This summer I found out I’m autistic. I’m 60 years old.
Late diagnosis sucks in a way. You finally understand why you’ve had so many difficulties in life. Why you maybe didn’t fit in, why people treated you differently, etc. I mean, it’s such a relief when you understand why you had all those issues, but the other side of that coin is that you also understand how much of your life was lost to the untreated and misunderstood part of you. Maybe people get physical and/or verbal abuse as children because parents can’t get a diagnosis because they don’t understand, or think you can be forced to be “normal”. Peers don’t get you, you’re the wierd kid, friendships are difficult. Missing out on connections that can help move your life forward. Lots of stress and anxiety.
It good to know now, but it hurts to know that life could have probably been different if you’d been understood and been offered tools to help yourself.
I’m only 27, but may have undiagnosed ADD. My schooling, career and health continue to be harmed by stuff I just can’t seem to get control over. Always been this way. I expect to die of heart disease while reaching for 30s.
I gotta ask, if you’re so sure, why don’t you seek treatment? Take a couple online tests to try to get a measure of it and go from there. I know it’s hard to force yourself out of a rut with ADHD, but screw leaving it untreated.
Bold of you to assume I haven’t. I’m on a waiting list for diagnosis right now. Ironically the same institution who fucked up my diagnosis in 2004. But they were the only place that had a 30 day, instead of a 30 weeks waiting list.
Why would I assume you’ve sought treatment when you stated you were undiagnosed? Nothing bold about that at all based on the provided information.
Do you find it helpful to have a diagnosis, or would you have preferred to just be “weird”?
Did the discovery have any deep impact on your life?
For context: I’m asking this because I’m socially close to a woman roughly in your age range that shows clear signs of autism, and I don’t know if I should encourage her to get diagnosed.
My daughter swears I’m autistic. I was talking to her this morning and said, “I spent every year with my desk right by the the teacher’s desk. I would have wondered if they all got together and planned it, but that’s where I was at, multiple schools in different states.”
She replied, “Dad, go get diagnosed. Seriously.”
The actual rules of Scattergories. I had no idea that the rules I grew up with were not the actual rules, and the actual rules make the game much easier.
How so
The rules say to do 3 lists with 3 different letters from the same list of prompts. My family would change out the prompts every time we rolled the alphabet dice.
I realized too late in my life that friendships of any kind or flavor all have a lifespan. This can mean anything, five minutes in line at the movies, childhood into high school, a semester of college, or your whole life.
Context: the friends I’ve (m35) had since childhood and into my adulthood have slowly and silently withered away due a multitude of reasons but mostly because we each have things going on in our life and those had taken precedence over cultivating and caring for our friendships. Sure we text for holidays or birthdays, but it all feels hollow compared to what we had together for literal decades.
Friendships fading away are very painful.
The slow, but sure, withering itself wasn’t painful, but after having a phone call with my friends and realizing that were I stood in their life was no longer even their priority, or on a level where they might actually care if I disappeared it wouldn’t matter or cause any alarm. Which is more sad imho than just not knowing.
There is no animal called “cow”.
Cow is a term for females of multiple species.
The animal that gives us milk is called cattle. Female cattle are cows. Male cattle are bulls.
I always thought cattle was a synonym for livestock, but it is a species of animal.
Words don’t work this way. They more often than not have multiple, somewhat overlapping, meanings. For example, Wiktionary lists five meanings for the word, when it comes to quadrupeds:
- (strictly) An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved.
- (loosely or informal) Any member of the species Bos taurus regardless of sex or age, including bulls and calves.
- (uncommon) Beef: the meat of cattle as food.
- (uncommon) Any bovines or bovids generally, including yaks, buffalo, etc.
- (biology) A female member of other large species of mammal, including the bovines, moose, whales, seals, hippos, rhinos, manatees, and elephants.
You’re likely referring to meaning #4 or #5, but keep in mind that #1 is the most common and #2 is likely the original one (due to the cognates).
See in number 2, where it says loosely or informal?
That means, “people have said this wrong for so long, that some may become argumentative if you try to tell them it’s wrong.”
Kind of like how literally, literally means literally, but it was funny to say literally when you meant figuratively, so literally literally is literally literally figuratively literally. Literally.
“Loosely or informal” solely means that it’s associated with an informal register, specially in contrast with #1. Any claim past is assumption.
“Wrong” is relative. Which is the standard/reference that you’re using for contrast? Your own usage?
And odds are that #2 is the original meaning. It isn’t like “people suddenly started to refer to Bos taurus regardless of sex”, it’s more like “people have been using it with this meaning for thousands of years”. #1 (the more common meaning) is likely the result of semantic narrowing, and #5 (the one that you’re defending as “correct”) is probably fairly recent. None of those meanings should be seen as “incorrect”, but picking on a meaning that backtracks all the way into Proto-Indo-European is extremely obtuse. (And no, the situation is nothing like the one for “literally”.)
Wait. The singular of cattle is cattle? I think that’s the part that confuses me. Or is there no singular and you must use cow/bull? Either way I’ve never really thought about it and now I can’t not
Actually, your already familiar with this: Moose.
One Moose. Two Moose. Male is a bull. Female is a cow. 🤯
“Cattle” is a mass noun. You have a lot of cattle.
If you want to state a number of them, you have seventy-two head of cattle. “Head” is a counter; compare “sheets of paper”, “bales of hay”, or “hands of poker”.
You wouldn’t say you have fifty hay, or that you played five pokers. And “papers” (count noun) are written works, whereas “paper” (mass noun) or “sheets of paper” (mass noun with counter) is what the works are written on.
If you’re in the cattle business, you absolutely do care about their age, sex, and reproductive status. So you might have one calf and six cows; or three steers; or two heifers, a yearling calf, and a bull.
If you really need to refer to one bovine without talking about its age, sex, or reproductive status … you have one head of cattle, or you have a cattlebeast.
Yep, that’s a thing.
No, the person you’re replying to is just wrong. The common name for that animal is cow, and in common usage it can refer to both sexes. Cattle is the plural.
Similarly, and also often misunderstood…
Peacock only refers to the males. A female is called a peahen.
You say peacock and nobody bats an eye… but you say poopcock and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS
- The Joker
That is such a logical thing, when you think about it.
Oh yeah! That’s a good one too!
Collectively they are an ungodly ruckus of peafowl.
Honestly not sure which is worse. Peafowl or guinea fowl
I’ve lived near both, and only one made me think that children were being murdered nearby.
Peafowl sound like nightmares.
First time I heard peafowl at night, I honestly thought a woman was being murdered in the distance or something. I was a kid and had to ask my parents what was going on. I almost didn’t believe them because I didn’t even know there were peafowl down the road at all. But that memory always stuck with me lol
My parents have several peacreatures… a refer to them as shut the fuck up… they are the donkeys of birds and should be exterminated.
“Look at me, I’m so pretty!” “AHHHHH-RAAAAAAAAAH! AH-RAH! AHHHHH RAAAAAAAAAAA!”
I live a 1/2 mile or so away and down a different road but they still sound like they are in my yard screaming… the first one they got immediately flew away, so then they had to make a giant outdoor cage with a roof to keep the next ones in… I’m not a genius but I believe if you have to build a outdoor prison compound to keep in your stupid screaming birds you should probably find a different hobby.
Wut.
I’m not sure if your mind is blown because you also didn’t know that, or you don’t understand what I’m saying.
I could clarify if you’d like, but you’ll have to let me know what you mean by Wut.
What you’ve said is technically correct (the best kind of correct). But the word cattle is also used to refer to other similar animals such as Yak, Bison, Buffalo.
Merriam-Webster defines cattle as
: domesticated quadrupeds held as property or raised for use
specifically : bovine animals on a farm or ranchCambridge defines it as:
a group of animals that includes cows, buffalo, and bison, that are often kept for their milk or meat
And Oxford as:
cows and bulls that are kept as farm animals for their milk or meat
Wikipedia is more specific and defines it as:
Cattle or oxen (Bos taurus) are large, domesticated, bovid ungulates. They are prominent modern members of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus Bos.
Not disputing your fact at all, just clarifying that words often have multiple meanings and meanings also change over time according to popular usage, so saying cattle means livestock isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just not as precise as the technical definition. And the more people that use it that way the more correct it becomes. As I dove deeper into the topic, I’m seeing evidence that suggests that Cattle is also an American term that means Livestock, but is marked as archaic. Which honestly makes sense as the word’s etymology is the following according to Merriam-Webster:
Middle English catel, cadel “property (whether real or personal), goods, treasure, livestock, (in plural cateles) possessions,” borrowed from Anglo-French katil “property, goods, wealth,” borrowed from medieval French (dialects of Picardy and French Flanders) catel, going back to Medieval Latin capitāle “movable property, riches,” (in Anglo-Saxon law texts) “head of cattle,” noun derivative from neuter of capitālis “of the head, chief, principal”
Anyway, good fact nonetheless.
Yeah. I often heard cattle used in that way, so that’s why I thought it. So, no it’s not wrong, but it was pretty wild to learn that it wasn’t completely correct.
What’s wild to me is that humans decided to name a whole-ass species “Property”.
I think it’s the other way around.
Like you might call a bunch of mindless followers “sheep”. We didn’t name the animal after those people, we started using the word that way because it reminded us of the animal.
The etymology suggests that originally we just called livestock cattle (i.e. these are My animals, my property), and the name was so ubiquitous that when it came time to give the specific species a name, it stuck.
Definitely meant as in I had no idea either and you helped me learn something today ☺️
Words mean how people use them. There is absolutely an animal called a cow, regardless of sex, and it’s a synonym for cattle.
You are also correct that cow means female is many species.
Ok
$10 says you are the person that makes everyone bummed when you show up .
Edit: you sure have a lot of accounts to downvote me with lil fella. I bet you’ll have a great time talking about it tomorrow
aloneI mean with your “friends”.Wow. You really over estimated how much I care. Here, I’ll upvote you so you can feel better about yourself.
Also why would you even bother creating accounts to downvote someone
I guess that’s important to some people.
Well thank you Mr comment watcher person. I sure do feel fuzzy inside now.
Glad I could help! Hope today is great as well!
Hey everyone, look at this guy! He thinks he deserves upvotes for being clever and not downvotes for an off topic, personal attack that derails the conversation.
Welcome to lemmy, where proper rediquette is actually followed sometimes.
Leonard, I give zero fucks about fake Internet points, I wasn’t trying to be clever, and I wasn’t trying to derail a conversation that wasn’t even happening… but it seems I sure was stating a fact.
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The sulfury water may be part of the appeal to those who like it.
There’s a handful of other sulfury foods that I love, but usually avoid if I know I won’t have enough alone time for the embarrassing afterparty.
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That kinda does sound like a feature though, ngl.
Economics. I never understood it that well having taken two years of high school classes for law and government, then watched a single Economics Explained video and understood so much that I hadn’t understood before.
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Link to the video?
I skimmed through the channel and believe it’s this one based on the fact it had Japan in it and was recent, but I might be missing something. Titles and thumbnails change often as a form of clickbait and that gets confusing when going back to something.
At 4 AM this morning I learned there was a smoke alarm in my office. Also that the beep it makes when the battery is dead is loud as fuck. Loud enough to wake me from a dead sleep in another room.
That’s the right amount of loudness, considering its purpose. Hope you were able to replace the battery with a minimum of misery.
I suppose that’s a good point. I definitely would prefer that to burning to death. I just wish the dead battery noise could be set at a different volume to the “wake the fuck up, you’re about to die!” noise.
You sleep in your office?
An office can be a room in a house.
It’s always at 3-4am. Every fucking time
It had always been so with me. First time it was 1sm, second was 4am.
I had it go off recently, but it was about 7:30am! I was surprised.
That’s because battery voltage drops with temperature, and most houses are coldest around that time.
That’s something that never occurred to me but it makes perfect sense.
Be thankful! Lil guy is doing his job well if he wakes you up
When you’ve been at good terms with a person close to you and they die, the pain will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced before and there is absolutely nothing you can do to make it stop.
But: Those are waves. At first it’s just constantly all over everything with no end in sight but then there’s suddenly a first moment of calm and then it starts again. Those moments get longer with time, for now, endure.
I never liked taking pictures of friends and family when traveling, cos I could see them anytime I wanted, but the places I was visiting I didn’t plan on going back to.
Comically sad when I found out it was the other way around.
Real talk
Thank you for sharing this.
My brother passed away in November - it hit me worse than many losses I’ve experienced. The calm and waves of sadness is so accurate, but nothing can prepare you for it; I spent years preparing for my brother’s death, but it did nothing when it actually happened.
I spent years preparing for my brother’s death, but it did nothing when it actually happened.
I had about a week between my dad being placed in ICU and his death. I saw it coming and I tried to get my mind into a place that would somehow hopefully cushion the impact when his final moment would be there and you know what, it didn’t do shit.
A few minutes ago I fell apart when I cut a breakfast sandwich because that’s what he used to to for me when I was, maybe fourteen. It was one of the things he tried to do to make things easier for me. I can’t fucking cut sandwiches without crying right now. It’s all just fucking shit.
When using Google Maps for driving directions, you can swipe left and it will show/speak the next upcoming step. I had no idea about this and I’ve been using Google maps for ages.
Well, this is news to me. Thanks! I often get worried that I accidentally turned off navigation or something, and hearing it repeat the next step would be great.
Holy crap, this could be a game changer for me. I live in an area with a ton of highway interchanges, so it not uncommon to get directs that say in 5 mile stay left on road XYZ, then right after that, it like exit right in .0001 miles. So, I’m always scrolling up on the map to see what’s really coming up.
Exactly! Or when you’re taking a left at a light and there are two turning lanes, I like to know if the next step will be a left or a right so I know what lane to get into, and how far away that next turn is.
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That if they stop loving you, they won’t start again no matter how hard you try.
This one hurts. I’m sorry, friend.
But what if I…
🫂
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“Conifers” comes from “Cone” as in Pine Cone
“Mammals” as in Mammary glands
Those are the two that come to mind but there have been several more in the same vein of these as I rapidly approach the conclusion of my fifth decade…
coney ferns
Ferns are very weird plants. The big fern plant you see doesn’t produce seeds. It is asexual and produces spores off the undersides of its fronds. The spores grow into tiny sexual plants, which then reproduce to make more big asexual ferns.
That West Berlin was an enclave deep within GDR, completely encircled by the Berlin wall. For some reason I thought that Berlin was right at the border between FRG and GDR with the wall splitting it in half.
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That would have made a lot more sense than what actually happened.
I’ll interpret “just learned” as in the last year or so
- Lifting weights is good for you and you should do it
- Running is only bad for your knees if your form sucks, your shoes suck, or you overtrain. Done correctly it’s good for you in basically every way.
- Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.
My main takeaway from this is that I should eat 5 times my daily calorie count in chicken breast and I’ll turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Time to get out my KFC coupons
Gaston ate 5 dozen eggs and he isn’t as big as prime Arnold!
Knees don’t fail from wear, they fail from tear. If you’re not actually injuring yourself, they get stronger from use, they don’t wear out.
Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.
No. You just shit it out. Your gut can only absorb so much protein in a day. Even if you only eat potatoes or rice, if you are meeting your caloric needs, you will automatically be meeting your protein needs. Meanwhile, animal protein is associated with very serious health issues.
And of course the facts that you have known all along but choose not to connect with emotionally: that the experiences of animals are real and matter.
If you’re trying to get fit and build muscle, eating more protein will help with that. 1.5-2g per kg is a pretty commonly recommended target for stimulating muscle growth. I’m not really smart on the specifics, but this power-nerd of a lifter is: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/
I’ll point out that if you don’t use it to build muscle, protein is also an energy source. You won’t shit it out, you’ll burn it or store it as fat.
Finally, there are plenty of good veggie sources of protein; I’m not advocating for eating more meat!
My kids love that I now make eggs and Canadian bacon with pancakes. They think it’s just a more elaborate breakfast. It may not actually be healthy but at least they’re getting some protein Instead of just massive amounts of carbs
Spoiler: It’s not fucking healthy, certainly less healthy than an equivalent caloric amount of pure starch. Everything is made of protein; as long as you are not eating highly processed foods, you don’t need to go out of your way to add it to your diet. That’s bro science nonsense.
