The deadliest chemical
Comment on The 1900s
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It’s like referring to water as “dihydrogen monoxide”.
yemmly@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
spookedintownsville@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
woodenskewer@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it’s an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn’t take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
I said I think it’s just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn’t get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they “researched the name” and it was actually harmful.
It was a strange experience.
Donkter@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
How so? I would certainly call something from 1894 to be from the "late 1800s’ or late 19th century. I mean, we’re a quarter of the way through this century, at some point it turns into history.
apostrofail@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
late 1800s*
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Because people don’t use that terminology when referring to a time period within a majority of living people’s lifetime.
Donkter@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Sure they do. I’m sure the century cutoff helps too.
If someone one would refer to the 1920s as “the early 1900s” cause it’s over 100 years ago it follows logically to call other parts of the 1900s the mid and late period.
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
Just because people can doesn’t mean people do. We have terminology for the time periods through the 1900s that have been in use for so long that people just don’t use that type of terminology. Particularly because it paints it in a misleading light, as if it were ancient history. People typically just refer to those periods as “the 80s” or “the 90s”.
Referring to those time periods with terminology we use for ancient history when we have far more frequently used terminology is a deliberate choice to make the time periods feel like ancient history. (Barring language barriers, of course)
It feels like you’re just trying to be contrarian. If you honestly believe it’s commonly used to refer to something so recent, then please provide evidence of people using that to refer to the 90s often. Otherwise you’re just relying on “I can imagine it, so it must be true”.
broken_chatbot@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
This may be a “loanword” from the student’s native language. In Swedish, they use “1900-talet” (1900s) instead of “twentieth century”
jerkface@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
When most of your life occurred in the 20th century, it looks a lot different.
Saleh@feddit.org 5 hours ago
Because you still had to watch things from poor quality VHS tapes on cathode-ray tube monitors. Of course it looked different.