no more certain than I think I might have been before: uncertainty, con't.

[jess]

If Des Moines were in KY, the Ss would not be silent though. Y'all should hear how people here pronounce Versailles (end is like sails on a boat), Athens (like the letter A-thens), and all the other european names. Doesn't really bother me (after all, it's not like they are referring to the European cities, but rather to KY places, and those therefore are the correct local pronunciations), but it drives my French-speaking labmate crazy.

Although we don't say the S on Louisville, so I guess not everything is screwy like that, although saying Louisville like a Kentuckian is its own trick.

[YojimboMonkey]

we have had the Louisville pronunciation discussion before I believe IIRC any town name in KY/TN ending in "-ville" is pronounced to rhyme with the word "full"

[Ignatius]

They pronounce Versailles that way in Missouri, too. The S in Vincennes, Indiana gets pronounced, too. In fact, might Vinnie Sennes work equally well as your fabled manager?

It seems that with French-influenced place names, the easier a thing is to say for an American, the more likely it is to be pronounced that way. The vowel sounds in Des Moines and Illinois are distinctly un-French in spite of the silent s, after all.

[Ignatius]

The double s in Missouri is all kinds of weird itself, now that I think about it.

[YojimboMonkey]

No, the weirdness in Missouri is the vowel in the last syllable, at least in how many Missourians pronounce it. "Missour-uh"

[jess]

we have had the Louisville pronunciation discussion before I believe IIRC any town name in KY/TN ending in "-ville" is pronounced to rhyme with the word "full"

I wasn't even thinking of the ville part! The Louis part is kind of between Loo and Loo-uh but the uh is so quick and smushed onto the Loo that it almost disappears in most native speakers (at least the ones I know). Anyone who says Loo-ee seems to be not from around here.

[YojimboMonkey]

http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/forums/index.php?topic=10155.0

[Thermofusion]

IIRC any town name in KY/TN ending in "-ville" is pronounced to rhyme with the word "full"

East Tennesseans do it with a "vull" and they say a lot of their town names oddly: "Maryville" is MUR-vull. "Elizabethton" is 'lizza-BETH-ton.

[Ignatius]

No, the weirdness in Missouri is the vowel in the last syllable, at least in how many Missourians pronounce it. "Missour-uh"

I always heard an "ih" at the end or else some uncomfortable vowel sound hastily cobbled together to end the word as soon as possible.

[jess]

http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/forums/index.php?topic=10155.0

Ha, well, that was before I was paying attention to anything KY-related.

[Dick]

Is this conversation an attempt to get me to post more? 

I went to college in two Indiana towns with French names: the aforementioned Vincennes, and Terre Haute.  For Vincennes the interesting split among native Hoosiers is which syllable to accent.  For bougies it tends to be the second, whereas for the hill folk it's always the first. 

Pronunciation of Terre Haute has a similar class divide.  People where I'm from tend to actually pronounce it closer to the French way, what with the dropping of the last 'e' in Terre and the glottalization/semi-glottalization of the 't' in Haute.

I just re-read pollo's post in that old Louisville thread, I remember I teared up when I read it the first time.  Man what is it about that city that is so wonderful?  I probably identify more with Terre Haute: home of Gene Debs, the only Real American.  Bad labor town, ground down by decades of de-industrialization.  etc.  But there is in Louisville an indefinable rhythm of life that made me deeply ok with the inconsequence of my existence.  I forget about that sometimes.  I feel like you could just say the word 'Louisville' and my blood pressure would go down a little.  If it were pronounced properly.

[jebreject]

Dick check your google plus

[elpollodiablo]

I keep forgetting that not everyone shares my pitilessly materialist view of culture. I always feel bad for making someone (usually a classmate) feel dumb for romanticizing something like a novel or record, when usually all I'm trying to say is that the impulse toward that romanticization needs more examination than probably the individual novel itself. But I do believe you need to have a very thick skin as a critic, up to and including the point of indifference toward others' indifference toward your own romanticizing impulses.

[dieblucasdie]

I usually inwardly roll my eyes at that sort of thing, and silently judge the person. All and all, your approach is probably more fair.

Stay critical or die, etc

[hannah]

A professor told me on Monday that I should just go ahead and have a dissertation proposal ready by the fall.

Mind you, I have been in graduate school now for four years (two years at one institution for my MA, two years at my current institution), so this is by no means unusual.

Even so, I am fucking terrified.

[Anne the Man]

Just being women in male-dominated fields, we feel like ambassadors and we have to do a really good job. We have to not only make this great work, but we also have to instruct and educate. I’m trying to get away from that. In a way, I feel like it becomes more even more sexist, where I’m not just a musician making work; I’m everyone’s mom, cleaning up their fucking dirty dishes.

Lord do I identify with this today, esp the part after the semicolon. Though not in terms of work, just in terms of feeling, for no apparent reason, that I should stop having ideas about stuff that is seen as 'bad'--getting annoyed in detail about people using the word sheeple, for example. I enjoy being pissed off about it, and the work has been fun for me, but I feel like I should engage with material that I can go "hey people, isn't this awesome" about and be all cheery, as though being pissed off will make me a drag somehow. I think it's partly from being surrounded by political people who are all also ranty, and wanting to balance it out a bit, but also from some misguided idea that I should be up and help other people be up all the time when it's their life and their responsibility when interacting with me to help balance it. This uncertainty is coming from nowhere otherwise--no one has criticised me for being like this, and yet the random self-flagellation. Frustrate.

[alex]

I am feeling very uncertain about what happened to one of our sausages (a mid-sized vaguely salami-like kind of sausage) that we left on our kitchen worktop to let it dry a little before transferring it to the fridge. We had two of them, lying next to each other on the counter, and now there is only one. We did leave the backdoor open for most of the afternoon and weren't around half of the time, so it is possible that a cat might have come in, but I have a hard time imagining a cat taking off with a whole sausage, and I do not see how anyone other than a cat would have come into our garden. We did have visitors (a couple and their daughter, aged two and a half), but I rather trust the grown-ups not to steal our sausage and I do not think the daughter would have been capable of reaching up to the counter on her own. (She was in the kitchen quite a bit, but usually accompanied by her mother.) Puzzling.

[Ashley]

My cat would absolutely steal an entire sausage.

[Antero]

My cat would absolutely steal an entire sausage.

I don't know why I find this sentence so funny but I definitely do.

[fishjim]

I am feeling very uncertain about what happened to one of our sausages (a mid-sized vaguely salami-like kind of sausage) that we left on our kitchen worktop to let it dry a little before transferring it to the fridge. We had two of them, lying next to each other on the counter, and now there is only one. We did leave the backdoor open for most of the afternoon and weren't around half of the time, so it is possible that a cat might have come in, but I have a hard time imagining a cat taking off with a whole sausage, and I do not see how anyone other than a cat would have come into our garden. We did have visitors (a couple and their daughter, aged two and a half), but I rather trust the grown-ups not to steal our sausage and I do not think the daughter would have been capable of reaching up to the counter on her own. (She was in the kitchen quite a bit, but usually accompanied by her mother.) Puzzling.

Strange. There's this sausage out of nowhere sitting on our cutting board.

[clare]

OMG! Sausage wormhole!!!

Thirded on the cat or some other small mammal theory. Mine wouldn't hesitate to make off with all the sausage they could.

[alex]

Part of the reason I posted it was I was curious whether some of you guys do think that a cat might be responsible, I admit. The reason I was hesitant is partly that it's a fairly large and heavy sausage by cat standards, and partly that it's the kind that doesn't have an edible skin, so I wasn't even sure it would register as foodstuff to a cat at all. But I guess it is the likeliest explanation at this point. So thanks for the input!

[jess]

Cats can carry pretty large potential food items. See for evidence, the best (Japanese game show) video ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfIdXGzEHkY

[Bernard]

Dick-check your google plus

[Greg Nog]

it's a fairly large and heavy sausage by cat standards

Sweet christ this statement is tickling me to no end