troglodyte_mignon

Yay, good luck to you two!

Oh you’re right, I forgot that they changed the system for the RER. You used to be able to access the RER with a “normal” metro ticket as long as you stayed inside Paris, but for the suburbs you had to buy a ”destination” ticket which costed more or less depending on the length of your trip. I wasn’t certain whether that system had completely disappeared.

I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that he seems to have just gone ahead and pushed the wheelchair user without asking them if that’s what they wanted. That doesn’t seem right. But we don’t have audio, so maybe I’m misinterpreting.

Yes, the author misunderstood something, you definitely don’t need an app. I regularly buy tickets, and I’ve never even installed the bloody app. The two-ticket system is annoying, though, and it’s the kind of mistake a tourist could easily make in good faith. (Taking the tram with a metro ticket, for example.)

Trains and metro travel require separate tickets at different prices. You can’t easily hop from one to another.

… Ah wait, I thought they were talking about the metro or bus+tram tickets, but they seem to be talking about the RER tickets instead ? That’s another issue.

aside that you basically don’t know how much you’ll spend until you’ve already spent it

That’s absolutely unacceptable to me.

Same.

looks like the output of extreme gastro-intestinal distress

I love the way you describe it, ha ha. It seems to be pretty spicy, from what I’m reading?

If think it’s pretty good! I can’t find any where I live, unfortunately, I’ll have to try to make it myself one of these days. Chard is awesome.

It’s not Italian, actually, it’s Nissart.

In Nice there’s a kind of swisschard gnocchi that’s called merda de can (dog’s shit) because of its appearance.

Judge by yourself (image taken from here).

The shape can be different depending on how you make them, but it always looks a bit suspicious.

It reminds me a bit of the “mud porridge” that we liked to make in a concave tree stump in the schoolyard when I was in preschool.

I’ve seen estadounidense in a Spanish newspaper before, and for some reason this word is very hard for me to spell.

In French too, there’s “états-unien” (also spelled “étatsunien”). It’s little known and rarely used (in France). I have no idea if it’s more often used by left-leaning speakers. (I do use it from time to time, and I think it can be useful to avoid ambiguity.) I can imagine its use being more common and more political in Québec, compared to France where I live?

While writing this comment, I stumbled on a letter from a very angry listener who wrote to the French public radio “arbitrator” (don’t know if it’s the right word) to complain about a guest using the word “étatZunien” (his spelling) several times (gasp) on the air. Apparently, the listener believed the word to be made up, and he wasn’t the only one who wrote to complain about it.

And the arbitrator’s like “um, dude, it’s a real word, it’s in the dictionary since 1961”.

There’s no point linking to that here, really — the letter’s all written in very incoherent French — but it made me laugh.

frequentative

Thanks to your comment, I’ve learned about the -le prefix and unlocked a new word. I’m going to bed satisfied. :)

Emoji are fine though; emoji are cool.

Emoji are the devil. 😠😠😠😠😠

I actually think it’s an interesting idea. We’re prone to click on a lot of links while browsing a page, going down a rabbit hole, spending way too much time there and regretting it later. If we had to copy and paste every link (which is still very quick to do, it’s not as if we had to type the whole thing), would we end up having more control about our internet media consumption? Having to take three seconds to copy and paste the link in my address bar might make me reconsider whether I actually want to visit that page right now, instead of just doing it out of habit. I don’t know if that’s really part of the motivation for “text-only links”, and I don’t think I would make that choice for my website if I had one, but I still find it interesting.

And really, the lack of clickability is not a huge step back, just a small, minor one, considering how quick and reliable it is to copy and paste. It’s in no way comparable to printed media, where you’d have to manually copy the reference and then go look it up in a bookshop or library.

That said, I am concerned about how it may affect accessibility. I’m very ignorant about those things, but I suspect it would be a hassle for people using a screen reader?

I’ve just watched the clip. Is it a parody of the Rawhide theme song or am I imagining it?

Keep in mind that

The EF English Proficiency Index has been the subject of criticism in literature. From the point of view of methodology, it suffers from self-selection bias. Instead of testing the level of English proficiency in the population, it tests the level of English of those who self-select.

(From the Wikipedia article.)

That is absolute nonsense.