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Protecting Itself From The Impending Cactus Attack

He'll just wait this one out. Cacti can't survive without water, right? ~NSHA




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TIFI WIN: The 10-Speed Lamp

Here we see a nice little floor lamp made from old bicycle parts. Be sure to lock it up or someone might steal it!

Check out more theft-worthy WINs here!





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Christian Pulisic & Tim Weah headline USMNT November roster drop | SOTU

Alexi Lalas and David Mosse reacted to the second United States Men's National Team roster release of the Mauricio Pochettino era, with Christian Pulisic, Tim Weah, and Weston McKennie headlining the squad.




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Bev Priestman fired as Canada women's soccer coach after Olympic drone scandal

Canada women's soccer coach Bev Priestman has been fired after an independent review of a drone surveillance scandal at the Paris Olympics




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Joey Logano 1-on-1: Winning Cup Series championship is 'electric'

Joey Logano sat down with FOX Sports to discuss the wild pace-car wreck, the playoff format and the feeling of winning the title at Phoenix.




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Providence's Oswin Erhunmwunse throws down a POWERFUL two-hand dunk vs. Hampton

Providence Friars' Oswin Erhunmwunse threw down a powerful two-handed dunk against the Hampton Pirates.




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Deion Sanders compares Shedeur and Travis’ chemistry to Michael Irvin and Troy Aikman | Speak

Deion Sanders talks about the strong chemistry between Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter, comparing it to the connection Michael Irvin had with Troy Aikman during their playing days.




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Mavs' Klay Thompson cheered by 400 Warriors employees in return to Golden State

Klay Thompson was greeted by some 400 cheering Warriors employees showing their love and appreciation for the former Golden State star and lined up along his path to the Dallas locker room




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Bensley Joseph finds Corey Floyd Jr. for a TOUGH ALLEY-OOP dunk as Providence leads 47-43 vs. Hampton

Providence Friars' Bensley Joseph found Corey Floyd Jr. for a tough alley-oop dunk against the Hampton Pirates.




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2024-25 NBA championship odds: Celtics, Thunder favored; Cavs rising

A number of contenders are chasing the defending champion Celtics on the oddsboard. Check out where things stand, with insight from Jason McIntyre.




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Champions Classic: Hunter Dickinson leads Kansas past MSU; Kentucky rallies past Duke

Hunter Dickson led No. 1 Kansas to an impressive win over Michigan State, while Mark Pope aced his first big test as Kentucky's head coach.




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what 'polite' means: Culpeper, O'Driscoll & Hardaker (2019)

I've studied the word please off and on for a few years now.* Currently, I'm trying to finish up a study that I started an embarrassing number of years ago. Now that I've returned to it, I have the pleasure of reading all the works that have been published on related topics in the meantime. They couldn't inform my study design, but they must now inform the paper I hope to publish. One of these is a chapter by Jonathan Culpeper, Jim O'Driscoll and Claire Hardaker: "Notions of Politeness in Britain and North America," published in the book in From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness, edited by Eva Ogiermann and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Cambridge UP, 2019). 

Their question, what does polite mean in the UK and US, was a research project on my to-do list. When I was a younger scholar, I'd have been (a) royally annoyed with those authors for getting to it first, (b) sad, sad, sad that I didn't get to do a fun piece of research, and (c) consumed with self-loathing for not being quick enough to do the project myself. It is both the blessing and curse of middle age that I now look at anything anyone else has done with gratitude. Good! Now I don't have to do it! 

Let's start with why it's interesting to ask about "notions of politeness" in the two countries. Here's a clue from an earlier post about use of please when ordering at restaurants. I asked:
So, how can it be that Americans think of themselves as polite when they fail to extend this common courtesy word?
I argued that Americans (subconsciously) find the lack of please in these contexts "more polite." In the comments section for that post, some people—mostly British people—could just not accept that a food order without a please could be described as polite. To them, to be polite includes saying please. If you're not using the word please, it's just not polite. 

Now, part of the reason for that disagreement is that I was using the word polite in linguistic-theory-laden ways. The distinction between how the word politeness is used in linguistic discussions and how it's used in everyday life has become such a problem for us linguists that we now talk about polite1 and polite2 to distinguish commonplace understandings of polite (1) from our theoretical uses (2). The failures of communication in my previous blogpost probably stemmed from having three understandings of politeness at play: the linguist's polite2, American polite1, and British polite1. 


Postcard from the How to be British series


 

Culpeper et al. set out to contrast British and American polite1. They point out that academic research on the topic of British/American politeness is "full of stereotypes that have largely gone unexamined." These stereotypes hold that British culture favo(u)rs maintaining social distance by using indirectness and avoidance in interaction, while Americans are more interested in creating interactional intimacy by being informal and open. The authors asked: how do AmE and BrE speakers use the word polite? If differences exist, then do they conform to the stereotypes, or do they tell us something new? To investigate this, the authors used two sets of data.


Part 1: clustering 'polite' words in the OEC

First, they searched the Oxford English Corpus, where they found thousands of instances of polite. In AmE, it occurs 6.8 times and in BrE 8.8 times per million words. They then used corpus-linguistic tools to determine which words polite was most likely to co-occur with in the two countries' data. They then used statistical tools to group these collocates into clusters that reflect how they behave linguistically. (I'll skip over the detail of the statistical methods they use, but it suffices to say: they know what they're doing.) For example in the British data, words like courteous, considerate, and respectful form a courteous cluster, while words like cheery, optimistic, and upbeat are in the cheerful cluster. 

The British and American datasets were similar in that polite co-occurred at similar rates with words that formed cheerful and friendly clusters. This seems to go with the common stereotype of American politeness as outgoing and inclusive, but contradicts the British stereotype of reserved behavio(u)r. 

The most notable difference was that British polite collocated with words in a sensible cluster, including: sensible, straightforward, reasonable, and fair. This cluster didn't figure in the American data. The British data also had a calm cluster (calm, quiet, generous, modest, etc.), which had little overlap with American collocates. British polite, then, seems to be associated with "calm rationality, rather than, say, spontaneous emotion." 

Other clusters seemed more complex. Courteous and charming came up as British clusters, while American had respectful, gracious, and thoughtful clusters. However, many of the words in those clusters were the same. For example, almost all the words in the British courteous cluster were in the American gracious cluster. That is, in American courteous and attentive were more closely associated with 'gracious' words like open-minded and appreciative, while British courteous and attentive didn't intersect with more 'gracious' words. Respectful is a particularly interesting case: it shows up in the courteous cluster for the British data, but has its own respectful cluster in American (with words like compassionate and humane). 
 
Looking at these clusters of patterns gives us a sense of the connotations of the words—that is to say, the associations those words bring up for us. Words live in webs of cultural assumptions. Pluck one word in one web, and others will reverberate. But it won't be the same words that would have reverberated if you'd plucked the same word in the other web. It's not that compassionate wasn't in the British data, for example—it's that its patterns did not land it in a cluster with respectful.  In American, respectful seems to have "a warmer flavour" with collocates relating to kindness and positive attitudes toward(s) others, while in the British data respectful has "older historic echoes of courtly, refined, well-mannered behaviour." 

Part 2: 'politeness' and sincerity on Twitter

Their second investigation involved analy{s/z}ing use of polite and its synonyms in a particular 36-hour period on Twitter. The data overall seemed to go against the stereotypes that American politeness is "friendly" and British is "formal", but once they looked at the data in more detail, they discovered why: US and UK words differed in (in)sincerity. In the British data, respectful seemed to "be used as a vehicle for irony, sarcasm and humour", while in the American data friendly "appears to have acquired a negative connotation" about 17% of the time, in which "friendly" people were accused of being untrustworthy or otherwise undesirable. This also underscores the idea that American respectful has a "warmer flavour" than British respectful. It's intriguing that each culture seems to be using words stereotypically associated with them (American–friendly; British–respectful) in ironic ways, while taking the less "typical of them" words more seriously.  

Yay for this study! 

I'm grateful to Culpeper, O'Driscoll and Hardaker for this very interesting paper, which demonstrates why it's difficult to have cross-cultural discussions of what's "polite" or "respectful" behavio(u)r. The more we're aware of these trends in how words are interpreted differently in different places, the better we can take care in our discussions of what's polite, acceptable, or rude. 


*If you're interested in the fruits of my please labo(u)rs so far, have a look at:





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Trump Posts a Photo of Himself Working on His Inaugural Address and it Gives Spark to a New Meme

Yesterday Trump tweeted a photo of himself hard at work on his inauguration speech and the internet has been having a field day with it. 

It started on twitter with people guessing at what The Donald might be drawing. Shortly thereafter it got a small photoshop battle. 

'What's Donald Drawing' definitely has the potential to catch on.

Get More Trump Memes that are simply tremendous, people tell me how amazing these memes are all the time.





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Donald Trump Cats Aren't Nearly as Scary as the Man Himself

To #TrumpYourCat, you should brush your pet, then form the hair into a "toupee", and place it on top of their head. Oh, and you can thank Donald Purrump for this genius idea!

And if you need some more Trump memes <-- those are simply tremendous





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The Internet Took the Opportunity to Photoshop Donald Trump With a Blank Sign and Ran With It

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The Funniest Protest Signs By People Who Think Trump's Presidency Is a Terrible Mistake

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Internet Had a Dangerous Amount of Fun Trolling Pic of Trump, Melania And Ivanka With The Pope

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Trump's 'TREASON?' Tweet Is Inspiring Some Pretty Clever Parodies

Recently Donald Trump tweeted the word "TREASON?" in light of the New York Times op ed that was published on Wednesday. The article was supposedly written by someone within the Trump Administration, calling themselves part of the "resistance." 

After Trump's "treason" tweet, people on Twitter began making their own amusing parodies, which you can read below!




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Have You Met Donald Trump's Imaginary Friend Jim?

It's been a fun week for political memes. While Donald Trump's friend "Jim" has been the subject of skepticism since as early as 2016, the marvelous mystery has once again been thrust into the spotlight by the Associated Press. Their July 13th piece, "Trump in Paris: The curious case of his friend Jim" was covered by outlets such as HuffPo and the AV Club, and inspired a healthy number of Twitter jokes. We've put together the most noteworthy Jim jokes from the past year, for your convenient viewing pleasure. 




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11 Animals That Are Donald Trump's Look Alikes

Well...Can't ignore the resemblance




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Twitter Is Roasting Ivanka Trump For Claiming She Had A Punk Phase

New York Magazine published an excerpt from Ivana Trump's memoir Raising Trump - and it has since become a wildly entertaining meme. Thhe excerpt is actually a quote from Ivanka, reminiscing about her "punk" days. 

"During my punk phase in the nineties, I was really into Nirvana. My wardrobe consisted of ripped corduroy jeans and flannel shirts. One day after school, I dyed my hair blue. Mom wasn't a fan of this decision. She took one look at me and immediately went out to the nearest drugstore to buy a $10 box of Nice'n Easy. That night, she forced me to dye my hair back to blond. The color she picked out was actually three shades lighter than my natural color… and I have never looked back!"

The quote has left Twitter users in stitches, making Photoshop memes and mocking the wealthy businesswoman's statement. The results have been delightful. 





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Nancy Pelosi Pointing At Trump Is An Assertive Dank Meme

During a meeting to discuss Syria, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was photographed assertively pointing a finger at Donald Trump. Trump later tweeted the photo with the caption, "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown!" the photo has inspired a whole host of memes from every political angle. 

Whether you're a Trump supporter or a Pelosi fan, we think you'll find these trending memes amusing. Or maybe you hate both of them equally! That's certainly an option too!




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Trump Gets Roasted And Meme'd For His Orange Tan Line

President Donald Trump was photographed on Friday returning to the White House from a trip to North Carolina and let's just say...he's looking a bit like a mandarin orange. People have been meme-ing and roasting the photo, which shows a very defined tan line of the orange variety on his face. Trump of course called the photo "fake news," and while we have to partially agree that the original was likely altered a bit, it's still amusing to see the reactions nonetheless!




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Joe Biden Gets Trolled With His Cringey 'I'm On Team Joe' Campaign

Poor ol' Joe Biden has been the subject of many memes in this election cycle. Whether you love him or hate him, you have to admit that they've been pretty amusing. This particular meme mocks a campaign avatar where one can insert their image next to text that says "I'm on team Joe!" It's moderately cringey to say the least, but cringey makes for the best meme material.




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Internet Reacts To Trump's Comments About Injecting Disinfectant To Cure COVID-19

The internet is reacting to comments made by Donald Trump during a COVID-19-related press briefing held yesterday. Trump claimed that the virus could be treated by bringing "light inside the body" or injecting a disinfectant. Thankfully medical professionals were quick to denounce these claims, and people on the internet have since been creating some excellent memes on the matter. 

This should go without saying, but please don't inject yourself with disinfectant, y'all.




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Confused Reporter Interviewing Trump Is Inspiring Some Top-Tier Memeage

On July 28th, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interviewed President Donald Trump on HBO about several topics including the staggering number of COVID-19 cases in the United States. His reactions to some of Trump's remarks are priceless, and needless to say, the memes have been top-tier. You can watch the interview here and garner your own reactions. Now on with the memes!




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Trump's 'Exploding Trees' Comment Has Memers Trolling Like Crazy

As wildfires continue to ravage the West Coast, President Trump has been quick to dismiss climate change as one of the root causes, stating that countries in Europe like Austria don't suffer from wildfires because Europeans live in "forest cities" that are "managed better" yet are "more explosive" than the trees in California.

We're not entirely sure what any of that means, and apparently neither do memers, so please enjoy the following memes about "forest cities" in Austria.




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15 Of The Most Tremendous Donald Trump Memes

One does not simply become president, without generating some Trump memes.

15 Trump memes mixed in with about a dozen or so Trump GIFs -so as to cushion the impact some of these may have on our more sensitive readers. Whether you love him or hate him, you've gotta admit that Donald Trump is incredibly meme material.

"We'll build a Trump meme, and make the Memeians pay for it"

Need more Trump memes? There's an abundance of Trump memes available at your disposal, such as Trump's Space Force memes or Hilarious Trump Space force memes which was related to announcing that America will be militarizing space, or the awkward memes of Trump staring at a solar eclipse or  Memes of Awkward Obama/Trump Interactions. Or wax nostalgic with photoshop memes of Trump's Executive Orders which were changed to look like a variety of hilarious scenarios that Trump has just signed. And for a simpler, more sophisticated laugh, try the Trump and Kim memes that really have a nice subtle nuance to their humor.

Donald Trump seems to be a magnet for being the subject of memes, and it really is not slowing down. Not much anyone can do to stop it so might as well sit back and laugh, regardless of where you stand politically




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The Best Memes & Tweets About Four Seasons Total Landscaping

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past week, you're probably familiar with the Four Seasons Total Landscaping drama that occurred earlier this week in Philadelphia. On November 7th, President Trump tweeted that a press conference would be held at the Four Seasons in the Pennsylvania capital. Eight minutes later, Trump tweeted an update - that the conference would actually be taking place at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in the same city. 

The tweets led to a great deal of speculation as to whether the administration had intended to book the hotel. The speculation grew when it became clear that the location, between a sex shop and a crematorium, was probably not their first choice. After Rudy Giuliani spoke to crowds about voter fraud, and even used a convicted sex offender as a witness, the occasion was largely seen as a massive blunder. And as expected, the memes began flowing freely. We've put together some of our favorite examples from the last week, but we're willing to bet this press conference will be talked about for quite a while. Here's hoping Four Seasons Total Landscaping is enjoying the free publicity. 




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What employers can learn from Wells Fargo’s failure to recruit and retain Black talent

We’ve all seen the quotes from Wells Fargo’s CEO in a June memo in which he blamed the bank’s failure in reaching diversity goals on a lack of qualified minority talent. “While it might sound like an excuse, the unfortunate reality is that there is a very limited pool of black talent to recruit from,” […]

The post What employers can learn from Wells Fargo’s failure to recruit and retain Black talent appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.




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How employers can address increased gender inequality due to Working From Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the nature of work as we know it. Between flexible work arrangements, part-time contracts, and side gigs, it’s been difficult to gauge just how many people are working from home as a result. But according to Stanford’s research, 42% of the U.S. labor force was working from home full time […]

The post How employers can address increased gender inequality due to Working From Home appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.




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How a Supportive & Diverse Culture Helped Land This NSA Employee Her Dream Job

Many people told Lareesha H. that she would never work for the National Security Agency (NSA) due to its perceived lack of diversity. They were wrong. “Through hard-work, late nights and additional schooling. I made sure I possessed the necessary skills to obtain a position at NSA,” she says. “In 2009, my dream came true […]

The post How a Supportive & Diverse Culture Helped Land This NSA Employee Her Dream Job appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.



  • Diversity Career Stories

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NFPA and The Center for Campus Fire Safety raise student awareness of fire hazards in on- and off-campus housing during September and October

September is Campus Fire Safety Month and this year the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and The Center for Campus Fire Safety (The Center) are working together to promote their national Campus Fire Safety for Students campaign. The campaign raises awareness about the dangers of fires among college-aged students who live in on- and off-campus college housing.




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As today’s homes burn faster than ever, this year’s Fire Prevention Week campaign presents critical home escape planning and practice messages

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Questions for Consideration on AI & the Commons

“Eight eyes. Engraving after C. Le Brun” by Charles Le Brun is licensed via CC0. The intersection of AI, copyright, creativity, and the commons has been a focal point of conversations within our community for the past couple of years. We’ve hosted intimate roundtables, organized workshops at conferences, and run public events, digging into the…

The post Questions for Consideration on AI & the Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.



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CC Certificate Alumni Making a Global Impact

Launched in 2018, the Creative Commons Certificate program has trained and graduated nearly 1800 people from 66 countries. The Certificate program offers in-depth courses about CC licenses, open practices, and the ethos of the Commons. Our staff is constantly inspired by our community of Certificate alumni, accomplishing incredible things. In this interview, we were delighted…

The post CC Certificate Alumni Making a Global Impact appeared first on Creative Commons.




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Quick Microwave Cleaning: Safe & Easy Steps

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The post Quick Microwave Cleaning: Safe & Easy Steps appeared first on Unclutterer.




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Ultimate Guide: Keep Your Dish Rack Sparkling Clean & Hygienic

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The post Ultimate Guide: Keep Your Dish Rack Sparkling Clean & Hygienic appeared first on Unclutterer.




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Dogecoin spikes ~20% after Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE; Dogecoin is up 153% since Election Day

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Trump names Elon Musk to role leading government efficiency drive

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In Africa, meager expectations and some hopes for a second Trump presidency

African leaders may have been quick to congratulate Donald Trump on his election, professing a desire for mutually beneficial partnerships, but there are meager expectations that his presidency will change things for this continent of over 1.4 billion people. In the wake of Trump's win, Kenya's…




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YouTube is now letting creators remix songs through AI prompting

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China battery giant CATL would build US plant if Trump allows it

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