Not related but related: "tapu" means both "forbidden" and "sacrosanct" and that same double meaning exists in Arabic for "haram" (pork is haram and the Kaaba is in the Masjid al-Haram, for instance). I wonder if that's a pattern in many languages.
The thing is that doesn't even sound wrong and I don't think any native speaker would object to the article when used with a place of origin/belonging in a speech.
It emphasizes the statement if you ask me.
Only many years after learning of the speech I read online that it's allegedly "a gaffe".
It's uncommon, but without thinking about it, I wouldn't have noticed that I wouldn't usually add the "ein" here. I think it emphasizes the affiliation to the group of people.
To me, "Ich bin Berliner" sounds relatively neutral, or like a short statement. "Ich bin ein Berliner" sounds a bit less direct or a bit softer to me because you state that you are just one of the citizens of Berlin. But this may be just my feeling.
(In case you put the emphasis on "ein", you would clearly emphasize that you are just one of the many Berlin citizens.)
Is it possible that after the JFK speech and exposure to English this mode of using 'ein' actually became more acceptable? If not I wonder what drove this story.
I think it's much more likely this story was spread by native English speakers who learned German as a second language in school. It has all the hallmarks of a teacher's pedantry to me.
That said, blunders do occasionally happen even at this level. During Bill Clinton's visit in Romania (the first time a US president visited the country after the Revolution), he said in a huge public speech that the American people stands shoulder to shoulder with the Romanians - which the translator for the public broadcast translated as "șold la șold", which sounds similar, but means "hip to hip" (the correct translation, which is also a literal translation as the expression exists in Romanian as well, is "umăr la umăr").
Even more common with "the". "They are THE vendors", which is either to say that those are definitely the vendors referred to elsewhere, or that they represent the archetype of vendors (whatever that is). Language is weird.
It's not just that it had quirks, it's that your feedback loop was longer in IE compared to Firefox with Firebug and Chrome. IE 7 did not, to my recollection, have a way to open developer tools and tweak CSS values until it looked right, or even to see what the effective CSS on an element was. So you had to save and refresh. Sure, that's not a super long cycle time compared to, say, compiling a binary and flashing to a ROM, but it's longer than the other browsers I was working with at the time.
mine had 2 male USB ends on one side and 1 on the other. It was to power a laptop hard disk drive from USB if one port couldn't provide enough power. Feels illegal. I bought it off eBay with a money order in like 2003.
In 2021 I cut the end off a USB cable to expose the power leads which I scotch taped to the power meter on my bike to charge it. I kept that cable. In 2024 I used it to add USB disconnects to the light strip I attached to the bottom of my son's crib, allowing me to keep the light strip intact when we lowered the base from the baby height to the toddler height. A week later we got rid of the strip because we really didn't need the light like that any more. Still, no regrets. This was my version of using every part of the buffalo.
While I like to improvise I'd never want to use a cut-off cable anywhere near a toddler. Whatever the savings or practical benefits, they just can't outweigh the risk of the toddler doing something that causes a shock, fire, ... Maybe for the best that you removed that light strip.
Fire is more worrying. You can also make small sparks with 5 volts under certain conditions, which may frighten someone about as much as a small shock.
There were no loose energized cable ends in this story, fyi. The light strip was your standard white LED tape cut in the middle of the copper pads [0]. I soldered the USB cable's power leads to the copper pads [1] and then covered the solder joint with heat shrink tubing filled with liquid electrical tape [2]. Then on the strip I connected to, it was the same procedure but with a female USB-A connector. There were no conductors with exposed ends to move apart and make a spark.
Yeah my plan was to anchor the loose cable ends under wood once we lowered the bed, but as I said, we pulled off the light strip very soon after. It now sits in, you guessed it, the big box of cables, in case I need a motion activated 5V DC power supply.
waiting for the next piece of this story, where your toddler turns 13 and gets their first mp3 player, which doesn't ship with a charger and guess who still has 18 inches of cable left?
The only things I can think of are: cheap track saws in Europe, and combination jointer/planers. There are two makerspaces near me with wood shops, and one has a French combo machine while the other has two separate machines. It saves floor space, but instead of one machine breaking, two do, so there are tradeoffs there.
- a few filter-on-top-bag-on-bottom dust collectors
- a router table
- squares, clamps, rulers.
Nothing in here strikes me as particularly exotic to a woodworker US. What are you seeing that's inaccessible in the US? For my money, Europe has cheap versions of track saws when there are no cheap versions of those in the US, so that's one difference, but that's not in the post.
When I worked at agencies, it became clear to me that the audience for a company's website was not that company's customers or prospective partners or anything, it was that company's execs, who were often on IE two versions back from what was current. Thank goodness the earliest I ever had to support was 7.
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