• zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        The students being allowed to peacefully protest at all is a nice change, and hearing about it could encourage other peaceful protesters, who could enact more direct change

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Both can be both nouns and verbs. This to me is the most annoying English oddity of all.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          This is one of the few oddities of the English language that I struggle with constantly. It seems like, as a native speaker, most of the other ones just “feel” or “sound” right, but I haven’t been able to nail that down with effect/affect for some reason

          • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            6 months ago

            The trouble is that both words have a verb sense and a noun sense.

            The noun sense of affect is something like “mood” or “emotion” and isn’t used often, while the noun sense of effect is “thing that happened (because of some cause)” and is a rather common word.

            The verb sense of affect is “to cause something to happen (to something)” and is a pretty common word, while the verb sense of effect is more like “to make something be true” as in “effecting change” above.

            The mnemonic I use is from dungeons and dragons, some spells are “mind-affecting effects” meaning they change minds and they’re caused by the spell being cast.

            • Laurentide@pawb.social
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              6 months ago

              If I use my Persuasion skill to help someone think their way through a problem, is that a “mind-effecting affect”?

        • ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          To “affect” a change would be to alter the change itself, for example if the university had already been reviewing its portfolio then the protesters might be affecting the change by making it happen more quickly.

          To “effect” a change would be to cause the change in the first place.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        6 months ago

        You know, I’m also super pedantic about this and only learned I’d been doing it wrong very recently.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        6 months ago

        I greeted my fellow 20-ish-year-olds with “what’s up kids” at that age as a way of saying we were still young party machines. I am not disrespecting these folks.

        • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Old enough to be sent to die and kill innocent non white people for profit so they are old enough to be adults.

          • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            The vast, vast majority of 18 year olds are not in the military, and it’s really weird to consider all 18 year olds adults because a tiny fraction of them are soldiers

            • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I never once said they all were in the military or that them being in the military made them adults. I said if we consider them adult enough to be able to do that, then we need to just consider them adults in general.