Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 September 30

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September 30

Alcohol

Drink alcohol in moderation. Doing so has health benefits, but is not recommended for everyone.

Moderate drinking can be healthy but not for everyone you must weigh the benefits and risks.

Alcohol may have benefits for some but maybe hazardous for others and entire books have been written on the subject

A reliable source has mentioned all of these things about alcohol following a healthy diet with Vegas whole grains and good nutritious foods and beverages but apparently alcohol has some health benefits but also says these other things mentioned above. Exactly what is the recommendation out of the things said above? 103.253.95.33 (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

The first thing that came to my mind is this: all of the above remains true for a lot of stuff that people eat. It's just that alcohol is a very delicate topic, and easily abused.

Then I googled and found a Mayo clinic page and our own Alcohol and health. See where this gets you. --Ouro (blah blah) 05:57, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Stay wary of diet studies, since it's easier to describe than prescribe what people eat. People in wine-drinking countries have less heart disease? Maybe, but it's not just the wine. Temerarius (talk) 19:35, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

What are "Vegas whole grains"? I drew a blank on google. Is it a typo for "vegan" whole grains? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:24, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Are there non-vegan whole grains? HiLo48 (talk) 02:09, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Beer with isinglass. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:56, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

English term for a very common type of fountain

One of the best known types of fountain is a decorative fountain with water splashing spectacularly upwards. In fact it is so common – or at least so spectacular – that most panels of our Fountains Collage, which graces the top of our article Fountain, exhibit one. Surprisingly, there seems to be no English name for this type of fountain that would distinguish it from other fountains, such as the ones depicted below. There is the name “splash fountain”, but according to our description that refers only to the subtype also known as “bathing fountain”.

Other languages have names (and dedicated articles) for this type, e.g. “喷泉” (gushing source) or “Springbrunnen” (jump well). Or is there a name in English? ◅ Sebastian 17:53, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

• 
  Roman nasona
• 
  Arab fountain of Alcamo
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  First fountain installed in London by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain [...] Association
• 
  A typical modern drinking fountain

Maybe it's just called "a fountain". If it's the most ubiquitous type, it perhaps doesn't need a descriptive qualifier? PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 20:08, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

From a quick Google, different websites devoted to landscaping and home improvement seem to call them "spouting fountains." At least for the Chinese, I can say that "spouting fountain" would be a pretty literal translation of 喷泉. bibliomaniac15 20:29, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. I can agree with PaleCloudedWhite with the addition of “most English speaking people”. Most may never feel a need for a specific term, but that doesn't mean it's unnecessary. Try deleting the articles dedicated to the topic in other languages for the exciting experience of an article or topic ban! For English, I like Bibliomaniac15's suggestion of “spouting fountain”. If there is no other opinion, then that answers my question. (I have to say, though, that I disagree with declaring “fountain” a “literal translation of [...] 泉”. The one word suggested by the two sources I checked, Collins Chinese Concise Dictionary and dict.naver.com, is “spring”. Which gives me an idea: How about combining German and English – as in “Eigenvalue” – to “spring spring”? 😉) Sebastian 05:51, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I happen to be an editor who has mostly written a Good article about the Vaillancourt Fountain, which does not spray water into the air but instead distributes it down in cascades. My article does not discuss this aspect of the design because I could find no reliable sources discussing this distinction. So, where are the reliable sources who discuss this distinction at length? Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 06:11, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

The central image in the illustration above is the Jet d'Eau in Geneva, which has been going for some 125 years and has inspired many imitations. So it could be called the type specimen or seminal example, and "Jet d'Eau style fountain" would be a valid (if clunky) way to describe them. King Fahd's Fountain is "the tallest of is type in the world", but the article doesn't specify what type. It says that the water is "jetted", but if I said these are therefore "jet fountains" I would be making that up.

Here's something: in Stanway House we have the term "single-jet fountain".  Card Zero  (talk) 09:19, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I would understand the term “Jet d'Eau style fountain” to refer to a fountain closer resembling the fountain in Geneva, not like e.g. the Fuente de los Leones, shown in the lower left of the collage above. Maybe my use of the word ‘spectacular’ led a bit off track; for the Jet d'Eau that probably was the main goal. But people find the Fuente de los Leones spectacular, too, as illustrated by the poem cited here. ◅ Sebastian 15:24, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Oddly, we have the idiom natural spring, yet it really does seem there is no common phrase for the artificial kind. Even just spring tends to imply naturally gushing water rather than a fountain. Fountainhead and wellspring both mean the source of a natural stream. I'm kind of disappointed with the English language at this point. (By the way, the article on the Jet d'Eau says that it wasn't originally intended to be spectacular: it was a safety valve for a hydraulic network, and only became spectacular by accident.)  Card Zero  (talk) 17:13, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Interesting – so the Jet d'Eau may be a candidate for “Most beautiful accident ever”! ☻ Don't feel too bad about this shortcoming of English; I guess every language has such blind spots. Many languages e.g. have no gender neutral pronouns. Chinese had one, which contained the indexing component “person”, but some 90 years ago they felt they needed to imitate other languages and artificially introduced new characters for the meanings “she” and “it”, limiting the meaning of the original one to “he”. (Why they didn't introduce a new one for “he”, I don't know – they simply could have replaced the indexing component with that for “male”.) ◅ Sebastian 11:27, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

The first article I could find about Buckingham Fountain, in 1925, doesn't give a "type" for the fountain as a whole, but it refers to the many individual "jets" in the fountain. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:55, 4 October 2021 (UTC)