English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

11:01 AM

purloined, scampering, wuthering, frisson, jaundiced, spendthrift, plus other references.

I feel like I'm reading one the Economist’s Leaders.

Shouldn't we discourage contributors from quoting long extracts from Wikipedia? Anyone can do that. If it's absolutely necessry to refer to Wikipedia at all, a link will suffice.

Andrew Grimm

@BarrieEngland which post is this referring to?

tchrist

Is this a General Reference case then?

Barrie England

There's this recent one: english.stackexchange.com/questions/90084/…

But it happens quite a lot.

tchrist

It is faster and easier for them to quote at length than to digest and summarize.

Andrew Grimm

11:06 AM

A link without any quoting is bad.

tchrist

But answers that can be met with a single link to a standard Internet references are indeed answers to General Reference questions.

You don’t want just a link; that is virtually always Not An Answer.

Andrew Grimm

A mixture of answering the question, and quoting from Wikipedia doesn't seem to be bad to me.

Barrie England

@tchrst: Exactly. As I said, anyone can do it.

tchrist

Well, and anyone could answer that question. It is not like it is not very generally known. I am pretty sure it is been raised before, and answered before. It may even have been GR-closed before.

user19161

One should summarize the answer and link to the site in such a case.

tchrist

11:10 AM

9

Q: Origins of possessive pronouns

If apostrophe + s is the acceptable way of denoting a genitive in English, is it possible that possessive pronouns, such as hers, ours and yours, started life as possessive adjectives with apostrophe + s? E.g. her's, our's, your's, their's? Perhaps, even his' ? Its and my obviously stick out fro...

That one is more pronoun-related than noun-, but still.

> Two uninspiring candidates, one Americans had fallen out of love with, one they could not fall in love with, one who had lost his narrative, one who offered a narrative with Janus faces and contradictory and occluded positions.

Surely she will trigger questions today. :)

Probably about Janus mutual funds. :(

Andrew Grimm

She has binders full of questions!

tchrist

Now this is an unfortunate metaphor, thrice over:

> Voting for either man seems a shot in the dark.

Andrew Grimm

@tchrist Not unless Dick Cheney was one of the candidates.

tchrist

We have a dark-skinned candidate. And one shouldn’t use shooting lingo around would-be targets of such.

Dr Strangelove has a new heart, you know. He even supports his lesbian daughter now.

> If we know him, why were we so stunned at his crimped, self-destructive performance in the first debate, when the man usually so in control of his emotions could not contain his contempt that he was expected to justify himself while this superrich, superphony, supercilious Republican dauphin stared at him with a smarmy smile?

Let’s play the Sesame Street game, one of these things doesn’t belong together.

But I do like her use of dauphin.

Andrew Grimm

@tchrist the one that's the "real" word?

tchrist

11:17 AM

The third of her superwords isn’t like the first two.

Way-rich, way-phony, and way-eyebrowed? I think not.

Andrew Grimm

Supercilious is a real word, unlike the first two.

tchrist

Oh, she has a coiner’s licence. And I’ve heard superrich before.

OED has things like superweak.

> David Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed medium, strained to paint the president as filled with vigor, telling reporters in Lima, Ohio, that Obama’s exhilaration “is coming from his loins.” Twitter users quickly dubbed the president the Loin King.

You think that loinking was something almost as wicked at boinking.

She ends by calling him President Spock. I guess President Tuvok would have been lost on the crowd.

But at least the skin color would have matched better.

Maybe we shouldn’t have reëlections, given how all presidencies, save one or two alone, always fall apart in their second terms.

The two exceptions I was thinking of are Washington and the second Roosevelt.

And I say this having voted for second terms for both Clinton and Obama. And Carter, for that matter, for all the good it did.

RegDwighт

1:05 PM

1

Q: How formal should the English in a personal blog be?

I'm starting a technology and/or programming oriented blog, and I was wondering how formal should the English be, specially when it comes to the shortening of words like "let's". Ideas?

formality

Wow. An upvote, two answers, no votes to close.

So this is what it's come to.

tchrist

1:43 PM

I was researching.

Something else.

Just spent a couple hours poring through this on “modally marked forms” plus a hundred pages both fore and aft, for Matt Ellen.

I see we have no defective tag. No, I am not saying we need it. Just thinking. There are a couple dozen hits, but many are false positives on defective merchandise.

@RegDwighт Actually, I see that it is much worse than just that.

Happy get-up-early day to all.

Shakespeare used the word egma in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “No egma, no riddle, no l’envoy; no salve in the mail, sir.”

Thus giving rise to the famed egma–smegma conundrum.

There are no other words in English that begin with egm-.

Today I have learned that the Coptics choose their pope via sortition. That’ll teach ’em.

Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey might be more amusing.

I need OCR for Cyrillic.

I am amused that Americans have zeebras where Britons have zedbras.

tchrist

3:04 PM

@Reg Don’t you have one of your new tag categories for this sort of thing?

0

Q: Negatives with a or any

Are these sentences both correct or not ? There isn't a cat in the kitchen. There isn't any cat in the kitchen.

grammaticality

tchrist

4:04 PM

@Reg Ok, I agree: Sunday is officially crapday on ELU.

-1

Q: American or Britsh . What's the difference?

What is the main difference between Amercian English and British English ?

meaning

Somebody please add the fifth close vote to this before the other four expire, so that we can delete it:

0

Q: "At the moment" vs. "in the moment"

I saw this Yahoo article: The problem is that this rule was already in place. It's what is called an "offensive foul," and referees have had the go-ahead for years to whistle offensive players that strike a defender after moving into the defender's designated space. You don't see as many k...

differences meaning-in-context prepositions

RegDwighт

5:03 PM

@tchrist I only have no-not. I don't think I can offer anything for any. Yet.

0

Q: Punctuation following an interruption with a dash

I am not sure what the correct punctuation to use when ending a clause that was introduced with a dash when the next character in the main sentence is a punctuation mark. Take the following contrived example: He was walking down the street when he saw something quite surprising — being easil...

punctuation dash

People should stop reading YouTube comments and start reading books.

tchrist

5:20 PM

Ayup.

BTW, the dumb phantasy thing has no correct answer.

RegDwighт

Yeah I just looked it up in COCA and BNC.

tchrist

Bringhurst says that the em dash, let alone the unspaced one, is part of our antiquarian Victorian past, and should be shed in favor of a spaced en dash.

Have you read the OED note?

a. OFr. fantasie (Fr. fantaisie), (= Pr. fantazia, Sp., Pg. fantasía, Ital. fantasia), ad. L. phantasia, a. Gr. φαντασία lit. ‘a making visible’, f. φαντάζειν to make visible, f. φαίνειν to show. The senses of φαντασία from which the senses of the word in the mod. langs. are developed are: 1. appearance, in late Gr. esp. spectral apparition, phantom (so L. phantasia in Vulg.); 2. the mental process or faculty of sensuous perception; 3. the faculty of imagination.
These senses passed through OFr. into Eng., together with others (as delusive fancy, false or unfounded notion, caprice, etc.) wh…

RegDwighт

Ph 31, f 50 in BrE, 24 vs 8720 in AmE.

tchrist

The point is that these are now perceived as distinct words.

> In mod. use fantasy and phantasy, in spite of their identity in sound and in ultimate etymology, tend to be apprehended as separate words, the predominant sense of the former being ‘caprice, whim, fanciful invention’, while that of the latter is ‘imagination, visionary notion’.

RegDwighт

Oh, and for the love of God, someone fix this awful image.

That's not text. That's cancer.

tchrist

5:23 PM

There is a quote Bringhurst cites about people who would letterspace the lowercase. Something like they probably sacrifice children to Baal, or some such.

RegDwighт

It's seldom. Compared to the people who do not letterspace uppercase. Or who use uppercase in the first place for no frigging reason whatsoever.

tchrist

I cannot imagine how they managed to get a different baseline on the "to" as on the "be asked".

I hate the straight tick, but that is the very least of the abominations there.

RegDwighт

Don 't.

tchrist

Yup. And w ait.

And the ampersand is not from that font, so is sized wrong.

It looks like a ransom note.

RegDwighт

Size is only one issue. Line thickness is another.

tchrist

5:26 PM

The stroke weight is ridiculous on the bottom.

jinx

RegDwighт

Yeah, stroke weight is the name.

tchrist

It is also matter/antimatter to mix a humanist ampersand with an inhumane face.

RegDwighт

tchrist

Ouch.

RegDwighт

Image result for "weight coke".

tchrist

5:27 PM

I can’t even read that.

What the hell tools are people using that mangle the text so badly?

RegDwighт

Its two hyde teh spellingz.

BBL

tchrist

k

user19161

5:44 PM

@tchrist Today I am summoned even without your ping.

tchrist

Would that I might say the same.

user19161

This site uses Georgia, a very beautiful font.

tchrist

That is stretching things a bit, but yes, it’s nice enough as these things go.

That is not the font used in the ransom note above, however.

tchrist

6:12 PM

@JasperLoy @RegDwighт All four of those are better than what we have. Which do you like, and why?

tchrist

6:40 PM

We’ve been supercollided four times today. No want there’s so much dreck.

Cerberus

Hi.

tchrist

Happy Get-Up-Early Day.

user19161

@tchrist I am now Will Hunting, so I did not get pinged.

tchrist

user19161

@tchrist HAHAHAHA.

RegDwighт

6:52 PM

@tchrist the second. The first is too terse. The leading in the third is awful. The fourth is too heavy.

Still AFKish. Dinner.

tchrist

@RegDwighт That was how I felt, too. The faces used are respectively Arno Pro, Alfios, Garamond Premiere Pro, and Georgia. I tweaked some of the kerning in a few infelicitous places, but more could be done. The Georgia that @Will likes so much is surely the worst of them, and isn’t a humanist face at all (see the ampersand, apertures, and axis). Those are all set at 36 points, although the Georgia looks bigger.

user19161

@tchrist What's your favourite font? Mine is Georgia I think.

tchrist

I don’t understand the question.

user19161

I mean if you were to wirte a story book, and publish it, what would look best?

tchrist

Georgia should not be used for print.

It is made for screen display.

And it isn’t all that excellent.

All three of the other faces I showed are nicer.

The main thing Georgia has going for it that everyone notices is that it has text figures by default.

user19161

7:01 PM

Hmm OK, beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

tchrist

The main problem with it is that it has very few sorts.

It looks fine on the screen, but is missing too much that you need.

Then again, you are stuck with butt-ugly titling figures in most fonts if you don’t know how to ask for the regular text ones.

Click my picture: don’t just look at the thumbnail here.

@RegDwighт I just remembered: I used the Display weight in the Arno; that is why it looks semi-condensed.

tchrist

7:17 PM

This is somewhat better:

You can fritter away the entire day tweaking little bits.

tchrist

7:30 PM

RegDwighт

8:16 PM

Sup with the questions. It's on the day of the Lord that the Lord takes a crap on ELU. I herewith christen this day Crapday.

Still not really here. The little time that I have to spend is wasted on cleaning after the Lord.

tchrist

4 hours ago, by tchrist

@Reg Ok, I agree: Sunday is officially crapday on ELU.

> Literary language is a register that is used in literary criticism and general discussion on some literary work. For much of its history there has been a distinction in the English language between an elevated literary language and a colloquial language.

I feel that virtually on ELU disavows the existence of literary language.

And no, hiphop is not literature.

I think it is because of being drowned out by ELLers.

tchrist

9:00 PM

@RegDwighт Just delete the entire question if you want; Nico is an idiot, and not even a native speaker to be telling us how to talk. He certainly is not a programmer.

0

Q: I or Me, what 's the diffrence?

What is the diffrence between You and I, and You and Me?! Thanks so much!

meaning

Crapday does not begin to described the depths to which we have sunk.

0

Q: Rephrasing the line

I am typing the following line in resume in MS Word ,but I am getting spellcheck error. Please tell Whats wrong with it and how can I rephrase it. "Developed a prototype for National Level “ECBC Website” for Government of India."

grammaticality sentence

0

Q: Meaning of "become stumped on"

What does the expression "stumped on" mean in the quotation below? We could be fine with shorter and more commonly used words, but we become stumped on the lengthy text. I've only found "stump up" or "stump with" or "stump by" or "be stumped for" in various dictionaries.

meaning

1

Q: Is this usage of 'for which' correct?

I recently typed the following to a friend in an email: Last night I went to the theatre to see a play with X. Before that, we went for dinner at a nearby pub for which my cousin came along. Now is that the correct usage of 'for which', or should I have used 'which my cousin came along to'?

grammaticality prepositions relative-clause

0

Q: Terminology for the sub-structures of laws & legislations

I am working on a paper for Russian history class that deals with emancipation reform of 1861. Basically reform was accomplished through legislature, made of 17 acts, and each act was made of multiple "laws". What would be the correct term for "laws"?

single-word-requests terminology legal

0

Q: "My hand is paining" or "my hand is hurting"

After a series of pull-ups, Mr P tells me my hands are paining my hands are hurting What is the rationale behind using paining and hurting? What is the difference? Is one of them more appropriate or is one of them totally incorrect?

word-usage

-1

Q: What term describes the relationship between 'collectivism' and 'collectivisation'?

I suppose the question speaks for itself. So, what is collectivism, in terms of grammar, of collectivisation?

grammar

0

Q: Synonym for "aforementioned" without the past-tense connotation

Is there a word that can be used when discussing something and wanting to refer to it in the manner of "the aforementioned", but without the temporal aspect making it sound like you've moved on and are referring back to it? The item under discussion is the current matter-at-hand and I'd like a w...

single-word-requests adjectives synonyms past-participle

And those are just the ones that are still scandalously open.

There are more. I gave up.

Carlo_R.

Today is a strange day. I have seen a lot of bad question.

tchrist

Please go vote to close them, Carlo.

Pretty please.

Carlo_R.

These questions are not good even for ELL.

OK.

tchrist

9:17 PM

IDIOT!

@tchrist: 1) I never said they have the same function 2) you are utterly wrong if you say that – is not shorter than —. Please buy a ruler. — nico 39 secs ago

Carlo_R.

Done, but I think that this trend is unstoppable.

tchrist

Need. More. Delete. Votes.

I am almost out of all possible votes today except for flags.

Oh wait. I just found a free delete vote, just where I need it, too. Hallelujah!

Done.

Cerberus

tchrist

Saw it.

24/50 closed, and many yet to go.

Crapday must be because everybody got up too damned early this morning.

I hate it when they warp time.

Just leave it alone, damn it.

I can’t believe the “What’s the antidote for virgin?” question hadn’t been Protected yet.

There is something slipperily ironic about someone named FumbleFingers giving anti-virginity advice.

25/50, fully 50% closed.

user19161

10:29 PM

Hey @mr. remember the turtle pie story? Well, I found out the person is a he and not a she, so end of story. =)

user19161

@Cerberus Wow, what a picture!

Cerberus

I know!

Shot by this Dutch photographer who happened to be in NY.

user19161

By the name of Cerberus.

Joseph Weissman

user19161

That's a naked Cerberus, how obscene!

2

Cerberus

10:38 PM

Yay!

Joseph Weissman

Yay!

Cerberus

10:50 PM

Is there an older image of Joseph in existence?

Joseph Weissman

titus flavius old enough?

if we're doing a roman thing

:D

Josephus

Titus Flavius Josephus (37 – 100), also called Joseph ben Matityahu (Biblical Hebrew: יוסף בן מתתיהו, Yosef ben Matityahu), was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer who was born in Jerusalem - then part of Roman Judea - to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry. He initially fought against the Romans during the First Jewish–Roman War as the head of Jewish forces in Galilee, until surrendering in 67 to Roman forces led by Vespasian after the six-week siege of Jotapata. Josephus claims the Jewish Messianic prophecies that initiated the First...

Cerberus

Haha.

If that is your best shot, I win!

Joseph Weissman

Oh no!

Well, we could go old testament.

Cerberus

If you have an old illustration from the OT, that will do.

But it will have to have been drawn before ca. 500 BC.

Joseph Weissman

After extensive archaeological efforts, I have unearthed this: