised by the concept of chocolate mixed with nuts! It's the classic chocolate combination. Ever heard of M&Ms?

You should be able to get a Daim bar at IKEA by the way.

It occurs to me that rather than short-sightedness, Sicilians are much more famous for a culture of vendetta, which involves conflicts that last for decades, where revenge is planned and enacted in spans of many years. Whatever their lack of tenses, it doesn't seem to hinder their conception of past and future.

This stuff is so dumb, I'm back to being cantankerous again.

I suppose folk linguistics, as exhibited by @I like sushi, is actually pretty interesting as an anthropological phenomenon.

The question I have is this: is my cantankerousness about folk linguistics justified? Does folk linguistics in fact contain nuggets of wisdom and could it actually support scientific linguistics somehow? This would mean that it can't just be rejected as horseshit, which is my first instinct. Note that I'm not saying, e.g., that Germans really are literal-minded because the language is more literal than others.

Incidentally, I'm not convinced that German is more literal than other languages. Does anyone have examples?

I think that because it was reported in the field by a linguist. Sicilians do not use future tense and are widely regarded as being short-sighted/fun-loving. — I like sushi

Your original claim was that one determined the other:

If you lack use of tenses (like Sicilians) then you are less likely to plan ahead — I like sushi

Did your mysterious linguist present evidence for the link, or just the lack of tenses? Nobody has argued with the latter.

And whether or not Sicilians are “widely regarded” (by whom?) as short-sighted is irrelevant. Is this more than just the stereotype it appears to be? Maybe what some mainland or Northern Italians habitually say about Sicilians? At most it sounds like a cultural trait that has nothing to do with the language.

German clearly impacts Germans too. There language is particularly literal and every european I spoke to living in Berlin remarked about how literal Germans were as the most significant cultural difference. — I like sushi

People say this kind of thing all the time. It’s just folklore. Or as @Hanover puts it, horseshit.

The fluent speaker of a language is an expert user of that language, but not necessarily an expert otherwise. An average German can’t be trusted any more than an average Mongolian to assess the extent of linguistic determinism among Germans, so what Berliners happened to tell you is irrelevant.

EDIT: I misread your comment. You actually mentioned what Europeans said, rather than Berliners. Well, that’s equally irrelevant.

Well, you asked for it. In the second sentence of the OP you claimed without backing it up that a difference between languages implies that one is better than the other--without even explaining what this means. On the face of it it's a silly thought, and you don't go any deeper to explain it.

I doubt those are even legitimate questions, in terms of linguistics.

I have a very strong, and perhaps very eccentric, hatred of ignorant chatter about language, partly because everyone who can speak seems to think they have the right to throw around their opinions about it without doing the most basic research. As I say, unless I see some linguistics here (or even philosophy of language, communication theory, or social sciences) I'm moving this to the lounge. Well, I'll be tempted to do so anyway.

I hope someone with knowledge of linguistics (seems to be only @hypericin so far) contributes to this discussion, because so far it belongs in the Lounge.

I mean...

I think English is particularly unique in that it developed in certain directions due to Latin, Ancient Greek, French and influences from colonies too.

This range could be viewed as positive or negative thing. Which is it? I would say mostly positive at one point in history, but as time has passed it may have become a little unwieldy perhaps? — I like sushi

What does any of this mean?

WARIFY — universeness

Good one.

I sometime explain away my obnoxious behaviour by saying I’m just being scraptious. I think it’s a combination of scrappy and captious.

I also use “falafel” to mean faff/hassle.

Cool. Note that there's a reading group section here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/16/reading-groups

I had to go on Google Maps when I saw Hobart mentioned here, since I knew nothing about it. It strikes me as a secret paradise, but that's partly a consequence of knowing almost nothing about Tasmania and thinking about it only once a year.

Weatherwise, not super warm in summer but warmer than Scotland (my benchmark), and not very cold in winter.

Born: London, England
Raised: The shires of Dumfries and Ayr, Scotland
Have lived in: Scotland, England, France, Spain, and now Russia but not for much longer!

Those are the facts. Identity is somewhat independent of them.

Strict typing ensures that these mistakes are picked up in development. — Michael

I've only recently started back with statically typed languages after a couple of decades of freedom, and it's been good. It does encourage good coding and it does allow you to fix stuff more easily.

It's a work in progress so not yet open source but parts of it are public anyway so check it out if you're interested: https://github.com/wtframework

I'm particularly proud of the SQL statement builder (https://github.com/wtframework/sql). My intention is to allow for the full spec. Just need to finish off some CREATE and ALTER stuff (mostly to do with partitions). — Michael

I just saw this bit. Great stuff, but the SQL stuff is a bit yikes to me.

Cool name.

I'm also in the process of building a PHP framework, inspired by Laravel but much smaller and faster. — Michael

Hey, everyone is building a framework these days. :grin:

my colleague is suggesting htmx for future projects so that's what I've been doing recently and what inspired me to make this. — Michael

I'm on board. I'd attempt to go down that route exclusively if I could choose all my tech myself (and use a compiled language on the server).

Funny to see how the frameworks come and go. Below is a chart plotting interest in frameworks over time.

When I started getting back into this stuff a month or so ago, I was intending on learning React and brushing up on Django, but I somehow got distracted into doing things with Crystal, Elm, Elixir, and other things more or less obscure. There are many choices now, and Python is so slow.

I see you're using Typescript. I've stayed away from it so far, but I'm appreciating the static typing in the server-side languages like Crystal, so I really see the benefit. Plus it's doubtful I'll be able to stay away from JavaScript frameworks as much as I want to, so I guess I'd better start using it.

By the way, amongst the front-end frameworks, I've found Svelte to be the most enjoyable to work with.

That explains it then! :grin:

Yeah I like the approach a lot.