Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Actually, come to think of it, the bathrooms in my current house all have two taps, lol. Wait, are we talking taps or faucets? One faucet, two taps. Is faucet vs. tap a regional distinction?

Tap is UK English, faucet is American English

But I assume we’re talking about two separate streams of water - not 2 taps/1 flow

OK, so we're talking one tap/stream/faucet for hot, one tap/stream/faucet for cold? In which case, no, I don't recall seeing that too often, maybe more often in bathtubs than in sinks. I do think my sister (in the UK) has a powder room with two taps/faucets, but it's a pretty old house.

I think you just described the same thing I did yesterday. One outlet, 2 controls. UK style is 2 separate water releasing units, one hot, one cold. So I think you are stuck mixing heats in the receptacle, sink or whatever rather than as it comes out of the outlet. So you can see why it would be something people would progress away from

which should have come with an xp since you just described the difference. But I was typing while holdiong my stereo which is in the way but has hopefully just been corrected a bit

So does that mean one outlet that only releases water at its hottest and the other water at its coldest? Must be uncomfortable to wash your face/hands!

that's what the basin and plug are for.

Yes I think the original distinction is the number of outputs ie 2 valves each with their own output (“two taps”) vs 2 valves leading to a single output (“one tap”). And then there is the truly single unit that pplains mentions where you sort of adjust it like a joystick to control both temperature & pressure

& yes I’d say the first kind is easily the most common (particularly in houses, particularly old houses) but the other 2 are far from unheard of

in practice you just turn on the hot tap and wait for it to warm up and then wash your face and hands quickly before it reaches its blistering apex

The worst is public toilets in pubs or wherever that don’t work properly & have a sign on them that says “CAUTION WATER EXTREMELY HOT” meaning “no seriously this water is way too hot to use and will scald you”

How am I supposed to exercise this caution except by not using your broken tap?! How is the sign a solution to anything?

Public toilets often have those taps you push down and which, once pushed down, take ages to stop running and so waste a shitload of water.

I work in a state of the art of 1995 green building, and the faucets are the ones with the little optical sensors that only turn on when you put your hand under them. And I’d say about 30% of the time they don’t turn on for me at all, and I briefly have thought “am I a vampire, am I a ghost, who just doesn’t know…?”

Re: optical sensors

The time clock face scanner at work also takes temperatures. If the weather outside is below, say, 60°F, the scanner reports my temperature as something like "Invalid temperature: 85.6°" It rarely happens to other people. So I'm probably undead.

It's nice to know there's ways of finding out if you're unsure like.
Liminality such a nice word.
But I'm sure immortality must get boring after a while.

during the first wave of covid I started using an electronic thermometer and found out I've got a permanently hypothermic/undead body temperature. But I thought fuck it, it'll be reet - there is enough other stuff to worry about etc..

This latest exchange reminded me of the last stanza of Ian Duhig's poem, 'Goths' - appropriately, since it is, apparently World Goth Day

Black sheep, they pilgrimage twice a year to Whitby
through our landscape of dissolved monastery and pit,
which they will toast in cider’n’blackcurrant, vegan blood.
They danse macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacula.
Next day, lovebitten and wincing in the light, they take
photographs of each other, hoping they won't develop.

curiously there are multiple goth books out at the moment

does seem a bit predictable

looking fwd to Mystic Stevo’s further predictions of things I’ll post

I'm looking forward to you copping onto what a complete douche I think you are..

Lads

Tom D otm.

XP I think I need to get around to reading that book on emotional vampires I picked up a few months back

The time clock face scanner at work also takes temperatures...

― Hideous Lump, Sunday, May 21, 2023 5:14 PM

The what?

[working with international students in the UK, this is absolutely one of the top complaints they have, it is not normal outside the UK.

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Saturday, May 20, 2023 3:56 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Actually, the only place ive seen NOT have hot and cold taps is the USA. (Of course ive only been the australia and europe)

And that fucking stick that turns the water from bath to shower. Fuck that stick.

Also, your tiny toilet pipes. Fuck those too.

I think I've gone my whole life believing that internment referred to both imprisonment and burial. Turns out interment is not a spelling mistake, but the correct way of referring to burials.

putting into the ground like.

Yeah, I've always been aware of "the body has been interred" etc, but for some reason my brain just rejected "interment" as a viable word.

Terra = earth is how I remember this

hard to forget that when you've done tedious exams with questions about the earthing arrangements of electrical distribution systems, like Terra-Neutral combined etc...

Make that "time clock/face scanner"

Yeah, I've always been aware of "the body has been interred" etc, but for some reason my brain just rejected "interment" as a viable word.

I think I've gone my whole life believing that internment referred to both imprisonment and burial. Turns out interment is not a spelling mistake, but the correct way of referring to burials.

― emil.y, Monday, May 22, 2023 5:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

WHAT

oh ffs

When wiring a UK 3-pin plug, you can remember which wire goes on the left and which on the right because it's bLue on the Left and bRown on the Right.

How often does anyone rewire a plug these days? It's probably about 10 years (at least) since I last did it, I remember rewiring plugs and changing fuses all the time when I was younger.

it's because back in the day lot's of houses still had the old bs3036 cartridge fuses. In the RCBO era you are more likely to have your switch trip than a blown plug fuse.

and also lots of houses had dodgy white goods/electrical equipment back in the day. My mum had a twin tub washing machine which used to become completely live! And with the old cartridge fuses if people didn't have any replacement fuse wire sometimes they'd stick a tack nail in there, lol I have actually seen this a few times - well 20 odd years ago.

hahaha yes

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7AY-GCCAAEaelQ.jpg

The interment/internment thing reminds me that sometime in my 20s I noticed that somebody had spelled "raspberries" with a p between the s and b and thought "huh, what a weird error" only to soon realize that everybody was making this error except me.

As usual, I'm going to use my "English is not my first language" excuse here.

Internment in a grave: Poe to thread

I love these sorts of misunderstandings, like how loads of people think it’s “elegaic”

or 'for all intensive purposes'

oh god

what does intensive even mean that intense doesn't

i think it’s “as opposed to extensive” ie over a small area.

the entire state of Florida is further west than the nation Colombia

"Intense care" sounds wrong, maybe just because we're used to "intensive care."

To go full patrician mode for a moment, Fowler's Modern English Usage has this:

Intensive.

Just as definitive & alternative are ignorantly confused with definite & alternate, & apparently liked the better for their mere length, so intensive is becoming a fashionable word where the meaning wanted is simply intense. It must be admitted that there was a time before differentiation had taken place when Burton, e.g., could write A very intensive pleasure follows the passion (lol); it there means intense, but the OED labels the use obsolete, & its latest quotation for it is from over two centuries ago; the modern relapse had not come under its notice in 1901, when it issued letter I. Intensive perished as a mere variant of intense, but remained with a philosophic or scientific meaning, as an antithesis to extensive ; where extensive means with regard to extent, intensive means with regard to force or degree:

The record of an intensive as well as extensive development. /Its intensive, like its extensive, magnitude is small.

This is the kind of word that we ordinary mortals do well to leave alone ; see POPULARISED TECHNICALITIES.

Unfortunately, a particular technical application of the philosophic use emerged into general notice, & was misinterpreted — intensive method especially of cultivation. To increase the supply of wheat you may sow two acres instead of one — increase the extent — , or you may use more fertilizers & care on your one acre — increase the intensity — ; the second plan is intensive cultivation, the essence of it being concentration on a limited area. Familiarized by the newspapers with intensive cultivation, which most of us took to be a fine name for very hard or intense work by the farmers, we all became eager to show off our new word, & took to saying intensive where intense used to be good enough for us.

The war gave this a great fillip by finding the correspondents another peg to hang intensive on — bombardment. There is a kind of bombardment that may be accurately called intensive ; it is what in earlier wars we called concentrated fire, a phrase that has the advantage of being open to no misunderstanding ; the fire converges upon a much narrower front than that from which it is discharged ; but as often as not the intensive bombardment of the newspapers was not concentrated, but was intense, as the context would sometimes prove ; a bombardment may be intense without being intensive, or intensive without being intense, or it may be both.

I don't think this really covers intensive care tbh, though it looks like that only arrived as a phrase in the '60s.

i scoff condescendingly at those who write, like apes, of "all intensive purposes" but what about those of us who use the actual, correct, expression? it's also bad