Language Overflow

Anonymous

12:30 AM

@DamkerngT. Probably. I don't have the low-back merger, myself.

Hello!

I bet that there must be a good name for things like a number of, a lot of, a majority of, a variety of, and so on.

Anonymous

Hello!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Quantifiers?

Anonymous

Well, strictly speaking, I don't part my noun phrases that way.

Damkerng T.

A-ha! Thanks for the pointer!

Ugh! Are you going to say that a is the head of the phrase? :D

Anonymous

12:35 AM

But sometimes it's easier to treat a number of as a constituent that modifies the following head noun, even if that might not be theoretically ideal.

Damkerng T.

Oh!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. No, but you can make a good argument that, say, number is the head of a number [of Xs].

Anonymous

For one thing, the of-PP can often be omitted.

Damkerng T.

Hmm... but we treat it as a plural noun (group).

Anonymous

The problem is agreement, yes. In CGEL, the approach taken is to label certain nouns as "number-transparent".

Damkerng T.

12:37 AM

I asked about it because I think our answer doesn't sound quite right.

0

Q: Should I use singular or plural here?

"A variety of toys IS made at the company called ZYD." Or "A variety of toys ARE made at the company called ZYD"

grammar

Except for user3169, everyone else suggests that it should be is!

Anonymous

That's okay. Lots of people are wrong.

Anonymous

We can start by looking at some corpus evidence: corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=41978330

Anonymous

What patterns do we see in is and are?

Anonymous

For example, we might notice that in many cases, when is follows it's not predicating on a variety of Ns: "Eating a variety of foods is key to maintaining good health [ . . . ]"

Damkerng T.

A variety of sources is right at the top (though it has only 5 hits).

Anonymous

12:42 AM

> [using a variety of sources] is

Anonymous

> [using multiple criteria or data from a variety of sources] is

Damkerng T.

3 false positives!

Anonymous

> [The ability to pull things together from a variety of sources] is

Anonymous

Yes

Anonymous

So we find legitimate results with both is and are, but are is more common.

Anonymous

12:44 AM

So I can't agree with someone who says that it "should" be is.

Damkerng T.

Hehe! Garner says "when the phrase a variety of means "many", it takes a plural verb".

Anonymous

People come to incorrect conclusions about grammar when they start with the simplified and incorrect models they have in their heads and try to reason.

Anonymous

A better starting point would be a set of good reference books.

Anonymous

An even better starting point is actual evidence.

Anonymous

That is, looking at how people use the language.

Damkerng T.

12:46 AM

nods

Anonymous

We can't decide how language should be used from first principles. Language is a highly complex natural phenomenon and is not nearly as "logical" as people might like.

Anonymous

We have to look at how it's actually used to come up with an accurate description.

Damkerng T.

I wonder if there are some real examples of A number of X is in the corpus.

(Or A lot of X is, even. Hmm... it could be possible.)

Anonymous

In that context number and lot have been grammaticalized and are rarely used with their literal meanings. When they are used with their literal meanings, though, that is possible.

Damkerng T.

Ah! COCA returned 0 results for: . a number of * is

Anonymous

12:53 AM

CGEL has an example. Just a moment

Damkerng T.

A-ha! Several results for: a lot of * is

tchrist

Well of course.

Damkerng T.

Wait, the * could be uncountable!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. A lot of work is

tchrist

A lot of many things this still many things are.

Anonymous

12:55 AM

A lot of errors were

Damkerng T.

nods

tchrist

It is a predeterminer.

A partitive predeterminer acts like an adjective and does not change the number of the logical subject.

Damkerng T.

There are only 5 results of . variety of * is (vs. 30 of are). All head-nouns are in the plural.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Variety isn't quite like lot or number.

tchrist

My favorite variety of rose is Morticia’s.

Damkerng T.

12:59 AM

@snailboat Indeed. It's like a quasi partitive predeterminer.

Anonymous

I don't reside in that terminological universe, so I can't comment.

tchrist

The question is whether it affects number.

No matter the terms.

Damkerng T.

Or quasi-number-transparent! :D

Anonymous

Yeah, the actual language is always more important than the theory you use to describe it.

tchrist

Sometimes "A Y of X" affects the number, but sometimes it doesn't.

Damkerng T.

1:01 AM

(perhaps 'number-quasi-transparent' would've been better)

tchrist

The number of X may still govern the verb.

Damkerng T.

nods -- It would be nice if we have a complete list of Y.

tchrist

Just as with adjectives.

It may well be that you cannot make a complete list.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. If you're going to combine quasi- with number transparent, I'd put quasi- before number :-)

tchrist

10

A: A battery of tests is/are

TL;DR: Both were and was are used when battery of tests is their subject, including in scholarly publications as shown below. Sometimes the choice of number depends on the intended meaning. There may be a relatively recent trend of were becoming a more common choice, but both are frequent. You...

Damkerng T.

1:03 AM

@snailboat Argh! Now both of them make sense to me.

@tchrist Oh, that's quite a lot!

I can't remember when I upvoted that answer. :-)

tchrist

Heh.

That's why I said I wasn't sure it is possible to create a "complete" list of them. It's just something that the language can do.

Damkerng T.

nods -- We have quite a long list in that answer; still, variety is not on that list.

> I again stress that you should not put too much trust in raw Google n-grams, let alone in that particular n-gram, for if you restrict the corpus to American English, the were case seems to disappear. Then again, it also disappears if you restrict it to British English! That calls into question the entire classification of published works that Google is using here.

That says something about Google Ngram!

0 + 0 = something greater than 0!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I responded to that comment

Anonymous

@JanusBahsJacquet Google won't report any n-grams that appear fewer than 40 times in a given corpus (source). It seems that these are relatively low-frequency searches to begin with, so they may be "disappearing" because they're falling under the thresholds in individual corpora. — snailboat Feb 8 at 0:48

Damkerng T.

A-ha!

Anonymous

1:12 AM

@JanusBahsJacquet The n-grams are also nonsense because they do not demonstrate that battery of tests is actually governing the verb that follows it, as I explain in my postscript. — tchrist Feb 8 at 1:12

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. This is the same reason I started by having us look through actual corpus results :-)

Anonymous

And the same reason I so rarely start any sort of research using Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Damkerng T.

nods -- I don't know why, but I can't use the BYU interface for Google n-gram data.

It keeps bouncing me back to this page: googlebooks.byu.edu/?c=us

Anonymous

Unfortunately, using that interface doesn't necessarily improve things, even if you're able to.

Damkerng T.

nods -- Because it's 5-gram at most.

Anonymous

1:15 AM

More importantly, the closest you can get to looking at the raw data is still a Google Books search, which unfortunately does not match up with the actual corpus search.

Anonymous

Although COCA is a much smaller corpus, being able to look at every result in context is really very nice!

tchrist

agree

Damkerng T.

0

Q: What does in an effort to mean?

I was listening to a ted video and I heard that the speaker started his sentence with this phrase "In an effort to". In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that...

grammar

> What do we call this kind of phrase [in an effort to]?

That would be "stock phrase". :P

tchrist

Why do people think there is a term for everything?

Damkerng T.

1:30 AM

Because they want to find more similar things?

tchrist

> ‘Receive it, lord!’ he said: ‘in earnest of other things that shall be given back.’

There, that’s my earnest effort. :)

Damkerng T.

:D

tchrist

1

A: List of words with " o' " in it

These are called contractions. Others include: cat-o’-nine-tails hop-o’-my-thumb o’er tam-o’-shanter thick o’ fog Tom o’ Bedlam tot-o’er-seas o’ my conscience warpling o’ the green will-o’-the-wisp This is not a closed set. People make them at the drop o’ their hat.

@chaslyfromUK Perl magic: I merely grepped the OED for \bo'. If you don't restrict it to word boundaries with \b then you get answers that included things like po’boy, which is a type of sandwich, or St Elmo’s fire, which is a will-o’-the-wisp. — tchrist 3 hours ago

Anonymous

1:45 AM

@DamkerngT. Collocation, maybe.

tchrist

I’m not going to tell him to install my unilook program. :)

Anonymous

I think that informally, people would just call it a phrase.

Anonymous

Although it's not a constituent in the technical sense.

tchrist

You can swap it out for similar phrases, but they will have the same structure at that level.

> in stuff [stuff [stuff]] to verb

Stuff like that.

Damkerng T.

2:01 AM

I wrote an answer.

> In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I ...

"students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences" -- That's interesting.

tchrist

@DamkerngT. A good one, too.

Damkerng T.

Thanks!

tchrist

Has everybody close voted this yet?

Damkerng T.

Done!

Anonymous

> This question is already closed - please refresh the page

Damkerng T.

2:06 AM

@snailboat 15 seconds too late. :P

Anonymous

Sorry! Snails are slow :-)

Anonymous

2:58 AM

I just noticed something. ELU has a modality tag, but it's only on two questions and there's no tag wiki.

Anonymous

ELL has a few questions tagged modality too, but it doesn't have a tag wiki either.

Anonymous

It's a pretty major topic.

Anonymous

6

Q: A word that means "apparently" but with less conviction?

Example: The circular window was apparently made to match the shape of the sun. Here apparently expresses doubt, but with a certain level of conviction: that was the intent of the person who designed the window. Is there a word similar to apparently but with less level of conviction? Alm...

word-choice

Anonymous

I saw this question and checked to see if there was a tag for evidential or epistemic modality.

Anonymous

There's a tag for modal auxiliaries on both sites, though of course that's not the same thing.

Damkerng T.

3:34 AM

Apparently, there is no clearly in any answer.

Nathan Tuggy

@DamkerngT. Clearly not.

Damkerng T.

Hello, @NathanTuggy!

Haven't seen you in here for a big while!

Nathan Tuggy

Indeed

Nathan Tuggy

4:04 AM

I guess I haven't had as much to say

Damkerng T.

Ah, I'm sorry. I'm working on something on another computer.

I've seen a lot of nice edits by you!

I think we could use more of your answers though.

Nathan Tuggy

Heh, yeah, I try to check the front page whenever I can stand looking at the sea of dubious titles

I wish there was a way to check the answer score without opening a question

Damkerng T.

Me too!

BTW, the learning suggestion was a nice answer.

Nathan Tuggy

Thanks!

For my sins, I have now been laden with the responsibility of protecting questions... anything you can tell me about that beyond the obvious?

Damkerng T.

4:19 AM

I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I'm glad it turned out very well. :D

Nathan Tuggy

Yeah, I came thiiis close to close-voting it from FP.

... and then I answered it instead :P

Anonymous

What's "FP"?

Nathan Tuggy

First Posts

Damkerng T.

@NathanTuggy How about adding more tags. :D

We have a hot new meta post about tagging.

Nathan Tuggy

Yeah... I've been dissatisfied with grammar for a while but haven't been sure where to start

But I meant the 3.5k privilege

Damkerng T.

4:25 AM

Oh, I see!

ESL Bible Learner's question may need to be protected soon. :P

When a question gets a couple of hundred views, it usually means that it's become a Hot Network Question, and sometimes a new user will join the site to post an answer to it.

Sometimes answers from new users are surprisingly good; sometimes they're not very good. :D

Nathan Tuggy

Yeahhhh

We got one on there that was ... pretty lame, and another one that wasn't all that much more suitable.

Damkerng T.

5:10 AM

3

Q: 'Her mother lived to be eighty five.' Is her mother still alive?

It is difficult for us (non-native speakerы) to understand 'to infinitive'. I saw this in a grammar book: 'Her mother lived to be eighty five.' In this sentence her mother still alive? or died at 85? In addition, Why does 'infinitive' have such a name? for example it is easy for me to underst...

grammar infinitive

live to be is an interesting phrase.

Though the common meaning would be it was the year she was alive, I wonder if it's just an indirect expression and doesn't necessary have to be so.

Nathan Tuggy

In the tense in the question, it does mean lived to be no more than eighty-five.

"Has lived to be" would indicated continuing.

Damkerng T.

Ahh.. I see. -- There is a similar expression in my first language: อยู่จนถึง. If someone said "[she] อยู่จนถึง 85", the normal understanding would be "She lived to the age of 85", but the literal meaning doesn't limit the meaning that she couldn't live beyond 85 years old. It's just the normal understanding. -- My first language doesn't have tenses, so it's a bit ambiguous.

Nathan Tuggy

Huh. That seems confusing from here ;)

Damkerng T.

The alternate reading I was trying to make is a bit contrived in my first language as well. :D

The question just reminded me that there are a lot of indirect ways that we could use to avoid saying things directly in most languages.

Perhaps in any languages.

Anonymous

I think people usually use the phrase lived to the age of X for someone who is now dead, although you can find occasional uses where that's not the case. Context should make it clear, regardless.

Nathan Tuggy

5:22 AM

@snailboat I think in most (all?) cases where they're not yet dead, it's because there's a following "before X happened to them".

Anonymous

@NathanTuggy Well, you can certainly claim that other cases are simply misuses.

Anonymous

But as I said they're only occasional.

Nathan Tuggy

That's my intuition, but I haven't really exhaustively sifted through corpuses....

Anonymous

Yeah, I was looking through corpora before commenting.

Anonymous

In almost all cases, that before PP describes them dying.

Anonymous

5:27 AM

So it's a pretty good generalization.

Anonymous

There are occasional examples like this:

Anonymous

> I followed him back to northern Ethiopia where he was born and lived to the age of 12 before immigrating to Israel.

Anonymous

I've only found three counterexamples so far, and none of them seem like particularly great sentences to me.

Anonymous

> And that’s how I lived to the ripe old age of 25 before ever reading a Dr Seuss book.

Anonymous

> As a non-Catholic, I lived to the ripe old age of 15 before finding this one out.

Nathan Tuggy

5:34 AM

All of those examples seem to fit my exception pretty well….

Anonymous

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your exception meant "something happened to them" as in "they died" :-)

Nathan Tuggy

Heh. No.

Damkerng T.

Ah! "something happened to" is another indirect way to say it!

Nathan Tuggy

More like "something fairly critical happened".

Anonymous

Well, in the vast majority of cases that is exactly what we find.

Anonymous

5:35 AM

Death.

Nathan Tuggy

</spookyoctobervoice>

Anonymous

There's only a very small minority of attestations where they appear to still be alive.

Damkerng T.

Oh, it's Halloween's month!

Nathan Tuggy

Indeed

Anonymous

Yeah, Halloween's at the end of this month.

Anonymous

5:38 AM

Halloween to Christmas is when Americans gain half of their annual weight.

Damkerng T.

LOL

Anonymous

I say this as a proud American. :-)

Anonymous

My housemate is already discussing her plans to get the least tasty candy possible this year.

tchrist

7:27 AM

This "single-word-request" idea is a mistake, I think. It's like asking for the single Chinese character for any concept. Mostly there isn't one. There are compounds, which are much more common, and there are constructions, which are vastly more important than single words (or characters). — John Lawler Jan 7 '13 at 15:53

Fantasier

8:20 AM

0

A: Is This Tag Useful? Episode 1 - The Big Boss (grammar)

Short answer We should define clearly what we mean by grammar, try our best to make sure ELLers understand when to use the tag, and tag the more specific tags along with grammar when editing a question. Long answer Grammar is ambiguous, but so are other terms. As you have pointed out, grammar...

Anonymous

10:37 AM

@Fantasier I think you make some good points.

Anonymous

I'm not really sure how to improve ELL's tag system, to be honest.

Anonymous

Which is not to say that I think it's particularly useful in its current state, just that I don't know what to do about it . . .

Anonymous

I do think that we're always going to have the problem of people asking questions without being able to categorize them themselves.

Anonymous

Like, a question that's about relative clauses asked by someone who has no idea what relative clauses are.

Anonymous

And so if we want to use specific tags like this, we really need to have site regulars retag all the new questions that come in.

Anonymous

10:41 AM

But if we do what you say, @Fantasier, what should we decide grammar means?

Anonymous

I mean, I know what I think 'grammar' is. I don't know if what I think is useful for the site audience.

Damkerng T.

Fantasier's answer raises several good points. I think the most important underlying one is, for whom are the tags?

Anonymous

I dunno. Do people asking questions use the tags much? At all?

Damkerng T.

Maybe we need another style of tags, like grammar-clause-relative.

Anonymous

The tag system, for what it's worth, is used for a bunch of different purposes.

Anonymous

10:43 AM

Like SEO, for example. They stick one of the tags into the page title for users that aren't logged in, which includes web crawlers.

Anonymous

Or at least, they used to.

Anonymous

I haven't kept up.

Anonymous

Ah, they still do.

Anonymous

I don't know how they pick the tag. Maybe they don't like the literature tag.

Anonymous

I tried searching for a question with only that tag, and it didn't have literature prepended to its title.

Anonymous

10:45 AM

But if I search for "usage of exempt", I find a page on ELL titled 'word meaning - usage of "exempt"'.

Anonymous

If our tags aren't doing anything else useful and we destroy the grammar tag, will we take an SEO hit? (Do we care?)

Damkerng T.

That's a very interesting question. I think for SEO, me may need grammar for everything related to grammar.

Anonymous

I know there are people who have followed or ignored tags. I don't personally think there are any tags on ELL interesting or uninteresting enough to do that, but . . .

Anonymous

On ELU, there's the single-word-requests tag to be ignored for folks who don't like those.

Anonymous

Do we have any tags on ELL that are controversial in that sense?

Anonymous

10:49 AM

(I mean, it seems like grammar isn't well-liked, but that seems like a very different kind of "controversial".)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Hierarchical tags!

Anonymous

It seems like that's something that should be designed into the tag system if we're going to do it.

Anonymous

And right now, it's not.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Yes!

Anonymous

Like a lot of stuff on SE, the tag system feels kind of like it was designed for Stack Overflow some years back, and no one's really asked themselves, "Does the tag system really work for language sites like ELL?"

Anonymous

10:52 AM

I think the answer is probably "no" in its current state, although it seems more dysfunctional on ELL than on other language sites.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh, hey, I got someone to turn a comment-answer into an answer today! :-)

Damkerng T.

Yay!

(I guess :-)

Anonymous

Yeah! I guess . . .

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I think both sides of the arguments in the our "tag" meta post just makes me realize one thing: we can come up with sets of tags from different viewpoints.

Anonymous

Sure.

Damkerng T.

10:55 AM

As they are, our tags seem to be better for learning "about" English.

Another possible set of tags for "learning" English could be just entirely different.

Anonymous

This site doesn't really seem like it's focused on learning English.

Damkerng T.

nods -- That's why it's somewhat mixed.

Anonymous

This might seem like splitting hairs, but to me it seems like this is a site primarily for learners to ask questions about English, not a site for questions about learning English.

Anonymous

Questions about challenges learners face that aren't directly about the language itself aren't given a very warm reception, although some of them seem to stay open.

Damkerng T.

(And the tags I use in my bookmarks are mostly "about" English "language learners".)

Anonymous

10:58 AM

But we don't get too many of those in the first place.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

I think a lot of that is because people wanted this site to be a sort of "ELU Lite".

Anonymous

And it started out with a lot of regulars from ELU.

Damkerng T.

If our site is more about learning English, the major stub tags would be the 6 main areas in those exams: reading, writing, listening, speaking, grammar, vocabulary

The "hierarchical tags" idea, though radical, could "just work". :P

I mean, we can revise all our grammar related tags into the hierarchy (e.g. tense -> grammar-tense)

Anonymous

The problem is that tags can only be so long.

Damkerng T.

11:02 AM

So when a learner typed gram, they would see a huge list of possible grammar tags!

Anonymous

You couldn't make a grammar-preposition-phrases (or even grammar-prepositional-phrases) because it wouldn't fit.

Damkerng T.

Ah, do we have a length limit for tags?

Anonymous

I believe it's 25 characters.

Damkerng T.

sad

Anonymous

In theory, I'd like to have hierarchies for topics which can naturally be subdivided, such as tense.

Anonymous

11:05 AM

That is, future-tense and present-tense or whatever tenses people come up with could be children of that parent tag.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Then people could browse the questions about tense and drill down to the future tense subcategory if they wanted.

Damkerng T.

We could put that in the hierarchy too, if it were allowed.

0

Q: What's the meaning of "by one count"?

Only 2.4% of the 113th Congresss were Asian-Americans; by one count, fewer than 2% of state legislators are. What's the meaning of "by one count"?

meaning phrase

An interesting choice of word! (by one count)

Anonymous

Sounds normal enough to me.

Anonymous

Which is not to say that it's uninteresting!

Damkerng T.

11:11 AM

I think on one count makes more sense to me.

Anonymous

But I don't think that would have the same meaning.

Damkerng T.

Using by gives me a strange feeling (not the "it's ungrammatical" feeling).

The more common sense of by one count (I think) doesn't really make sense in this context.

Anonymous

by ≈ according to here

Anonymous

I think

Damkerng T.

Yes! So it should be according to.

Perhaps it's just journalism.

Anonymous

11:13 AM

I'm not sure whether it refers to separate methods of counting, as in the upvoted answer, or to instances of counting, which is what I thought when I read it.

Anonymous

But it's definitely very normal using by with a NP complement whose head is count: "By my count, we've got 10 people missing!"

Damkerng T.

Or maybe they just want to try to be vague (and wouldn't want to say outright "by one method that was used to count" or "according to one count").

Anonymous

≈ "I tried counting and found that ten people were missing."

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=41986100

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Does that sound rather formal, or is it common in every occasion?

Anonymous

11:16 AM

@DamkerngT. By my count doesn't sound particularly formal.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

I think this phrase is neutral with respect to formality.

Anonymous

> The list of potential legal breaches is, of course, enormous; by one count, the administration has broken 269 laws, both domestic and international.

Anonymous

Someone counted and came up with 269.

Damkerng T.

So I think, our +3 answer is not quite correct.

Anonymous

11:17 AM

Well, it says something other than what I thought when I read the sentence.

Anonymous

So I didn't upvote, but I didn't downvote, either. All I know is how I understand that phrase personally.

Damkerng T.

Fair enough. :-)

I don't know how many state legislators there are in the US in total.

Anonymous

I don't either.

Anonymous

A lot? :-)

Damkerng T.

Some thousands?

Anonymous

11:20 AM

7383, I guess. ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/…

Damkerng T.

A guess?! That's a very precise one!

:D

Anonymous

I guess here is a modal expression bleached of its literal meaning.

Damkerng T.

nods -- I was just playing with the word. :-)

Anonymous

Ah :-)

Anonymous

Oh, look! They have a fancy pants graph with the same information, but in color! ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2014.pdf

Damkerng T.

11:24 AM

The "split" items are interesting. :D

Word of the Day: unicameral

Anonymous

Politics makes my brain melt.

Anonymous

Oh, that's a useful word, and not just in politics!

Damkerng T.

Oh! Does it have some other meanings?

Anonymous

Oh, sure! It literally means one-chambered. Bicameral is two-chambered.

Damkerng T.

A-ha!

Anonymous

11:27 AM

There's a famous theory, widely regarded as a masterpiece of crackpottery: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

Damkerng T.

A two-chambered mind!

Anonymous

You could also say the human heart is tetracameral, but I think people usually just say it has four chambers :-)

Damkerng T.

Ah, we have a Wikipedia page for tetracameralism: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetracameralism

Anonymous

That's also where the word camera comes from.

Anonymous

< camera obscura 'dark chamber'

Damkerng T.

11:31 AM

Ahh... I wouldn't see the relation if you didn't point it out for me!

Anonymous

Camera obscura

A camera obscura (Latin: "dark chamber") is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, inverted (thus upside-down), but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. The largest camera obscura in the world is on Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, Wales. Using mirrors, as in an 18th-century overhead version...

Damkerng T.

Makes sense.

But our cameras don't have any chamber anymore!

Anonymous

You might also run into the term cameral in discussion of the chambered nautilus, a very important mollusk! :-)

Damkerng T.

Except for very expensive ones.

Anonymous

I love how advanced cameras have gotten!

Anonymous

11:32 AM

I've never owned a real, professional-type camera.

Damkerng T.

I always use relatively cheap ones. :D

Anonymous

I use my phone camera. I always have my phone with me.

Anonymous

I use it a lot!

Anonymous

Although I think they're not ideal for taking pictures of people.

Damkerng T.

Hehe! -- Oh, speaking of camera...

2 days ago, by Damkerng T.

People, be careful when taking selfies!

Anonymous

11:34 AM

It's a leading cause of death!

Damkerng T.

> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Yes!

Anonymous

I actually read somewhere the other day that people have tried backing up for a picture, only to fall into the Grand Canyon!

Anonymous

So if you're ever standing in front of the Grand Canyon? Don't back up.

Damkerng T.

Good advice!

Anonymous

amazon.com/Over-The-Edge-Expanded-Anniversary/dp/0984785809

Damkerng T.

11:36 AM

Wow, it happens everywhere!

(I'm looking at the list "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought".)

Anonymous

I've never read this book. Actually, it sounds a bit morbid, and I don't really like to read things like that. But if I were actually planning on visiting the Grand Canyon, I might give it a read just to learn some things not to do! ;-)

Anonymous

Hey, how come it says "in Grand Canyon" instead of "in the Grand Canyon"? Doesn't it get an article?

Damkerng T.

Hmm... headlinese?

Anonymous

Hmm, apparently it only gets an article some of the time!

Damkerng T.

Ahh... like "If you have iPhone, ...", maybe. :P

Anonymous

11:39 AM

Yabbut, in that case I think pretty much everyone but Apple agrees! :-)

Anonymous

Maybe it's short for "in Grand Canyon National Park".

CopperKettle

Good afternoon, Snails, Damkerng!

Damkerng T.

Good afternoon!

CopperKettle

@snailboat Maybe Grand Canyon is a proper name?

Anonymous

Good afternoon! :-)

Anonymous

11:45 AM

By which I mean early morning!

Damkerng T.

0

Q: I need the interrogative sentence for this answer

James Monroe was the fifth President of the United State If the answer is "the fifth" , what/how would the question form be for that answer? Pls note the name "James Monroe" should be in the sentence.

interrogative

Ah, it's a duplicate (but of which question?)

Anonymous

This question has been asked N times. What is the value of N?

Damkerng T.

Fifth. xD

Anonymous

It's funny because it's so trivial in other languages.

CopperKettle

A snow storm has just passed...

Here it is, going away to the northeast

Damkerng T.

11:50 AM

That's a huge chunk of cloud!

Anonymous

Pretty!

CopperKettle

Yes.. It was dark and very snowy just 30 minutes ago!

Damkerng T.

After a storm comes a ~~cloud~~ calm.

:P

CopperKettle

Every cloud must have a silver lining.

(0:

Anonymous

Storms scare me.

Anonymous

11:53 AM

One time I was driving down to Champaign, IL.

Anonymous

I was driving on a narrow road between two fields―soy fields, maybe? There's a lot of soy in Illinois.

Damkerng T.

thinking of tornadoes...

Anonymous

And right where I was, straight overhead, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Anonymous

But off in the distance there loomed a dark grey expanse of cloud, stretching as far as I could see in either direction . . .

Anonymous

I was a teenager and it didn't occur to me to do anything but drive through it :-)

Anonymous

11:55 AM

I was fine.

Anonymous

But it was scary!

Damkerng T.

Must be exciting-- I mean, scary. :D -- I think I haven't been in a real storm.

Anonymous

I've been way too close to tornadoes.

CopperKettle

I only saw tornadoes on (the?) TV...

Anonymous

I'm really scared of them! Even after I moved to California, where tornadoes are basically nonexistent, I had nightmares about them for years.

Anonymous

11:56 AM

I was in Iowa City for a couple tornadoes. They get a lot of them over there.

Anonymous

Even in Chicagoland, where I grew up, tornadoes weren't that uncommon, although it depended on where exactly you were.

Anonymous

I knew a lot of people around the Chicago area who had never seen one.

Anonymous

I used to be friends with a couple of storm chasers.

Damkerng T.

(Selfie lovers) "Look, a tornado is coming!" "Yay, let's take some selfies!" [whoosh!]

Anonymous

Storm chasers are crazy.

Anonymous

11:58 AM

@DamkerngT. "Hey, self! Back up so you can get a better shot of you and the tornado!"

CopperKettle

@snailboat Cool! Of the scientific type, or just people who love to be in a storm?

Anonymous

@CopperKettle They'd go and film tornadoes.

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