> How is anyone (as in not us, the tech nerds) supposed to reason about this?
People have more than enough brain power to reason about this. "There are several distributions, I recommend this one" is not exactly rocket science.
We really need to stop treating people like they have an IQ of 30 and only 5 minutes of free time per day, or we'll never defeat Google et al that purposefully maintain us in this belief.
The classic one is "should have" or "should've" to "should of" because when spoken, it really does sound similar. I don't know what the fuck people are learning in English classes these days though, or if they even still have them.
Spelling is no guide for pronunciation here, though. In North American and Commonwealth dialects of English I don't think there's a context in which the in is really pronounced as a [f]. It is rather a [v].
Not sure where you're from but in my dialect (North American) it's more common than not to have _have_ realized as [əv] ("uhv") in contexts like _should have_, _could have_ (but not _I have a car_, where it has to be the full [hæv]). Only in deliberately enunciated speech do I feel like I'd expect [hæv] in the former kind of context. So it's an understandable mistake to make.
Which might actually make me less likely to make certain mistakes, precisely because I'm not influenced by pronunciation, only by grammar (I actually have to think about the words I use)
> Funny tidbit: "missile" used to be an adjective, "a missile weapon" = "a weapon than can be sent/thrown".
Related bit of comedy:
> Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up.
Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.
The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones:
An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.
How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?
For a foster parent you only need to find someone willing to adopt a child, which already register themself into a list. For marriage you need to find someone willing to marry and to marry you out of random people.
People have more than enough brain power to reason about this. "There are several distributions, I recommend this one" is not exactly rocket science.
We really need to stop treating people like they have an IQ of 30 and only 5 minutes of free time per day, or we'll never defeat Google et al that purposefully maintain us in this belief.
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