> (Editor’s note: Yegge wrote this in 2011 and posted it on Google+. He intended to make it visible internally to Google only, but accidentally made it public. He quickly took it down, but it was much discussed at the time and continues to have good insights into service-oriented architectures and “platforms”. Since the original no longer exists, we’ve made a copy here.)
This is welcome news! I already use spreadsheets and SQLite as part of my Jekyll workflow. I import spreadsheet data into SQLite, create some additional tables, and export them to CSV files. Jekyll ingests CSV files automatically and makes them available via Liquid. I look forward to learning more about this project.
To this day, the burning of the library in Louvain remains a battle line, which we should be weary [sic] to ever cross again, for as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) so eloquently once stated, “where they burn books, they will also burn people”.
I always assumed it was just a misspelling of "wary" by analogy to "wear". You're telling me that people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"? That's very different from what I thought.
While they do both often express a reticent emotional state, the cause of that state is different: for 'weary', it is exhaustion from past events, while for 'wary', the concern is to avoid undesirable events in the future.
There is arguably some overlap where someone is being wary because they are weary of similar situations turning out badly all too often in the past.
As a non-native speaker, 'to be wary' is not really in my vocabulary, while 'to be weary' seems much more common, and both sound pretty close to each other even if there is a difference even with my accent, so I could see myself making the mistake.
It looks similar to than/then, but than/then is much more jarring to me for some reason.
They are not homophones? I’m not a native speaker and I’ve simply always assumed they are. I lived in London and the US for many years, but these are not common words in speech so I never got corrected.
I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
This vowel digraph remains my eternal nemesis… Ever since I learned as a child that “bear” doesn’t rhyme with “fear” and found myself faced with the overwhelming realization that I will never speak this language 100% correctly, no matter how much effort I put into reading and writing.
> I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
Indeed so! "Wear" and "ware" are homophones, having the same vowel sound as "wary".
"Weary", on the other hand, rhymes with "cheery" or "dreary".
> I will never speak this language 100% correctly
I am a middle-aged native speaker, an avid lifelong reader with a love for the language, and I still occasionally discover that I am mispronouncing words I have known for years.
