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August 29

Fresh scents

In my part of the world (for the purposes here, that might mean "Ontario", or "Western World", I dunno) there are a limited number of smells/tastes that are considered "fresh" and they have fairly well circumscribed areas where they're employed: mint, which is used to freshen breath (toothpaste/gum/candy); pine scent (we don't really have an appropriate article), which gets used for cars and furniture; and lemon, which gets used for furniture and room deodorization. There's a pretty limited number of others in the group: cinnamon sometimes gets used for breath freshening, some formulas use orange oil rather than lemon oil, that kind of thing. But we don't, broadly speaking, make use of pine toothpaste or mint room deodorizers, etc.
Or am I wrong and that's just the way things are near me? Our article on mint says that it was previously used as a room deodorizer, back when dirt floors were more common. I've seen cinnamon toothpaste and breath fresheners, but they're clearly a tiny minority compared to mint - are there parts of the world where that's reversed? Are there places where my list above would be completely inaccurate? Matt Deres (talk) 14:35, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Consumer products for air freshening began to emerge in the late 1800s which coincided with the arrival of the first synthetically produced fragrant Aroma compounds. Aroma compounds can naturally be found in various foods, such as fruits and their peels, wine, spices, floral scent, perfumes, fragrance oils, and essential oils. Philvoids (talk) 19:53, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Smell is a social phenomenon, invested with particular meanings and values by different cultures." That's the opening line of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. I have yet to find the part where it discusses which scents in which part of the world mean "toothpaste" as opposed to "detergent". Card Zero (talk) 06:26, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While I don't have a specific answer, one thing to bear in mind is that's it's likely in quite a few places, such products were either imported when they were first introduced, or at least produced by people or companies from what we'd now call the Western world. Some of the places would be colonies of such, and even when they weren't they were often heavily involved in earlier industrialisation. And even when this wasn't the case, it's quite likely they were at least heavily influenced by and relied on stuff from there, e.g. their synthetic aromas. For example, AFAIK, the infamous Darlie toothpaste generally has mint flavours which I suspect might hark from their early days. It was a bit difficult to find much about the founders in English (it's said to originate in Shanghai from the Niem family [1] but their details are a bit unclear) but from machine translations of the Chinese article zh:DARLIE好來 it seems the founders were 严柏林 and 严中立 with Niem being a perhaps slightly unusual transliteration of Yan (surname 严). The controversial name and marketing itself is enough to show some influence from what's now the Western world, but it seems they and their employees came from zh:中国化学工业社 (Sinochem) who were possibly one of the early brands of local toothpaste in China (which our Darlie article suggests were mint flavoured). The machine translation of our article on Sinochem suggests they had problems in the early days due to a flood of foreign products. Of course I'm not totally sure whether there was a reason for mint to be associated with such things in what's now the Western world before it happened anyway. Nil Einne (talk) 22:51, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Menthol has local anesthetic and counterirritant qualities, that's what's up with that. Card Zero (talk) 23:43, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

One of the most interesting things about menthol is how large a role it plays in Filipino and Latino folk remedies. See Vicks VapoRub where it is described as "a cultural touchstone among Hispanic and Latino Americans", in particular. Regarding Filipino culture, Gabbi Constantino writes: "It is a cultural trait that transcends generations, somehow marrying medical science and our propensity for anting-anting (talisman or amulet), sometimes on the same level as stereotyped eccentricities ('Don’t sleep when your hair is wet') or brow-furrowing dogma ('Watching horror movies will invite demons into you!'). Say, for example, the idea of cure-alls. Just as Nia Vardalos' big Greek family has learne]]d to trust Windex, many Filipinos have depended on a limited number of products (perhaps due to economics or convenience) to get through almost whatever ails us. Got a cough? Slather Vicks on your chest. Cough has morphed into a full-blown flu? Just put more Vicks. The comedian Jo Koy's mother Josie was one such believer. 'My mom never took us to the doctor. My mom raised us like we were still in the Philippines,' he joked in his Lights Out Netflix special. 'There was one time I thought I had pneumonia, I go 'Mom, I think I have pneumonia.' She goes, 'I’ll put extra Vicks in your body, Joseph. Just rub it everywhere, Joseph. Rub it on the bottom of the foot, then put a sock on the foot. And the Pneumonia will come out of the foot, Joseph,' mentioning a favorite go-to move of Fillipino moms to the howls of the Fil-American crowd."[2] Viriditas (talk) 22:39, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The presence of petroleum jelly in something intended for inhalation makes me worry in the context of Fire breather's pneumonia, but I expect that's entirely different and I'm being absurd. Card Zero (talk) 08:24, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lavender was widely used to deoderise rooms, especially wardrobes and clothes drawers. It is a very common garden plant in Britain, so you could just pick a bunch and hang it where needed. Somewhat out of fashion, as the scent of lavender is now commonly associated with elderly ladies. Alansplodge (talk) 11:23, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Strewing herb observes that "As people got smellier, the use of fragrant herbs became more popular." Card Zero (talk) 12:53, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, the King and Queen still cary a nosegay at the annual Royal Maundy ceremony, originally intended to ward off the odours eminating from their subjects. Alansplodge (talk) 14:45, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pine is a traditional scent for disinfectant, I think we mention it at pine oil. DuncanHill (talk) 22:34, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 1

Hostage update

In the article Israel-Hamas war hostage crisis, does the latest tally of the dead include the 6 bodies recovered last night, or not? (Source: [3]https://www.timesofisrael.com/bodies-of-6-hostages-murdered-by-hamas-just-days-earlier-found-in-rafah-idf/ ) 2601:646:8082:BA0:C9A8:A23F:68B1:8029 (talk) 22:40, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we can see from this edit that several numbers were increased or decreased by six. Card Zero (talk) 11:05, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the update! 2601:646:8082:BA0:C9A8:A23F:68B1:8029 (talk) 22:32, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 3

Dark-skinned mixed black-white people

Is it possible that a mixed race black-white person can be dark-skinned? 86.130.217.84 (talk) 19:58, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, of course. Witness the furore about the speculation about the colour of the then-unborn child of Meghan and Harry. (Btw, for the life of me I still can't understand what that issue was all about. Harry is white, and Meghan has half-African ancestry, so zillions of people were already wondering about and talking about this very question. But for a member of the Royal Family to voice such a thought - shock! horror! How dare they! I have a lot of respect for Oprah, but she seemed to be the main culprit in fanning the flames of this confected outrage.)

The technical term is mulatto. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:20, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I remember my black uncle and white aunt wondering about the colour of their unborn children. And tbh I didn't realise Meghan was black until I was told. Hey ho. DuncanHill (talk) 20:27, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Barack Obama, with a white mother and a black father, is fairly dark-skinned. He would have been called "mulatto" in the old days, though that term has fallen out of favor (to say the least). Going farther back, Roy Campanella was mixed-race and dark-skinned. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:56, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, don't say "mulatto" in London, it won't end well. Alansplodge (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I can't keep up with what's deemed to be offensive today that wasn't offensive yesterday. Can anyone make a submission to the committee that makes these decisions? Is there any formal appeals process? We have this ridiculous cultural situation now where people feel constrained to avoid certain words because of their alleged innate offensiveness. I remember when "negro" was widely used by the African-American community; Martin Luther King Jr. used it all the time, and he wasn't about offending his own people. It was the standard expression, and it wasn't offensive, innately or in any other way. But somehow its very essence has magically changed, and now it's innately offensive. As for the N-word, we can't even say the word that "N-word" represents, not even in some theoretical context where nobody is using it in reference to anybody else.

Get this: there is no such thing as a word that is inherently offensive. Some people get offended by certain words, while others don't have that experience of those exact same words.

The other aspect of the cultural thing is that for someone to be offended by something someone else says has become a fate worse than death, so we must all weave our way gingerly through the cultural and linguistic minefield we've created, to ensure that never happens. People are dying in wars and famines everywhere, kids are getting massacred in schools every day, DJT was elected president - there's no end of these disasters. How come people don't get mightily offended by any of that; offended enough to actually do something to change them? I guess that all seems too hard, so we stick to what we can manage (whether we should manage them seems never to be considered). We've become exactly like the Nazi book-burners and the Index of Prohibited Books, except we're all to some degree complicit in creating these Regimes of Fear and then making sure we keep ourselves under own thumbs. Neat trick that: self-repression in an age where self-expression is lauded as the sine qua non of what human life is all about. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:08, 4 September 2024 (UTC) [reply]

The solution is simple: Consideration for others. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:10, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, certainly. The trouble is, the things we're enjoined to be considerate about, and the list of Words We Must Not Use, grow longer every day. Ultimately, we might end up with a wordless language. (something to brush up on while eating foodless sandwiches). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:23, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you would be offended if someone calls you a moron. You may not be personally offended if you hear the term applied to someone else, but presumably it may diminish your respect for the speaker. But when American psychologist Henry H. Goddard coined the term in 1910 it was a technical, non-offensive term, meant for clinical use. The adjective dumb was likewise originally not offensive. Terms may become offensive through how they are used.

The censure that may be bestowed on someone using a non-PC term, unaware of its newly acquired non-PC status, usually does not come from someone who the term refers to, but from the self-appointed PC police. It is more productive to explain why a term is now considered offensive. --Lambiam 23:42, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It would be even more productive to explain how, societally, we've become addicted to being offended. The formula "That word is offensive, so I must be offended by its use, whether directed towards me or anyone else; and I must speak up" has become a sort of 11th Commandment. Also, to explain why being offended has become a fate worse than death. Put those together, and we've become addicted to a fate worse than death. Is it just because people can take legal action and potentially get millions of dollars just because someone said some nasty words to them? Is that how we're teaching our children to be resilient, and to focus on the things that matter? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:34, 6 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Halle Berry, I believe, also has a blond mother. —Tamfang (talk) 18:33, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ahem: [4] AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:57, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fraternal twins. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:10, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Following Human skin color § Melanin and genes and later sections, the genes that determine the amount of melanin produced (and other determiners of skin color) are somewhat scattered around the world, and combine with partial dominance. Assuming you're using a U.S.-based concept of race and color (and if I understand the articles correctly) one can have two light-skinned Europeans who carries a number of such alleles mate, and if the carried alleles all make it to the embryo, then the child can have significantly darker skin than both parents. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:35, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 5

welcome template

What are the most used Welcome templates? 2603:8001:6940:2100:7C09:7771:CAEC:BA36 (talk) 01:02, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There are too many; WP:WT list 35 "general" ones and many more special ones. Since they are supposed to be subst:ed, it is not easy to count the uses, but I think simply {{subst:Welcome}} is by far the most commonly used, and then probably {{subst:Welcome cookie}} and {{subst:Welcome-t}}. --Lambiam 09:12, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 6