jacks

The picture is of an adjustable height table whose top can be raised or lowered with what I call a scissor jack.

English is a human language and it continues to evolve. Some of the people who use it seem to have chosen their ancestors unwisely. Evolution just means change, and it isn't always for the better.

Many years ago I was in Germany and had to translate a technical document into English, my colleagues found it hilarious when I described connectors as Male and Female-thought I had a sex obsession.

And some connectors, like SMBs, can have female plugs.

Kinky.

It's called polysemy.

Then things get complicated:

Using accent symbols to differentiate between different meanings of words that look the same is called diacritic differentiation or lexical diacritic disambiguation. When specifically applied to words with the same spelling, these accent marks are widely known as distinguishing diacritics, distinctive diacritics, or diacritic marks for homograph/homonym differentiation.

Thankfully, English doesn't do this. It certainly simplifies the typesetting.

John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@Glen--Canyon.com wrote: |-----------------------------------| |"English is such a messy language."| |-----------------------------------|

Truly.

(S. fuer Kontaktdaten!)

+1          ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF           ======================          Dearest creature in creation,          Study English pronunciation.          I will teach you in my verse          Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.          I will keep you, Suzy, busy,          Make your head with heat grow dizzy.          Tear in eye, your dress will tear.          So shall I!  Oh hear my prayer.          Just compare heart, beard, and heard,          Dies and diet, lord and word,          Sword and sward, retain and Britain.          (Mind the latter, how it's written.)          Now I surely will not plague you          With such words as plaque and ague.          But be careful how you speak:          Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;          Cloven, oven, how and low,          Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.          Hear me say, devoid of trickery,          Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,          Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,          Exiles, similes, and reviles;          Scholar, vicar, and cigar,          Solar, mica, war and far;          One, anemone, Balmoral,          Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;          Gertrude, German, wind and mind,          Scene, Melpomene, mankind.          Billet does not rhyme with ballet,          Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.          Blood and flood are not like food,          Nor is mould like should and would.          Viscous, viscount, load and broad,          Toward, to forward, to reward.          And your pronunciation's OK          When you correctly say croquet,          Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,          Friend and fiend, alive and live.          Ivy, privy, famous; clamour          And enamour rhyme with hammer.          River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,          Doll and roll and some and home.          Stranger does not rhyme with anger,          Neither does devour with clangour.          Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,          Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,          Shoes, goes, does.  Now first say finger,          And then singer, ginger, linger,          Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,          Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.          Query does not rhyme with very,          Nor does fury sound like bury.          Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.          Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.          Though the differences seem little,          We say actual but victual.          Refer does not rhyme with deafer.          Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.          Mint, pint, senate and sedate;          Dull, bull, and George ate late.          Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,          Science, conscience, scientific.          Liberty, library, heave and heaven,          Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.          We say hallowed, but allowed,          People, leopard, towed, but vowed.          Mark the differences, moreover,          Between mover, cover, clover;          Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,          Chalice, but police and lice;          Camel, constable, unstable,          Principle, disciple, label.          Petal, panel, and canal,          Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.          Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,          Senator, spectator, mayor.          Tour, but our and succour, four.          Gas, alas, and Arkansas.          Sea, idea, Korea, area,          Psalm, Maria, but malaria.          Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.          Doctrine, turpentine, marine.          Compare alien with Italian,          Dandelion and battalion.          Sally with ally, yea, ye,          Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.          Say aver, but ever, fever,          Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.          Heron, granary, canary.          Crevice and device and aerie.          Face, but preface, not efface.          Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.          Large, but target, gin, give, verging,          Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.          Ear, but earn and wear and tear          Do not rhyme with here but ere.          Seven is right, but so is even,          Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,          Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,          Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.          Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!          Is a paling stout and spikey?          Won't it make you lose your wits,          Writing groats and saying grits?          It's a dark abyss or tunnel:          Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,          Islington and Isle of Wight,          Housewife, verdict and indict.          Finally, which rhymes with enough --          Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?          Hiccough has the sound of cup.          My advice is to give up!!!

                            -- Author Unknown

Gerhard Hoffmann snipped-for-privacy@Arcor.De wrote: |---------------------------------| |"         ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF"| |---------------------------------|

+593

|----------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] Britain. | |         (Mind the latter, how it's written.)"| |----------------------------------------------|

I used to be in my 20's before I knew that I tend to misspell Britain. (S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

The jack is the less mobile half of the connection, regardless of gender.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Every once in a while I think about a word with many meanings. Today's is "fence."

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Thanks for that! Though I found d'Antin's more clever.

English is a chore because it is a hodgepodge of words appropriated from other languages. In the US, it is made worse by regional variations as well as cultural preferences (inSURance vs. INsurance?)

If you have the occasion to write a text-to-speech package, the vagaries become incredibly apparent: bread rhymes with read (and red) but breed rhymes with read (and reed!). Ditto for treed/tread.

Some folks pronounce the 'L' in saLmon and aLmond.

And, when we encounter british spellings, most folks

*feel* them as inherently "wrong" (e.g., our use of Z for sounds the brits code with S)

And, I still don't get "aluminIum"! I first thought it was just a mispronunciation but...

OTOH, we also have oddball misspellings like vacumn vs vacuum vs vacum vs. vaccum -- all having been used, in print, over the years.

Then, the inappropriate use of some words: "I stopped driving since the car was stolen" is that a temporal relationship or a causal relationship being expressed?

AI Overview

The verb "run" has the most meanings in the English language, boasting over 645 distinct definitions in its verb form alone according to ongoing lexicographical research. Previously, the verb "set" held the official Guinness World Records title with 430 distinct senses in the Oxford English Dictionary.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

English relies on context to distinguish words that look the same or sound the same, but have different meaning in different contexts.

All languages rely on this. They may add helpful indicators to make it easier - my wife's research sometimes involved "garden path sentences" deliberately constructed to mislead the reader/listener to expect one context while the sentence switched to a different context fairly close to the end.

> AI Overview

As usual, AI doesn't know what it is talking about.

and there are hermaphrodites where there is only one type and they can mate

Oxford English Dictionary doesn't know what it's talking about?

and almost every RF connector is also available in RP (reverse polarity). For example:

"AMPHENOL Reverse Polarity RF Connectors"

Perverse polarity.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

afaiu they were mostly an invention to "comply" with requirements that things like Wifi routers don't use a "commonly available" connector for the antenna

The original RP connectors were contrived as a solution to the FCC demand that Wi-Fi devices and antennas must be certified as a complete system and therefore must be tested and sold as a complete system. The brilliant FCC bureaucrats were trying to prevent users from replacing low gain Wi-Fi antennas with larger antennas that offered superior performance. Good intentions, but not what manufacturers and users wanted. The FCC eventually allowed some exceptions, such as wireless microphones, but unique antenna connectors are still required for certification.

FCC Part 15.203

"An intentional radiator shall be designed to ensure that no antenna other than that furnished by the responsible party shall be used with the device. (...) The manufacturer may design the unit so that a broken antenna can be replaced by the user, but the use of a standard antenna jack or electrical connector is prohibited."

Oops. I forgot to check the date. The above is from an old version of 15.203 and 15.204. Below is a later version that includes a longer list of exclusions, which allow some acceptable antenna substitutions and less rigid requirements for substitute antennas: