Snow gates in Scotland

Haven't seen the grass since early November... You do realize that's the January thaw and once you're lulled into thinking winter isn't so bad you'll be shoveling snow at -10C.

I'm fairly sure I've heard al-U-min-i-um as some sort of bastard child of the accepted British pronunciation and the American a-LU-min-um. I have no idea why that's the special snowflake with lithium, beryllium, magnesium, and so forth.

I also have the suspicion that if you asked 100 American kids who didn't completely sleep through grade or high school science classes you would find several that think aluminium is something completely different than an aluminum frying pan. The first is some sort of weird chemical that will kill you.

On a completely unrelated note, why do people put the word "that" everywhere? In your paragraph above, simply delete both thats and it means precisely the same and is smoother to read:

Later, they took teacher certification so they could work abroad and travel some more. They found out there is strong competition for those year-long jobs, so their first one was the least attractive (for climate and tourist spots), Kuwait.

Yeah, I spoke too soon. The clouds rolled in before I made it to the trail head. I passed a dog who didn't know what to make of the sounds of my micro-spikes biting into the ice.

I don't have SAD but I really, really like the sun... A friend went to Seattle on vacation last week. I think he may come back with gills. I don't know how much of that crap will get here as snow.

The best built person I ever saw outside of actual bodybuilders was a brig rat. I'll save you the look-up:

(US, military, slang) Somebody who has spent time in the brig; an offender in the military.

The sucker could do one arm pullups until told to stop. I understand the US prison system can tune-up inmates too.

I haven't spent much time in cold places, but some years back I took a bus tour through central Europe, and 0 C was the top temperature for the entire tour.

After that I went to Ireland, where the temperature was up to 4 C. It felt like a tropical paradise.

Trouble is that makes the bad guys tougher - not a good idea.

On the subject of pullups, when I was 15 and skinny, I could do 17 pullups, yet I've seen people on the internet who are well built saying 20 pullups is quite an achievement most people can't do. WTF? If a skinny boy can do 17, surely a fit man can do way more than that. I'd expect 50+.

Sounds like a chemical element. Maybe that's advertising.

Is that a jewish term?

You mean a rucksack? It took you three attempts to figure that out?!

You thought we still lived in caves?

No socks is better, then they can't get wet. There is no need for socks.

For some reason I think people pulling suitcases along on wheels looks ridiculous/snobby.

I've never owned a suitcase and don't understand why you'd want a stiff container.

Why are you scared of water?

That's almost shirt sleeve weather. A couple of days before Christmas it was -28C. The Arctic decided to visit for a few days. That was atypical. It usually hovers around 0C, with just enough warming in the day to melt the snow which then turns to ice by morning. It builds character. Or something.

Fora is the right plural to use when discussing the meeting places of ancient Rome. Whether it is the right plural for internet discussion groups, where forum is a borrowed word in the English language, is a matter of debate.

On the eastern end of the continent, the really snowy weather often doesn't arrive until February. Apart from the few days around Christmas, it's been at or above freezing all winter here in southeast Michigan. The five inches of snow that we got on December 23-25 was gone when the weather hit 54 F and rainy on December 30.

I thought pullups are something that toddlers wear if they can't control their bladders.

I gave up on them a while back. The muscles and spirit were willing, the joints and tendons weren't.

"Was submerged/was drowned/went under"?

Anglo-Normans affected the nobility more than Anglo-Saxons.

While the Anglo-Saxons had used their own language, which we call Old English, for all manner of things, the Normans replaced it with Latin first, then Anglo-Norman as the official language for all forms of documentation and literature.

After assorted Scandinavians and Germans had a whack at it...

Trickle down works much better for culture than economics. Look what happened when Aethelbehrt became a Christian when his little French hottie told him he wasn't getting any until he accepted the White Christ.

Well of course. The oldest languages we know of native to Britain are the Celtic (Gaelic, Irish and Welsh) languages. English as such is mostly Anglo Saxon French Norman with a bit of Viking Norse tossed in, but with the grammatical constructions of Celtic.

Germanic Yoda Speak use we do not.

If you can say Quora you can say fora.