But that can be said for every newspaper in the world. What newspaper has never embellished even part of an article? I don't think we can find any.
Snakes don't open their eyes.
But that can be said for every newspaper in the world. What newspaper has never embellished even part of an article? I don't think we can find any.
Snakes don't open their eyes.
Arkan_Wolfshade
Philosopher
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,154
I think the obvious flaw in the article that we are all missing is that broccoli and snakes are natural enemies. There is no way she could have found a live snake in the with the broccoli, as the broccoli would have eaten it long before it could have made it to her kitchen counter.
Bzzt, wrong.
Maybe it's because English isn't your first language, but we don't call it a drumstick until it's dead and on our plates.
Not that any of that has to do with how wrong you are about the whole eyelid thing, I just thought I'd point that out.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Thinking about this, I'm not sure I entirely agree. Obviously I don't wholly disagree! However, I've been working my way through that train-wreck of a thread entitled "Loose Change", about the Twin Towers attacks, and I see a bit of a parallel.
Much of the material which the CTers cling to consists of minor reporting discrepancies like this. Small inconsistencies, little points that for one reason or another don't quite add up. Pretty much all of the time there is a simple and non-sinister explanation for the discrepancy - misreporting, misremebering, misunderstanding, mixing up two events, that sort of thing. What they don't do is provide serious grounds to doubt the generally-accepted account of events on 11th September, and postulate a "globalist" conspiracy instead.
I think we need a bit of perspective here. Obviously, nobody should be taking any improbable story at face value. But equally obviously, a small reporting inconsistency is not necessarily sufficient grounds for a wholesale rejection of the entire tale.
So, in which category is this? The woman could not have seen the snake open its eyes. She says she did (though we don't know if she would stick to that story if challenged with a herpetology anatomy book). Is this enough to start declaring the entire story to be a complete fabrication? Or is it more likely that in the shock of the moment, the woman simply thought she saw a small detail she actually didn't see?
My own view is that knowing the story comes from the Sun is sufficient grounds for me to be taking it with a pinch of salt in the first place. The "opened its beady eyes" bit doesn't really add to that much, and in my mind would tend to reinforce my opinion of the quality of the journalism, rather than immediately make me start to consider seriously that the entire tale might be a complete fabrication.
Rolfe.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
Claus, you're completely in Humpty-Dumpty territory now.
Not even birds walk on drumsticks. Poultry keepers and vets don't refer to the "drumstick" of a live chicken. Nobody refers to any part of the leg of any mammalian species (including man) as a drumstick, live or dead.
And yet, because "drumstick" is a term for a particular serving of cooked poultry (from the way the bare, disarticulated distal bone - can't remember the technical anatomical terms for this stuff on a Saturday! - protrudes from the rounded meaty portion of the severed leg), Claus wants Darat to agree that it is perfectly reasonable for him to refer to his living, walking human legs as drumsticks.
What dictionary might that be. Claus? One which specifically allows the use of the word "drumstick" for a human leg? Did you buy it last Saturday?
If you're trying to defend the use of the word "eyelid" to describe the spectacle or brille of a snake, by asserting that the word "drumstick" is acceptable usage for the human leg, you're on a loser, I have to say.
Rolfe.
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I don't think it is comparable to the Loose Change people (there's a moniker that fits).
We can verify that snakes don't "open" their eyes. They have nothing that moves (regardless of what people may call it).
Similarly, those Loose Change people are demonstrably wrong. There is not a shred of evidence that there were explosives in the towers, while we have plenty of evidence of huge planes filled with fuel hammering into the towers.
Claus, you're completely in Humpty-Dumpty territory now.
Not even birds walk on drumsticks. Poultry keepers and vets don't refer to the "drumstick" of a live chicken. Nobody refers to any part of the leg of any mammalian species (including man) as a drumstick, live or dead.
And yet, because "drumstick" is a term for a particular serving of cooked poultry (from the way the bare, disarticulated distal bone - can't remember the technical anatomical terms for this stuff on a Saturday! - protrudes from the rounded meaty portion of the severed leg), Claus wants Darat to agree that it is perfectly reasonable for him to refer to his living, walking human legs as drumsticks.What dictionary might that be. Claus? One which specifically allows the use of the word "drumstick" for a human leg? Did you buy it last Saturday?
If you're trying to defend the use of the word "eyelid" to describe the spectacle or brille of a snake, by asserting that the word "drumstick" is acceptable usage for the human leg, you're on a loser, I have to say.
Rolfe.
A drumstick is not a leg? O....K.
English seems to be a very versatile language. You can get it to mean whatever you want.
Rolfe
Adult human female
A drumstick is a specific term for a part of the leg of a cooked chicken. This does not mean that you get to use it for the leg of a live human.
Claus, what is it about this that you find so hard to understand?
Rolfe.
Claus, what is it about this that you find so hard to understand?
Rolfe.
That's true, but I've never heard anybody say "well, if it says it in The Times, it must me true", then laugh.
Why do you care how crap The Sun is anyway?
HarryKeogh
Unregistered
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2003
- Messages
- 11,319
Very versatile. You can try and convince humans the legs they walk on can also be called drumsticks (i.e. the legs of a cooked fowl). It won't wash but you can keep trying.
Claus, I don't understand why an intelligent adult like yourself loves to play dumb so much.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Why am I still addressing this? It's a lovely day and I'm trying to go out....
There is some algebra that addresses this matter. Actually, the bit I remember is from 12-year-olds' maths classes, and the author of the text was Charles Dobson - same guy as wrote about that Humpty Dumpty fellow who decided that it would be fun if words meant whatever he wanted them to mean, which I have to say you're close to emulating here, Claus.
The definitive statement was "all lipe shends are umpty". Then the pupils had to say true or false to a series of statements, based on whether or not they must be true in the light of the definitive statement.
Hint. For "All umpty shends are lipe", the correct answer was "false".
A drumstick is a specific term for a particular part of the leg of a particular group of species (fowl), when it is butchered and cooked. There are many specific terms for particular parts of legs of different species under different cirumstances. Having these different terms is what makes it possible for the language to be specific, and for conversations to be meaningful. If you can simply decide that all these specific terms are interchangeable, simply because they are all part of the same larger set (in this case the set of "all words for different parts of the leg"), then we're into Tower of Babel territory.
Claus, you are being repeatedly told here what the words really mean. Your insistence on making them mean whatever you want is simply perverse, and accusing the language of the very fault you yourself are committing is ridiculous.
The original point seems to be a disagreement about the status of the term "eyelid". One point of view is that "eyelid" is a word for anything that covers the eye, in any way. Consequently, we would infer that "brille" is a subset of "eyelids", being the thing that snakes have covering their eyes.
The other point of view is that "eyelid" is the specific term for eye coverings that do not permanently cover the eye, and that "brille" is the specific term for transparent, permanent eye coverings.
I don't actually know who is "right" here, it may be that both points of view are arguable.
Nevertheless, to support the former view by asserting that a human leg can be called a drumstick, is apparently to completely fail to get the point about specific words for subsets of things not being applicable to the entire set. And so seems to me to undermine the argument fatally.
Claus, can we describe our eyelids as brille?
Can we describe the nictitating membranes of birds as brille? As haws?
Can we describe the haws of a cat as brille?
Do you even begin to understand set theory?
Rolfe.
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Not the accepted use and since I try to communicate in a way that people will at least vaguely understand what I am saying I try to use the normal meaning of words not my own made-up ones.
Claus please point out where *I* did that and I'll answer you - I can't answer about things *I* haven't claimed.
Walter Wayne
Wayne's Words
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2002
- Messages
- 2,502
No one said a leg is not a leg. When you post strawmen like this it is easy to say this is becoming an Alice-in-Wonderland thread. You've failed to address many links that state snakes don't have eyelids for reputable sources, but then base your assertion on one quote from Wikipedia.
SteveGrenard
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2002
- Messages
- 5,528
So by this you theorize that it came in with plants imported from Japan? This is a tale repeated too often but with larger invasive alien species.
Few people realize that when they imported Royal Palms for the King Kamehaha School in Hawaii they brought in Typhlops with them that are still there, burrowed in the surrounding soils. Hawaii has a rep of having no ophidians while this little guy persists til this very day happily and blindly chomping away at slugs which I suppose nobody minds. The bilge water of large ships when ejected in waters other than where it was collected also transplant organisms and is a serious problem. Some parts of our Great Lakes are inundated with the alien Zebra Mussel as a result of this.
Invasive aliens like Graptemys scripta elegans and Rana catesbiena in Italy and elsewhere in Europe are a problem as is Bufo marinus, deliberately introduced into Australia. In Florida right now there are more than a dozen aliens veying for a niche in the ecosystem, crowding out indigenous species. There is a wholesale slaughter of two species of iguanids which are running amok there. As vegetarians and tree climbers, no fruit or leafy vegetable is safe from them.
Probably somewhat more reliable than The Sun.
rwguinn
Penultimate Amazing
Tabbys are Cats. Lions are cats. Tigers are cats.
Cats are not lions.
Simple logic. A subset is not the set.