Language Overflow - 2015-10-11

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5:15 AM

A charming turn of phrase in Indian English: "it tracks that" instead of "it follows that"

"It tracks that there is a potential for engineering this group of NPs for therapeutic purposes."

Anonymous

5:52 AM

I'm really surprised I can't find the colloquial usage of track in dictionaries. Like "That tracks" meaning something along the lines of "That makes sense. The information you just presented fits well with information I already had access to."

Good morning, @snailboat!

So it's not an Indian English specimen?

Nice.

Anonymous

I didn't say that.

Anonymous

I don't believe I've ever seen "It tracks that" meaning "It follows that".

Anonymous

But my mind immediately leapt to the usage I tried to describe.

Anonymous

I couldn't find any sentences beginning with It tracks that in COCA.

6:00 AM

ah. I see!

2 hours later…

7:43 AM

9

Q: Preposition before noun phrases - omission of "in"

I have seen in some cases prepositions are omitted before some noun phrases. And it's explained that those phrases are actually an adverb phrases. But I know a simple thing. If the head of the phrase is a noun, it's a noun phrase. If the head of the phrase is an adverb it is an adverb phrase. Fo...

I just saw this question. It's amazing.

Did you have any discussions on that question before? I'll do the search, in that case :-)

2 hours later…

9:24 AM

@Fantasier We had discussed it, and we had no conclusion either.

Interesante

10:20 AM

0

Q: What's meaning of "pictures of mountains looking up"?

It`s always snowy in the Himalayas. Parts of the Asian mountain chain never see a day without it. It's easy to find pictures of these majestic mountains looking up. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1503/10/sn.01.html What's meaning of "pictures of mountains looking up"? Does it m...

Isn't this an easy question that's hard to explain?

2 hours later…

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

11:50 AM

@snailboat It's popularity. The tag with more questions.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Strange thing is, sometimes it [Google] doesn't pick up any tag.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Yeah I don't understand that either.

Anonymous

12:21 PM

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Yeah, I found people claiming that was true too.

Anonymous

Maybe the counterexamples I saw in search results did contain the most popular tag at the time Google saved its copy.

Anonymous

That could explain some of the discrepancies.

Anonymous

1

Q: in a scientific context, how to talk about reasons and consequences?

I've written down 4 sentences and my thoughts. High temperatures would melt stones .( imaginary situation in the time of speaking) High temperatures will melt stones . ( I have no Idea ! - I don't think it suggests a future event ) High temperatures melt stones. ( It is a fact and al...

grammar sentence-construction

Anonymous

This one shows up with "sentence construction" on Google, not "grammar". But the "grammar" tag wasn't added to the question until a few hours after it was posted.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@snailboat That explains it.

Anonymous

12:25 PM

0

Q: What does "that of"stand for in a comparative sentence?

What is the difference between "my skill is better than that of tony's" and "my skill is better than tony's" . When to ommit or add this "that of"?

grammar american-english

Anonymous

Here's an example where no tag shows up.

Anonymous

That example falsifies my hypothesis for why it sometimes doesn't show up, since one of the tags is grammar.

Anonymous

So now I'm back to square one.

Anonymous

Hey, we have an error tag.

Huh...

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

12:29 PM

I need to tag grammar with error.

I think error is worse than grammar.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Fantasier Hmm.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Hmmm.

Anonymous

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I looked through some more examples, and I think that might explain all of the discrepancies I saw last time I checked. So that makes sense. I'm still curious about why it doesn't show up sometimes, though.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Fantasier Hmmmm.

Anonymous

12:30 PM

@Fantasier Me too.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Hmmmmmmmmm.

Anonymous

If you two don't put an end to this, the world will soon be covered in m's!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Fantasier Hmmmmmmmmmm. BRING IT ON! (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Anonymous

Oh no! That poor ちゃぶ台!

I like M&M's. (Is that relevant?)

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

12:31 PM

The Periodic Table

Haikus are awesome / Chemistry's even better / So pull up a chair

Anonymous

Very relevant.

Anonymous

Especially since Halloween is coming up.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

We have a table-flipping tag there.

Treat or Treat :-)

Anonymous

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Hey, that's 5/6/4, not 5/7/5!

Anonymous

12:33 PM

I feel like I was promised more syllables than I got.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

At least it's not mine.

Anonymous

Haikus are awesome / Chemistry's even better / So pull up a chair

Everywhere, everyone seems to know how to write a Haiku. :-P I still don't.

(0:

Haikus are easy-peasy / But not for me, alas / Fantasier sighs

user image

A blizzard!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

12:48 PM

@CopperKettle Did you draw that?

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I shot that 7 minutes ago.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@CopperKettle With a helicopter? O.o

(0:

user image

Snofalls this heavy usually start around October 15-20.

This year is one of the coldest here.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

It's still so artistic!

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M All kudos goes to God!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

12:50 PM

in ELL's Cabin, 45 secs ago, by inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

When you say effective Oct 12, I believe you mean I won't work for you starting Oct 12.

@CopperKettle *kudos

@Copper ^

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Thanks!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Was I right in thinking that way?

44 secs ago, by inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

in ELL's Cabin, 45 secs ago, by inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

When you say effective Oct 12, I believe you mean I won't work for you starting Oct 12.

This, I mean.

What heart could have thought you?—
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapor?—
“God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered,
He wrought me,
From curled silver vapor,
To lust of His mind—
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.”

1:31 PM

Weird, this one didn't ping me!

@Damkerng T., I think it's intended as $5000.00 (which looks normal to most people), then also USD so nobody tries to screw around with some other dollar with less value (as a formality). It's redundant, but satisfies two different sets of people fully. Like "part and parcel" or "last will and testament", etc. — MichaelS yesterday

1 hour later…

2:49 PM

I wonder if this from is felicitous:

According to Uralkali's estimates, global potassium chloride demand should reach 58 million tonnes in 2015, which would mark an 8% decline from the record-breaking level reached a year earlier.

One US person told me it should be in.

I would leave the from.

Thank you, @tchrist! And good evening!

He fixed the sentence to "Uralkali estimates that global potassium chloride demand will reach 58 M tonnes in 2015, which would mark an 8% decline in the record-breaking peak demand in 2014."

the in seemed weird to me

But who can beard the (a?) native speaker in his lair?

heh

..in his den

I would not use in there, really. I liked the from.

I also wondered about hte use of As such, an expression I've rarely seen.

"Uralkali's output of potassium chloride reached 3 M tonnes in Q3 2015, marking a 6% increase over the same period last year. As such, Uralkali's 9-month potassium chloride output is 8.7 M tonnes (marking a 5.5% y/y decline), whereas ts goal for _ 2015 is 10.8 M tonnes."

As such is ok.

3:02 PM

Could it mean "Taking into acount the aforementioned figure", I wonder.

That is what it means, yes.

Oh. Nice. I hope I will remember this.

I would never have guessed it meant this.

I guess that that sense of as isn't quite obvious in several other languages.

3:31 PM

So briefly, after looking through, some possible and not necessarily exclusive courses of action come to mind:
1) Destroy [grammar]
2) Blacklist [grammar]
3) Retag some of the questions that [grammar] attracts with more appropriate tags like [exam-question]
4) Edit tag wiki excerpts for the kinds of questions that [grammar] attracts to contain "grammar", such as [meaning], [usage], and perhaps some others.

~~For 4, the practical effect of this is that they will be suggested when you start typing in "grammar"~~

Wait, maybe they don't. :/

The effect of 1 and 2 are, I hope, self-explanatory.

The intent of 3 is to make these questions highly visible. People who tag things "grammar" because they appear in exam or practice questions will benefit from people who are answering with that knowledge. Incidentally, we already have an [exam-question] tag. Hmm.

I'm interpreting this as further proof that people pick grammar even though there are much more obviously specific tags, because it's very prominent. I have seen single-tagged [grammar] questions that declare themselves to be about exam questions.

And for 4, I suspect that it would be the weakest action on its own, because people don't read excerpts. But perhaps they would if they had to.

I think the exam questions can still be divided further into two main categories (which will be of interest to different user groups).

I very much believe that users should be able to choose their own tags. This is a problem for ELL. Because I also believe that tags should be a useful way for answerers to focus on a specific subtopic, this presents somewhat of a dilemma for me. So if we destroy and blacklist grammar, we should replace it with things that users are likely to be able to use.

One is those in proficiency tests. The other is those in the books used for beginners to intermediate learners.

And we also have something another kind of exercises which would look more like English of the 19th century.

@jimsug To many learners, there are only 6 things in English: reading, writing, listening, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary; and that's all about it.

I think those are all rather broad topics.

nods

They're really broad, but for many learners out there, the only thing that makes English relevant to them is to pass an exam or a proficiency test, and they'll have about 40 questions in the exam with grammar/usage and vocabulary/verbal test combined.

I think that's one possible reason why "grammar" is so small to them.

But almost every one of them has to pass the "grammar" test.

4:14 PM

@jimsug I'm with your there. :-) I'm fine if grammar is destroyed and something users can use is in its place.

@DamkerngT. Yes, because that's generally how coursebooks divide their sections in each unit.

It's a bit sad that many people learn English to pass their exams or tests.

Yeah...

Well, if an exam is well designed, it can ensure that takers have at least some knowledge needed. You have to know at least something to pass it (Although that rarely happens)

@DamkerngT. If they're not going to actually use the English, it won't matter. And if they are going to use the English they will find that using it is a much harder test!

@StoneyB That's right. I think a lot of those people who learn anything just to pass the test will find a lot of problems later in life. Some problems are relatively easy to fix; some aren't that easy.

@Fantasier If books such as "How to beat X/Y/Z tests" work, I think something is not quite right. :-)

My wife is teaching Freshman Comp these days and says the hardest thing to get through the heads of kids right out of high school is that now they're graded on performance, not a test.

4:25 PM

Here's one unit in the coursebook I'm currently studying with, if this could help you get the picture of how contents are organized in EFL (as I see it). Please tell me when you're done, so I can delete them. (1) drive.google.com/file/d/0B2Hp2Y4BMxdwWU5kSWhyc0RtelU/… (2) drive.google.com/file/d/0B2Hp2Y4BMxdweW5PVWs4TjFGUkk/…

done

done

Deleted :-)

It's good that at least the audio comes first!

So that's basically like you said, @DamkerngT., Listening & Speaking, Grammar, and Vocabulary.

4:28 PM

Odd. I've just discovered that I went from mid-October '14 to Feb '15 without answering a single question tagged grammar. How on earth did that happen!

nods -- The same idea is echoed in most proficiency tests.

Reading appears only in some chapters, because it takes a lot of space. Writing has its separate units.

@StoneyB Because you've retagged all of them with something else, perhaps? :-)

@Fantasier I wonder if that (the missing of reading/writing) will drop the reading/writing skills of younger generations.

On the contrary ... I've been backing down the calendar, from the most recent to the latest. The last one I did was from February; the next one on my list is October.

Hmm... that book reminds me of something I recently read.

It was about the movement from grammar-based teaching to another thing, and then the grammar made its comeback.

I can't remember the name of that another thing, though.

4:32 PM

@DamkerngT. Er, no? Actually in at lower levels, reading appears in every chapter (because the passages are shorter and simplified). At this (advanced) level, it appears only in some because the excerpts are not abridged/simplified, but taken directly from the sources (including newspaper, novels etc.). They are long :-P I feel writing needs to be separated anyway. It's a huge subject and could make a whole course, or courses.

nods -- essays, speech, and all.

@DamkerngT. Yea... I got to read part of Churchill's speech in the exercise book.

Wait, is this a coursebook you're using in your current course?

Yes.

Oh, so it's at the college level.

4:36 PM

Oh, no.

I mean, the university does use a General English coursebook in freshman year, but at a lower level (B2; this one is C1), and it uses another two coursebooks for 1) Presentation and 2) Academic Lecture Note-taking this year.

nods

This one I use for my course at an English school I've been going to for ages.

That's why I've seen so many coursebooks. I use it at this school, at university, and when I was in high school they also used another series of coursebooks. So... I've lost count lol

Does the university still have an English pre-test to allow some freshmen be exempted from the English courses?

That's probably also behind my being probably overly confident in this matter when I talked about grammar

@DamkerngT. No, we had to take an English exam alright. But nobody is exempted.

The exemption is still in place in some other universities though, Thammasart, for example.

@Fantasier I think you have made a few good points. Though I think tagging is up to the community.

@Fantasier I see. I think it was because the resources weren't enough to support all the freshmen back then.

4:46 PM

I didn't know we can italicize tags. italicized-ha-ha-ha

@DamkerngT. The term used in the US appears to be "communicative teaching".

@DamkerngT. I know. I just do my best in debates :-)

That sounds really close to what I've read, I think. It's really close, but I feel like they use some other words.

Oh, I think it's called "audio-visual" method... or is it?

Sorry, how could I have skip that message?

I think audio-visual could be a sub-method in the methodology.

4:49 PM

I have an article discussing these methods somewhere...

@StoneyB Oh, yes! I think communicative is exactly the right word! It's just that they use the word "approach", i.e. "communicative approach".

Personally I think grammar-based can only get you to master writing/reading. We need more than that to be able to really use the language.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M closed this question I was trying to save: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/70596/….

I voted to reopen it.

@Fantasier That's true. However, I think the communicative approach seems like "not the real answer".

But of course, it has one big advantage: it's trying to teach students to "communicate".

@DamkerngT. True. A lot of my friends who used that approach ended up speaking what some people would consider "broken English."

nods

4:55 PM

They get their meanings across all right, but the morphosyntax is a mess.

That's a counter-argument against the approach.

In my day, grammar was the foundation of language instruction. You crammed grammar and read copiously - and at the end of a year you didn't really have to worry about it anymore, you'd appropriated it.

But hey, if you're going to use it just to communicate then I guess that's fine.

@Fantasier I wonder if the "speak-first" approach arose out of the communicative approach.

Absolutely it did.

4:58 PM

It's very popular recently, and it also has one big advantage: it's reasonable to expect the students to be able to "speak" in the second language.

nods

@DamkerngT. I do like "speak-first" approach though. It could work if the learners start really young. The younger they start, the more native-like they're going to be.

For older learners (like me), I think the approach should be combined with grammar teaching.

The problem is a) finding competent native speakers to speak to, and b) having something to say.

@Fantasier Yes, and we could have learners with reading/writing skills at only about as good as young people in their first language.

I've helped some people review master and doctoral theses; I lost count of my sighs.

Another possible counter-argument is that L2 could interfere with the native language.

@DamkerngT. Exactly. And it's not just SL/FL learners: native-speaker high-school students in the US come out never having been challenged to master the written standard.

The native language could become more L2-like, but perhaps it's unavoidable.

@StoneyB Indeed. I think people overlook the fact that we all need to learn to read/listen/speak/write in our first languages too!

5:06 PM

@DamkerngT. Yeah... I think I participated in a thesis on how English has affected my interpretation of Thai syntax.

@DamkerngT. That's a common fear, particularly among the languages that have recently escaped linguistic imperialism; but I think it's more politically than linguistically driven.

(I put I think there because I wasn't told what they were looking for when I took the test, but I can guess...)

The flip side is that the more you learn about other languages, the more deeply you understand your own -- that's certainly been my experience.

@StoneyB I think it could be both political and realistic. Sometimes I can tell right away whether a native speaker of Thai has studied in an international school before.

@StoneyB Happened to me too! Languages are always in contact and influence each other.

5:09 PM

@StoneyB I can feel that too! But I have to put my own effort into it, trying not to allow L1 and L2 leak into each other.

Fersher. English became what it is today by mugging other languages in dark alleys and stealing their stuff.

lol

Speaking of which, I saw this cartoon...

Hehe!

[That's a John Lawler joke]

user image

(From: facebook.com/sillylinguisticscomic/photos/…)

5:10 PM

lol

Interesting question is, in what language are those two speaking!?

lol

... running out of coffee and cigarettes: gotta run away and get my drug levels up. 'bye guys.

See you!

See you soon!

(I was away to check my side door. This one usually leaks when it rains heavily.)

Ah, I hate torrential rain. Happening every. single. day. now.

5:14 PM

Yes! Yesterday the water came through and one of my old document boxes was damaged! :-(

:-( I'm sorry.

It's all right! Those documents are from my old projects. The chance to use them again is slim to none. :-)

:-)

I should've emphasized old. :D

@DamkerngT. I'm amazed by your ability to guess the context... I found the original revision totally incomprehensible.

5:23 PM

I sometimes switch to use my good old chunk-based parsing technique. :P

It doesn't work every time, but sometimes it helps!

5:56 PM

The translation may reflects the "subjunctive inversion" in the original German: "Unentrinnbare Verpflichtung zur Selbstbeobachtung: Werde ich von jemandem andern beobachtet, muß ich mich natürlich auch beobachten, werde ich von niemandem sonst beobachtet, muß ich mich um so genauer beobachten." —Tagebücher 1910-1923, 1921, 7. November — StoneyB 3 hours ago

This is the best answer in that question, imho.

6:15 PM

Google Image makes the meaning of beobachten exceedingly clear.

Good evening!

@DamkerngT. - good evening!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

6:41 PM

Darn this cold! And I have two exams tomorrow. :/

9

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

I guess one of the best ways to get your message across is putting a TL;DR in the beginning. If you agree with the sentiments of the TL;DR the rest might not be necessary to read but if grammar has saved your life somewhere, bear with me so I'll tell you why it's not a good tag. So here goes: TL...

discussion tags tag-cleaning

Hey one more vote and I'll request for burnination.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Chemistry?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Guys I need your help: @Dam @Stoney @Copper should we first ask for grammar's death and then hold a retagging event?

@CopperKettle Math (probability) and geology.

Or more like, geology meta.

Ah. Probability is simple to solve in terms of pure math but it's hard to decide which formula to use.

With combinatorics and stuff.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

It relies heavily on being creative.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I'd like to maintain a neutral status relating to the matter, just like Switzerland in WWII. :-)

6:55 PM

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M nods

@DamkerngT. heh

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

There are a few simple formulas to begin with, with harder problems to solve.

@DamkerngT. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

:D

Good luck during the exams, Muhammad!

I'd better go catch z's.

Try to catch lots of them!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

REPEAT SAID:
Anything other than killing "grammar" will fail.

@CopperKettle Thanks!

@CopperKettle zzz

So wait, @Dam I first have to see your alternative solutions.

Was there anything other than

> 1. Clarify tag wiki.

?

6:58 PM

A solution to what problem? The grammar tag?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Yes.

Hmm... I wouldn't want to upset you.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Why would I be upset? I'm just trying to find a solution.

"Clarify tag wiki" will fail, for sure.

If you can see why "cats" and "dogs" each takes 1/3 of questions on Pets, you would understand why I don't think the tag itself is a real problem.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I'm going to ask for burnination, but I wanna first see other possible solutions.

7:01 PM

But the abuse of the tag is.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Is that so . . . Then they also need someone like me to remove those tags. Then again, prolly not, since I imagine their usefulness in searching.

cats doesn't mean anacondas or raccoon or fridge.

Right.

If I were a cat expert who wanted to answer all new cat questions on Pets, it'd be convenient for me to follow the tag "cats".

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Yes.

But the ELL god of grammar, @Stoney, admits he doesn't find any value in the tag.

It's up to him, imho.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I'm for full burnination. — StoneyB yesterday

7:05 PM

But what if we had another user who wanted to answer all new grammar questions?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Still wondering what this discussion is after our only grammar dupehammer says he doesn't like it.

@DamkerngT. What are grammar questions? OK, wait, what are grammar questions?

It's like saying "what if we had someone who wants to answer an ELL question?" :D

Those questions that are not about reading, listening, speaking, writing, or vocabulary.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. But the tag isn't being treated as such.

Right. That's why I'm fine with whatever we choose to do.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Back to square one, what options do we have other than burnination and editing tag wiki?

7:08 PM

I think we have not many choices to do. In a way, it's similar to our title edit event.

It's not that because our titles are bad, we won't use titles anymore.

We chose to improve them.

Rather painfully, I'd say.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Sort of, yeah.

Because the improvement relies upon only a handful of users who help edit them.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Exactly, and bad ones still pop up. I added a FAQ and that was all I could do. I can't write a FAQ for a tag!

Questions can be without grammar. Questions can't be without titles.

Not that I'm saying I would've removed them if I could, but my point is these two are different.

So, I'd just go with the flow. :D

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

To my dismay, only an SE dev can burninate a tag, so we have to step on their toe carefully.

So burninate it is. Hides from @Fanta

7:15 PM

In a perfect world, we'd've had a compendium of tags and tagging.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Back to square -1, should we first hold up a TRE or feature-request grammar's burnination?

At the moment, I can see that we still step on each other's toe when it comes to tagging and retagging.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Precisely, because we don't have a clear consensus on what a tag should be.

A logical question is, if we don't have grammar, then what else that we should use?

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Exactly!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

verb is a bad tag, because it can be misinterpreted and be applied to questions where its value would be lost.

yesterday, by snailboat

My fear of tornadoes is one I don't really want to get over, though. I consider it a perfectly rational fear. :-)

Smileys look terrifying on the star board.

@DamkerngT. I'm still looking for a missing tag that "grammar" currently covers.

7:19 PM

Could you expand on that a bit more?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

And BTW, ELL's TCE and chem's TRE have given me some exp. so this TRE will have better UX. :)

@DamkerngT. I mean, all of the questions tagged with grammar currently can be tagged with one of its subsets. There aren't any missing tags, not that I've seen.

I think Chem is different from Lang.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

The process was crudely the same.

Taxonomy would be the easiest stack when it comes to tagging.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Hey, after we get rid of this tag, I promise I'll become an avid editor, or at least an avid retagger.

7:21 PM

(If there were such a stack.)

TIA!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

I haven't analyzed Bio's set of tags.

@Dam, I have a message, and I'll ask you to pin it. Will you?

Post it away.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

We're going to hold up a chat event to retag at least ~1.7k questions. What should its frequency be? e.g. once a week

@Dam ^

Okay.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ

7:24 PM

:D

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

While you're at it, @Dam @Stoney please gimme your ideas on that.

I think StoneyB may finish it within a week or so. :-)

A suggestion: 1) Work vigorously to retag all QQ that now bear the tag 2) Leave the tag in place to act as a flag for retaggers: "Please retag this question to reflect the actual grammar issue involved" 3) Add a tag label saying something like "Use this tag when you know a grammatical issue is involved but don't know what issue is involved."

@DamkerngT. I will finish retagging the questions I have answered in a couple of weeks .. I'm nearly down to 400 now, having started with 570 or so.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Chem's TRE is once a week, but there's not an urgent need for a buttload of retags, so it's fine. Furthermore, some people there use the active tab, so they don't want it flushed out often. But people on ELL seems less sensitive to the active tab.

@StoneyB Yay!

7:31 PM

[RESUMING] The ptb may grumble about our permitting what's basically a meta-tag, so let's not talk to them.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@StoneyB Then we should at least have it on one question, since a tag applied to no questions gets removed after 24 hours.

So it could be faster (and less work for you) if we have more people helping.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@StoneyB I believe the new tagging system I/we am/are working on solely depends on usefulness in searching.

Hence, verb is bad, gerund is almost good. O.o

@StoneyB (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ But I still think organization works good here. Proof: TRE stats on chem.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I actually use it, but I now know what else I could use.

@DamkerngT. Keep in mind, though, that my 570 were only about 11 or 12% of the total.

TRE?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

7:34 PM

The best thing about this TRE is badges!

14

Q: The Great Retagging Event - Episode 1: The one-taggers

The next TRE will be held at 16:30 UTC on October 16th. What good is in working so much on cleaning tags if they're not applied to questions? I thought, we should do something extraordinary. Oh no The Retagging Event (TRE) Rationale Editing questions bumps them up; and somehow surprisingl...

discussion featured tags retagging chat-event

Perhaps invite folks to do what I'm doing: retag questions to which they have supplied answers. Give em a sense of personal responsibility AND give em QQ they understand AND give them an opportunity to push their pet terminologies.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@StoneyB I don't think introducing new tags without a meta post should happen.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Somebody write a self-answered question on "What do we mean by 'grammar'?"

put the grammar tag on that

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@StoneyB Not me, I still have two meta Q's in mind.

Haha!

Oh wait, you meant seriously?

Good suggestion.

Of course. You don't even have to answer it. Just collect half a dozen totally incompatible definitions and list them.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

7:41 PM

So it's 3 meta posts then.

And you can spend the next month girding up your loins to take on the real monster meaning!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Stoney I'm going to make that post, flag for CW status, and ask on meta "please contribute to the 'what is grammar' post" and explain in the meta post what our decision on grammar is.

I still have unfinished business of my own: the passive voice.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

(/¯◡ ‿ ◡)/¯ ~ ┻━┻

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