Quid Pro Crow | Hacker News Reader

Quid Pro Crow

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

59 pointswarrenm32 comments

For those that like this sort of thing, Wikipedia calls them malapropisms [1]. Reddit has a bunch of them at r/BoneAppleTea [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea.

This is likely not a malapropism (incorrect usage of a word because it sounds similar to the correct word) but simply a pronunciation mistake.

That is, I bet if we asked the speaker to write it down, he would write "quid pro quo", no birds to be seen.

I ALSO think you're overestimating the intelligence of Republican politicians. :)

barely related, but it's funny to me how in anglosaxon countries you use the locution "quid pro quo", while here in italy we use "do ut des" to mean "a favor for a favor".

And that "qui pro quo" - in italy - means just a misunderstanding.

It's one of the funniest false friends that I've encountered while studying English

Yeah, quid pro quo literally means "one thing for another thing". The ambiguity of the "for" led to divergent evolutions.

The "pro" (for) can be either mean "instead of", "in the place of" (One thing in the place of another thing). This is where the interpretation currently used in Italy and possibly other places settled on.

But "pro" (for) also means "for the benefit of" and that's the interpretation that caught on in the Anglosphere.

I liked that when a major person in Italian organized crime was arrested, US newspapers called him a “capo dei capi” while Italian newspapers called him a “boss dei boss”.

For example, here’s a book using that title

https://m.libreriauniversitaria.it/amp/product/BIT/978887928...

The subject of the book is also featured in an Italian TV show using the title Il Capo Dei Capo: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_capo_dei_capi

Hannibal Lecter, being anglosaxon, uses it for "a favor for a favor". When in doubt, I always side with the cannibal.

That is bizarre indeed.

Man, I'm disappointed this wasn't research on corvid culture!

This takes me back to the days where I used to use Praat [1] for studying phonetics/phonemics. It's a really fun piece of software

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praat

Fun in the sense that it has great functionality packaged in an absolute insane example of what I'd call an "academic UI".

Here's the thing. You said "crow" instead of "pro".

Do they rhyme? Yes. No one's arguing that.

As someone who is a linguist who studies human speech, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one says "crow" instead of "pro".

The audio seems to be a mispronounciation. I bet the speaker knows how to write it down correctly.

this an joke in reference to unidan and a flamewar about crows in 2014.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/unidan

I would class that as an eggcorn[1] and not just a simple error.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

This reminds me of a comment I heard a politician make in private among a group of us.

When passively asked "what's going on?", her reply: 'oh, much to do about nothing!'

This sounds like something Charlie from Always Sunny would say in a court of bird law.

Or you could learn how it's pronounced in Latin and you wouldn't have this problem.

We don't even know how stuff is pronounced in Latin. So for all we know, "crow" could be the correct pronunciation!

Somewhat related question - does anyone know where I can get the raw audio of every Tucker Carlson episode? I want to try to visualize his hypnotic pattern of speech during his monologues...

To what extent are we put into a suggestive state by the stylistic presentation of speech, not just the rythms, but the rest of the oratory and rhetoric? This is a great place for LLMs to make a contribution with neutral, consistent rewording. I hope that the boringreport.org is the start of de-hypnotizing bubble I can deploy between myself and the world.

If say a Maddow vs a Carslon monologue could be stripped down into a sequence of neutral observations and assertions and anonymized it would go a fair way toward switching off the typical tribal inflammation of the ratiocination.

The implications of what you might use AI fueled political agitator for give me pause.

I just want to make a meme by averaging his monologue waveforms to hopefully reveal his distinctly ridiculous manner of speaking where he alternates his pitch with a specific meter. ;) World domination of TuckGPT can come later.

This is how hypnotoad is born isn’t it.

crows recognize human faces. never forget

and they can train other crows / transfer the information to the rest of their murder

How is this a hacker news?

More like James Crowmer

Double fault!

Qui pro quo!

Was expecting https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31604026

I was expecting a piece on Harlan Crow

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