Hearing people actually say it might help me, what with the intonation etc, but here is what may be behind that "wrong" phrase.

I could care less = I think the subject matter is so not worthy of my attention, that the little I care is not actually the least someone could care about it.

Of course I think in phrases like this, which are "cemented" and linked to very specific occassions, other things than the whole meaning of the words might play a role.

For instance the presence of the "n't" part might create such a phonetic impression (sort of speak) to the speaker which doesnt suit the emotion he/she wants to convey. The hard consonants /d/ and /k/ (could and care respectively) are interrupted by an /n/ which adds what I would describe as a silent sylable. So it breaks the flow of an otherwise phonologically "clean" phrase: v-cvc-cv-cvc (I didnt count the /r/ as a consonant) and turns it into v-cvc-c-cv-cvc (I didnt put down the /t/ because I think in normal speech I think it isnt really pronounced but that may vary) with a different acoustic impact.

PS: If some actual linguist is reading this and facepalming... I'm just pondering.

.

*is in the process of making a post*

Hm I may come off as a(n) _______. Let's add this and that. That'll fix it!

*presses submit*

*minutes later*

Oh no that thing that I added to my post, now made me sound like a(n)_______ in stead.

>__>

What comes to your mind?

Gyros, souvlaki, moussaka and greek salad probably.

But that is hardly all that Greeks eat that is "ours". There are some dishes that I ate a lot when I was still living with my parents and I'll list them here just to get a better idea of greek cuisine (at least from my prespective) or even to try to cook it on your own.

• Pastιtsio

This reminds me of moussaka a bit in that it has a beschamel sauce on top and its layered. But other than that its different.

Bonus video! :lol:

• Fasolakia

Green beans (with potatos optionally). Watch the video; the lady's accent is funny. This is one of our "lathera" which means "oily" literally. Additional links: text recipe | another video recipe

• Fakes

This is basically lentil soup and its amazing with vinegar. My mum makes it more soupy than that lady in the video and doesnt add those greens in the pot.

• Spanakorizo

Its basically spinach with rice. And its very simple. Nothing fancy, but tasty.

• Soup Avgolemono

My mum always made that soup with chicken (video).

• Beef and barley soup

Sort of like in the link, but with no mushrooms and very liquid.

• Papoutsakia

Eggplants stuffed with ground beef/pork and topped with bechamel (white sauce).

• Spetzofai

Sausage and peppers dish. Just like the video but I usually had it with much more peppers and specifically green peppers because the green peppers' bitterness goes well with the spicy sausage (red and yellow peppers are usually sweet), and it was cooked in a deep pot in stead of a frying pan (like in the video) with more tomato and that made a bit more soupy (but not like a soup of course).

• Youvarlakia

Those are meatballs (not just meat though; their mixture contains white rice and parsley too) topped with avgolemono sauce. This is the soup version of the dish but I've never had that. My mum used to just cook the meatballs and then she made a thick avgolemono sauce using corn flour and then poured it over the meatballs.

____________________

So thats it folks. Those are the recipes that I can think of which I think are worth mentioning.

When I was new here I made a couple of blogs on the etymology of some english words.

In them I basically claimed that they all derived from Greek.

I dont remember all the words I used but the correction is that the above is not necessarily correct.

While the english words I used and the greek words I claimed they come from are etymologically related, that still doesnt mean that the first derived from the second.

Many times they both just derive from the same language from which Latin (which is a great source for the vocabulary of english) and Greek derive which is the Indo-European proto-language linguists believe to be the mother-language of those two languages (and of asian Indian I think).

It is true that Latin appears to "steal" words from Ancient Greek and that is a conclusion due to their resemblance, mostly when it comes to vocabulary (not that all or most of the vocabulary of Latin is like that). In fact there still are some people who would claim that Latin is some sort of Ancient Greek dialect (in exaggeration probably to suggest that Latin borrowed a lot of stuff from Ancient Greek and that it could be considered a dialect).

I have not researched the whole thing to say what is most likely (whether Latin borrows stuff from Greek or that it derives from the same mother language which inevitably means they will have some similarities) but the thing is its still the case that some "common" vocabulary is due to the second: that they are "sister"-languages.

Anyway bottom line is that both are reasonable explanations and both are true (one for some words and the other for others) but I dont know for a fact which is mostly responsible for the resemblance and which one is less responsible for it.

Thats all.

EDIT: The words that I think derive directly from Greek are words of English terminology of various sciences.

Caffe mocha (or moccaccino as it is called in Greek cafeterias) is my favourite coffee and here is why.

It has the good bitter taste of coffee but also the sweet chocolate flavour of hot chocolate. The good thing about it is that different cafeterias use different hot chocolates it seems (and different brands of espresso usually although illy is popular here).

So everytime I go to a different cafeteria and order a moccaccino, it always has a distinct taste than the rest, because the special taste of the hot chocolate a cafeteria uses makes it different everytime. But not so different to annoy me or think that I am drinking something else.

While I was in my hometown I went to two cafeterias and it was great on both. On one of them, the coffee was a bit thick and the chocolate itself was very sweet. In the other cafeteria it was more chocolate-y.

Now in Athens I went to a cafeteria, and there the coffee was both thick and sweet, and very chocolate-y.

___________________

Update for last blog: In the end I bought a Sennheiser pair. They are actually better than the Sony's I used to have.

I want to buy some new in-ear ear-buds for my mp4 player and I cant decide.

My mp4 is a Sony device (I dont know if that changes anything) and I found 2 earbuds: one from Sennheiser and one from Sony.

The Sennheiser model costs 45 euros. The Sony model costs 40 euros. Not much different and in the end the price isnt what "troubles" me.

I would normally go for the Sony ones and save me from researching the whole thing and its not like I had any bad experiences with Sony products.

Its just that I hear many people recommend other brands and browsing this site I usually browse for electronics, I saw the brand Sennheiser and I remembered that some audiophiles (sp?) on OT have mentioned this brand and said good stuff about it.

So if anyone knows about these things and would like to help me out...

Sony MDR EX38IPB [1][2]

Sennheiser CX-350 II Street [1][2]

(replace the capital i on link 1 of the sony model with a lower case L because as usual Glitchspot doesnt like the word styIe)

Thanks in advance.

At some point in OT I hinted that a language's phonology is determined by the climate of the place where it is spoken. That notion was based on the thought that more vowels = more air being exhaled, which is a good body-ventilation technique (sort of speak) and thus it follows that languages that evolve in hotter climates allow many vowels and have less consonants, crudely put. The opposite for colder climates: more consonants = less air exhaled = less heat being wasted.

This is in fact not a correct statement to make since there are several examples that defy that supposed "rule" to an extraordinary degree.

For instance Finnish is spoken in a place that is very cold all year round. Its phonology though is full of vowels (if I recall there can be even 3 vowels in a row within a word).

As for hotter climates, Turkish is full of consonants.

I should have seen that coming since it did occur to me a couple of times -and especially about Finnish that I had read when looking at Tolkien's influences- but the official answer came from my professor this semester. Another student asked if this notion is true and he pretty much said its a myth.

So there you (I) go.

Right now I am eating a salad I ordered from a local eatery, and this salad has a dressing with honey.

And it reminded me of that time when my family and my cousins family (she and my two nephews) went to a restaurant that had a menu designed to resemble the cuisine of Ancient Greece.

Most of the dishes (either the salads, the appetisers, and even the main dishes!) had honey in them.

For instance, my dish was pork meat and the meat was like coated in a mixture that definitely had honey in it.

I dont remember much from that night (about what we ate in specific that is), but I remember that the appetisers were very good and I didnt have much "room" for the main dish, that the Greeks obviously had no forks back then so all we had were spoons and knives to eat with and that all dishes had mashed vegetables at the side (for instance mine had mashed peas); oh and that I was probably the only one that liked the whole honey situation.

Even before anything came to the table, they brought us some drink that also had honey in it. I think it was wine with honey. That was awesome and everyone liked it; it wasnt very sweet so thats why.

Another thing I remember was that for dessert they brough several different things and most were a-ok but one in particular was sooooo tasty. It was like a modern greek galatopita and it was so good.

I wish we go there again but I remember it was quite expensive, plus I was the only one who really liked it so I dont see it happening. =/

So today when I turned on my PC, the fans inside made loud noise and it wasnt even steady. It was going from low to high all the time, like the fans kept speeding up and slowing down.

I dont remember how I got the idea but I though "lets remove the front panel". I removed it thinking "I've never done this before and I might break something but I dont care; whatever happens, happens".

Anyway I opened and I saw the interior filled in dust. And not just a thin layer of dust on top of the horizontal surfaces. It had even created many of those dust-balls all over the place: on the bottom, on the graphics card and a lot of it was stuck in the metalic spiralbehind the CPU's fan.

So I looked up on the internet for some guides on how to clean the interior of a PC. All of them mentioned compressed air.

I didnt havy anything like that, so I just tried to blow the dust away with a magazine. It did work for most of the dust but it was still dusty (it had THAT much dust).

So I though "If I am going to do this, lets do it properly".

So I went outside (!) took the bus and went to a local electronics shop. I bought the compressed air spray and returned home (for some reason the guy there told me to not use it immediately but to wait, I dont know why. I used it right away. It worked fine).

Anyway so it really helped to clean up the dust from the VGA, the PSU and the rest parts except for the metal spiral thingy behind the CPU's fan. Of course when I pointed it there, I did see a lot of dust blowing out from the back but there was still this net-dust clogged inbetween the metal sheets. I left it.

I closed it again and now there is no loud noise.

If only you could see how it was with the dust. It was literally like some old rooms left unopened for years and then you walk in and no surface is visible due to dust.