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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My favorite French borrowings are gentle, genteel and jaunty. All borrowed from gentil (kind, pleasant, nice), but at different times (13th century, late 16th, and 17th, respectively).

    The French word is from Latin gentilis, meaning “of the Roman clan.” English borrowed that from Latin as gentile.

    So we have 4 English words, all from the same Latin origin. Of them, genteel is probably closest to the Old French pronunciation (but the vowels are still a little bit different).



  • It’s funny that there are two unambiguous alternatives to bimonthly, but they both mean 2x/month: fortnightly and semimonthly.

    Both German and Dutch distinguish their equivalent words with clear prefixes meaning half- and two-. The English word was unclear after 1066 since the French word bimensuel would have been used by the new bosses. And that means 2x/month. English used bimensual for a while before developing a new, worse word with the Latin origin bi- and the Germanic origin -monthly. And it seems to have been ambiguous from the start. So this has probably been messed up for almost 1050 years.

    Maybe we should resurrect the Old English prefix twi- to make a new(old) 1x/2months word twimonthly or more intuitively, twomonthly that we can use in opposition with halfmonthly.





  • For flexibility and size I like external m.2 enclosures. I have some from Sabrent, Orico and Rosewill. Of them all the Rosewill is the smallest, has the nicest build quality, and seems to dissipate heat the best.

    So I would recommend a Rosewill 9SIA072GJ92919, and add an NVMe SSD of your choice.

    I think your MacBook is Thunderbolt 2, so you won’t get full speed but it should still be plenty fast. And this enclosure will give you TB3 speeds if you upgrade your PC later.