Captain Aggravated

The Matrix references are dated but not the Lion King references. Or the 1970’s movie it ripped off.

Look, I’d like to see that little shit do better.

Well that’s nice of them.

You think they licensed that from…it would be Disney now?

Homestaw Wunnew.

No lemons, on melon.

Too bad I hid a boot.

Lisa Bonet ate no basil.

War sir is raw.

Was it a car, or a cat I saw?

LLMs like Gemini have basically the exact same UI form factor as the Starship Enterprise’s computer. All you need is that little tweedle “I’m listening” prompt and a Text-To-Majel-Barrett library. Thing is, on the Enterprise, it always correctly worked. If you asked it for a statement of fact you’d get a quote out of a database. Gemini will just make shit up that sounds plausible.

Well straight off the dome I can think of another:

A wall that is straight up and down is said to be ‘plumb’. …like pipes? Kinda! The tool we use to measure verticality is called a plumb bob, a heavy weight with a point on one end and a string on the other. The Romans named the tool after the material they made it out of. In English we call it lead. In Latin they called it plumbum. Which is where pipes got their name; they made pipes out of lead. It’s why the Atomic symbol for lead is Pb.

Tried and True.

To you it probably means “tested and found to be reliable/trustworthy.” An example, a few days ago the topic of a car without hydraulic brakes made the rounds. Hydraulic brakes on passenger cars are “tried and true,” we trust them, and are skeptical of a vehicle without them. But that’s not where the phrase originally came from; it’s a centuries old woodworking term.

This is a try square. An OLD tool; examples survive from ancient Egypt. It’s such a basic tool that it’s often used as the symbol of the carpentry trade. “Try” in this case means “examine” rather than “attempt”, more like how a judge “tries” a case than a jedi trainee “tries” to lift an X-wing out of a swamp. A try square is used to examine a board. For squareness, and possibly also straightness and flatness. A board that passes this exam is said to be “true.”

“True” meaning straight, flat, parallel or even concentric is still in use to this day; “truing” a surface means to flatten it.

You’ll find it in a lot of sea shanties. I’m a fan of The Longest Johns, it’s like every third song.

See? I knew there was some crumpet eating reason.

Gesundheit.

Similarly…Americans size wire carpentry nails as some number followed by a d. 16d nails are most common for nailing together two-by lumber as standard in structures, 8d are used for one-by lumber trim or plywood.

The d is pronounced ‘penny’. And like most of the stupid little stuff we do, it’s the Limeys’ fault.

Back when the UK had three moneys rather than two, they abbreviated pound as L (as above), shilling as S and, for some crumpet eating reason, pence as d. At some point in history, nails were sold in lots of 100, and different sizes at different prices. A box of large framing nails might cost 16 pence, a box of small tacks might cost 4 pence. The terminology has pretty much stuck to this day.

Partially because NATO has members that don’t speak English as a first language and how else do you clarify how to pronounce “five” without resorting to IPA? It’s kind of why they insist 4 is pronounced “Fo-wer.”

The v sound is so soft that communication grade radios will sand it off so it sounds like “fie” or “fah” depending. The vowel sound is similar to “nine”, add in some static or pushing the PTT a little too slow and you might mistake “iev” for “ien”, another reason to say niner and to NOT say fiver.

Insisting that you say “Climb and maintain Fife thousand Fife hundred, turn left heading One Fife Niner” makes sure it sounds like words on the far end of the radio.

I’ve also seen some glossaries insist 3 is pronounced “tree” because pronouncing fricatives strong enough to come across on the radio is hard for some NATO member states.

You might be familiar with the radio term “roger.” Per the FAA’s Pilot/Controller Glossary, it means “I have received all of your last transmission. It should not be used to answer a question requiring a yes or no answer.”

They want to make it VERY clear that roger does not mean “yes.” So why do we use the word “roger” to mean “acknowledged”? Because Americans in World War II.

First of all, radio was still a fairly new warfighting tool in the 1940’s. In a lot of cases, they still used Morse code tapped out by telegraphers on straight keys. Morse code was like the SMS of its day, it takes a long time to spell each letter out, so you end up with abbreviations, some of which really only make sense if you’re familiar with Morse. For example, you know the radio practice of saying “over” and “out?” In morse code, you use K (-.-) to mean “over” and KN (-.- -.) to mean “out.” There’s an entire list of “Q codes”, for example, you can tell someone to reduce their transmitter power by simply transmitting QRP (–.- .-. .–.). There’s one that means “what’s your barometric pressure?” because aviation. You’ll still sometimes hear “What’s QNH?” in aviation circles.

Most relevantly, a reply that simply means “I have received all of your last transmission” is simply abbreviated to R (.-.).

They also had AM voice mode radios. And now we get to talk about phonetic alphabets. We’ve all independently invented one at least once, talking to tech support on the phone and reading a serial number “One Three Four D as in Dog, Two, E as in Egg, Seven Eight one.” Because a bunch of letters sound the same when saying them out loud. You might be familiar with the modern one used by NATO, also required by the aviation world via ICAO. Starts out Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta etc. R in the modern one is Romeo. But NATO formed well after WWII.

The phonetic alphabet used during WWII by English speaking nations went Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox etc etc. Peter Queen Roger Sugar etc etc Xray Yoke Zebra.

So we say “Roger” because in WWII the Morse code abbreviation for “received” was R and the letter R would be pronounced “Roger” on an AM transmitter, and even though the phonetic alphabet has moved on, the word remains in use with a specific definition.

“Avocado” is Spanish for “lawyer.” I think it’s where English gets the word “Advocate?” So why do we call that staple of the millennial diet, the gator pear, that? Apparently that’s what the Spanish heard the native Mexicans calling it. But they weren’t saying “Avocado” they were saying “ahohado” or some similar. Which in their native language meant “testicle.”

That is the version of the story I heard from Alton Brown.

Piggybacking off of this one, the reason we say “niner” in the radio to mean “nine” is to prevent it from being mistaken for the German word for no, nein.

The Pilot/Controller Glossary also insists you pronounce “five” as “fife.” Good Luck, With That.

Let’s take the helicotter.

The all-new Ikea Cjardboord.

Prerequisite for divorce.