I can’t recall the title or author (and I’ve been googling furiously the last ten minutes trying to find it), but the author of one and only book I’ve read on the history of alphabets—yes, that’s alphabets, plural—argued that the Korean alphabet is not only beautiful but linguistically, also the most well-designed.
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Hangul is quite modern. It was intentionally designed with a lot of organization.
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I have to think that “glassed” means hit with a bottle?
If so, it is depressing that it is common enough to merit a slang term.
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For as long as booze has come in glass bottles, the belligerently drunk have cut their hands to shreds trying to use them as cqc weapons.
It really is a dumb weapon. Glass bottles break very chaotically and there’s little consistency to how they break, typically leaving the glasser with a hand full of very sharp shards.
Honestly a heavy glass ashtray that won’t break is a much better weapon than a bottle or beer glass.
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Yeah that’d be about the gist of it. I don’t think they ever caught the guy either.
Yes.
The term is from the UK, Common Wealth and Ireland though.
Its just the most succinct way to put it. She was just standing on a street corner. Some guy decided to start hucking bud light bottles at the women with short hair and screaming about evil gays and Trump.
Again. In the pricey, hipster part of Brooklyn.
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I’m somewhat relieved to hear they only went as far as throwing bottles. As soon as I saw the word ‘glassed’ in your previous post, all I could think of was that pub scene towards the end of Trainspotting.
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Yes, the Korean alphabet is very well designed and easy to learn. It was introduced in 1446, so it’s a more recent invention that many other writing systems, but it’s been around the block a few times by now.
There’s even a museum in Seoul dedicated to the alphabet (http://www.hangeul.go.kr/lang/en/) and an annual holiday to celebrate it.
But I’m sure the Starbucks racist knew all that.
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Throwing bottles isn’t a relief. And the photos I saw were very much like the scene in trainspotting.
I don’t know this person well. Like I said friend of a friend. But there were an awful lot of stitches involved from what I was told.
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Poor phrasing on my part. I’d imagined that by throwing them they wouldn’t have done as much damage as they might have otherwise. Clearly my imagination underestimated the injury possible from this type of glassing. That’s terrible. What public reporting, on social media or otherwise, was there of the attack?
There seems to be a steady stream of viral videos of older white ladies freaking out about someone not speaking English in California (urban California, no less), which is baffling to me. How the hell does someone live in urban California without constantly being exposed to non-English languages, much less get fixated on English-only in a state where Spanish was being spoken long before English was… how does one not accept that as the basic reality of living in the state? There has to be something wrong with these people - beyond simply being idiot racists. (I also have to wonder when they immigrated here…)
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What’s wrong with them is: they’ve lived their whole lives in a state of privilege and being treated preferentially. And now that other people of unfamiliar race and ethnicity are rising to a more equal footing when it comes to social participation and power, these older white women feel like they’re being oppressed.
Never forget: to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. It’s not, but they’ll act exactly as if they’re being discriminated against when they’re only being treated the same as everyone else.
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(I said, basically, “But as you know, Korean is beautiful.”)
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Witnessed something similar at the US Embassy in Manila last month. American shouting at a clerk who was speaking Tagalog to his Philippine wife, “Speak English in the US Embassy!” I’m surprised they didn’t escort him out but they didn’t.
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I don’t remember all the details. But some one in the group had a phone out to take a selfie or a video or something. There was video of at least the aftermath and photos of her immediately after. I believe it made the local Indy press. Didnt see anything in the major papers or TV.
A day or so after the attack, as the cops had very little to go on. And as part of that activist push to highlight all the hate crimes spiking around the election. She had a friend put the video and photos on social media.
I don’t think anything ever came of it unfortunately. There was a lot of crazy shit going on in NYC in the weeks around the election. And it seems to have simply gotten lost in the noise.
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I can answer that as a follow up to the other reply to you.
I grew up in the Bay Area (I was born when LBJ was prez), right smack in the middle of the biggest city - San Jose - and although it’s known as being extremely liberal and tolerant, etc… it’s like any place else, full of nice normal people and plenty of cranks/idiots/racists.
Growing up where I did in the city, we lived in a white, upper middle class neighborhood. We were literally taught immediately (not me personally by my parents, but we as in all the white kids in our neighborhood) - avoid the scary areas downtown and the East side because of all the blacks and Mexicans. Vietnamese immigrants were looked down upon and treated with disdain. Racial slurs were as common than when we lived in FLA for 2 years in the early 70’s when my dad took a job there.
Now, when one has good parents and grows as a person, spreading out, meeting new people, understanding other cultures, etc…, one does not turn out like this.
Believe me, I’ve had to block people I went to HS with after a bunch of us became friends on FB when our 30th reunion was nearing. All of a sudden I was friends with like 100 people I hadn’t talked to in decades and not a few of them turned out horrifying. And they voted for Trump, of course.
In other words, the kind of person who posts the meme on their FB wall - “Why do I have to push 1 for English!??”
I guarantee, this lady hates CA. She hates the Bay Area and complains about it all the time. And it comes down to this - she never fucking grew up and became a whole person. Her world doesn’t look like her all white Class of 1959.
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I don’t know why; but I do find that things that are just on the wrong side of being comprehensible language are substantially more wearing than ones that are either clearly comprehensible or clearly just noise.
As best I can tell there are a couple of things at work: at least subjectively, the process of screening out speech as irrelevant happens after I’ve done some decoding of it. The table next to me? Comes in nice and clear, lock on, conclude that I have no interest in their conversation, tune out; only a problem if they are super obnoxious in some way. Table on the far side of the room? Just fades into the background noise, no urge to attempt decoding is triggered. Table a few rows away? Clearly identifiable as a conversation; but I can’t get a clear decode long enough to decide whether to tune out or not; my urge to focus harder and try to do so just loops hopelessly.
You see a similar thing with conversations between two people vs. one person conversing on a phone: despite having twice the audible chatter, the full conversation fades into the background if deemed irrelevant; while your brain goes nuts trying to fill in the blanks when given one side of a conversation(a half larded with enough clues to set you going on trying to infer the missing chunks; but not enough to succeed).
An unknown language isn’t galling in itself; but it can push an input into the tricky liminal area under certain circumstances. If the input would be under the threshold anyway, it doesn’t seem to make a difference(the mixed sounds of a large crowd, say, register as background noise; and are no more or less distracting depending on whether you know the language being spoken). If comprehension is hopeless enough(seems to happen most easily with languages that differ most substantially from ones you know) you can also eventually relax and tune it out; but the case that is clearly larded with grammatical structure, sometimes bits that are or sound like words you know; but isn’t comprehensible? You just keep snapping to attention when some detail seems like a lead, then bouncing off, and repeat(in my experience, ‘differ most substantially’ means that I don’t have much trouble recognizing that an east Asian language conversation just isn’t going to decode and consigning it to background; but a Romance language just keeps poking me in my poorly remembered Latin; occasional loanword or cognate, and the like, very hard to push out of the center of my attention).
You don’t tend to encounter these in the wild(the closest is probably the telephone case); but I suspect that suitably crafted nonsense inputs would have the same effect, whether they are constructed by stringing together syllables in a way that suggests grammar rules or by sprinkling just enough intelligible fragments into gaps or noise to get you to try to reconstruct the missing pieces.
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Not to defend her. But older people unemployed use Starbucks for free wifi.
They’ve lived and worked their entire lives with the expectation they’d have jobs and be able to get jobs. Then if they’re fired/downsized/laid off…SSI doesn’t cover their cost until they’re well over 60 or 68. Pensions have been raided and mostly non-existent, or won’t mature until age 65.
they lash out…if you’re over 55 you stand basically zero chance to get a job in previous profession and after your unemployment runs out…and either you’re on the street or telling people ‘welcome to walmart’.
And that home you bought when you were sitting on top of the curve has a mortgage due.
Anger at younger people and younger employed people from other countries is a reaction you’d expect. Misplaced, but a reaction.
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That defintely is a social problem, but did I miss the part where she’s identified as an older unemployed person whos been reduced to using Starbucks for free Wi-Fi?
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