Comment on AGI achieved 🤖
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days agoObligatory ‘lore dump’ on the word lollapalooza:
That word was a common term in the 1930s/40s American lingo that meant… essentially a very raucous, lively party.
The current merriam webster and dictionary.com definitions of this term meaning ‘an outstanding or exceptional or extreme thing’ are wrong, they are too broad. While historical usage varied, it almost always appeared as a noun describing a gathering of many people, one that was so lively or spectacular that you would be exhausted after attending it. When it did not appear as a noun describing a lively party, it appeared as a term for some kind of action that would cause you to be bamboozled, discombobulated… similar to ‘that was a real humdinger of a blahblah’ or ‘that blahblah was a real doozy’
So… in WW2, in the Pacific theatre… many US Marines were often engaged in brutal, jungle combat, and they adopted a system of basically verbal identification challenge checks if they noticed someone creeping up on their foxholes at night.
An example of this system used in the European theatre, I believe by the 101st and 82nd airborne, was the challenge ‘Thunder!’ to which the correct response was ‘Flash!’.
In the Pacific theatre… the Marines adopted a challenge / response system… where the correct response was ‘Lolapalooza’…
Because native born Japanese speakers are taught a phoneme that is roughly in between and ‘r’ and an ‘l’ … and they very often struggle to say ‘Lolapalooza’ without a very noticable accent, unless they’ve also spent a good deal of time learning spoken English (or some other language with distinct ‘l’ and ‘r’ phonemes), which very few Japanese did in the 1940s.
::: racist and nsfw historical example of this
www.ep.tc/howtospotajap/howto06.html
:::
Now, some people will say this is a total myth, others will say it is not.
My Grandpa who served in the Pacific Theatre during WW2 told me it did happen, though he was Navy and not a Marine… but the stories about this I’ve always heard that say it did happen, they all say it happened with the Marines.
My Grandpa is also another source for what ‘lolapalooza’ actually means.
I’m still puzzled by the idea of what mess this war was if at times you had someone still not clearly identifiable, but that close you can do a sheboleth check on them, and that at any moment you or the other could be shot dead.
Also, the current conflict of Russia vs Ukraine seems to invent ukrainian ‘паляница’ as a check, but as I had no connection to actual ukrainians and their UAF, I can’t say if that’s not entirely localized to the internet.
Have you ever been to a very dense jungle or forest… at midnight?
Ok, now, drop mortar and naval artillery shells all over it.
For weeks, or months.
The holes this creates are commonly used by both sides as cover and concealment.
Also, its often raining, sometimes quite heavily, such that these holes will up with water, and you are thus soaking wet.
Ok, now, add in pillboxes and bunkers, as well as a few spiderwebs of underground tunnel networks, many of which have concealed entrances.
You do not have a phone. GPS does not exist.
You might have a map, which is out of date, and you might have a compass, if you didn’t drop or break it.
A radio is either something stationary, or is the size and weight of approximately,.slightly less than a miniature refrigerator, and one bullet or good piece of shrapnel will take it out of commission.
Ok, now, you and all your buddies are either half starving or actually starving, beyond exhausted, getting maybe an average of 2 to 4 hours of sleep, and you, and the enemy, are covered in dirt, blood and grime.
Also, you and everyone else may or may not have malaria, or some other fun disease.
Ok! Enjoy your 2 to 8 week long camping trip from hell, in these conditions.
It’s weird foot soldiers kept killing each other.
It’s not weird we had ‘frag’ as a verb from the Vietnam war.
Look at how they suppressed the christmas truce.
Friendly fire incidents are still fairly common even in the modern era…
… ask any Brits deployed to Iraq how they feel about the A-10…
… Pat Tillman was hyped up in the media as an early Iraq War 2 US casualty who died valiantly… when the truth was he was actually killed by friendly fire from his own unit, oh and he actually thought the entire operation in Afghanistan was “fucking illegal”… because Congress is supposed to declare war, not the President…
Even in the RussoUkranian war, right now, in the past few years, there have been tons of incidents of Russians accidentally shooting their own at fairly close range, due to poor coordination, and I’m sure its happened with the Ukranians as well… and thats to say nothing of accidentally drone or arty striking a friendly infantry squad or tank or IFV or what not.
Just go play any modern semi-realistic war game (Squad, Arma 3/Reforger, etc) that doesn’t have a pop up HUD with blue for friend and red for foe, and has friendly fire enabled, and you should be able to see that friendly fire happens all the time with noobs.
…
As for fragging… that term, as it originated in Vietnam, specifically refferred to tossing a frag grenade into an area (often their bunk) where an officer or NCO was.
It was a form of mutiny, essentially, against officers that kept sending men into meat-grinders…
…chewing them out for not maintaining their early M16s which were unreliable as fuck due to being rammed through the production pipeline by McNamara, shoddy quality control from Colt, and everyone just pretending swapping to a new kind of powder in the rounds wouldn’t blow past the designed tolerances of the weapon…
… or just, you know, fuck being drafted into this bullshit war.
In the modern day, ‘frag’ is mostly a gamer term that basically just means ‘killed a guy’, and the origin of that term has been obscured, forgotten.
It does make sense to use a phoneme the enemy dialect lacks as a verbal check. Makes me wonder if there were any in the Pacific Theatre that decided for “Lick” and “Lollipop”.
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 3 days ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
I’ve heard “squirrel” was used to trap Germans.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
If you’ve ever heard Germans try to pronounce “squirrel”, it’s hilarious. I’ve known many extremely bilingual Germans who couldn’t pronounce it at all. It came out sounding roughly like “squall”, or they’d over-pronounce the “r” and it would be “squi-rall”
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sqverrrrl.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Oh yeah, I forgot about how they add a “v” sound to it.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I wonder if any if the Axis even bothered to have such a system to check for Americans.
Image
"Bawn-jer-no
resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I speak Italian first-best.