Going omnibus with my reply here:
Did we already mention steep learning curve?
Graphs based on changes over time always put time on the X-axis. For a “learning curve,” knowledge would therefore be on the Y-axis. A steep slope would mean a lot of knowledge gained in a short amount of time. So something that’s hard to master should be referred to as having a shallow learning curve! Or else steep learning curve should mean “easy to learn.”
This might be where using a “
long learning slope” — namely, on learning difficult skills — might be more accurate, but to use this in a passage would have people ask you pause from speaking for a beat as they process the visual or logical implication of that never-heard phrase.
I am poor at Calculus but quite good at Statistics (as I needed to be as a biologist). You could trust me to give you an accurate estimate of the population growth of rabbits in your field (or, in fact, the accuracy of a political survey), but not to design a bridge over a river
Conjuring that old gem, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Better certainly for the respect gained by the flight attendants and their jobs. However, I definitely do NOT find the passenger experience better in any way regardless of how someone refers to the working employees.
Flight attendants are doing their best with the limited resources they have nowadays.
The slide in quality and service is all in the hands of what shareholders want (which is, usually and unsurprisingly, a maximum quarterly dividend in the near-term, with very little concern for the long-term consequences of their short-term greed). That parenthetical aside applies to a whole lot more than just the air transport sector, though.
It’s worth caching that thought each and every time you see quality of service or quality of product start to break down: on one end, the consumer wants the best bang for the buck, but investors (who are, ironically, also consumers, few of whom bother to make this connection or just don’t care) want to extract every last drop of “value” from their shares and funds. That leaves little room for upkeep of operations and proper pay for the labour. Consequently, things come undone.
As for work titles, I’m quite glad “stewardess” is no longer, just as “waitress” — now “server” — has fallen into antiquated disuse, as their use also conferred, implicitly, a distinction based on gender which, consequently, gave teeth to even more lopsided underpay from their gendered counterparts in those circumstance which had some overlap (“steward” and “waiter”, respectively).
I think it sounds pretentious (at least it would in my apparently lower social class circles 🙄).
We often think of class being centred solely around fungible wealth (and in great part, it can be), but a bigger part of class values comes from the willingness and curiosity to be a sponge of learning throughout one’s own life. The obvious, easiest way to fill that sponge is to pick up and read books from all areas. Another is to develop skills for critical analysis, for things like writing on reviewed research (I’m thinking of both scholars and old-fashioned journalism here). (There’s a third leg of class — learnt from “finishing” schools — for which very few people ever see or know themselves, and which play into a much older sense of “class” based on a notion of pedigree — something probably more familiar to the British upper classes and, for most of today’s generations, not so much).
So much of what we hold onto, just as a sponge with water, stays with us and in how we interact with people around us. It’s easier to not draw from that sponge for everyday interactions than it is to try to draw from a drier sponge around interactions which absolutely rely on retention of that moisture.
That “filling” sponge confers, in practice, a great deal about one’s class, insofar as that willingness and curiosity are prioritized. Put another way, one can have a lot of money and be poorly read: their class won’t be “upper” in any meaningful sense (see, “
nouveau riche”), whereas one can have nearly no money but extremely well-read or worldly. They may be “poor” in the bank account sense but but won’t be parsed as “lower” in a class-based discussion.
The moral, I guess, is to strive always for having a great sponge, a drive to quench its parched thirst, and to ignore anybody who argues how this isn’t a good thing for one to have.
Personally, I really dislike (for, needless to say, we don't use these terms, but yes, naturally, of course, we do understand them), American colloquialisms such as "gonna" or "gotta".
"Gonna" (a contraction of "going to") is used in lieu of the future tense - what's wrong with "I will"?
I’mma remember this is one of your peeves from now on!
Bring back the thee's and thou's
Interestingly, only fairly recently did I learn how the “y” in things like “ye olde” was, in the day of Middle English, not pronounced as we would any word today starting with “y”, but as we would “th”. So, yes, “ye ole” was pronounced then, verbally, as “the old(e)”.
I’m guessing there might be something to the “thee” and “thou” involved here, as well, where back in their printed daily use (either before or just after the Gutenberg press, not sure the timing here), they might have been pronounced verbally as “ye” (kind of like “ya” or “yuh” now) and “you”, respectively.
Linguistics is a disciplinary rabbit hole I was always kind of afraid of — probably in no small part due to being yanked from grade-school class twice a week for an hour of speech therapy though three years of my childhood. That therapy, plus a very mocking, poorly-read parent who denigrated me for my several speech impediments — and also for my use of what they would refer to as
“twenty-five-cent words” (yes, I guess the inflation is real) — scarred me for life from delving further into that discipline for either fun
or profit accreditation.
It must be inflation. I always remembered them referred to them as two dollar words and now they are ten-dollar words!
Yup. Definitely inflation.
