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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • While I don’t think that’s the objectively correct way (I can accept reasons both for and against switching accents), I also try to say some words the “original” way. In fact, at work I often hear native English customers pronounce some foreign loan words in their corresponding language (or at least making an attempt at it). I wouldn’t say that’s the dominant style, but it does happen.

    What does NOT happen as often is the overexaggerated pitch change that is present in the video. Obviously, they were doing it intentionally for comedic effect, but it also makes fun of people who don’t do it out of pretentiousness. Once a word is used often enough, I don’t see the point sticking with the “original” pronunciation (I guess not many people pronounce ‘beef’ as ‘bœuf’ anymore). Even moreso if the “original” word has sounds that the English language doesn’t. I won’t get angry if you can’t roll your R’s.

    But when they butcher words that just take some careful reading I lose it. They know the German ‘sch’, and it’s fine - even remarkable. What’s not remarkable is when they see a combination of those letters, ignore the order, and just pronounce it as if it was ‘sch’, regardless. Fuchsia. C-H-S. Maybe, just MAYBE it’s not the same as S-C-H. English has a good bunch of words containing CH. The plural of tech is techs. You don’t pronounce it as ‘tesh’. Fuchsia is, originally, a word containing CH, followed by S.

    Another pet (ha) peeve of mine is Dachshund. I know it’s confusingly many characters, all c, h and s. But English also has the word ‘hound’. It comes from the same root as the German ‘Hund’. The rest is Dachs. For hints, see the above paragraph. Pronouncing it as “dashoond” is just as offensive and ignorant (to me; not in general) as saying warthog as war+thog.



  • A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete.

    You’re loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!

    And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won’t even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.

    You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.

    Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff…? Suddenly it’s not a problem like it was with remote working.