h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've never heard milder after a hot spell. It always seems to follow frosty weather.

In the UK you can tell people of a certain generation because they use temperature scales C and F at the same time but they never meet up. E.g. hot weather is in the 70s or 80s while cold weather is just above or below 0.

I'm sure people use 30' (using ' instead of degree sign as I can't find it!) to indicate very cold weather in the US. In the UK my generation would be lost! We never use 30'F to indicate cold weather and 30'C wouldn't mean much to a lot of people.

Even the Met office in the hot summers want to announce the 100'+ record has been beaten! And they've been using C for ages! Does this mean we are literally boiling?!

Why are we so selective in what can be described as mild - temperature, manners, curries, shocks, perhaps one or two others - and what links these diverse things other than that they can take the adjective mild?

For weather its interesting to compare the adjective clement, which means much the same thing, but there is no corresponding clementer or clementest.

When people start talking in Fahrenheit, I have to mentally convert into Celsius before I understand.

The golden rule is 68 / 86.

68°F = 20°C
86°F = 30°C

Since the temperature has never reached higher than that here, I don't need to know about 90's, 100's etc.

>>Understanding such a weather report requires a rough knowledge of previous conditions, viz whether it was too stormy, too hot or too cold for comfort.

You've pinpointed something quite fundamental about human language processing here. We rely heavily on context. We interpret words and sentences by reference to our understanding of the wider world. That's why computer speech processing is far poorer than human; computers simply don't have the experience we've built up over the years. We're still a long way from a successful Turing Test.

Which brings us to Seth...the same applies. Our use of 'mild' is associated with our knowledge of the default state.

F/C - and they coincide at -40. But we don't wish to know that.

Back to my obsession with 'The Lake Isle of Inisfree'.

"And I shall have some peace there/
For peace comes dropping slow"

I've just realised that one of the things that's going on there is to do with vowels. In the first line, the 'I' is in fact a diphthong, so the 'a-ee' creates an internal rhyme with 'have'. Then in the second line, the vowels in the stressed syllables progress forward in the mouth: -ee- -o- -oh-. The final -oh- is an exhaling of worry and care, like when Shirley Valentine arrives in Greece and takes her seat by the side of the sea. (and then there's the mirroring of the s's and the p's)

Damn clever to pack so much into so few words. Do poets know they're doing this at the time, or is it just intuitive?

Both. Like a composer crafting a phrase that rises and falls.

You may be on to something Edward. "And i-o i-o i-o / By priests and people sungen" refers to a Greek exclamation of joy or triumph. Sir Michael Tippett used "ee-ah-oo" in his Vision of St Augustine, spelt (I think) iota-alpha-omega or maybe eta-alpha-omega.

Is this related to the "yow" that Irish people yelp at the end of a good piece of traditional music to express admiration?

In Scots Traditional Music - and especially during ceilidhs - there's a wonderful high-pitched 'Eeeeeee-ap.' It's only done at certain times, and when I enquired as to how one knows what the right time is, I was told "It's at the turn in the music." Which is obvious, once you know.

Yes, surely, to both of the above, and also "Yeee-har!"

I have never really bothered about the temperature outside. It's usually either hot or cold (and here we do get up to 36°C sometimes). But for recipes I need to know quick conversions. At that end of the scale you can generally sort of double the C to get the F or vice versa - 200°C is just under 400°F etc.

Fair enough, I just always took mild in that context to mean "neither hot nor cold" and couldn't be neitherer or less neither.

Vestboy, for future reference - hold down the Alt key and press 0,1,7,6.

Trouble is that Alt-anything in a reply box now gets me to pages I don't want: Alt-0 gets me the list of all the other "accesskeys". To put in special letters and symbols I have to write them in a notepad and tansfer them.

This 30º was achieved by typing 30 Alt-167 in Notepad and cutting and pasting it here.

If you have a Linux Gnome desktop, you man make a wee 'drawer' on your taskbar where you keep the equivalent of the MS 'Symbols' chart - and even the individual symbols that you use the most. I find it handy for typing in German.

I find instructions such as "It's just Alt + whatever" somewhat unhelpful. There's too damn many to remember! Far better to say "Just google 'alt codes symbols'" This is what you get if you're feeling lucky:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html

btw - 30ºC is, pedantically, incorrect. It's just 30C. And it's no longer Centigrade - just Celsius. It's still 87ºF, though.

...but even that page doesn't give me the Czech 'r with a hat on' - bummer, since I've a friend with one in her name. Even more of a bummer to be unable to pronounce a friend's name.

I don't think you're right there, Edward. There's no degree sign in kelvins, but there is one in Celsius.

Most Czech people will be quite happy if you just roll an r as the Scots do, then follow it with a zh sound as in Dr Zhivago.

W***pedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Alt_keycodes

>> Most Czech people will be quite happy if you just roll an r as the Scots do<<

.. whereas standard English pronunciation of 'r' is ..?

Question is when pronouncing the r of rock, should the tip of the tongue touch the roof of the mouth or not?

Or you could use A1007713 (or variations - put al key codes into the search bar). Not as comprehensive as wiki but then it ain;t as confusing either

>> Most Czech people will be quite happy if you just roll an r as the Scots do<<

Sadly, I have a weak R. Not quite a Jonathan Ross, more a Paul Morley.

One of the sexiest things I've ever witnessed was my Czech friend demonstrating how to pronounce r-with-a-hat-on. She held aloft a perfectly poised cigarette, lidded her eyes and trilled...it was somewhere between Eartha Kitt and an unusually erotic bumblebee.

Vaclav Havel is famous for not being able to pronounce his Rs-with-hats. It's considered a characteristically artistic trait.