My uncle turned up drunk for my wedding reception. He’d got the venue wrong and had already spent an hour at a different wedding reception eating and drinking, easy to do at Indian weddings with a huge number of guests.
But that’s only half the story. He’d got the date wrong too, and had already done the whole thing the night before.
Something like this has also happened to me when in holiday in Spain. I was looking around nice buildings open to the public, and entered one that I later found out happened to be a university. Walking around I entered one very well decorated hall, also because it started to rain and had to wait somewhere until it passed. To my horror, more people started coming in as well and I realized I was in for some sort of book or thesis presentation on the subject of Spanish language on the Balearic islands.
I barely speak Castilian Spanish (the more common one) and it was instead in Catalan Spanish, so I didn't understand a word, but stayed for the 1-2 hours it took, clapped, and skipped the handshakes/signing part of it.
I attended a funeral for the family member of a friend of mine. After the funeral we all were to convene at his sister's house. Because of the crowds I parked half a block away and found myself in a group of similarly dressed people walking towards what I remembered to be her house. After maybe 5 minutes of not recognizing anyone, someone simply says "who are you", and after explaining my relation to the deceased, my error became apparent.
I had a similar experience in Monza, Italy. Was taking a walk around some old church and a guy was giving an explanation in English so I stopped to listen. They started ushering the entire group into the crypts underground so I just went with the flow.
While showing us where the dead bodies were stored the guy said something like “but you’re all doctors so I’m sure you’re used to it” was when I realised this was an organised event.
I thought this was the difference between the laid back European culture vs the more, um… detailed mindset of the Far east one I grew up in. The Italians probably didn’t care if there were strays while the Singaporean or Japanese organisers would be doing a headcount at every stop.
FYI naming it Catalan Spanish would be akin to naming Welsh as Welsh English. Catalan and Spanish (also known as Castilian) are two different languages, like French and Italian.
So it's normal that you didn't understand much, as even it having some words that are similar the tonalities and some of the constructs are very different.
And they might have been speaking in Balearic, which is a Catalan dialect, and that's sometimes even harder to understand.
I don’t think it is akin; Welsh is almost completely different to English with only a few modern words in common. Just try reading some Welsh as an English speaker. It’s unintelligible.
Catalan is very much a Latinate language, and anyone who speaks Spanish or Italian or French (or even English) can guess the meaning of a lot of words and understand the grammar quite easily.
Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson came to give a lecture at my university when I was a student. I was busy in the lab and engrossed in my work, and realised the time 5 minutes after the talk was due to begin. I was too embarrassed to walk in late, so to my eternal regret I didn't go. I'm more comfortable with that sort of situation now, but I can appreciate the desire not to make a scene.
Haha yeah, same here—I totally get that feeling. Sometimes the best stories end up being the ones we didn’t live through, because we keep replaying the “what if” in our heads. At least we can laugh about it now, and share it here. Makes me feel a bit better knowing I wasn’t the only one who missed out.
This is a weird comment to make when the original comment didn't mention anxiety at all, and wasn't even worded like it was a bad experience or that they felt they were forced to stay there. Maybe they had nothing better to do, they were waiting out the rain after all.
If someone I didn't know had left, I wouldn't have minded. Even someone I did know, in fact, although I would have asked what happened afterwards and if everything was okay.
People have all sorts of emergencies.
I would have minded if the person leaving said anything though, unless I really needed to be informed of something. Better to leave in silence without disrupting the presentation. It is stressful enough as is.
Many years ago I took a look at my high school senior yearbook for the first time since I’d graduated. I spotted a note from a girl asking me to call her after graduation.
I didn’t remember the name (first name only), and the phone number was from a different town 20-30 miles from my high school. Unfortunately I don’t believe I still have the yearbook, so it shall forever remain a mystery. I literally had, and have, no clue.
When my father left us, a cousine of mine (from my mother's sise) got confused and parked a couple blocks away. She entered the house where people were mourning, and she realised the people she didn't recognise had to be from my father's side.
Then she approached the casket and leapt forward exclaiming "I'll miss you, Uncle", only to find a lady laying inside.
Yeah! He didn't want to appear rude by just walking out, so he stayed it's been all over the local TV News - he looks a tall guy so yes, he'd definitely be noticed making a sneaky exit!
That being said, it seems like he might be better at blending in than he gives himself credit for:
>You can’t exactly stand up and walk out of a wedding mid-ceremony, so I just had to commit to this act and spent the next 20 minutes awkwardly sitting there trying to be as inconspicuous as my 6ft 2 ass could be
And yet, no one actually seemed to notice him other than the photographer (who presumably didn't know most of the guests beforehand), and the bride and groom only found out he was there because the photographer took a number of pictures with him.
The article clearly explains it: He rushed in, the ceremony started, and then he realized he was at the wrong wedding.
Once the ceremony starts, you stay quiet. Getting up and leaving from aisle seat while the wedding party is coming down the aisle would have been a jerk move.
I am something of a professional gatecrasher, which is a skill I picked up from a friend many years ago.
Interesting event happening as you’re walking past? Just walk on in, look like you belong, see where it goes. That or carry around a hi vis vest - they fold up tiny and can live in a jacket pocket unnoticeably, and they will allow you access anywhere. Occasionally I’ve had to doodle “STEWARD” or similar on the back. Back in the pocket once you’re in, or you’ll be rigging lighting or serving drinks.
Through this I have ended up with friends, work, and anecdotes galore.
I’ve also been chucked out of a few things but that’s definitely the minority - most of the time when people are like “so are you with the royal brigadiers…?” I’ll just say “no, I’m gatecrashing”, and they assume I’m joking until they realise I’m not, but by that point we’re already on our fourth round.
I'm not sure I understand this correctly but did they mean just the wedding and not the wedding reception?
In my corner of the world it's still fairly normal to have people attempt to crash a wedding reception and it's typically the role of the best man to bribe them with offerings like a shot of vodka or treats.
I have a distinct memory of my friend's father in law, a man close to 2m tall, walking forward, vodka bottle in one hand, shot glass in the other, while the uninvited guest, with just a shot glass, walking backwards towards the gate to the venue where the reception was held.
On the flip side one night over a decade ago I was out on a walk with my SO when we overheard some rowdy people. We wanted to avoid them, but they caught up to us and it turned out that this was an after-party after their wedding reception. They invited us to join them to enjoy the leftovers with everyone.
Yes, just the ceremony, not the reception. He left as soon as he could (after being held up for the group photo) to attend the wedding he was supposed to be at.
this happened to my mother-in-law, where she was the crasher.
in North London there is a large Turkish centre that hosts Turkish weddings. She was invited to a wedding there.
Traditionally, the bride and groom stand in the centre of the room and then family members lineup next to them all in a procession.
As you enter the room to reach the bride and groom, you must shake the hands in turn of all of the people in the procession.
When my mother-in-law eventually got to the bride and groom, they realised that the bride and groom were strangers. The accurate wedding was taking place upstairs at the same time.
There are multiple wedding venues in that particular Turkish Centre.
When I was an intern years ago I went to an event at a hotel in LA. I didn't know what room the event was in, so I approached the concierge, described the event I was there for, and he immediately whisked me to an upper floor, where I began to talk with the other guests. It took about 10 minutes for me to realize that while the people there were also interns, and we were in the same field, they were from a particular company, whereas my event was for an industry group. They had just been flown in from all over the country, so it didn't seem odd to them to see a new face (we were all new faces).
I eventually realized the error and quietly excused myself to look for the industry group meeting (which sadly lacked the delicious catered food and open bar that the first event had). Fortunately I made my exit before the higher-ups had arrived, as they would have quickly realized I was in the wrong place.
I woke up one morning in college and thought I had overslept. I threw on clothes and ran from my dorm to my class. I walked in two minutes late and grabbed an open seat on the front row, right in front of the teacher.
I didn't recognize anyone and soon realize that I hadn't overslept and was just an hour early. I was too embarrassed to get up and walk out so I sat through the class.
A student once arrived, disheveled and with 20 minutes left, to a midterm. I gave him a stern look and a copy of the exam. While I was grading the exam, I discovered with slight horror that he'd showed up to the first of two classes that I was teaching back to back in the same room -- he was enrolled in the second, and had arrived 30 minutes early. Horror turned to joy as I failed to find a single error on his exam. We had a good laugh as I returned his exam; he was justifiably proud and only slightly embarrassed.
That happened to me when I was a student. Crammed all night, napped, and slept in.
The adrenaline from rushing to class somehow made me both ace the test and be the first to turn it in.
Funny enough that was my last day attending, I decided I wanted to switch majors and dropped it the next week. I always wondered what the professor thought haha.
I had a roommate back in college that was a devoutly religious catholic. We went out drinking one Saturday night and he started talking about church (I was and still am irreligious). He convinced me to go with him to mass the next morning.
Next morning we get up, get dressed, drive to the church and walk in all hung over. I hadn't ever been in a catholic church before but it was a huge crowd already seated and there were no seats in the back. The priest was up front speaking. So we walk through the pews looking for a seat and get all the way to the front before we find one. Everyone is staring at us. We sit down. The priest said a few words and I think there was a prayer and like 5 minutes after we sat down everyone got up to leave.
It was daylight savings time change and we hadn't adjusted our clocks being drunk college students. That was my one experience attending mass.
Something similar happened to me in college. I got to my class late, and there was only one seat left, in the middle of the row in the large auditorium, so I had to make a big commotion getting to it. I finally sit down and pull out my notes, only to realize that whatever this substitute teacher was talking about was totally Greek to me. After a while, it dawned on me - I wasn’t late for class, I was super early! Since I made such a commotion getting to the seat, and since I didn’t want to do that again, I just sat there and pretended to take notes. My class was the one after, and I left the room when everyone else did, went to the bathroom, then came back, just so no one would notice that I was going to the much more junior class right after. :D
There was an even crazier story when someone was fired from Apple, but still kept coming to the office to work on their project for free for like half a year before someone noticed.
Or the stories about Musk firing people for the smallest nuissance, and then their immediate superior sending the "fired" person to another department the day after - next time Musk would see that person and not remember he "fired" them
All of your points are correct. But so many companies/employers keep abusing this power that I have to assume they see some value. Some of the things you mentioned are even short term gains for some companies. For some of Boeing’s execs, employees hiding flaws was a win until it wasn’t and it became someone else’s problem.
> One might wonder where the US could be if the corporate culture wasn't so trigger happy on firing people and if laws against improper terminations would a) exist and b) be enforced.
Probably the labor market would look more like countries that already do that?
> The amount of knowledge cost alone that any company incurs with such bullshit is insane, but almost no one gives a fuck because the lost knowledge reacquisition cost is usually booked under "training costs" or whatnot.
No. Bean counters don't magically skip counting those beans. Hiring managers aren't magically ignorant of effects on their team's productivity.
We would probably have much higher unemployment and slower-moving industries, and might no longer be the economic powerhouse of the world.
When it's simple and easy to fire people, companies are a lot more willing to take a chance on hiring somebody they aren't 100% sure will be a good employee, and willing to hire a lot and grow fast knowing in both cases they can fire easily if needed.
I find it sad that so many people never think about the second and third-order consequences of what sounds like feel-good policies. They often end up being a net-negative for the people they were intended to help.
I strongly disagree. If they're is such a massive difference we would see alot less globally competetive European companies.
> a lot more willing to take a chance on hiring somebody they aren't 100% sure will be a good employee.
Just proof hire them for 6 months to a year.
Your argument doesn't hold for someone that has worked for 10 years. If they were a bad hire; it's on you at that point.
But the improvements are plenty;
- Easier planning life and reduce work anxiety for employees.
- It encurrage companies to invest and train their existing employees since they're hard to get rid off.
- It makes employees less scared to speak up or discuss problems.
- It makes companies more cautious about reckless hiring if they're not sure about their economics.
- Allows older workers to remain productive for longer, reducing the burden on the pension or unemployment system from people 55+ having a hard time finding new work for few years before retirement.
Finally, i must ask what the societal purpose of jobs and companies are. From a pure "numbers go up", there is a cost to worker protection. But id argue the society as a whole benefit much more from it than having a multinational IT company on the stock market. There is a balance to these things ofourse, but dismissing it outright is not fair.
You're welcome to disagree, I don't mind some competition.
> Just proof hire them for 6 months to a year.
As is common with most quickly tossed out "tiny fixes" to Socialist policies of excessive regulation, this makes the whole thing more complex and doesn't really solve the full problem for either workers or companies the way true free markets do. The only real "just" is just stop meddling with what everyone else does, let workers quit and companies fire whenever they want to.
> Your argument doesn't hold for someone that has worked for 10 years. If they were a bad hire; it's on you at that point.
Yes it does. It's not necessarily only that they're a bad hire. They could have the wrong skills or temperament or something for where the company needs to go, or the company could need to shut down a whole department or something. I don't know, the world has infinite complexity and possibility. I'm not smart enough to come up with everything anyone could ever want to do, and frankly, neither are you or anyone else.
> Easier planning life and reduce work anxiety for employees.
That sounds like a personal problem. I don't care to reshape national policy to cater to someone's alleged anxiety.
> It encourage companies to invest and train their existing employees since they're hard to get rid off.
Eh maybe, but many companies still do that now because good people are still hard to find. That's the better and more reliable way to do all of these things.
> It makes employees less scared to speak up or discuss problems.
Plenty already do that, I don't think it's much of a point. It's not really proven any more than the counter-statement that it makes employees more willing to slack off.
> It makes companies more cautious about reckless hiring if they're not sure about their economics.
That's exactly my point. I think it's good to let them "recklessly" hire if they think they can afford it. Some will get things right and grow huge, other will fail and those workers will be able to find new jobs more easily.
> Allows older workers to remain productive for longer, reducing the burden on the pension or unemployment system from people 55+ having a hard time finding new work for few years before retirement.
"Allow" how? They can already do that fine. Many companies value the experience of older workers just fine without the Government forcing them to do things. And I'd rather they have a comfortable retirement already set up from a robust investment market, possibly with a 401k or something like that. I don't want them to be dependent on either one company or the Government.
And intentionally saving this for last along with the end:
> If they're is such a massive difference we would see alot less globally competetive European companies.
> Finally, i must ask what the societal purpose of jobs and companies are. From a pure "numbers go up", there is a cost to worker protection. But id argue the society as a whole benefit much more from it than having a multinational IT company on the stock market. There is a balance to these things ofourse, but dismissing it outright is not fair.
"much less competitive European companies" is exactly what I do see, and you are also arguing that that's a good thing. Europe seems to have very little in the way of invention or growth pretty much since WWII. They haven't invented much new, and most of what they have invented has been eclipsed by more aggressive and nimble American companies. The European economy is still mostly dominated by the same large companies mostly doing the same things they've always done, sometimes adopting new technology long after American companies led the way.
I'm not dismissing anything outright. I've carefully observed the results of both styles of economy and I prefer freer markets. I like helping lead the way towards creating awesome things thanks to everyone's free will. It's not always perfect, but the market usually fixes things faster and better than half-baked Government policies.
I know this is quite a deep cultural difference between Europe and USA going back ... probably since the the industrial revolution. I dont even think we can compare numbers and expect the same outcome if the US implemented european worker laws.
One thing i am curious about though. Do you think worker unions are a good thing? Historically USA pioneered them, yet theyre nearly nonexistent today.
The reason i ask is, Sweden where I'm from, does not actually have a miminum wage, or much of any worker protection codified in law. Its a more open market than people (even swedes) really realize. Its just that a we have a 68% unionizaion rate of all workers, 2nd highest in the world. Its the unions that have established much of the worker protections.
> They haven't invented much new, and most of what they have invented has been eclipsed by more aggressive and nimble American companies.
I think this is rather difficult to measure. Certainly it looks that way for the tech sector in particular.
But europe also has a very high upstart per captia ratio. Its also there really common that small innovative european upstarts get bought up by international and American companies after passing 100-200 employees. We rarely see new giant corporations show up in europe before being absorbed.
Though i also think if any of the US FANG companies were based in europe they would be shattered by monopoly protection laws at a heartbeat. Our ideals about a good company is simply different.
My opinion on unions is mixed, I suppose. They may be necessary in some times, places, and industries to compel reasonable treatment of workers. If such things are necessary, they're probably better than government intervention due to being much closer to the actual workplace. Historically, they have been responsible for establishing some good practices as standard in the American workforce. But they also have their bad sides. They tend to encourage an excessively antagonistic relationship between workers and management, cause pay and promotions to depend only on seniority rather than skill and work ethic, make it impractical to terminate workers who are ridiculously lazy or toxic, force everyone to take the same benefits whether they want them or not, enforce ridiculous rules about who can do what when, and other such things. They probably deserve at least some of the blame for the fall from grace of American automobile manufacturing due to things like being unwilling to accept greater factory automation even if it may lead to fewer workers needed, thus making the whole company less competitive.
I suppose in my ideal economy, I'd expect around 10-30% unionization, with the rest of the workers treated reasonably well due to a combination of market forces and threat of unionization. That's decently close to what we have in the US right now.
I do find advocates of it in the US to be ridiculous at times. Like, okay maybe unions are necessary and beneficial sometimes, but I think software engineering is about the least in need of unionization of any career in the modern world. But still some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of it.
Anti-monopoly regulation seems to be a mixed bag to me too, particularly in today's economy. Only 20-25 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad monster company, enough so that the US Government did start to look at using monopoly regulation against them a little bit. But the internet world and Google took the wind out of their sails better and faster than the Government could, and I think the tech world is better for it. FANG occupy similar economic space now, and I think it's likely that changing technology and market forces will again do a better job of knocking them back down a peg than the Government would.
Europe certainly doesn't lack smart and ambitious people, but I think those attitudes of who is allowed to be "on top" in society and what a good company looks like holds them back. That's a legitimate tradeoff that the people of Europe are free to make of course, but I disagree that it's the ideal way to organize a society.
It's a valid point. As with anything there is balance. Consider the value of being able to plan some aspect of one's life. This generally goes up as one gets older and is responsible for others.
I don't understand the dig here. Is that that Elon is required to memorize the face of every single person he interacts with? That he isn't allowed to fire people he manages when he sees behavior or actions that don't align with what he wants in his orgs?
Also, what exactly is the source of this information? I spent multiple minutes googling for an anecdote of him firing someone for a small nuissance, or firing someone and then not recognizing them later, or firing someone and then them getting surreptitiously moved to a different department.
I'm fine if this actually happened, Elon definitely sucks. But otherwise this just feels like weird middle school gossip.
The dig is three fold. (if the story is true, about which I have my doubts.)
One: Elon instead of cultivating an organisation where the right people are rewarded and the wrong people are selected out tries to personally weed out the wrong ones. That is fundamentally foolish even if he is firing people who should be fired.
Two: His subordinates don't respect his decision and instead of letting go the people he wanted to fire, they "hide" them in the organisation elsewhere.
Three: He is too distracted / stupid / incompetent to then notice that his decision has been undermined.
Weren't there also stories of people being afraid of stepping into elevators with Steve Jobs? He'd ask them about the work they were doing and if the answer didn't please Jobs he'd fire them
I had something like this happen to you me once, though not at Apple.
I was quite young in my career and ended up on an elevator with the CEO. I got super nervous and just started running my mouth about something I perceived as a problem within the organization (!).
On Monday he called me into his office and reamed me. Though I don't think chewing a young employee out in such a situation is the best approach, I'd say I at least deserved a, "Ok, listen youngster..." sort of dressing down.
My boss pulled me aside later and said, "Don't ever talk to a CEO. Nothing good can come from it." I followed that advice the rest of my career.
My father, a blue collar immigrant worker, did the same thing in his 40s. His CEO had an open door policy so he went in and expressed concerns. That day, he learnt that an open door policy is a massive red herring and got reamed for disturbing the CEO. It was all performative - they don't actually care.
In the Episcopal Church (of the U.S.), and doubtless in others, my understanding has always been that wedding ceremonies are just as open to the public as any other church service. [0]
(In contrast, the reception would be a private event.)
I was going to my cousins wedding, and accidentally went in the wrong building hosting a different wedding party, and a bunch of people near the entrance looked like slightly off doppelgangers of my cousins and uncles. Like I walked in on an alternate reality.
In many parts of the world it is expected that random strangers would attend the ceremony, reception and party. At the very least stranger to the bride and their respective nuclear families but not necessarily to all attendees.
The guy made an honest mistake - like that time I mistakenly stayed in the bar across the street from one wedding venue (that I had been invited to) and then tried to mingle with the crowd once they came out.
I once did the Holloway Road pub crawl in London with a friend. At the final boozer, the end of level boss of the crawl, there was karaoke going in the back room so we put our names down and 10 minutes later we were up on stage singing Queen's Don't Stop Me Now incredibly badly. Mid-song, I noticed a massive pile of wedding presents under a table near the stage and realised we were at a stranger's wedding reception. The only thing we could do was to style it out and finish the song.
While Catalan speakers would be very unlikely to say "Catalan Spanish", there is a conception that there are many "lenguas españolas" (Spanish languages, as in languages that are part of the country of Spain). In this formulation even Basque is a "Spanish language" (as a language of Spain), even though it isn't linguistically related to Castilian Spanish.
Notably, the constitution of Spain uses this phrasing in its article 3:
1. El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla.
2. Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus Estatutos.
3. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.
In English:
1. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the state. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
2. The other Spanish languages are also official in their respective Autonomous Communities, in accordance with their Statutes.
3. The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be accorded particular respect and protection.
I've heard a minority of (seemingly highly educated) people prefer to say "Castellano" instead of "Español", maybe as a deliberate reference to this concept.
Not always. People from the center and west side of Spain typically refer to it as "español" rather than "castellano". Nonetheless, it's true educated people typically refer to it as "castellano" as well as other Spaniards that live in a region where other official languages are spoken.
And some of the people I was thinking of who said "castellano" were from Latin America (though this is clearly a minority usage there; maybe some of those people even had Catalan-speaking friends or colleagues or something).
While "Catalan Spanish" is certainly a nonstandard term, when contrasted against "Castilian Spanish" it does make some sense: it's the Romance variant that developed in the Catalonia part of Spain, vs the one that developed in Castile.
I see the point. But it hangs on a thin string. One more stretch and you'd get "west-side Spanish" for Portuguese, or some sort of "gaelic Spanish" for Occitan.
Regardless of how they might feel, they're still Spanish (hold a Spanish passport), so it's a true fact. I also take issue with you claiming that all Catalans feel this way, that's largely untrue.
That being said, both terms "Castilian Spanish" and "Catalan Spanish" sound weird to me. Source: I'm both a Catalan and Spanish speaker. In my languages, they're both referred as "Castellano" o "Catalan".
I'd appreciate that people referred to these languages either as Catalan or Spanish, no need for unnecessary qualifiers. (Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.)
> Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.
So you'd say there are no distinctions worth noting between the Spanish spoken in any Spanish-speaking Latin American country and the Spanish spoken in Spain?
I'd say that, for example, there are significant enough pronunciation (and in a few cases, vocabulary) differences between Portuguese in Portugal vs Brazil.
From experience, learning one is not the same as the other.
So there are definitely contexts where these differences matter.
Then, they can declare an independence war, and win that war. They can't have their cake and eat it.
Something that not even the most stubborn separatists want to do, while enjoying the special treatment of "I feel oppressed under the weight of all this Spanish fiscal benefits that other Spaniards don't have".
Until that war happens, saying I'm not Spanish, I'm from Catalonia, is like an American native from Oklahoma saying "I don't feel like an USA citizen, so I will not pay taxes but I will keep all the benefits, freedom of movement, etc that they have". Yes you are and US citizen. Feelings are irrelevant from a legal point of view. Stop acting like a child. After 20 years repeating the same dumb lie, is frankly annoying for the rest of us.
I learned Spanish in Madrid - there's definitely no Catalan dialect of Spanish - it's either/or. And the northeastern Spanish accent is perfectly understandable (unlike, say, Galicia or Andalusia).
So it's surprising that OP thought Catalan was a version of Spanish, because it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish as a second language (like myself) - not sure about native speakers. I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
> it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish
This is wild. The languages share a lot of vocabulary and grammar.
> I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
This is also wild. I can see there are some words like "passeig" and "plaça" which aren't immediately familiar, but they're not far from the Spanish equivalents. And you could have a good shot at pronouncing many other streets like "Gran Via" and "Diagonal".
You can take a wild guess at the street names if you're reading them out loud, of course.
But what do you do when someone tells you an address on a street like Passatge di'Alió ("pasa je dia lio??"). You're not remembering that on the first try, you won't write it down correctly and later when you try to tell the taxista where to go they'll look at you like you're crazy. (This is from personal experience.)
Scottish bloke rocks up to the wrong wedding, simple mistake.
Top thread on HN riffs on Catalan independence. To be fair, Scotland and Catalonia both cite each other as exemplars.
For me, I'm fighting for Wessex's independence from England and hence Britain oh and the UK. Eventually I'll fight for Somerset, then Yeovil and finally Brunswick Street. Not sure how it will all work.
Nominative tribalism can be a force for good or bad but rarely makes a useful contribution to an article about a daft mistake that has a heart warming finale.
My uncle turned up drunk for my wedding reception. He’d got the venue wrong and had already spent an hour at a different wedding reception eating and drinking, easy to do at Indian weddings with a huge number of guests.
But that’s only half the story. He’d got the date wrong too, and had already done the whole thing the night before.
Three wedding receptions in two days. Not many people would have done that even when actually invited to all three.
Hardcore!
So the night before, was he at the wrong venue as well?
Yes, I believe the same venue that he first went to on the second night, so the wrong one.
3 times was a charm for him.
I hope you actually got wedding gift , as unlikely as it sounds!
Something like this has also happened to me when in holiday in Spain. I was looking around nice buildings open to the public, and entered one that I later found out happened to be a university. Walking around I entered one very well decorated hall, also because it started to rain and had to wait somewhere until it passed. To my horror, more people started coming in as well and I realized I was in for some sort of book or thesis presentation on the subject of Spanish language on the Balearic islands.
I barely speak Castilian Spanish (the more common one) and it was instead in Catalan Spanish, so I didn't understand a word, but stayed for the 1-2 hours it took, clapped, and skipped the handshakes/signing part of it.
I attended a funeral for the family member of a friend of mine. After the funeral we all were to convene at his sister's house. Because of the crowds I parked half a block away and found myself in a group of similarly dressed people walking towards what I remembered to be her house. After maybe 5 minutes of not recognizing anyone, someone simply says "who are you", and after explaining my relation to the deceased, my error became apparent.
I had a similar experience in Monza, Italy. Was taking a walk around some old church and a guy was giving an explanation in English so I stopped to listen. They started ushering the entire group into the crypts underground so I just went with the flow.
While showing us where the dead bodies were stored the guy said something like “but you’re all doctors so I’m sure you’re used to it” was when I realised this was an organised event.
I thought this was the difference between the laid back European culture vs the more, um… detailed mindset of the Far east one I grew up in. The Italians probably didn’t care if there were strays while the Singaporean or Japanese organisers would be doing a headcount at every stop.
FYI naming it Catalan Spanish would be akin to naming Welsh as Welsh English. Catalan and Spanish (also known as Castilian) are two different languages, like French and Italian.
So it's normal that you didn't understand much, as even it having some words that are similar the tonalities and some of the constructs are very different.
And they might have been speaking in Balearic, which is a Catalan dialect, and that's sometimes even harder to understand.
I don’t think it is akin; Welsh is almost completely different to English with only a few modern words in common. Just try reading some Welsh as an English speaker. It’s unintelligible.
Catalan is very much a Latinate language, and anyone who speaks Spanish or Italian or French (or even English) can guess the meaning of a lot of words and understand the grammar quite easily.
So by your logic those would be properly called Italian Spanish and French Spanish?
Maybe more like dialects of Latin? :-)
I have never heard it claimed that English speakers can guess the meaning of a lot of Catalan words. Is this a common sentiment?
It is akin in that the same sort of mistaken political intrusion into linguistics was being made.
Couldn't you just leave? Like what if you had genuinely been there intentionally but had an emergency at home? People understand
Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson came to give a lecture at my university when I was a student. I was busy in the lab and engrossed in my work, and realised the time 5 minutes after the talk was due to begin. I was too embarrassed to walk in late, so to my eternal regret I didn't go. I'm more comfortable with that sort of situation now, but I can appreciate the desire not to make a scene.
I'm sorry you missed it. I'm also sorry I missed it.
Yes of course but most don’t think that
Haha yeah, same here—I totally get that feeling. Sometimes the best stories end up being the ones we didn’t live through, because we keep replaying the “what if” in our heads. At least we can laugh about it now, and share it here. Makes me feel a bit better knowing I wasn’t the only one who missed out.
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This is a weird comment to make when the original comment didn't mention anxiety at all, and wasn't even worded like it was a bad experience or that they felt they were forced to stay there. Maybe they had nothing better to do, they were waiting out the rain after all.
If its a lecture hall, Leaving may make them VERY noticable and force others to move to let them through.
Imagine having a final thesis presentation only for one of the facualty leave mid presentation without a word.
If someone I didn't know had left, I wouldn't have minded. Even someone I did know, in fact, although I would have asked what happened afterwards and if everything was okay.
People have all sorts of emergencies.
I would have minded if the person leaving said anything though, unless I really needed to be informed of something. Better to leave in silence without disrupting the presentation. It is stressful enough as is.
Many years ago I took a look at my high school senior yearbook for the first time since I’d graduated. I spotted a note from a girl asking me to call her after graduation.
I didn’t remember the name (first name only), and the phone number was from a different town 20-30 miles from my high school. Unfortunately I don’t believe I still have the yearbook, so it shall forever remain a mystery. I literally had, and have, no clue.
When my father left us, a cousine of mine (from my mother's sise) got confused and parked a couple blocks away. She entered the house where people were mourning, and she realised the people she didn't recognise had to be from my father's side. Then she approached the casket and leapt forward exclaiming "I'll miss you, Uncle", only to find a lady laying inside.
What a classy move to quietly ride it out and avoid doing anything to distract from the ceremony.
Yeah! He didn't want to appear rude by just walking out, so he stayed it's been all over the local TV News - he looks a tall guy so yes, he'd definitely be noticed making a sneaky exit!
That being said, it seems like he might be better at blending in than he gives himself credit for:
>You can’t exactly stand up and walk out of a wedding mid-ceremony, so I just had to commit to this act and spent the next 20 minutes awkwardly sitting there trying to be as inconspicuous as my 6ft 2 ass could be
And yet, no one actually seemed to notice him other than the photographer (who presumably didn't know most of the guests beforehand), and the bride and groom only found out he was there because the photographer took a number of pictures with him.
"Wrong wedding <leaves>" could have removed the tension of most weddings?
The article clearly explains it: He rushed in, the ceremony started, and then he realized he was at the wrong wedding.
Once the ceremony starts, you stay quiet. Getting up and leaving from aisle seat while the wedding party is coming down the aisle would have been a jerk move.
I am something of a professional gatecrasher, which is a skill I picked up from a friend many years ago.
Interesting event happening as you’re walking past? Just walk on in, look like you belong, see where it goes. That or carry around a hi vis vest - they fold up tiny and can live in a jacket pocket unnoticeably, and they will allow you access anywhere. Occasionally I’ve had to doodle “STEWARD” or similar on the back. Back in the pocket once you’re in, or you’ll be rigging lighting or serving drinks.
Through this I have ended up with friends, work, and anecdotes galore.
I’ve also been chucked out of a few things but that’s definitely the minority - most of the time when people are like “so are you with the royal brigadiers…?” I’ll just say “no, I’m gatecrashing”, and they assume I’m joking until they realise I’m not, but by that point we’re already on our fourth round.
> That or carry around a hi vis vest - they fold up tiny and can live in a jacket pocket unnoticeably, and they will allow you access anywhere.
Probably won't work as well at a wedding.
Tuxedo works fine for a wedding. I'm a wedding musician, so I'm often in a tux, and nobody questions it.
Let's hear some stories!
I'm not sure I understand this correctly but did they mean just the wedding and not the wedding reception?
In my corner of the world it's still fairly normal to have people attempt to crash a wedding reception and it's typically the role of the best man to bribe them with offerings like a shot of vodka or treats.
I have a distinct memory of my friend's father in law, a man close to 2m tall, walking forward, vodka bottle in one hand, shot glass in the other, while the uninvited guest, with just a shot glass, walking backwards towards the gate to the venue where the reception was held.
On the flip side one night over a decade ago I was out on a walk with my SO when we overheard some rowdy people. We wanted to avoid them, but they caught up to us and it turned out that this was an after-party after their wedding reception. They invited us to join them to enjoy the leftovers with everyone.
Yes, just the ceremony, not the reception. He left as soon as he could (after being held up for the group photo) to attend the wedding he was supposed to be at.
this happened to my mother-in-law, where she was the crasher.
in North London there is a large Turkish centre that hosts Turkish weddings. She was invited to a wedding there.
Traditionally, the bride and groom stand in the centre of the room and then family members lineup next to them all in a procession.
As you enter the room to reach the bride and groom, you must shake the hands in turn of all of the people in the procession.
When my mother-in-law eventually got to the bride and groom, they realised that the bride and groom were strangers. The accurate wedding was taking place upstairs at the same time.
There are multiple wedding venues in that particular Turkish Centre.
You just reminded me how awesome the wedding scenes were in the Diriliş: Ertuğrul TV show. [1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlaVdEv74NU&ab_channel=TRTDr...
When I was an intern years ago I went to an event at a hotel in LA. I didn't know what room the event was in, so I approached the concierge, described the event I was there for, and he immediately whisked me to an upper floor, where I began to talk with the other guests. It took about 10 minutes for me to realize that while the people there were also interns, and we were in the same field, they were from a particular company, whereas my event was for an industry group. They had just been flown in from all over the country, so it didn't seem odd to them to see a new face (we were all new faces).
I eventually realized the error and quietly excused myself to look for the industry group meeting (which sadly lacked the delicious catered food and open bar that the first event had). Fortunately I made my exit before the higher-ups had arrived, as they would have quickly realized I was in the wrong place.
I woke up one morning in college and thought I had overslept. I threw on clothes and ran from my dorm to my class. I walked in two minutes late and grabbed an open seat on the front row, right in front of the teacher.
I didn't recognize anyone and soon realize that I hadn't overslept and was just an hour early. I was too embarrassed to get up and walk out so I sat through the class.
A student once arrived, disheveled and with 20 minutes left, to a midterm. I gave him a stern look and a copy of the exam. While I was grading the exam, I discovered with slight horror that he'd showed up to the first of two classes that I was teaching back to back in the same room -- he was enrolled in the second, and had arrived 30 minutes early. Horror turned to joy as I failed to find a single error on his exam. We had a good laugh as I returned his exam; he was justifiably proud and only slightly embarrassed.
That happened to me when I was a student. Crammed all night, napped, and slept in.
The adrenaline from rushing to class somehow made me both ace the test and be the first to turn it in.
Funny enough that was my last day attending, I decided I wanted to switch majors and dropped it the next week. I always wondered what the professor thought haha.
I had a roommate back in college that was a devoutly religious catholic. We went out drinking one Saturday night and he started talking about church (I was and still am irreligious). He convinced me to go with him to mass the next morning.
Next morning we get up, get dressed, drive to the church and walk in all hung over. I hadn't ever been in a catholic church before but it was a huge crowd already seated and there were no seats in the back. The priest was up front speaking. So we walk through the pews looking for a seat and get all the way to the front before we find one. Everyone is staring at us. We sit down. The priest said a few words and I think there was a prayer and like 5 minutes after we sat down everyone got up to leave.
It was daylight savings time change and we hadn't adjusted our clocks being drunk college students. That was my one experience attending mass.
Had a similar experience at a dining hall in college:
- Walk into crowded dining hall
- See a big round 8 seater table with only a backpack at one seat
- Only available seat so I place my tray with food down in the opposite seat
- Pretty girl ends up sitting at that first seat. Kind of cool (especially since this is an engineering campus)
- her 6 other friends sit down at the table
- I didn't know what to do so silently and VERY awkwardly finished my meal as they were all joking around and having a great time
- Got up and left once I was done
- I should add: at no point did anyone ask me who I was or make any comments towards me
Today me would totally have either excused myself and joked about it or made small talk with the "I am totally a the wrong table" as an opener
This reads almost like a scene from the IT Crowd.
“The Work Outing”, the episode with a vaguely similar plot which made me cry with laughter the first time I saw it, is available for free on Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cj490uNht4o&pp=ygUVaXQgY3Jvd2Q...
The scene where Maurice finds himself behind the bar serving drink had me crying in laughter
"I'm disabled" still makes me giggle just thinking of it.
Or Harold and Maude obsessed with weddings instead of funerals.
Something similar happened to me in college. I got to my class late, and there was only one seat left, in the middle of the row in the large auditorium, so I had to make a big commotion getting to it. I finally sit down and pull out my notes, only to realize that whatever this substitute teacher was talking about was totally Greek to me. After a while, it dawned on me - I wasn’t late for class, I was super early! Since I made such a commotion getting to the seat, and since I didn’t want to do that again, I just sat there and pretended to take notes. My class was the one after, and I left the room when everyone else did, went to the bathroom, then came back, just so no one would notice that I was going to the much more junior class right after. :D
There was an even crazier story when someone was fired from Apple, but still kept coming to the office to work on their project for free for like half a year before someone noticed.
Or the stories about Musk firing people for the smallest nuissance, and then their immediate superior sending the "fired" person to another department the day after - next time Musk would see that person and not remember he "fired" them
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I think the losses you’re thinking of are more than made up by the gains coming from the employees being afraid they can be fired at any moment.
I think employees being afraid they can be fired at any moment also creates a loss of productivity.
It’s really disappointing to read someone describing that kind of toxic working environment as a “gain”.
Of course I was talking from the point of view of the employer. I come from a completely different work culture and expectations.
- Make employees scared to point out flaws.
- Make employees less engaged in the success of the company.
- Encurrage employees to hide or mask issues.
- Encurrage employees to pretend to be more productive than they are.
- Make employees mentally and physically less healthy.
- Make employees shy away from taking on more responsibility or tasks.
- Make employees less happy to train up new hires in their work.
Yes. Gains. All those gains. I can only see gains here.
> I can only see gains here.
All of your points are correct. But so many companies/employers keep abusing this power that I have to assume they see some value. Some of the things you mentioned are even short term gains for some companies. For some of Boeing’s execs, employees hiding flaws was a win until it wasn’t and it became someone else’s problem.
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> One might wonder where the US could be if the corporate culture wasn't so trigger happy on firing people and if laws against improper terminations would a) exist and b) be enforced.
Probably the labor market would look more like countries that already do that?
> The amount of knowledge cost alone that any company incurs with such bullshit is insane, but almost no one gives a fuck because the lost knowledge reacquisition cost is usually booked under "training costs" or whatnot.
No. Bean counters don't magically skip counting those beans. Hiring managers aren't magically ignorant of effects on their team's productivity.
We would probably have much higher unemployment and slower-moving industries, and might no longer be the economic powerhouse of the world.
When it's simple and easy to fire people, companies are a lot more willing to take a chance on hiring somebody they aren't 100% sure will be a good employee, and willing to hire a lot and grow fast knowing in both cases they can fire easily if needed.
I find it sad that so many people never think about the second and third-order consequences of what sounds like feel-good policies. They often end up being a net-negative for the people they were intended to help.
I strongly disagree. If they're is such a massive difference we would see alot less globally competetive European companies.
> a lot more willing to take a chance on hiring somebody they aren't 100% sure will be a good employee.
Just proof hire them for 6 months to a year.
Your argument doesn't hold for someone that has worked for 10 years. If they were a bad hire; it's on you at that point.
But the improvements are plenty;
- Easier planning life and reduce work anxiety for employees.
- It encurrage companies to invest and train their existing employees since they're hard to get rid off.
- It makes employees less scared to speak up or discuss problems.
- It makes companies more cautious about reckless hiring if they're not sure about their economics.
- Allows older workers to remain productive for longer, reducing the burden on the pension or unemployment system from people 55+ having a hard time finding new work for few years before retirement.
Finally, i must ask what the societal purpose of jobs and companies are. From a pure "numbers go up", there is a cost to worker protection. But id argue the society as a whole benefit much more from it than having a multinational IT company on the stock market. There is a balance to these things ofourse, but dismissing it outright is not fair.
You're welcome to disagree, I don't mind some competition.
> Just proof hire them for 6 months to a year.
As is common with most quickly tossed out "tiny fixes" to Socialist policies of excessive regulation, this makes the whole thing more complex and doesn't really solve the full problem for either workers or companies the way true free markets do. The only real "just" is just stop meddling with what everyone else does, let workers quit and companies fire whenever they want to.
> Your argument doesn't hold for someone that has worked for 10 years. If they were a bad hire; it's on you at that point.
Yes it does. It's not necessarily only that they're a bad hire. They could have the wrong skills or temperament or something for where the company needs to go, or the company could need to shut down a whole department or something. I don't know, the world has infinite complexity and possibility. I'm not smart enough to come up with everything anyone could ever want to do, and frankly, neither are you or anyone else.
> Easier planning life and reduce work anxiety for employees.
That sounds like a personal problem. I don't care to reshape national policy to cater to someone's alleged anxiety.
> It encourage companies to invest and train their existing employees since they're hard to get rid off.
Eh maybe, but many companies still do that now because good people are still hard to find. That's the better and more reliable way to do all of these things.
> It makes employees less scared to speak up or discuss problems.
Plenty already do that, I don't think it's much of a point. It's not really proven any more than the counter-statement that it makes employees more willing to slack off.
> It makes companies more cautious about reckless hiring if they're not sure about their economics.
That's exactly my point. I think it's good to let them "recklessly" hire if they think they can afford it. Some will get things right and grow huge, other will fail and those workers will be able to find new jobs more easily.
> Allows older workers to remain productive for longer, reducing the burden on the pension or unemployment system from people 55+ having a hard time finding new work for few years before retirement.
"Allow" how? They can already do that fine. Many companies value the experience of older workers just fine without the Government forcing them to do things. And I'd rather they have a comfortable retirement already set up from a robust investment market, possibly with a 401k or something like that. I don't want them to be dependent on either one company or the Government.
And intentionally saving this for last along with the end:
> If they're is such a massive difference we would see alot less globally competetive European companies.
> Finally, i must ask what the societal purpose of jobs and companies are. From a pure "numbers go up", there is a cost to worker protection. But id argue the society as a whole benefit much more from it than having a multinational IT company on the stock market. There is a balance to these things ofourse, but dismissing it outright is not fair.
"much less competitive European companies" is exactly what I do see, and you are also arguing that that's a good thing. Europe seems to have very little in the way of invention or growth pretty much since WWII. They haven't invented much new, and most of what they have invented has been eclipsed by more aggressive and nimble American companies. The European economy is still mostly dominated by the same large companies mostly doing the same things they've always done, sometimes adopting new technology long after American companies led the way.
I'm not dismissing anything outright. I've carefully observed the results of both styles of economy and I prefer freer markets. I like helping lead the way towards creating awesome things thanks to everyone's free will. It's not always perfect, but the market usually fixes things faster and better than half-baked Government policies.
I know this is quite a deep cultural difference between Europe and USA going back ... probably since the the industrial revolution. I dont even think we can compare numbers and expect the same outcome if the US implemented european worker laws.
One thing i am curious about though. Do you think worker unions are a good thing? Historically USA pioneered them, yet theyre nearly nonexistent today.
The reason i ask is, Sweden where I'm from, does not actually have a miminum wage, or much of any worker protection codified in law. Its a more open market than people (even swedes) really realize. Its just that a we have a 68% unionizaion rate of all workers, 2nd highest in the world. Its the unions that have established much of the worker protections.
> They haven't invented much new, and most of what they have invented has been eclipsed by more aggressive and nimble American companies.
I think this is rather difficult to measure. Certainly it looks that way for the tech sector in particular.
But europe also has a very high upstart per captia ratio. Its also there really common that small innovative european upstarts get bought up by international and American companies after passing 100-200 employees. We rarely see new giant corporations show up in europe before being absorbed.
Though i also think if any of the US FANG companies were based in europe they would be shattered by monopoly protection laws at a heartbeat. Our ideals about a good company is simply different.
Yes, I suppose it is a deep cultural difference.
My opinion on unions is mixed, I suppose. They may be necessary in some times, places, and industries to compel reasonable treatment of workers. If such things are necessary, they're probably better than government intervention due to being much closer to the actual workplace. Historically, they have been responsible for establishing some good practices as standard in the American workforce. But they also have their bad sides. They tend to encourage an excessively antagonistic relationship between workers and management, cause pay and promotions to depend only on seniority rather than skill and work ethic, make it impractical to terminate workers who are ridiculously lazy or toxic, force everyone to take the same benefits whether they want them or not, enforce ridiculous rules about who can do what when, and other such things. They probably deserve at least some of the blame for the fall from grace of American automobile manufacturing due to things like being unwilling to accept greater factory automation even if it may lead to fewer workers needed, thus making the whole company less competitive.
I suppose in my ideal economy, I'd expect around 10-30% unionization, with the rest of the workers treated reasonably well due to a combination of market forces and threat of unionization. That's decently close to what we have in the US right now.
I do find advocates of it in the US to be ridiculous at times. Like, okay maybe unions are necessary and beneficial sometimes, but I think software engineering is about the least in need of unionization of any career in the modern world. But still some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of it.
Anti-monopoly regulation seems to be a mixed bag to me too, particularly in today's economy. Only 20-25 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad monster company, enough so that the US Government did start to look at using monopoly regulation against them a little bit. But the internet world and Google took the wind out of their sails better and faster than the Government could, and I think the tech world is better for it. FANG occupy similar economic space now, and I think it's likely that changing technology and market forces will again do a better job of knocking them back down a peg than the Government would.
Europe certainly doesn't lack smart and ambitious people, but I think those attitudes of who is allowed to be "on top" in society and what a good company looks like holds them back. That's a legitimate tradeoff that the people of Europe are free to make of course, but I disagree that it's the ideal way to organize a society.
It's a valid point. As with anything there is balance. Consider the value of being able to plan some aspect of one's life. This generally goes up as one gets older and is responsible for others.
I don't understand the dig here. Is that that Elon is required to memorize the face of every single person he interacts with? That he isn't allowed to fire people he manages when he sees behavior or actions that don't align with what he wants in his orgs?
Also, what exactly is the source of this information? I spent multiple minutes googling for an anecdote of him firing someone for a small nuissance, or firing someone and then not recognizing them later, or firing someone and then them getting surreptitiously moved to a different department.
I'm fine if this actually happened, Elon definitely sucks. But otherwise this just feels like weird middle school gossip.
The dig is three fold. (if the story is true, about which I have my doubts.)
One: Elon instead of cultivating an organisation where the right people are rewarded and the wrong people are selected out tries to personally weed out the wrong ones. That is fundamentally foolish even if he is firing people who should be fired.
Two: His subordinates don't respect his decision and instead of letting go the people he wanted to fire, they "hide" them in the organisation elsewhere.
Three: He is too distracted / stupid / incompetent to then notice that his decision has been undermined.
> I don't understand the dig here. Is that that Elon is required to memorize the face of every single person he interacts with?
That he is required (well, expected) to remember the faces of people he _fired_.
I thought it was a funny story...
Weren't there also stories of people being afraid of stepping into elevators with Steve Jobs? He'd ask them about the work they were doing and if the answer didn't please Jobs he'd fire them
I had something like this happen to you me once, though not at Apple.
I was quite young in my career and ended up on an elevator with the CEO. I got super nervous and just started running my mouth about something I perceived as a problem within the organization (!).
On Monday he called me into his office and reamed me. Though I don't think chewing a young employee out in such a situation is the best approach, I'd say I at least deserved a, "Ok, listen youngster..." sort of dressing down.
My boss pulled me aside later and said, "Don't ever talk to a CEO. Nothing good can come from it." I followed that advice the rest of my career.
Oh and the CEO canceled my end of year bonus. :)
My father, a blue collar immigrant worker, did the same thing in his 40s. His CEO had an open door policy so he went in and expressed concerns. That day, he learnt that an open door policy is a massive red herring and got reamed for disturbing the CEO. It was all performative - they don't actually care.
Are you perhaps referring to this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33229793
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY
Aside from Craigs talk which i think never was released publicly my favorite talk
In the Episcopal Church (of the U.S.), and doubtless in others, my understanding has always been that wedding ceremonies are just as open to the public as any other church service. [0]
(In contrast, the reception would be a private event.)
[0] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/celebration-and-ble...
Two separate Sherlock Holmes stories have a "stranger at a public wedding ceremony" as a plot point!
Same is true for the Catholic Church. Weddings and funerals are both open to the public if anyone in the community should wish to attend.
In the UK, all legal wedding ceremonies must be public to allow objections to be raised, with notice published to a formal schedule ahead of time.
My wedding was at a relatively famous shrine; I'm sure we're in a few tourists' holiday photos.
I was going to my cousins wedding, and accidentally went in the wrong building hosting a different wedding party, and a bunch of people near the entrance looked like slightly off doppelgangers of my cousins and uncles. Like I walked in on an alternate reality.
In many parts of the world it is expected that random strangers would attend the ceremony, reception and party. At the very least stranger to the bride and their respective nuclear families but not necessarily to all attendees.
I once fell asleep at an outdoor rave, I woke up during an outdoor baptism.
The guy made an honest mistake - like that time I mistakenly stayed in the bar across the street from one wedding venue (that I had been invited to) and then tried to mingle with the crowd once they came out.
I once did the Holloway Road pub crawl in London with a friend. At the final boozer, the end of level boss of the crawl, there was karaoke going in the back room so we put our names down and 10 minutes later we were up on stage singing Queen's Don't Stop Me Now incredibly badly. Mid-song, I noticed a massive pile of wedding presents under a table near the stage and realised we were at a stranger's wedding reception. The only thing we could do was to style it out and finish the song.
I thought “whoops, wrong wedding” was a little anti-climactic.
It's a cute just so story. Maybe not super interesting, but a fun read
Seinfeld episode if I ever seen one, something something Kramer with some side shenanigans...
You may be referring to Catalan language. I'm not aware of any "Catalan variant" of Spanish.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45234383 and marked it off topic.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While Catalan speakers would be very unlikely to say "Catalan Spanish", there is a conception that there are many "lenguas españolas" (Spanish languages, as in languages that are part of the country of Spain). In this formulation even Basque is a "Spanish language" (as a language of Spain), even though it isn't linguistically related to Castilian Spanish.
Notably, the constitution of Spain uses this phrasing in its article 3:
1. El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla.
2. Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus Estatutos.
3. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.
In English:
1. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the state. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
2. The other Spanish languages are also official in their respective Autonomous Communities, in accordance with their Statutes.
3. The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be accorded particular respect and protection.
I've heard a minority of (seemingly highly educated) people prefer to say "Castellano" instead of "Español", maybe as a deliberate reference to this concept.
> I've heard a minority of (seemingly highly educated) people prefer to say "Castellano" instead of "Español"
I would expect castellano in Spain, and español in the Americas. Does this align with your experience?
Not always. People from the center and west side of Spain typically refer to it as "español" rather than "castellano". Nonetheless, it's true educated people typically refer to it as "castellano" as well as other Spaniards that live in a region where other official languages are spoken.
And some of the people I was thinking of who said "castellano" were from Latin America (though this is clearly a minority usage there; maybe some of those people even had Catalan-speaking friends or colleagues or something).
While "Catalan Spanish" is certainly a nonstandard term, when contrasted against "Castilian Spanish" it does make some sense: it's the Romance variant that developed in the Catalonia part of Spain, vs the one that developed in Castile.
I see the point. But it hangs on a thin string. One more stretch and you'd get "west-side Spanish" for Portuguese, or some sort of "gaelic Spanish" for Occitan.
Darn! You're right.
The step after is to start talking about Provencal as if it were a dialect or French. Or Sicilian or Napolitano as a dialect of Italian.
What will the world come to!
Isn't Occitan "French Catalan Spanish"?
Obviously Catalonia is a part of Spain, they are Spanish, while Portugal and France are different countries.
FWIW, I think some Catalans have a very different opinion.
Regardless of how they might feel, they're still Spanish (hold a Spanish passport), so it's a true fact. I also take issue with you claiming that all Catalans feel this way, that's largely untrue.
That being said, both terms "Castilian Spanish" and "Catalan Spanish" sound weird to me. Source: I'm both a Catalan and Spanish speaker. In my languages, they're both referred as "Castellano" o "Catalan".
I'd appreciate that people referred to these languages either as Catalan or Spanish, no need for unnecessary qualifiers. (Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.)
> I also take issue with you claiming that all Catalans feel this way, that's largely untrue.
There are literally 10 words in my comment and you couldn't even read all of them?
Sorry for misreading, didn't notice the 'some'.
> Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.
So you'd say there are no distinctions worth noting between the Spanish spoken in any Spanish-speaking Latin American country and the Spanish spoken in Spain?
Most of the times, for most of the speakers, there is no need to make a distinction.
Why would any one feel it's important to say they went to Sydney and spoke to the peoples of Australia in Australian English?
I'd say that, for example, there are significant enough pronunciation (and in a few cases, vocabulary) differences between Portuguese in Portugal vs Brazil.
From experience, learning one is not the same as the other.
So there are definitely contexts where these differences matter.
There are contexts where the differences matter, but not in the vast majority of contexts (especially the OP's context).
> they're still Spanish
Isn't Catalan the official language of Andorra?
"Catalan Spanish" makes as much sense as "Basque Spanish". It sounds like an English translation of "catañol".
Yes, but when people refer to "Catalan people", they refer to people from Catalunya, Spain, not Andorra.
Then, they can declare an independence war, and win that war. They can't have their cake and eat it.
Something that not even the most stubborn separatists want to do, while enjoying the special treatment of "I feel oppressed under the weight of all this Spanish fiscal benefits that other Spaniards don't have".
Until that war happens, saying I'm not Spanish, I'm from Catalonia, is like an American native from Oklahoma saying "I don't feel like an USA citizen, so I will not pay taxes but I will keep all the benefits, freedom of movement, etc that they have". Yes you are and US citizen. Feelings are irrelevant from a legal point of view. Stop acting like a child. After 20 years repeating the same dumb lie, is frankly annoying for the rest of us.
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
I learned Spanish in Madrid - there's definitely no Catalan dialect of Spanish - it's either/or. And the northeastern Spanish accent is perfectly understandable (unlike, say, Galicia or Andalusia).
So it's surprising that OP thought Catalan was a version of Spanish, because it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish as a second language (like myself) - not sure about native speakers. I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
> it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish
This is wild. The languages share a lot of vocabulary and grammar.
> I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.
This is also wild. I can see there are some words like "passeig" and "plaça" which aren't immediately familiar, but they're not far from the Spanish equivalents. And you could have a good shot at pronouncing many other streets like "Gran Via" and "Diagonal".
You can take a wild guess at the street names if you're reading them out loud, of course.
But what do you do when someone tells you an address on a street like Passatge di'Alió ("pasa je dia lio??"). You're not remembering that on the first try, you won't write it down correctly and later when you try to tell the taxista where to go they'll look at you like you're crazy. (This is from personal experience.)
Scottish bloke rocks up to the wrong wedding, simple mistake.
Top thread on HN riffs on Catalan independence. To be fair, Scotland and Catalonia both cite each other as exemplars.
For me, I'm fighting for Wessex's independence from England and hence Britain oh and the UK. Eventually I'll fight for Somerset, then Yeovil and finally Brunswick Street. Not sure how it will all work.
Nominative tribalism can be a force for good or bad but rarely makes a useful contribution to an article about a daft mistake that has a heart warming finale.
tbf, Catalonia and Caledonia are homophones when uttered by an American dyslexic
rofl! Love it!
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