First comment on the answer:
This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen.
And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.
First comment on the answer:
This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen.
And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.
I was the one who solved this. It was an exciting time
Well done for completing God's own work.
Am I missing some joke or wordplay, or are you just a genuine believer who felt God warranted a mention here?
As far as I know, “you’re doing God’s work” is a relatively common - if somewhat archaic - idiom. It means roughly “I appreciate what you’re doing.”
nah. far easier to be offended. that'll show 'em.
Maybe I'm also misunderstanding you, but if that comment was aimed about me then I wasn't remotely offended by somebody mentioning god, I just didn't understand if they were literally talking about the God they believe in or if it was a joke/idiom/whatever
Ah, yeah if it had been worded like that I'd have recognised it as the idiom, but hadn't occurred to me it could be an unusual wording of that idiom.
I also take it to mean that it's either work others are often unwilling to do, or something that's really difficult, or something that I've been wanting for a long time but haven't gotten anyone to help me with.
For example: There's a fluorescent light above my desk that flickers and has been driving me crazy for years. I can't get facilities to fix it because they need a ticket that's approved by management and has an approved budget, and all their other tasks are more urgent.... so it slowly drives me mad for a year. Finally, a facilities person says "You know what... I'm not supposed to do this without management approval... but I'll just fix this real quick and it'll be our secret" ..... Me: "Oh, thank you, you're doing God's work"
I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.
I married a southern gal, eastern North Carolina to be exact. As a Minnesotan, I have become familiar with the following:
1. "[he/she/they] are doing the lord's work" roughly translates to, "that task is so terrible/annoying, but someone has to do it, so props to them for doing it without complaining."
2. "bless their heart" roughly translates to, "they are really trying, but wow, so much fail"
I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?
Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y.
Combining that:
鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese.
and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art:
Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language which I found via google translate is 斧头
However, 斧头 doesn't yield anything that starts with Y, and Google image search doesn't really seem to understand that that 鉞 (yuè) means axe. Duck Duck Go image search returns pictures of axes for 鉞, but doesn't show the original clip art in the top of its search results.
At any rate, it's unlikely the designer was using either of those search engines. Perhaps some Chinese search engine displays the "translation" of 鉞 to yué, and also provides the correct clipart.
I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.
The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.
Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_axe#/media/File%3ACMO...
you don't learn about this character normally in China. So I would say it is impossible this is the explanation.
I'm confused too.
Their posts brought up two points:
1. Y might be for yellow than axe.
-- I agree but that remains a theory.
2. The designer likely used a clipart of axe by searching "axe" in Chinese ("斧头"). The exact image was found.
-- ..OK? Not sure how this means anything, let alone "solved".
To be fair, other comments in that 2017 threads confused me too, e.g.
1. The letter 'A' and an upside down Y-shaped character share the same key on a Chinese/English key board
I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about, as a native-Chinese speaker.
I was wondering the same. After a little searching, I reckon they're referring to 人 on a keyboard using a dàyì layout.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayi_method
My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway
Is it solved? My reading was we still don't understand why a Chinese manufacturer took some random words from Swedish.
I think the answer to that question is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035853
I've bought my fair share of cheap do-dads from Ali Express over the years. All I can say is good luck trying to understand Chinese pirates.
That was the most thorough stackexchange answer i've ever read. Thanks for the entertainment
There is a proverb in Turkish that means “One madman (ein Chinese) threw a stone into a well, forty wise men couldn't get it out.” This discussion is a bit like that.
Turkish proverb: "Bir deli bir kuyuya taş atmış, kırk akıllı çıkaramamış."
The most upvoted answer gives the explanation the ball manufacturer is Swedish ('axe' in Swedish starts with a 'y'), but other answers say it was probably manufactured in a country where English wasn't the first language (e.g. China) and the 'y' for axe was simply a typo.
The evidence against the Swedish explanation is that the ball says c for 'cat' and d for 'dog', but in swedish the translations are 'katt' and 'hund' respectively.
This may be a case where the most upvoted answer is likely wrong, but because it was so entertaining and took so much effort, it was upvoted much more than the boring (but probably correct) answer.
EDIT: I had only skimmed the most upvoted answer, it does indeed trace the ball's manufacture to China and suggest the 'y for axe' is a typo. Apologies for the confusion.
Is there also a Swedish version of the ball? In that case I have a possible explanation.
When the ball was copied, they may have worked from images. You need more than one image because the ball is round.
Could the copycat have used an English version for one of the sides, and Swedish for the other? By looking at the images and letters around the Y, they actually make more sense in Swedish
The poster may have made a mistake by interpreting the "W" for "worm". If the Swedish theory is right, it is actually an "M" as worm is translated to "mask" in Swedish. They also seem unaware that a picature of the nail can also be translated as "nagel".
E - Elefant
N - Nagel
M - Mask / Metmask
K - Känguru
To me it looks like that side fits the Swedish words perfectly. The "Q" (queen) is copied from a different picture that comes from the English version
Edit: One of the comments on Stack exchange seems to suggest the same theory. The symbols seem to be a mix of at least two different sources.
Edit 2: Corrected the translation of worm
Worm in Swedish is "mask". "Mark" means "ground".
Thank you. I changed it now
If the Swedish theory is right, it is actually an "M" as worm is translated to "mask" in Swedish.
This obviously cannot be the case because, if you view the artwork of the worm, the letter accompanying it is a W.
If you instead orient the ball so that the letter might be an M, you find that the artwork for that letter is upside down.
Another correction, nagel might technically still have the meaning (metal) nail in the dictionary but it's not understood that way in modern swedish.
It's clearly not properly designed to be for swedish, this is noted in the reply, apart from some letters being off, it lacks åäö. But it's still not clear why they would use "u-boat" for u. While apparently correct english (never heard it), it being Swedish ubåt seems higher likelihood to me.
I'm wondering if they might have combined mixed two designs, as a lot of the letters works in both. Maybe they looked at two pictures and didn't realise one was for another language? It seems possible to me that they'd design the ball based on product pictures, and those are often not showing all angles of a product.
Don't think it's easy to say one answer or
U-boat nowadays is used almost exclusively for WW2 era German submarines
That's not a "nowadays" thing. That has always been the meaning of U-boat; it was an explicit propaganda goal to use different words for German submarines and American ones.
The most upvoted answer does track it down to a Chinese source.
My mistake (I completely confess to only having skimmed the most upvoted answer!).
Our suspects! Hiding in China, right where our intelligence said they'd be. And all the other images match as well.
And the lead came from HN itself!
Dog in Swedish is "hund".
The most upvoted answer doesn't say that it's a Swedish designed ball, rather that it is a Chinese knockoff where they moved things around and replaced some of the symbols with ones from books/toys for Swedish kids.
Hence why the ones that match the 'official' ball make sense in English but the ones that don't make more sense in Swedish.
My thinking is that somebody who is not a native reader/writer of the latin alphabet, or English, confused h/y and the picture denotes a hatchet.
'hunn'
hund, not hunn
Y for yellow, given that's the color of the handle and that you need something to be representative of the color. Even having a yellow square could confuse it with S for square, or having a banana can confuse it with B for banana. Similar problems exist with S for Sun, C for (a yellow) crayon etc.
Also the handle is what has been drawn superimposed over the letter.
Still, confusion with A for axe isnt any better than S for sun or whatever. Maybe the reasoning was that axe was semantically far enough away from being one of the usual standard bearers of the color yellow, that children would associate the letter with the color rather than the object?
A bucket of yellow paint would be a likely choice if that were the case.
A bucket of yellow paint would be "B"
By that logic, it might as well be "A."
Extending this, can there be found a single image that can be representative of all letters of the alphabet?
A is for A Xylohphone
B is for the Band in which I will play the Xylophone
C is for the all the Concerts in which I will play the Xylophone
D is the for the Disappointment my parents showed for my selection of the Xylophone
.
.
.
M is for the Mallets, used to play to Xylophone
.
.
.
W is for the time Wasted, learning to play the Xylophone
X is for the way the Mallets are held whilst playing the Xylophone
Y is for Why did you choose to dedicate so much time to playing a Xylophone?
Z is for the Zoo to which the Xylophone was donated as entertainment for the chimpanzees
Just having the stream-of-consciousness writing above, I think it should also turn into the story of the eventually fatal decline of enthusiasm for the instrument.
Q is for the Quiet my parents beg me for.
R is for the Resolve with which I continue to play.
S is for the Sadness that results.
T is for when I got Thrown out of the house at 16 with nothing but my xylophone.
(This needs Edward Gorey)
a single image that can be representative of all letters of the alphabet
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
https://cdn.dribbble.com/users/5592333/screenshots/15202838/...
"Yellow handled axe" is the kind of answer that has seen me banned from playing Scattegories with certain people.
("Poo-Brown" as Colour starting with 'P' was the actual instigator)
I'm going to have to concur with the ban, sorry.
And I don't hold that against you in any way.
As my long-suffering better half said about me recently (to her psych no less): sometimes he just says and does things to see what kind of reaction it gets from people; to work them out, to understand their limits and motivations, to find their boundaries.
...and maybe even more accurately: just to entertain himself.
Certainly. The limits, the boundaries, are where there be dragons; excitement; life!
sometimes he just says and does things to see what kind of reaction it gets from people
pours cereal box out onto the floor
"Some have called me a cereal instigator."
I'm liking the yellow theory as the "axe head" looks a log like the top of a paint tube like the one in this poster: https://www.kingandmcgaw.com/prints/david-booth-malcolm-and-...
Good observation, it could conceivably be a slightly distorted image of paint coming out of a tube! The waviness of the axe handle does look quite strange.
However it'd be a really counter intuitive choice to use a green Y for "yellow"...
Personally, I can't see the answer being "yellow", as this is all about nouns and tangible objects (like things and animals).
Having said that, I enjoyed how the case was built on the faded outline, while this entire spot of the ball shows faded black print, as may be observed by the outlines of the infamous "Y".
(I'd rather opt for the "yxa" approach, probably the route taken by someone just browsing image search for quick ideas and failing to realize that this is not an English word. — Non-indo-european languages and scripts do exist.)
I didn't even notice the difference in printing quality on that part of the ball, I just assumed it was part of the normal variation for such things and didn't think it had any meaning beyond that.
However that being said I think the analysis in the original article is probably as valid and likely more so than mine; I was having fun trying to bullshit-lawyer what was clearly the consequence of a hasty mistake into the work of over-thought intent.
Apparently this was discussed here while the investigation was ongoing, and an HN user (thedrake) was responsible for finding the ball on alibaba:
Be sure to read that link with showdead.
thedrake’s victorious final comment “ SOLVED!!!!!! I spent several hours looking for an axe or a hatchet or an Ubåt…” is dead.
Possibly because of a heuristic aimed at killing spam posts with too many links.
Thanks! it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673626 and I've unkilled it now.
(It was killed because of the lmgtfy link btw)
Kill it again. An old story about a children's ball is not HN worthy.
I'll wait for the downvotes, flags, and an admonishment.
I hesitate to engage, but I'm curious. What, in your opinion, is "HN Worthy" exactly?
The 99.9% of submissions that aren't like this. Basically everything you see on HN normally.
c'mon, man, that's not an answer. I'm asking for details!
The value I can see in this post, as relates to what I think merits HN:
- there's a deep dive into researching a supply chain
- the research in question is an outstanding example of OSINT
- great reading over a cup of coffee
- I didn't have to read about freaking NFTs or anybody's politics
I still don't get it. That comment just says they searched google images for axe pics. In Chinese, for some reason. They don't even address the letter Y mystery.
in china because there's 80% chance that ball was made there
is there a way to show [flagged] and [delayed] ?
the alibaba link in that thread (from 2017) doesn't work anymore -- product no longer available
I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word
I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced!
Well worth reading.
Thanks for sharing, OP!
Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me.
That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.
The "weird u-boat thing" further supports the Swedish hypothesis - "ubåt" or "undervattensbåt" are the standard terms for a submarine in Swedish (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t). The word "U-boat" is also used in English, however with the meaning "German submarine during WW1/2" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat) - but I don't think it's widespread enough (or appropriate) to be eligible for a toy.
Why English doesn't just call them "under-sea-boat" or "underwater-boat" has been a mistery to me for a long time. (as a Dutch, we call 'em Onderzeeboot or Onderzeeër - underseaboat, undersea-er). It's so much simpler than combining latin/scientific terms.
That is completely unlikely. As ximeng says, it's an archaic word for a special weapon, but also:
* Most of the other letters on the ball work well in English but would not work well for Chinese words with pinyin
* Children do not learn the alphabet by studying pinyin since pinyin only has a subset of letters. The initials in pinyin are: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, w, and y. As you can see, there is no 'v'. Children in Chinese-speaking countries would still use English to learn their ABCs.
As you can see, there is no 'v'.
V also doesn't occur in any pinyin finals, but Chinese people commonly use it in their own pinyin spelling anyway because it is used in pinyin input methods as a substitute for ü, which is harder to type.
Your list of initials left out the zero initial, which is important for words like 饿 or 安. As I've commented elsewhere, though "y" is a pinyin initial, "yue" does not feature it - "yue" is just the spelling of the final -üe when no initial is present.
This leads into a question I've had for a while - I know that some Chinese people do not distinguish between y- initials and r- initials. I'd like to know whether that lack of distinction somehow extends to every pinyin syllable that might be spelled with a "y", even if the "y" is normally not viewed as being part of an initial, as in "yu" / "yin" / "yue". Do you know the answer?
(I know that the lack of distinction occurs for 人 even though it does not rhyme with any syllable that might theoretically begin with y- in Mandarin. But that's not quite the same as what I'm asking about; 人 is definitely not a syllable with a zero initial. I would be interested in how the lack of distinction plays out for a syllable like "ri", where it's not obvious to me how the vowel would accommodate changing the initial to y-.)
That’s an uncommon historical term for axe. A Google image search will show it doesn’t resemble the picture. There are more common characters with pinyin starting with y, like 月 for “moon”.
Chinese probably stole the cliparts without understanding where they come from and what needs to be adapted.
Similar thing happened with "Polish dancing cow meme song" being used in some singing toys. The song is very vulgar and talks about hard drugs withdrawal, depression and suicide.
It's not a really really badly drawn ax with a weird wavy yellow handle, it's yellow paint coming out of a paint pot. The reason the "ax" looks nothing at all like an ax is that it isn't supposed to be an ax.
The term 'paint pot' is perhaps confusing, the drawing represents the end of a 'tube of paint' out of which yellow paint has been squeezed. The 'y' word is indeed 'yellow'.
This image comes up in a google image search for the Chinese characters for "Axe" https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lvi0V.jpg
I would accept this as an answer. More like an ink container you dip a quill in. Yellow Ink.
Are you kidding? The curved handle axe is a thing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=curved+handle+axe&iar=images&iax=i...
There’s another answer suggesting this if you scroll down on the source link. I personally disagree though.
Weirdest damn paint pot I've seen.
I don't think that's an axe, I think it's a (poorly drawn) tip of a tube of YELLOW paint.
I was convinced of this initially, but then I went back, deeper into the rabbit hole of the stackexchange discussion, and someone tracked down this image as clipart attached to the chinese characters for "axe" - so the illustrator did choose this image as specifically being an axe.
fascinating - thank you!
I think that's what it's supposed to be. Probably one artist's initial sketch was handed off to another artist who misinterpreted it as an axe and rendered as such
That makes sense.
that's creative, and now I see it this way too. if only the "tube" was oriented so the "paint" was more lined up with the mouth. that would make for an awkward yaxe though
This is most likely the correct answer: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/396624
Maybe you missed the answer above it?
I believe StackOverflow randomizes the order of answers, you should link or otherwise reference the one you mean, rather then specify its position.
For me they always seem to be sorted by vote count. Nevertheless, here is the link: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/396697
The answer above it: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/396697
Spoiler: It's axe clipart
Wasn't yew wood used for wooden handles in the past? It kind of looks like a yew-handled axe. Surprised that nobody mentioned that option.
Fun fact: Ötzi the iceman had a staff and axe made of yew -- https://www.iceman.it/en/equipment/
It kind of looks like a yew-handled axe
OK, I'll ask: What is it about this rather poorly drawn axe makes it look like it's yew handled?
I oddly enough had the exact same thought!
Played RuneScape as a kid => grinding woodcutting on yew trees => axe.
I thought yew was springy, which made good bows, but I would think might be too much for an axe: you don't want that sproi-oi-oing. I'm not an expert, but you want a little bit of spring so your wrists don't absorb all the shock, but you don't want a whiplash backlash.
You won't get the sproi-oi-oing on a rod with the thickness of an axe-handle.
Some "bong", which is what you want: rather than the energy dissipating through your wrists and elbows into your back and skull, it gets absorbed by the handle, and "boinged" back into the axe-head. A good yew (or carbonfibre) handle is a back- and joint-saver. I owe a few really good axes (swedish make, irony?¹) and one very bad one (chinese). The bad one has some poor and way too stiff wood.
Not only does it break on mis-hits, much easier, it makes a difference on the amount of pain I feel after a day of chopping (I am a mere amateur, so muscle and back will hurt)
¹ https://www.gransforsbruk.com/en/butik/products/splitting-ax...
Why did no one guess "yurt" (with smoke coming out the chimney)?
Pictures of yurts here, first one with a chimney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt
It isn't a yurt. It doesn't look even remotely like a yurt, even a yurt with a chimney. It's obviously meant to be an axe. It has a clearly depicted edge and the 'smoke' would need to be be coming out of the side at a really weird angle. It doesn't even have a door.
100% yurt. Yurts in cold climates is a thing. Sometimes they just have a smoke hole in the roof instead of a chimney. All the pictures are at weird angles, they're printed on a ball! :-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=yurt+smoke&sca_esv=599339112...
The geometry of the ball isn't relevant - the "smoke" as depicted is going out of the side of the "yurt" at a right angle and continuing in that direction. That's not how smoke works. And the "yurt" itself is clearly depicted as a wedge. With the "smoke" attached to it as a cylinder.
If it's supposed to be a yurt, one has to ask why someone went through obvious effort to make a yurt look as much like an axe as possible.
Here's one from the inside with a wood stove, thanks airbnb:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/17261315?adults=1&children=0&in...
Yeet
Is the past tense of yeet, yate or yote, or yeeted?
I’d go with yeet/yet/yet, like meet (the confusion makes it even better). “Yotten” does look peculiar, though.
Meet moot met mitten
So it’s probably yitten.
It’s irregular, so it’s yat.
A wonderful example of the human propensity to "hallucinate" meaning starting from a random connection (there's an undoin uncommon specific word for that - also noticeable in children and psych).
There is a smoking gun in one of the later comments: https://i.stack.imgur.com/bDRX5m.jpg
What about that image is a smoking gun?
If the axe head is a gun, then the yellow handle is smoke. Just turn the image sideways and squint. Trust me, after a while you will see it.
Wow, that Dan Bron sure put in some legwork. Impressive level of investigation. Same goes for many of the other commenters. It’s pretty impressive when people ban together to use their collective talents and minds this way. Are there any groups/subreddits or other places online where people get together to do this kind of stuff?
r/rbi
It's the mods who ban together locked as interesting
After reading that lengthy, well-researched answer, I felt a bit deflated when I saw another answer lower down, that seems pretty plausible given that the ball in question a knock-off created by a Chinese company:
鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. This translates to ax.[0]
We'll probably never know if the origin is yxa or 鉞... or even something entirely different, sadly.
The character '鉞' is not commonly used in modern Chinese. I would seriously doubt that anyone teaching Chinese would use this word to illustrate the letter 'Y' in English or Pinyin, especially to toddlers. There are plenty of child-friendly words starting with 'Y' that could be used instead.
Well, more to the point, someone teaching Chinese would be unlikely to think that illustrating a particular letter was a concept that made any sense. Pinyin is a syllabic system, not an alphabetic system.
For example, the letter Y in the syllable "yue" is notionally silent -- making it an especially terrible choice of something to illustrate! -- and "yue" could appear in the same row of a pinyin table as "wu", since they both start with the same consonant (or, more accurately, neither of them starts with a consonant at all). But Y in "yang" is not silent; it represents the same sound you'd expect if you were familiar with English.
By the same token, "i" represents a very different vowel in "shi" than it does in "ni". And interestingly enough, although "ni" rhymes with "xi" and doesn't rhyme with "shi", the traditional analysis says that "xi" and "shi" use the same vowel (again, it's supposed to be a lack of a vowel, not a vowel that exists) while "ni" is doing something that is somehow different.
Modern analysis would disagree with the traditional claim about vowels, but can support the idea that "yue" and "wu" both begin with a zero onset.
Isn’t there an obvious answer that the y means “yellow” and refers to the color of the axe?
Yes. Except there is no axe.
I would bet that the Chinese manufacturer that cloned the design never had one of the original balls in their possession in the first place. They probably saw photos of the ball online, copied the design as closely as possible and googled some clipart to fill in the letters that weren't visible in the photos. That clipart was Swedish, maybe by coincidence but probably intentionally.
Pretty much. Although the toys for young kids (at least in the EU) are quite regulated, including the plastics that can be used. Other than that, I'd have immediately considered a mistake - it's designed for kids, it should be obvious. No need for extensive research or a question on the interwebs.
My personal theory is double translation of sorts. The item in question could be a 'hatchet.' Many romance languages use 'j' for the 'h' sound in English. Somebody somewhere was looking at 'jatchet.' Next, someone assumed that the j was pronounced 'y' as in a Germanic language (and also Semitic?). Thus, they ended up with 'yatchet.'
Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.
Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.
I could also potentially see somebody, not entirely comfortable with reading/writing latin script, mixing them up as the glyphs aren't entirely dissimilar.
It’s questions like these that made StackExchange worth visiting and browsing. When they decided to be super strict about being on topic it made the quality of the sites go downhill a lot. Now there is much less reason for experts to hang out on the sites and while there provide answers to new questions.
I'll note though that it is locked. Anytime I find something super interesting in a SE forum, it has been declared off-topic.
It's yellow paint being squeezed out of a tube.
The handle is the paint. The axe-head is the tube.
The number of people in the comments still speculating and believing in the aye theory is funny.
It's literally in the following answer on the StackExchange thread.
Or maybe I'm the one who feels the "swoosh" of the joke going over my head, and everyone pretends to see an axe for lulz.
It looks nothing at all like a paint tube though. And why is the paint coming out the side of it?
Also. This clipart image comes up for a google image search of the Chinese characters for "Axe" https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lvi0V.jpg
Its not a Y but an X if you combine the stick of the axe with the letter Y.
It probably was an I, before the axe was used on it.
My kids had an alphabet/animal book where each page had an an [Adjective] [Animal] pattern: "Breakdancing Bear," "Rollerskating Rabbit."
"X" was a problem. They ended up saying "Fox in sox."
Xenial Xerus
A web search on "ax y" gave me the following ... maybe that's the answer.
Ax = y
y = Ax + e
Solved it
Maybe it's Yaxche, which sounds like Axe.
In Swedish
I wonder why no one emailed the Chinese company and ask them where the letter comes from. That would be the simplest and better solution.
They did?:
> reached out to Hedstrom via their online contact form, Twitter, and Facebook. They replied…
Though it turns out to be a knock-off, finding the actual manufacturer might be difficult.
This reminds me of a wood board alphabet puzzle that was gifted to my kid which was made to both work in English and French. Every letter from B to Z were easy to guess. However the letter A was the drawing of a little girl playing in a puddle...
We figured out it might stand for Anorak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parka
Yeoman?
That response went from "interesting" to "obsessive" to "cringey" pretty fast.
This was quite the ride and entertaining too.
It’s also a window in what SO could’ve been
Could it be a word play? Axe -> Axis -> Y
Friends, please, click on the link. There's a long and interesting investigation that answers the question, which is presumably why this was posted.
The widespread manufacture of low price goods in China had been at full steam for over a decade, closer to two, by 2005 the date of first manufacture of the ball.
And the manufacturer couldn't find the original designers' details. And laid no claim to copyright (which seems strange).
Perhaps it was the case of a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff. A CAD file from the 1990s bumping around commodity manufactures via QQ and USB sticks, the design adapted the next order of 10,000 items by any one of a multitude of small commodities producers. Having sourced during that time to now, I'd fully believe it.
This is one of those posts that reminds me why I love this site so much.
The guy from Taken wrote the answer
Most of the images are hard to figure out. For example, if the picture of the cat was not next to a C, I would have thought it to be a monkey. I would have assumed the dog to be actually a pet cow. The blade of the so called axe does look like a beaker or an old fashioned fountain pen ink bottle pouring out yellow ink or paint.
"Yule" - is the Germanic word for the Christmas period, and there are "Yule" logs. So it could be a misinterpretation of this?
I saw the "Yxa" note, but couldn't it be for "Yew" which is a tough wood used to make axe handles? It also fits the curved handle picture in this article - https://www.woodworkingtrade.com/best-wood-for-axe-handles/
The "Yakety Axe" suggestion at the end got a cackle out of me. Excellent collaboration and writeup.
I like the yellow theory. Looks like the top of a paint can spraying some yellow paint.
Swedish yxa is English axe?
Ultimate nerd snipe
Past submissions:
(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 615 points|Gigablah|7 years ago|158 comments
(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 179 points|flexagoon|1 hour ago|53 comments
(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 56 points|colinprince|4 years ago|4 comments
(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 3 points|kent1|7 years ago|0 comments
(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 3 points|vermilingua|7 years ago|0 comments
HN really should surface these by default.
Yxa
Perhaps it’s “Yikes! It’s an axe!”
I'll go with poorly drawn picture of a Yo-Yo.
Why do I remember something like this resulting in the answer being “yeoman” as in a worker of land, also considered one who often chops wood?
The effort given in the top answer is extraordinary, and is probably the real reason for the submission, so perhaps trying to answer the actual question is off topic…
That axe managed to kill some time.
Anybody who has bought children’s toys on Amazon before would immediately think, “oh, it’s because it’s a knockoff made in China, this is not worth further investigation”. And they would be right.
The Magritte ball has a pipe for letter P but, of course, that isn't right.
In Soviet Russia, yo-yo is axe.
Wonderful read. Silly suggestion: Could it be Y-axis?
Clearly it's a yklwa.
The handle is yellow. Maybe it was about the color than the object? Amazing response ticked as answer.
Have no idea
I saw "YOLK", as in, a weirdly drawn cracked egg with the yolk pouring out downward and to the left.
Of course, after reading through I'm convinced enough of the mainstream conclusion.
I'm with the hypothesis Y stands for yuè (钺).
"Yaks"
This submission reminds me of this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359193
The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge (1028 points | 4 months ago | 270 comments)
Investigating thoroughly about something that doesn't fucking matter.
These theories are fun. My first instinct was that maybe it’s for “yeoman”. But that’s not the most kid-friendly or likely word to appear on a ball. “Yellow” seems a lot more plausible, and the spray paint can idea is especially clever.
There is a well-known Russian meme called "китайские кубики" https://trinixy.ru/18802-kitajjskie_kubiki_polnaja_versija_7...
That set of toy cubes had everything: letter not matching a word, image not matching a word (like an orc from Lineage 2 for "щука"), made up words like "knifefork" and of course lots of typos.
FINALLY the stackexchange cookie-dialog works (goes away) in old FF (68.11.0)!
Oh yeah, that answer is incredible. Makes me think of the "Obama Harry Potter Sonic Backpack". Don't worry thought, it can't hurt you in your nightmares.
YAA - Yet Another Axe
Of course, it's a yak shaving tool!
I love that this is the on the top of Hacker News.....
Typical stackexchange! The question is marked "off-topic"
It means "to axe the question Y?"
Looking at it, I suspect it is actually just a mediocre illustration of yellow paint being squeezed out of a tube as one of the contents suggests.
Took me about a minute to identify it is a yo-yo (without reading any of the discussions), and they point out there that the official ball has a yo-yo for Y, so I am quite convinced that it is supposed to be a yo-yo as well. Just not drawn particularly nicely: the yellow bit is a cartoon string, the blue-and-white bit is the yo-yo's "body".
Edit: although now that I finished reading the rest of the investigation, there are quite a few arguments for "yxa" as well. Still seems like an odd coincidence to see a yo-yo there myself, and then to read that it is supposed to be a yo-yo on the official ball.
Did the answer's author just misspelled his surname, which should be "Brown" instead of "Bron"? /s This was definitely a thriller-like read!
Related:
Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382164 - Sept 2020 (2 comments)
Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22685058 - March 2020 (4 comments)
“Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14670306 - June 2017 (158 comments)
I really thought it was going to be something about a “Y axis” or “Y Axes”
Wow. I've never seen someone so viciously nerd sniped in my life.
Comments are not for extended discussion
Sums up stack overflow moderation. At least in the future any time anyone has any tangential questions about children’s toys, axes, or the letter y, they can point to this and mark it as duplicate.
The close votes are misguided. The question is about English. That the most likely answer is a Swedish word does not change the fact that the question is about English.
FFS. Wherever people can put their own words on someone else's website, you'll find this guy.
They had me at Yxa. They really did.
Had to be from a fellow Brazilian!
It's obviously Yew handled axe :).
Yeet
I came up with 'Yaks', plural of a type of beast of burden/farm animal. Probably not the solution, but I didn't see the solution on the post, just a Swedish word suggested. What was the solution decided on?
Ok, I conflated 'looks like' with 'sounds like'. Still curious about the solution though.
The most exhilarating true-crime citizen-sleuth detective story I've ever read. Eat your heart out, Serial.
No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open....
BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570. The highest scored answer is this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi... (of course this is related to teh size of the community)
My favorite is this one:
https://qr.ae/pKqzpCI don't really like that because it's obviously a troll question. Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered, so it can't be a real question even by a chance. One thing to consider if it's indeed real: how much water is in that well?
I think if a bear fell into a well, there would be friction between the bear and the side of the well...
If bear is alive and not oiled, then yes.
Well, if we start by assuming the bear is perfectly spherical and there is no friction...
Given the viscosity of air vs. water, one might assume there's no water in the well. Also, given some surface area of a bear, and air pressure from a cushion of air formed under the falling bear, the fall speed does seem a little high, at least for a calculation with that number of decimal places, but perhaps the well was located in the crust of the earth where gravity's a tad higher.
Living bears are also buoyant, and will be slowed down considerably on meeting the water, so the bear is unlikely to have reached the bottom of a water-filled well for a long period, if at all.
To answer OP, I'd say the bear is brown, because of the mud from the base of the (somewhat empty) well. However to an outside observer, given the lack of light in the well the shade of brown might not be discernable. A human in the well with the bear will see the colour of the bear as a low relative concern compared to A) being in a well and B) being in a well with a bear.
One variant of this question was designed to test the theory that students try to fit the inputs to an answer regardless of whether the answer has anything to do with the question.
People see this as some sort of failing of students but I think it says more about the teachers. You’ve overtrained students on problems that mean nothing to them, then you throw another nothing problem at them that’s simply three times as much nothing as the usual level of irrelevance.
Randall Monroe said it best: we should be teaching high school students how to split the bill for a birthday dinner. That’s more complicated math than most 20 year olds can correctly manage. It’s also what they’re going to do with math about 75% of the time.
What is definition of bottom of the well? The water level or the possible bottom when pumped empty or dry?
Maybe I am bad at promoting, but I could not get ChatGPT3.5 anywhere near a logical process to answer this question.
https://chat.openai.com/share/67998d60-0f81-410e-ba8b-ec5a0f...
I couldn't get GPT4 to answer it either, even with several variations on the prompt. It gets too fixated on the "bear" part, so it just assumes that the answer is "white", because that's a "common trick question".
I find it interesting that it disregards the rest of the question, and just picks "the most common answer to a trick question involving the color of a bear"!
Chat GPT 3.5: https://chat.openai.com/share/9187924c-64ab-4246-a2b0-0c9cea...
Regenerate for more languages solutions
I like the work he put into the answer but he totally flubs it at the end. Black bears are actually dark brown and brown bears are also brown, so there’s no need to try and guess a specific bear species; the bear is necessarily brown.
The best part about that RegEx answer is the moderator's note at the bottom.
From back in the day when Stack Overflow was fun.
Hi lolinder, welcome to HackerNews. Your comment implies that Stack Overflow isn't currently fun. You are of course well within your rights to make that assertion. However, I find that your comment may be improved by removing any implication that Stack Overflow isn't fun. So I invite you to explain your reasons and maybe consider future improving edits to your post.
This is almost too polite to be Stack Exchange satire.
I feel like a lot of commenters here mistake passive-aggression for politness.
Well I guess some of us just have a higher tolerance for passive-aggression.
… ;)
Nowadays it seems like every other comment on Stack Exchange is full of forced and phony politeness. That's in their rules too.
Here is a comment that must be helpful because it got upvoted, but it's impossible to understand because the sibling comment it replies to is hidden somewhere at the bottom of the comment list.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat].
Hmm, I recently thought it would be a great idea to answer a question on SO again, and did that by first posting a link. Then I realized how useless that would be if the link disappeared, so I clicked edit and pasted the actual info.
All this took like 20 seconds, but the hounds had already descended. Someone had posted a note on an answer that was literally 20 seconds old saying that it could be improved.
When I responded with an offended comment they deleted all their comments, and I lost the ability to report them.
That was the first, and also the last time in the past 4 years I thought to post anything there.
TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚ N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ
You wanted to report them for asking you to do the thing that you also thought had to be done? What would you even report them for? Giving valid criticism? Responding quickly?
I miss those days. I tried to go back there now and discovered things had escalated up to Wikipedia tier deletionism.
“Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions.”
He meant Chuck Norris.
Jon Skeet is who Chuck Norris calls when confronted with a regex[0]
(Apologies for the Medium link)
[0] https://medium.com/geekculture/the-chuck-norris-of-programmi...
The HTML parsing question is an annoying meme that people laugh along with to feel part of nerd culture. This one is an extremely thorough attempt at answering the question. Not comparable at all.
I can't say that comment about regular expressions is particularly good -- it isn't even true.
(Some variants of regular expressions can implement arbitrary context-free grammars).
Have you read this one? It's got the HTML parser answer beat by a lap and a half.
The only comparable answer I'd ever seen was something on Seasoned Advice, the culinary SE. I'll have to go dig that up.
The famous answer is wrong though, since the question is about tokenization of XHTML (not parsing into a tree) which is indeed possible using a regex.
This is why none of the condescending answers suggest a better way. There isn’t one.
Man people on SE are cringe af ngl
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).
I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then.
I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so would other English speakers I know.
You're right, I didn't put that together, and now find myself descending down the rabbit hole of Navy slang :)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Nav...
And probably also German WW I submarines which were a factor drawing the US into WW I but might be less discussed as the war had less impact on the US and was longer ago
It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt.
[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t
The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904)
Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.
Swedish probably got the word from German, but u-båt is short for the Swedish word undervattensbåt, which is pretty much a straight-forward translation of submarine boat or Unterseeboot. The U- is not from German.
Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
"Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
That stood out to me too.
A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
That isn't a literal translation. That's a translation of an unrelated word.
There's a Chinese in-joke, though, where they like to say "day day up", translating 天天 "every day" as if it were just 天 "day" twice in sequence.
I don't get it. What does "every day up" even mean?
It is derived from a famous quotation from Chairman Mao.
好好学习，天天向上
"Study well, [and] improve every day."
Making progress is conceived of as "upwards" movement.
I really like preserving english word order and just swapping out words for their lowest string distance portuguese equivalents, especially false cognates. I also forcefully transform english -ing and -er words into portuguese equivalents or completely new words if necessary. Everything comes out hilariously backwards and almost but not quite nonsensical, tortured yet parseable with mental error correction, like some portuguese newspeak. I especially like rendering book, movie and video game titles this way, especially to my english speaker friends who consume all this content in native english and aren't used to or look down on their translated portuguese versions.
I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head.
There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.
That just calls for the purchase of 2 copies and the application of the learnings inside. A near infinite source of inside jokes. I know well who I have to make.
In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.
Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.
I'd pay good money to watch a cinema verité documentary capturing the moment when the graphic artist encounters the StackExchange page and reads each comment in turn, while the camera slowly zooms in closer and closer on their eyebrows as they alternately furrow and rise up in surprise.
I am quite positive none of that happen, or would happen. Mistakes do happen, including picking the wrong clipart and publishing it.
They found a 2nd, different clipart, from the same original artist, with a different Y with the same Axe.
That proves that the original (Chinese) artist actually thought that the image is associable with Y, and they were paired before going on the ball, not someone (other than the original artist) picking the wrong image to go with a letter.
I wouldnt spoil the fun of explaining such an obvious pun. Why ask?
Why do I hear Curb Your Enthusiasm music?
I think it's not unlikely that if it were actually important (someone's life depended on it, or a serious amount of money was at stake), this person _could_ be located. It would almost certainly require someone who speaks fluent Chinese to go to China and investigate in person, though.
Trying to force a research/speculation on a mistake hardly deserves the most extraordinary answer.
A better approach: the ball, likely, can be traced to the company producing it. The toys for very young kids tend to be regulated, hence expensive. Contacting the company would be a direct approach, significantly improving the yield to provide a correct answer.
Did you read the entire answer? Because they did exactly that.
Yes, much much later (many edits later). Also I meant the original poster.
I’ve just read a dissertation about a plastic ball. I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s a mixture of impressed, horrified and bemused…
To me it felt like a new season of Serial
Here's another question with an answer that blew my mind just the other day; not nearly as long though: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid...
Did you notice in the comments that someone found the newspaper from the background?
https://i.imgur.com/gAHYUW7.jpg
If you're into this kind of content, https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ may be fun. There's lots of trivial stuff, but you can find many deep investigations like in this submission too.
In this case, only checking the comments on HN brings about a feeling of dismay at the sad state of comments on HN.
People should indeed read the top answer. I assumed it ended after the first paragraph and only after your comment read the rest of it. Quite a rabbit hole and great investigation!
And in classic fashion, of course the moderators locked it as "off topic".
I feel like this video about the Casio VL-1 demo melody has a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI The fact that people do this much research/investigation to find answers to questions like this is pretty cool.