Angry Karen educates Dunkin Donuts employee, explaining that a dozen means 50 donuts

Given the diet I think we’re talking about a super bowel.

Sorry… think I just vomited a little in my mouth

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I know a fellow medical lab tech (…) who I know must have learned as much clinical chemistry as I did but who still managed to lose a foot that way. It is not always about knowing or understanding but also about caring and self-management.

Self-destructive behaviour is not uncommon among people with chronic health problems.

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Metric, of course.

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Polyamory ftw.

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Ding ding! We have a winner!

Well, more like, before the socioeconomic circumstances existed in which it made sense to use the well-known fact that a circle rolls on the ground because enough people lived together and cooperated that it made sense to build a complex tool that was relatively breakable and only really worked if cleared level ground was available. No nomad needs a wheel, that’s something that a farmer needs to ferry muck around the farmyard.

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In French: “une cinquantaine” can mean “more or less fifty” aka “a fiftyness”

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And you also have to invent some kind of axle and some way of building a cart or other rig to transport whatever you’re trying to move that is both strong enough to hold up and light enough that you can still move it. Same goes for the wheel itself.

Oh and domesticating those fast running things or those things with the bloody great horns would help.

Which is not to detract from the point that people didn’t become smarter over the last few thousand years.

It’s a slightly different way of putting the argument that one thing depends on lots of others.

At least a dozen, I’d say.

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Fifty? She must be a dough nut.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …47, 48, 49, 50.
Gimme a couple more…say, 12

This is a weird tangent on the original story, but I’m into it. As a couple of you have said, the story of the wheel is told poorly. The wheel itself is obvious. It’s roads that are the invention. Grading, packing, surfacing, etc all involve a range of skills and technologies that took a while to develop. Over time, roads and wheels continued to evolve together. Modern cars really can’t function without the latest road technology. Compare that to a Model T that does pretty well in a farmers’s field because it was sold in a time where much of the country still had poor or zero roads.

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Strikes me that we often do ourselves a disservice by ignoring how technologies co-evolve historically? Like the road and the wheel in your example here.

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I imagine so! Also as was pointed out upthread, society and culture co-evolve with technology as well. I didn’t think about this until @Brainspore said it, but you don’t invent roads until you have somewhere to go. You need to meet your neighbors and develop relationships with them to trade (or have a desire to invade them).

Perhaps, as our resident historian, you have more cromulent thoughts on this. :grinning:

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I’ll have to think on it a bit…

I do wonder if the ancients had Karens, tho, to bring it back to topic…

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In both encouraging and discouraging ways too. The Roman Empire had windmills and watermills, ships with fore-and-aft sails, and of course the famous steam powered novelties. But they never got that much use out of them because it was really easy to buy slaves to grind flour, row, and basically move whatever heavy objects you needed.

I looked up κάρην in an ancient Greek dictionary and it tells me it is some kind of passive homeric aorist form of the verb κείρω, meaning to cut down, destroy, or consume.

More seriously, I am imagining how the “I would like to speak with your manager” impulse interacts with slavery, and…ugh. I don’t think they had Karens, I think they would have something much worse.

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Well, except in both Greek and Roman culture, women had little to no actual power in society and were often relegated to the home. But on the other hand, that could have made Karening worse.

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In one of Neal Stephenson’s books he keeps referring to groups of anywhere from 5 to 15 individuals as a “brace”, driving the pedant in me crazy. A brace is two.

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I think the ancient term was “mother-in-law.” (adding :wink: in case joke is not implied!)

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Yeah, clearly, you marry into a family, and the mom instantly becomes a shrew. I can’t wait until that’s me… /s

Mom Nod GIF

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Mostly joking, of course, but from reading some personal accounts of olden times when women had so little power, the woman moving into the home of her husband’s family was at the mercy of the in-laws. Surely some of them were delightful, but there are a lot of sad and demeaning stories.

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Those two are related. We know that people with no to little social power often lash out with what little power they do have.

That’s also what made it to historical accounts. I wouldn’t discount the misogynistic assumptions about women’s behavior right up to this day skewed that…

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