site banner

Friday Fun Thread for December 15, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Antidepressants or Tolkien?

Can you guess which words are from Tolkien's legendarium and which are drugs?

18/24. Tolkien rarely used ‘x’ and some other letters and letter combinations in fantasy names, while 6/7 names with accents are Tolkien.

13/24 and the only one I knew for sure was Bilbo.

15/24. Basically 50/50 coin flips apart from the really obvious ones like Bilbo and Sildenafil.

Got 24/24 but that's sort of cheating because I've played this before. There's one name on it which tripped me up the last time because it accurately follows Tolkien's naming conventions.

22/24.

One of the ones I missed had an á or é. I didn’t know drug names did that. Must not have been American?

Great quiz though. Got me to pause a few times.

Yes, there was one drug name with an accent which seemed designed to trip people up.

14/24, barely better than 50/50 guesses.

Nigga what the fuck

Sildenafil is many things and an indispensable miracle drug for many middle aged men around the world, but I have yet to see anyone call it an antidepressant. I'm sure it has antidepressant-adjacent properties, in the sense that most people would get at least a little depressed if their dick stopped working. Doesn't make it part of the same class.

At any rate, the only reason this particular format works is because Americans are fond of their stupid brand names while more enlightened countries use generic. I'm pretty sure I can recognize almost any generic antidepressant by name, including the atypicals, but it's like calling Genghis Khan "Bob" and then expecting everyone to know who he is.

Yeah, I clicked the link thinking, "how hard can it be, IUPAC naming scheme is massive, but mostly logical!"