So Spooky

That was makes it the perfect game for Belgians.

@FrankHarr or Swiss, or Luxemburgers, or Alsatians

Americans: We're subtle as a trainwreck.

@Radu Pssh, give some credit. Trainwecks are usually far more subtle. I mean, as long as it's not a derail, the most people notice is the trains are running slow.

@Radu I don’t understand if America is pissed off because he hates foreign languages… or that they’re playing with an Ouija board.

@Radu and darn proud of it apparently.

Wait - so, it's really a "Yes-yes" Board?

@OnTopOfTheWorld No, there actually is a much more sinister thing going on with it, going by the unholy name of "trademark we just guessed up". It's owned by Hasbro today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija#Commercial_parlor_game

@OnTopOfTheWorld No-no.

@Radu Nonnein

It's a bit of a tradition for everyone to think it's pronounced "wee-jee" but learn it's actually "wee-yah".

But we need to unite against the real linguistic monsters; people who mispronounce "aluminium" as "aluminum"; it's an element isolated in the 19th century, it's a metal, so it should end with "-ium".

@CorruptUser Exactly, "aluminum" is just lazy.

@VeryCreativeName It's the way we were taught growing up in the US, so it'll be damn near impossible to get people to change. Hell, we can't even manage to switch to the metric system, and that's a lot more important. (To be fair, most scientific fields use metric anyway.)

@Manabi (cough) NASA (cough)

@Manabi

If you think we 'murricans can't adopt metric, note that most bullets are measured in millimeters, e.g., the 9mm.

@CorruptUser Not really. 9mm Parabellum was so named before it got adopted in the US. If we had really adopted metric we would be shooting 9mm ACP shorts instead of .380 ACP, 9mm Smith & Wesson short for .38 special, 9mm Smith & Wesson long for .357 Magnum, and 11.4mm ACP Short for .45 ACP.

Mostly anything adopted after the 1940's was adopted as a metric cartridge in order to align better with customary NATO countries. So .308 became 7.62 NATO and .223 is .556 NATO and so forth.

@CorruptUser *shrug* Measurements used for bicycle parts are a hodgepodge of metric, imperial, historical French and historical Italian. (And given that Nokia is a noted maker of bicycle tires, we're probably quite lucky not to have any poronkusema in the mix as well.) Participation in international trade doesn't define a domestic preference ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_Finnish_units_of_measurement#Miscellaneous

@Manabi Except that one lonely sign in some road, plus ammunitiron calibre, as @CorruptUser noted.

@VeryCreativeName so apparently aluminium/aluminum was named British Humphry Davy and he wanted it be pronounced aluminum but is fellow British countrymen were "no we're going to call it aluminium" but the Americans kept calling it aluminum.

here's a video about it https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gfxm2qqghsQ

so we Americans are just respecting a dead man's wishes unknownly


also British invented the word soccer

@AmericanButterfly sorry, mate, "soccer" is not a word, it's an abbreviation of "association football" and it's not "association" that's the driving word here but "football".
It has been called football since the beginning, always has been.

@Star-ling I already knew that

@Star-ling

Doesn't change the fact that the Brits came up with the name "soccer." And to be precise you should always call it Association Football to distinguish it from all the other footballs out there.

@VeryCreativeName It's also much easier to say and things actually get labelled"aluminum"in america so... *shrugs*

Keep in mind, we're also a country who name objects after brand's depending on the region. (I.E: Calling all washing machines "Maytag", calling all internet searching "Googling", etc)

@Radu It's pretty common to name objects after brands. In the UK, they say "hoovering" instead of "vacuuming" for example, and in the case of Frisbee, I'm not even sure my native language (Swedish) *has* a generic name for the toy in question.

@CorruptUser Aluminum was identified before the nomenclature was standardized. This is one of those cases where Canada has chosen the American variant over the English one.

@CorruptUser You mean like "platinium" and "lanthanium", to say nothing of "molybdenium"....

@dtilque I find it ironium that you don't simply point to copperium ... :-3

(And let's all be grateful for the incorporation of Wixhausen that "fixed" the naming-to-be of Darmstadtium ...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmstadtium#Naming

@JoB Grateful, indeed. Imagine the amount of schoolboy humour resulting from an element named "Wixhausium" (roughly translatable as "Wankhomeium") in the periodic table.

@Natifftoff And imagine the black market springing up for trace amounts of that "extremely radioactive synthetic element" [Wikipedia] in the wake of that schoolboy humor reaching the ears of those willing to try novel products in their love life ...

@dtilque Chrysanthemium

@CorruptUser The spelling was agreed to democratically. How can you call yourself American, being against democracy?

'@anonymousskimmer' America is not and was never a democracy.

@CorruptUser Nothing makes my day like getting a shipment of bulk plate Helium. ;)

Maybe you wanna back off the coffee there, champ. XD

@quoopy I fail to see how that disproves anything, considering that it's not a case of "if and only if". "Helium" is also a bit odd because if it was discovered today it'd be named "Helon" instead, due to being a noble gas.

@CorruptUser I love how America decided to call it "aluminIUM", and then, after everyone agreed to do it the American way, America changed its mind..

@CorruptUser It was originally called "Alumium", but people asked for the name to be changed to something more latin. So, the inventor first changed it to "Aluminum". It was later changed again to "Aluminium". America decided to go with the first correction, while Europe chose to accept the second.

Besides, what is wrong with Aluminum? Platinum, Lanthanum, and Molybdenum already exist, and you guys aren't fighting to shove an "ium" on those. And, you aren't calling for adding "ium" to Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, et al.

@Arden Beg your pardon, who exactly is that "Europe" you're asking that? In my native German, it's "Platin", "Lanthan", "Molybdän", but still "Aluminium" (and "Holmium" and ...)

I suppose that anyone more fond of Latin than I am would have a fieldday explaining how, in a proper language, "-um" and "-ium" indicate different grammatical gender or whatnot ...

@JoB In finnish, that be, Platina, Lantaani, Molybdeeni ; and Alumiini and Holmium (essentially core metals have full translation, bit later ones have -a end; latter that is -iini ,and latest only get ium or whatever its named when publicized

@Arden The root is alumina, (in contrast with magnesia) and the correct ending is given by dropping the "a" and adding "um". This has been followed in Platinum (from platina) etc. Someone overrode Davy's spelling (aluminum) and that has, unfortunately stuck with those lacking the understanding of Latin endings.

When is a new comic coming out?

Prescient-
Newscasters seem forever surprised and baffled by the change of each month.
. Can you believe it is October already? It was September just recently.
. September snuck up on me. I thought it would stay August forever.
On the other hand, Humon gave us a comic that predicted Halloween from back in August.
We need Humon as a news presenter. It would triple the sum of the IQ coming from my video contraption.
--Kidding aside, I hope Humon feels better soon.

I will admit, the people who go "I can't have a Ouija board in my house! It's calling out to the Other Side and inviting spirits in!" make me sigh very loudly and deeply. It's just a board with letters on it and literally manufactured and sold by the same people who make Monopoly sets. If you believe that's a tool you can use to contact dead people, okay, but you can also do automatic writing with pen and paper, and nobody's like "Ballpoints are just asking to let the Devil in."

Funny, but no. The board was an American invention created to speed up fake messages from fake ghosts (because waiting for spirits to knock out a message in what I can only assume is some method of Abrahamic morse code was taking too long). The word has no appropriate pronunciation because a sister-in-law of the one of the creators asked the board what to name itself and ouija is what it "spelled" out. Behold, the world's first personalized pronoun.

@GyreBrillig the comic just making fun of the name

@GyreBrillig Really? I've never heard that before. Where did you learn about it?

And they are owned by Parker Brothers.


Yes, the board game guys and I’m not kidding.

@Bookeater well duh, it’s a board “game” which were completely harmless fun until a horror movie in the 70s featured it and all the religious freaks in the US decided it was now a tool of the devil and not rated for 4 years and up.