Language Overflow - 2016-03-13

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12:34 AM

@snailboat I remember I have seen it sometimes back on Twitter, may be. I can't recall for sure. That time I took it for a mistake. And considering there are many such "slip of finger" mistakes people make in online social networks, I didn't give it much thought. :-)

I really can't guess what that even is doing there.

It sounds like quantum particles are talking :D The particle is at a time at one place and at the same time he made it's presence at other place. If he speaks that sentence I would assume that he is sure about his one location, but not about his second, and by that sentence he is asking the location :-)

Anonymous

1:09 AM

@Man_From_India I've seen it too often for it to be a "slip of the finger". It tends to be with younger speakers, too, which supports the idea that it's an innovation.

I really can't make out of the meaning that even makes there?

To my ears it really sounds like the one I mentioned in my quantum particle example. In normal situation that sort of thing is too unlikely. In ancient folklore in India I sometimes heard that there are some sadhus who could actually be on two different places at the same time. And in those situations that usage is possible. But it's not normal, not real, and only restricted to imaginary situations or mostly restricted to dreams. So what does it actually mean?

Anonymous

1:42 AM

@Man_From_India Well, it doesn't change the basic meaning. I think in this case it's a colloquial way of adding emphasis.

Anonymous

I can't explain it very well, though, I'm afraid!

Anonymous

(Cue Jim Reynolds telling me not to be afraid again :-)

Emphasis to am or emphasis on the place, where?

Anonymous

Well, conventionally, even would precede the element it focuses.

@snailboat Why? Did he become vegetarian? lol

Anonymous

1:44 AM

This even is new territory for me, though.

Anonymous

@Man_From_India Whenever I use the grammaticalized I'm afraid (that) construction, Jim Reynolds seems to think it's strange.

Anonymous

But I think it sounds normal.

@snailboat And when it is Jim who tells not to be afraid I think that he is tired of eating humans :P

Anonymous

Well!

:-)

Anonymous

1:46 AM

I, um, certainly hope he doesn't eat any humans here in Language Overflow. :-)

Umm actually because no one till now got trapped in his fishnet. hehe.

4 hours later…

5:21 AM

What's that funny thing on the carpet?

Anonymous

I don't know, what is it?

5:42 AM

Hmm... curious. Very curious!

@snailboat Oh, I think V.V. meant your hamster!

An impressive list of references! :-) — snailboat 8 hours ago

Agreed.

I'm not sure about Encyclopedic Graded Grammar, though. (I ran into it once on Google Books, and I'm not sure. Some parts of it seem to be very resembling to other sources.)

Anonymous

Oh! The hamster girl? :-)

Yay for the hamster girl!

Anonymous

I have never heard of that book.

It looks like it just came out of nowhere some years ago.

The writing style in its preface is quite interesting, iirc.

Sounds like ... adverb? How? — Maulik V ♦ 19 hours ago

I have never been confused like that. I still think it's an adverb John. — Sara Naseem 19 hours ago

The comments (the whole thread) remind me that those who know are probably not always the best helpers.

Unless they can see things the way those who do not know see.

And unless they can take those who do not know from there.

Anyway, even a simple sentence such as She stays there can cause a long debate.

I wish we had a better answer. Sadly, I don't think I can write a good one myself.

Ah, I ran into this word again! shamrock

Your fragment doesn't sound like a likely sequence to me.Can you give a more complete context and intended meaning? Google Books records no instances of the education is on history (or the same with in). I won't bother searching for the same for maths (which would normally be math in AmE), but I'm sure it won't be much different. — FumbleFingers yesterday

Interesting!

have a X education in Z sounds natural enough to me.

Perhaps I share some features with InE speakers in this respect. (It seems like most of those who write had a X education in Z in Google Books are InE speakers. And those who write received a X education in Z are probably from Eastern Europe.)

Hmm...

the first example of "an education in science" looks good:

> and only a tiny proportion of headteachers of schools had an education in science.

Anonymous

6:08 AM

People learn only the most basic functions each kind of word can have and get confused when they encounter things that don't fit the simplified frameworks they have in their heads.

@snailboat nods -- Particularly when the framework was taught in a vague way.

So I guess there are only two reasonable choices: back out, or go deeper.

6:20 AM

17

A: Put your hands "in" or "into" your pockets?

As per this Cambridge Dictionaries page, We use in to talk about where something is in relation to a larger area around it: A: Where’s Jane? B: She’s in the garden. I’ve left my keys in the car. We use into to talk about the movement of something, usually with...

There's an interesting assertion in the answer.

> However, even with a verb like put, some additional context can favor the use of one preposition over the other:
- I put my hands in/into my pockets to keep them warm.
- Slowly, he put his hand into his pocket and snuck out a folding knife.
In the second example, we're placing emphasis on the movement of the hand, so into appears to be more appropriate than just in.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Hey, the downvote on my meta question on EL&U disappeared! :-)

Anonymous

Now it's at an even 40. I'm happy.

@snailboat Yay!

Anonymous

I like round numbers.

Hehe! I guess round numbers are popular!

"Jack has lived in New York" means Jack is still living in NY since "has" is the present tense. If you want to make this past tense then "Jack had lived in New York." With had it isn't clear if living in NY was in distant past or recent past. If he recently moved then "Jack had lived in New York, but he just moved here." — MaxW 4 hours ago

IIRC, MaxW is a native speaker.

The comment makes me wonder about his dialect.

Anonymous

6:29 AM

It's not a matter of dialect. Probably a failure of contextualization.

Anonymous

> Jack has lived in New York for two years now.

Anonymous

Jack still lives in New York.

Anonymous

> Jack has lived in New York, Paris, and London, but now he lives in Berlin.

Anonymous

Jack no longer lives in New York.

Nice examples!

Anonymous

6:31 AM

The unified feature the perfect expresses is the current state as a result of something in the past. One type of current state is the experiential state; Jack has the experiences of living in each of those places, even though he's no longer in any of them.

Anonymous

If MaxW is a native speaker, he's just failed to think the possibilities through to their logical conclusion. It's an easy sort of mistake to make.

Anonymous

When we see a string of words, we don't naturally think of every possible way it could be interpreted in any context. That's a very unnatural action, in fact.

nods -- It looks like MaxW never mentioned his first language, so it must be my impression, reading his posts and comments.

Anonymous

It's like trying to come up with a list of all the letters of the alphabet out of order. You know all the letters, but it's still not a natural task for the brain.

Anonymous

I'm a native speaker (American English, not real English) // (1) I'm almost 21. (2) I'm nearly 21. (3) I'll be 21 in June (It's feb now...). — MaxW Feb 13 at 16:51

Anonymous

6:35 AM

So MaxW is a native speaker of American English but hasn't studied linguistics.

A-ha!

My alternate version of the task: given a set of a few letters in an alphabet, can we come up with the letter that would be "in the exact middle" of the set right away?

Let's see if I can: e z p x d s

I can't!

Anonymous

P!

Anonymous

Aw, it was O.

Hey, you're good at it!

Anonymous

Well, O would have been in the exact middle of D and Z if it were a choice.

Anonymous

6:37 AM

Not exactly what you asked :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I have number values for each letter memorized.

Oh!

I can remember only a few. (And I think you can guess which ones. :-)

Anonymous

I think the key to solving that sort of problem rapidly is some sort of advance preparation.

nods

We're very well prepared for real speech in our first languages. :-)

Anonymous

MaxW's comment isn't quite right. There are multiple types of perfects, and an experiential interpretation does not imply that Jack still lives there. Compare: ① "Jack has lived in New York for two years now." Jack still lives in New York. ② "Jack has lived in New York, Paris, and London, but now he lives in Berlin." Jack no longer lives in New York. — snailboat 10 secs ago

Anonymous

6:42 AM

I turned my chat messages into a comment.

Yay!

Hmm... come to think of it, I think I can turn my little task into a demonstration hinting at how we encode information in our brains.

We have only two users on ELL that passed 2k without getting downvoted: data.stackexchange.com/ell/query/449361?minrep=2000

Anonymous

Hey, Chemistry has four.

Anonymous

Notably, all six so far are low rep users.

Hullo @Dam @Snail, good [some time of the day, or night]

Anonymous

6:45 AM

Good $TIME, @IͶΔ!

Let's make the task simpler. The list always has 5 elements, and the answer (the middle element) is always chosen from the list. -- I think we're all faster with numbers than with letters.

Good morternoon!

Anonymous

English.SE appears to have none.

Anonymous

English.SE does have some rather aggressive downvoters.

It seems this trend applies to users who don't engage in site activities often.

Anonymous

Japanese.SE has three!

6:47 AM

They just come and go, and post something every once in a while.

E.g., pick the middle element (in the value order): A = {7 3 4 8 2}, B = {e c p m x}

Close voters on larger sites get many downvotes.

Anonymous

I think this particular example actually took me the same amount of time.

@snailboat Oh!

Anonymous

I don't think people downvote my posts because I close vote.

6:48 AM

What sites are you close voting in?

Anonymous

Just the ones where I participate.

Anonymous

Japanese.SE, ELL.SE, English.SE.

That's weird. Maybe 'cause ELU OP's relatively rarely check back their question.

Anonymous

I know I get downvotes in bad faith sometimes, but I imagine the majority of downvotes I get are from people who legitimately disagree with my answers or think my questions are bad. Stuff like that.

Adverb of an adverb freaks me out.

Anonymous

6:50 AM

I think it's the -ly -ly that freaks you out.

Anonymous

Very slowly probably doesn't have the same effect, does it?

@IͶΔ What about this? This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticizing concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating.

Anonymous

I gave up 3 words in.

@DamkerngT. Nah man, I loving -ing.

Haha!

6:51 AM

Though I'm pretty used to reading something I don't understand.

Anonymous

There's a thingy called the double -ing constraint.

They taught me how to read at 4.

@IͶΔ I'm not sure if you take it as a good thing. :P

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. @IͶΔ lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/gerund-participles.pdf

Well, I started reading. And I never understood them.

@snailboat I think I've downloaded that three times since you linked it to me.

6:53 AM

@snailboat Actually, your comment makes me feel like hunting for a long -ly sentence. :-)

There are stuff I understand now that I've read 10 years ago.

@snailboat Oh, *Terry was starting reading aloud is ungrammatical? Hmm...

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Terry was starting to read aloud.

Anonymous

Terry started reading aloud.

Ahh, so that's what this is all about! Ahh, so that's what "hybridization" meant. Ahh, so that's what they call "loose".

Anonymous

6:55 AM

*Terry was starting reading aloud.

I know that starting to read is normal, but to say that starting reading is wrong was unexpected.

I'm DejaVuing righting nowing.

Anonymous

There's no double -ly constraint, but two words in a row with that shape can sound a bit clumsy.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. But it's not just to V vs V-ing as a matter of complementation. Started reading is okay.

@snailboat Am all about clumsy.

Anonymous

6:57 AM

@IͶΔ And diary drop!

Sadly, D language already exists.

D what?

D programming language.

Dang language?

Oh.

Anonymous

There's even more than one language named D.

7:05 AM

Is E occupied too?

Anonymous

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems. DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments...

Anonymous

@IͶΔ It's safe to assume all the letters are occupied. Luckily, you can multiply occupy them.

Anonymous

I'm trying to be precise lately about using diary drop or conversational deletion only when I'm talking about the relevant kind of left-edge deletion, rather than using either term as general.

Anonymous

I think the two have to be distinguished since they don't result in the same set of strings.

Anonymous

They also occur in different registers.

7:14 AM

Oh, I thought you were talking about some kind of diet!

Anonymous

> Am all about clumsy.

Anonymous

My mother writes her emails like this. She leaves out her sentence-initial first person pronouns.

Anonymous

It's how she wrote letters on paper, too.

Anonymous

The same left-edge deletion is characteristic of the diary register, hence the name "diary drop".

Ahh

I read diary as dairy, really!

Silly me. :P

Anonymous

7:16 AM

Dairy drop! Get that lactose outta yer diet!

The most familiar example is probably "Been there, done that".

@snailboat Yes! That's what I thought!

Anonymous

I've been working on a sustainable diet, but I don't really have an ideal source of calcium. I've been taking calcium supplements.

Anonymous

I don't consume dairy very often.

BTW, is the "sun outage" global?

Anonymous

Um. Is the sun out of order? 'Cause that sounds worrisome.

7:19 AM

Probably global

@snailboat It's happening now over here.

It's disrupting our TV broadcasting a couple minutes every an hour or two.

Anonymous

Hmm, the sun does seem to be on the fritz. There's some kind of planet in the way and I can't see it :-(

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh! Is that what you mean? I didn't know how to interpret "sun outage" until now :-)

@snailboat It's a weird expression, if we read it word-by-word, isn't it?!

Hi, I couldn't recognize the fluffy animal. She is big.

Anonymous

swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/geomagnetic-storms

Anonymous

7:21 AM

@V.V. She is big! For a hamster.

Anonymous

About the size of my hand :-)

I like your pictures.

Anonymous

Thank you!

Anonymous

Here's a snail peeking out from under a leaf:

Anonymous

user image

7:23 AM

I hope she feels fine under the leaf!

Wondering how heavy a leaf is to a snail.

Anonymous

Think of a snail like a little bulldozer. They snail about, pushing whatever they want out of their way :-) They're a lot stronger than you'd think.

Anonymous

Although I tend to think of them as miniature land zeppelins.

2

Hehe!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Did I send you a copy of Weir 2012 a while back?

I'm not sure, but I googled for diary drop and found Weir's paper.

Not sure if it's the same paper.

Anonymous

7:26 AM

Oh, good!

Oh, this one is weir2009.pdf.

Anonymous

Oh.

Anonymous

Which paper is that?

Subject pronoun drop in informal English

Anonymous

I noticed Weir 2012 wasn't available online, but I thought I remembered sharing it on ELL chat before.

Anonymous

7:28 AM

Left-edge deletion in English and subject omission in diaries (Weir 2012)

Anonymous

I just used a time machine to bring a paper back from 2102 to 2012.

It's not on this computer. Maybe you shared it not recently. (It could still be on my old computer if I've downloaded it.)

Thanks for the paper!

Anonymous

The paper discusses both the written and spoken forms of left-edge deletion and contrasts the two to some extent.

Anonymous

Weir notes that the distribution is different in the written and spoken cases.

I guess the diary drop would sound odd in writing, most of the time.

Anonymous

7:31 AM

He doesn't refer to it as a kind of left-edge deletion, but uses the term subject drop.

Anonymous

Hence diary drop, since one of the registers it characteristically appears in is the diary register.

He even used subject pronoun drop (SPD) in his 2009 paper.

Hey, the contents are almost identical!

(Especially the examples)

Anonymous

Ooh, I didn't have to upload the paper. He has it on his website.

Anonymous

folk.ntnu.no/andrewww/papers.html

Anonymous

I thought that if it was on the web, Google Scholar would have indexed it.

7:34 AM

I feel like I'm reading two revisions of the source code of a program!

Anonymous

He suggests on his website reading the 2012 paper instead.

nods

Anonymous

I guess I'll zap that link I uploaded, then . . .

Anonymous

Or wait, I'll replace it with a link to his website :-)

Anonymous

I'm glad I have magical infinite editing powers.

7:35 AM

:D

Anonymous

I'm re-reading this paper now.

Anonymous

> Deletions of similar elements in written English cannot receive exactly the same analysis, as the surface distribution is different. In particular, such deletions are not strictly left-edge phenomena, as deletions in the spoken case are.

Anonymous

> I have suggested that, at least in the case of ‘diary drop’, there may be a possibility of extending the phonological analysis proposed for spoken English to the written case, while accounting for the differences in the surface distribution of the phenomenon by appealing to independent evidence for a sentence-medial position for modifiers in written English.

Anonymous

So perhaps I should stop using "left-edge deletion" as a general term for the two, even though subject drop in these written registers is typically at the left edge.

Anonymous

Which I guess leaves me using left-edge deletion and conversational deletion as terms for describing the stripping of material from the beginning of a sentence in spoken English and written registers that directly reflect spoken language (as in chat).

7:41 AM

Hmm... if it's not only about left-edge...

medial...

Ahh... written diary.

Anonymous

7:57 AM

Speeding is illegal. But many people do it and only a few people are punished for it. Killing is "very illegal". The police will look hard to find you if you kill someone. So the usage has more to do with how likely you are to be pursued. — user1663987 1 hour ago

Anonymous

This comment is very close to my intuition about the phrase.

Anonymous

@user1663987 If you posted that as an answer, I'd upvote it! :-) — snailboat 29 secs ago

Anonymous

Carrot attempt #1.

:D

Anonymous

My whole body hates me today. I pushed myself a bit past my comfort zone while exercising.

8:03 AM

Aww

Yesterday was MAR, now it's you.

Anonymous

I tried to "sprint" on the rowing machine and shaved 30 seconds off my 2000 meter time! Success! But at what cost!? :-)

Some muscle aches? :-)

Anonymous

I also tried upping my weights.

Anonymous

But with fewer reps.

Anonymous

My arms are stunned that I would do such a thing. Why!? They demand to know.

8:05 AM

They'll become stronger in a few days. :D

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It's really not that bad. Actually, for some reason I sort of like the feeling. But I'm exhausted! :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It seems really hard to build muscle.

How 'bout some Gatorade? (Just kidding :-)

Anonymous

Oh no! Empty calories!

Anonymous

I had some of that "protein plus" pasta today, and some rice, and a protein shake.

Anonymous

8:09 AM

And two bananas!

Anonymous

So I actually had lots of carbs.

Nice! Bananas are packed with energy, too!

Anonymous

I guess I'm eating a lot of processed food. That protein shake is processed, too :-) But it's hard to get enough protein without eating meat all the time.

I guess you have lots of beans.

Or soy anything! :-)

Anonymous

Oh, my diet used to have a lot of soy when I was a vegetarian! It still does to some extent.

Anonymous

8:12 AM

I still eat a lot of the same foods I ate then.

Have you tried salmon yet?

Anonymous

I went to the Japanese market but they had California Proposition 65 labels on all the nori, so I decided not to buy any right then. So I figured I'd look it up later.

Anonymous

So I don't have the ingredients to make the sushi rolls yet.

(BTW, be careful with the knife if you're exhausted and feel like making some sushi.)

Ahh

Anonymous

I can always appreciate a good warning about knife safety :-)

8:15 AM

trying to find some info about California Proposition 65...

Anonymous

ksl.com/?sid=27711857

Anonymous

> Take Coke and Pepsi, for example. Manufacturers recently changed their caramel coloring to avoid the Prop 65 label even though the FDA had said before the changes it would take more than 1,000 cans of pop a day to reach doses shown to lead to cancer in mice.

Thanks!

Anonymous

> In California the labels are posted in bars, restaurants, coffee shops, schools, apartment buildings and on scores of products. Critics said the label is so overused, it has lost its effect of warning people of legitimate dangers.

Anonymous

But which chemical is it? I wonder :-)

Anonymous

8:17 AM

oehha.ca.gov/prop65/prop65_list/files/P65single120415.pdf

Must be a long list. :-)

Anonymous

So I didn't get anything while I was there except a new set of nuribashi and a bag of loose sencha.

Anonymous

If I buy bags of green tea at the local market, it's $3 for 20 bags of tea. But at the Japanese market, I get about 70 cups worth of loose tea for $3.

Sounds like a bargain!

Anonymous

I love going there. I wish the local Japanese bookstore was bigger, though.

Anonymous

8:20 AM

We have a nice Japanese bookstore in the area, but I have to go all the way up to San Francisco.

Anonymous

I end up ordering a lot of books instead :-)

:D

Anonymous

You'd be proud of me, @JimReynolds. Are you lurking somewhere out there? :-)

Anonymous

I'm really quite weak but I'm doing weights anyway :-)

> Amid the criticism, the film picked up an enthusiastic following, particularly among female sci-fi fans who have embraced the film with the general attitude of: "This movie is garbage, but it's OUR garbage!

Wow!

Anonymous

8:26 AM

Haha!

Anonymous

Now that's faint praise.

BTW, Google knew what I was looking for by just typing jup!

@snailboat Hehe!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. I haven't seen that movie, but I do remember talking about it to my friends (who I suppose would count themselves as female sci-fi fans).

Anonymous

They told me the movie made very little sense.

Haha! I think she was right! :-)

I find that movies in the last two years are somewhat different. Sometimes I can't even make up my mind whether I like it or not. (Just like this one.) I think it could be a good way to relate to or to understand how people in the current generations think.

But the feeling of "it's different" is rather strong.

Project Almanac; The Predestination; Men, Women & Children; Jupiter Ascending are the strongest.

> "Women don't always want superhuman robots to look up to. We want to be the same klutzy nobody who is cosseted and petted and told we're special – despite all evidence to the contrary," she wrote.

Sounds like the key to a handful of blockbusters in the last five years or so.

1 hour later…

9:39 AM

Lee Sedol has won one game!

@CowperKettle Pfft. AI is doomed to fail if it has "Google" written anywhere on it.

@Snail I'm becoming more and more like you

. . . in hating HNQ.

9:56 AM

@IͶΔ Sorry, I'm being busy.

@CowperKettle Uh, you didn't need to post that message then. ^^'

It's like chatting and saying "I can't chat".

Anonymous

@IͶΔ But HNQ is where I get all my upvotes! :-)

That's why I hate it. (/¯◡ ‿ ◡)/¯ ~ ┻━┻

Anonymous

ELL doesn't have enough voting from ELL users. We let the HNQians vote for us.

Anonymous

They hail from the land of Hnqia.

10:01 AM

Yeah.

Heh.

Good afternoon, @snailboat!

The land of Hitandquitia.

Reminds of "Terabithia", a good movie.

Anonymous

Good afternoon!

I really should be reading some stuff... d'oh.

Anonymous

Remind too needs an overt object, at least in this use. Reminds me of…

10:16 AM

@CowperKettle A movie yet to see in full for me.

@CowperKettle Yay for the humanity!

@DamkerngT. Is that sarcasm, a call of desperation, mocking your stupid cousin, or what?

@IͶΔ Well, it's like the last sparkling light of humanity, so it's worth being cherished for. :-)

@DamkerngT. Oh. Is the guy gonna play the next round with you?

He has to win my cousin first. :P

Hmm... people use lots of related phrases: 10000-foot, 20000-foot, 30000-foot, 50000-foot view.

But which one is the best one?

Fox tossing (German: Fuchsprellen) was a popular competitive blood sport in parts of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, which involved throwing live foxes and other animals high into the air. It was practiced by members of the aristocracy in an enclosed patch of ground or in a courtyard, using slings with a person on each end to catapult the fox upwards. It was particularly popular for mixed couples, though it was hazardous for both the tossed animals and the people launching them. Sometimes the terrified animals would turn on the participants, and the outcome for the tossed animals was usually...

O_O

10:27 AM

Huh?

> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
> This is not just standard fanboyism; it reflects the fact that when you ask people to choose a style or design that they prefer, unless they are trained, they will generally choose the one that looks most familiar.

It's old, but it's still good to read.

That sounds familiar...

> “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong, every single time.”
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3227536-when-people-have-the-freedom-to-choose-they-choose-wrong

11:29 AM

I think We're all in the same boat may work, but it has a different connotation from your "wet and dry will burn together" if I understand you correctly. — Damkerng T. 3 mins ago

It's hard to translate a proverb without shifting the meaning a bit.

I think Justice is blind! would work, too.

Dura lex sed lex

Or something inventive, like, No one can escape the mile.

A tad bit connected.

@DamkerngT. No change in meaning, but change in connotation.

nods

Yah

11:32 AM

Nice Latin, BTW.

Nah, it's just one of the few stuff I actually know. :)

WAIT A MINUTE AND HALF

That proverb is Persian.

It seems so.

We have a nice new meta post.

12:27 PM

1

Q: an English proverb meaning "the good suffer with the bad"

In my native language, when we want to describe a situation in which a group of people suffer a special consequence regardless of how they performed or whether they deserve that or not, we say "(When fire comes,) wet and dry will burn together" meaning it doesn't matter whether there are dead bra...

translation proverbs

A nice question. I'll read the answers then they come.

I can recall only the expression "give no quarter".

@CowperKettle Hey, we have a discussion about this above.

Ah, sorry, indeed you have.

Collective punishment

Collective punishment is a form of retaliation whereby a suspected perpetrator's family members, friends, acquaintances, sect, neighbors or entire ethnic group is targeted. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment to retaliate against and deter attacks on their forces by Resistance movements (e...

Quotes about punishment:

goodreads.com/quotes/tag/punishment

"indiscriminate punishment proverb" brings up nothing

"making no distinction proverb" too

I found an opposite expression

Blackstone's formulation

In criminal law, Blackstone's formulation (also known as Blackstone's ratio or the Blackstone ratio) is the principle that: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", ...as expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. Historically, the details of the ratio have varied, but the message that government and the courts must err on the side of innocence has remained constant. == Historic expressions of the principle == The principle is much older than Blackstone's formulation, being...

This one:

err on the side of

Verb: err on the side of

(idiomatic, transitive) To behave in a manner which favours or which is biased toward.
1849, James Fenimore Cooper, The Sea Lions, ch. 15:
Every man would prefer that the woman in whom he feels an interest should err on the side of bigotry rather than on that of what is called liberalism in points of religious belief.
1893, George Gissing, The Odd Women, ch. 13:
You tend to err on the side of severity.

(6 more not shown…)

Maybe we can say "I will err on the side of guilt".

> 1893, George Gissing, The Odd Women, ch. 13:
You tend to err on the side of severity.

Maybe the teacher might also say "I will err on the side of severity". — CowperKettle 14 secs ago

user image

A great photo of a @snail

12:55 PM

@CowperKettle @Snail or someone else posted it a while ago in this chat.

@IͶΔ I thought so too. It's beautiful enough to have been known to Snails.

1:12 PM

TIL a new expression (to me): got nothing on you

3 hours later…

4:05 PM

> It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down.
He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop.
`'Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark,
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark.'

@Man_From_Ironbark how does Sydney look like?

4:32 PM

It's very sad that I have to bear articles like this under analysis on ELL. :(

5:04 PM

I feel that sometimes. Our users seem to read all sort of stuff. It could be depressing at times.

5:19 PM

@IͶΔ I did a hasty walkthrough in this article, but failed to grasp why it's so horrible. It's just right-left bickering in the UK.

Full of "isms", so it's hard to understand what the writer exactly meant to say.

2 hours later…

7:06 PM

Just saw Zootopia and my god the subtext is so deep at so many levels my head is spinning. This is like animated Citizen Kane

Tweeted by codinghorror on March 12, 2016 at 1:42 AM

I kinda had that hunch when watching its trailer.

BTW, about human vs. computer at Go...

The lesson we learned last week was crystal clear. Humans need to get better at playing Go.

Tweeted by davepell on March 12, 2016 at 8:41 PM

7:18 PM

user image

3 hours later…

Anonymous

10:43 PM

0

A: British equivalent of "Can I get a ... "

Firstly, let me point out that is should be written as Can I getta...? which is asking about the possibility of having something, possibly in a particular way. The BrE equivalents might be Please could I have... Could I please have... I would like to have... Would it be possible ...

Anonymous

Is should be written getta? Really?

Anonymous

The generally low quality of participation on ELL today is frustrating. I'm going to go do other things.

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