English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

xkcd keeps crashing my browser. But I've found the right edge.

ΜετάEd

@Marthaª Have you looked at the PDF?

Is there a mirrored copy somewhere? The one that's linked from various places has exceeded its bandwidth.

4:44 PM

Stupid file not found error. If the file isn't found, then why are you working, huh?

Jez

<-- getting a bit excited about writing a theme and extension for Seamonkey to make it look and behave like Firefox 3

trouble is i have bugger all spare time to do it!

ΜετάEd

@Marthaª I got a copy, evidently before that happened because I did not use a mirror.

american-english british-english possessive comparison

0

Of late I have noticed British people using the following sort of construct: John and Jane make such a cute couple because John always wears a similar hat to Jane. To my ear, that is ungrammatical, or at least nonsensical, because John seems to have mistaken his wife for a hat! John’s hat ...

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. The title of the book comes from the case study of a man with visual agnosia. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat became the basis of an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman, which premiered in 1986. The book comprises twenty-four essays split into four sections which each deals with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisph...

5:12 PM

gah! I can't use the BNC.

gah! I forgot to check my backup.

gah! you got your peanut butter in my balrog.

ΜετάEd

@cornbreadninja You got your balrog in my peanut butter.

I wonder how @aedia is doing. I haven't seen her in months.

Cornbread filled up her spot nicely.

But I still miss her.

What was I doing now?

@ΜετάEd I feel like we've been here before.

@KitFox !0_0!

Have you still not heard anything from her? :(

5:27 PM

@KitFox checking you back up

@cornbreadninja Not recently. I could write to her, I suppose...

@MattЭллен Well, I checked it, but it hadn't backed up. And so oops. Too late.

Which is uncharacteristic of me.

indeed

but you've made one now!

hello everyone

I was thinking of aedia because I hadn't yet checked my colors.

hello

5:29 PM

Hello.

although, I don't speak for everyone

@KitFox of course

hello!

Oh, I can do that. &c: hello @thavan.

:D

When we sending a email, when we use

Hi,

Hello,

5:32 PM

I use Hello for when I'm addressing an unknown customer services person. Hi for friends and colleagues.

Same here.

brb, cooking

ok. If someone is my colleague and I don't that person. I mean he is unknown to me... what will use hi or hello?

@thavan Hello.

Usually. Unless you want to appear very friendly.

If I were emailing a colleague that I didn't know personally to invite them to the office lunch, I would probably say "Hi" but if I were emailing to ask them to join a committee, I would probably use "Hello."

"Hi" is more social, "hello" is more formal.

i'm copying the question again. I missed some words... "ok. If someone is my colleague and I don't know that person. I mean he is unknown to me... what will use hi or hello?"

5:40 PM

5 mins ago, by KitFox

@thavan Hello.

mm... Do you say it is depends on known or unknown people. not related the work relationship?

@tchrist I really must get around to reading that book one day.

Hello everyone. I am come back.

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/round_tuit

@thavan Yes and no. Saying "hi" is familiar, so sometimes even with strangers you might use "hi" if you want to seem friendly.

"Hello" is always a safe bet, but I doubt you'd offend anyone by using "hi" when it would be more common to say "hello."

You'd use "hi" with your friends, family, co-workers, etc, also generally with contemporaries, even if you've just met.

So if my friend introduced his girlfriend, I'd probably say "hi" rather than "hello."

Hello @Carlo.

5:46 PM

@KitFox thanks.

But both are pretty common. If you are in doubt, use "hello."

@thavan Does that help at all, or just make it more confusing?

I said to my girlfriend that "I want to have sex with you". She said, Actually, She was doing MS in united states, Don't say that "I want have sex with you", say "I wan't to make love with you"

making love, having sex, what is the difference?

@KitFox yes, it really helped me...

@thavan Usually you make love to somebody. It's considered a more romantic way of saying "having sex."

You can have sex with any partner, but you make love to someone special.

But "having sex" is not vulgar right?

No, not vulgar.

5:57 PM

@KitFox ok

@thavan not vulgar exactly but a bit blunt.

6:22 PM

@KitFox Even friendlier than saying "hi" to strangers is having sex with them.

@tchrist

Eh?

or anyone, I have a UNIX question

Gah. I think I'll take a walk.

@Robusto may you find a friendly stranger.

There's an exercise I've tried, but I'm not sure I did it right (aside from the fact that it works).

"Write a crafty script called ghoul that is difficult to kill; when it receives a SIG-INT (from a ctrl-C), it should create a copy of itself before dying. Thus, every time an unwary user tries to kill a ghoul, another ghoul is created to take its place. Of course, ghoul can still be killed by a SIGKILL (-9) signal.

So I have:

$ cat ghoul.sh
#!/bin/sh
x=1
trap 'echo Control-C; cp ghoul.sh ghoul; exit 1' 2
while [ $x -eq 1 ]
do
echo I am a ghoooooul
sleep 2
done
$ ghoul.sh
I am a ghoooooul
I am a ghoooooul
I am a ghoooooul
^CControl-C
$

But I feel like I was supposed to use a variable to make the new ghoul.

Gigili

6:27 PM

Wow, I thought ghoul was a Persian word.

So all it should do is copy it, not start a new version?

That seems less than impressive.

Indeed.

I should have thought it would fork a background copy.

blanches

I have provided the text of the exercise.

What is your question?

6:28 PM

Aside from it working, did I do what was asked?

Wait.

No, I don't think so.

You should start up another copy of the running program, not copy the file. Copy the process.

OIC

as in, get the PID

The easiest way is to do "ghoul &" or some such.

no

Probably not.

I would just call the same script as $0 again in the bg.

6:30 PM

brb unixing

If that makes sense.

erm, sort of

Can you imagine how much nastier the Stooperuser chatters would be to you?

So, I've finally weighed in on the who / whomever debate. For my sins. I should be put up against a wall and shot, no doubt.

shrug

why wouldn't I ask in UNIX/Linux chat instead?

now it say end of file unexpected

#!/bin/sh
x=1
trap 'echo Control-C; ghoul &; exit 1' 2
while [ $x -eq 1 ]
do
echo I am a ghoooooul
sleep 2
done

oh, snap

no, that didn't work

6:33 PM

@Gigili Arabic, I believe (etymonline.com/…)

@DavidWallace thanks; I was gonna have a look-see myself.

@DavidWallace or feathered into

Feathered?

> This used to carry a fairly murderous connotation, having gotten its start back in the days when the English long bow was the ultimate word in destructive power. Back then if you drew your bow with sufficient strength to cause your arrow to penetrate your enemy up to the feathers on its shaft, you had feathered into him.

from wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-2.html

I had a friend who wanted to write a compression algorithm called "feather", just so that he could say that he would "tar and feather" his programs for distribution.

ha!

Gigili

6:36 PM

Haha?

But I had always assumed it meant coating the victim in feathers, rather than shooting him/her with an arrow.

Which is kind of silly, thinking about it.

You might could die from a substantial feather-coating.

Your skin needs to breathe.

Think of the guy who played the Tin Man.

great, I've run tchrist off

It's like - OK, we can send you to the electric chair, we can hang you from the gallows, give you a lethal injection, or we can coat you in feathers. You choose.

@DavidWallace :D

@cornbreadninja Can you let me know how, for future reference?

6:39 PM

@DavidWallace ask him an inane, entry-level UNIX question. ^_^

Gigili

I think I'll go to sleep rather than talking to you boring people.

God damned users.

4

I send an Excel file, they send back a Numbers file.

@Gigili re-blanches

HTF am I supposed to open that?

Izzat some apple thing?

6:39 PM

@Gigili You're so nice.

@cornbreadninja Good to know. Thanks.

Isn't it only about 8PM in Gigili land?

checks armpits - must be me. She's gone.

@KitFox Bilge rats, the lot of 'em.

@Marthaª Scurvy dogs. I should toss them out the scuppers.

Q: How blundererous are spelling and sentence mistakes when writing to your boss?

7

I often write to my boss (Director) to report the changes that I make to the software. These changes could be new functionality or enhancing the existing features. My problem is, I make spelling mistakes quite often. Sometime just a couple and sometimes the sentence is a bit wrong because while p...

boss projects email

Isn't blundererous a wonderful word?

(I suspect it has an extra er in it, though.)

6:46 PM

Yes, I like that.

On another note, Her Majesty still hasn't replied to my email. If I have to spring for overnight shipping because she can't be bothered to answer a simple question, I will not be a happy scribe. Can a I post a question about how to politely tell off royalty? :/

Yes.

On Etiquette.SE

Unless you frame it as "what is the present formal of the verb "fuck"?"

@KitFox Zamzar.com?

@KitFox Eh, that's no fun. I hate having to sign up for yet another site just to ask a question. (It's what I like least about the whole SE system.)

@Marthaª Signing up on new SE sites is fairly quick and painless for me.

6:49 PM

@TRiG Oh no, I don't play that game. I sent it back to her and told her she needed to fix it.

@KitFox Whether that works depends on how computer-literate the person you're dealing with is.

@TRiG If they're literate enough to change it to Numbers, they are literate enough to change it back.

And I got it back already in xls.

Hungarian has a whole class of curses that aren't really curses at all. "Azt a kutyafáját" = "that wood of the dog", that sort of thing. Some people can get quite poetic about it. (Kinda like Shakespearean insults, come to think of it.) But I think Avelina would get hopelessly confused if I wrote her something like that.

Not a very bright queen, eh?

Oh, she's bright enough - she is/was a herald, after all - but something about wearing a pointy hat makes people lose brain cells.

@TRiG It's not the signing up that's a problem, it's the keeping track after that.

6:54 PM

@Marthaª True. I do now have a ridiculous number of SE accounts, many of them on sites I've visited only once or twice.

@Marthaª How would you use that in context? Is it an insult? Or something you'd yell when you hit your thumb with a hammer?

@TRiG The latter, at least in this case. Similarly for "azt a mennydörgős rézangyalát" = "that thundering brass angel". But "le van szarvasbőrrel takarva" is basically a minced oath for "le van szarva" = "it has been crapped on".

My goodness but this fellow does ramble:

1

It isn't just BrE speakers who produce this kind of unclear English. AmE speakers have been doing it for decades -- and probably centuries as well. It's not fit for formal writing simply because it's nonsense. "A similar hat to Jane" isn't the same as "a hat similar to Jane": the latter has meani...

I suspect he will piss off the Brits, though.

Even more than I seem to have done. Damn it.

I didn’t intend that.

@tchrist The logician in me screams that a hat similar to Jane would look rather odd, but then I remind myself that language doesn't have to be logical.

4

(That's just from reading the title. Off to read the full thing now.)

But it's not a hat similar to Jane. It's a similar hat to Jane.

> You got slapped for being a peevish pedant and everyone else was told that speakers are sloppy, oral English is often elided in the extreme, the structure is more than 150 years old (documented), and the nonsense that it represents is unimportant because Jane isn't a hat unless you have a special kind of brain damage (interpolation).

yow.

7:03 PM

@tchrist I agree with Kit & Andrew Leach: this is just ellipsis.

Isn’t that something?

'tis

@TRiG It's positively blunderful.

It is very hard to find in American writers, and very easy to find in British ones. If the ranter is right that it is only 150 years old, it may be a fashion that never caught on in America.

> It's not fit for formal writing simply because it's nonsense.

I did manage to find examples in formal writing, finally.

But his statement is . . . not meant to win friends.

@tchrist True, dat.

7:07 PM

@Marthaª So you think it is an ellipsis for a leading “that of”, to supply the apostrophe-s context?

@tchrist How does "a hat similar to Jane" have meaning, I wonder. Colorless green hats sleep with Jane furiously.

@Robusto None of those make sense to me. Look at the four examples.

@TRiG Languages don't have to be logical, but expressions using them ought to be.

@Robusto It's not "a hat similar to Jane."

In the first, Mr Malcolm has become a disability!

7:09 PM

It is "a similar hat to Jane."

@KitFox He says in his answer "a hat similar to Jane."

Whatever. it's still gobbledygook.

> In consultation, our members observed that other people with a similar disability to Mr Malcolm — perhaps with varying degrees of severity — would have been able to understand the sub-letting regulations.

@tchrist Ellipsis is inherently sloppy. Insert whatever words are needed to make yourself grammatically happy.

All of the examples that are given have the similar prior to the noun.

It is an important difference.

I had a similar dream to @Robusto. Hm.

Very weird.

7:10 PM

\And everyone keeps putting it after the noun and saying "well, how does that make sense?" Well, no one said that!

It's making me quite irritable.

@KitFox Really, you don't say?

> Dave had a similar accent to dumper truck man, so that’s who I thought it was.

How could he have an accent that was similar to dumper truck man?

Is dumper truck man an accent?

Dave was similar to dumper truck man.

> Auroville’s two or three thousand inhabitants, most of whom live in similar style to André . . .

Because of his accent.

7:12 PM

And now André is a style.

Not a person.

OK, off to the post office. The address is Pikestaff better be correct, because that's where the scroll is going, because Her Majesty can't be bothered to reply to emails.

The inhabitants were similar to Andre via their style.

Makes no sense.

You are the one who makes no sense.

Hi @tchrist, congratulations for your today question? I upvoted.

7:13 PM

Yes Mistress. Anything you say Mistress. I is wrongester.

argh...repeating them over and over I can't tell anymore which sounds right and which one's not. "similar hat to Jane" sounds wrong but "similar accent to that man" sounds OK

@Mitch What about the others?

"similar style to Andre" sounds sort of OK

Dave and the dumper truck man had similar accents.

(but didn't before; I was in total agreement with you before, but now some might pass just fine. I can't tell if it is the examples or if tehy become acceptable by saying them over and over again)

7:15 PM

> A second horseman wears a very similar hat to that of the Magus, but rather less grand, and he wears blue and white mi-parti with pink hose so that his dress is virtually a replica of the donor's, though there is no facial resemblance.

American author.

How can that be? Now the dumper truck man is an accent?

> I noticed that he was wearing a similar hat to last time, but not as pretty.

British author.

@KitFox yeah that's what it means but saying it the other way, actually that doesn't sound terrible.

They are doing something really weird.

@Mitch This is what I'm saying.

7:16 PM

@KitFox I was taught that via should be used in a geographical sense only.

(I actually tend to not use it at all.)

@TRG no, you are wrong.

> She wore a similar hat to the girls and a healthy scowl.

@TRiG Then you've been wasting your life.

But 'dumper truck man'? To take this all in a different irection, shouldn't it be 'dump truck man'? 'dumper truck man sounds like he had an accident in his pants.

> On one ofthe nearby rooftops stood a Nazi officer, wearing the armor of the infantry, but he had a similar hat to the chancellor, instead of the helmet.

7:17 PM

@Carlo_R. Hang on a minute. The claim I made was absolutely and indisputably correct.

All very castamucky.

@TRiG what do you use for non-geographical senses?

So we have a huge corpus of examples demonstrating that tchrist is confused about something.

@tchrist well, now you've gone and done it.

@TRiG we sent the letter via fax

7:18 PM

No, we have a bunch of British examples that are ungrammatical in American English.

@Mitch There's rarely a need to use the word at all. In a geographical sense, by way of works fine. That can also be used non-geographically, or the sentecne can be reworded.

@tchrist According to you. I can understand it just fine.

@Carlo_R. The claim I made was I was taught X. That claim is correct. I was indeed taught X.

@tchrist I would have formerly said so, but a couple of the examples seem to work for me. the ones with 'accent' and 'style'.

I never said that X was correct.

7:19 PM

@KitFox What is wrong with you lately? You are mean.

@tchrist But that's the way we like it. Rawwr.

What part of the moderator agreement covers meanness?

How is that mean? And how is that different than you normally perceive me?

(Sorry.)

@Carlo_R. We sent the letter by fax.

@TRiG don't worry

7:21 PM

You used to be fun and pleasant. Now you seem to go out of your way to say harsh things to me for no reason.

That's in your head, not mine.

It is insulting.

I know, via is questionable whenever a simple preposition would suffice

Generally, when via is used to describe a method, it can be substituted with by. And, generally, that substitution is a good thing. It makes the sentences simpler.

No.

7:22 PM

@TRiG I said that

@Carlo_R. That's probably where the advice I got came from.

@Carlo_R. Yeah. While I was typing. And I hadn't noticed till after I sent my comment.

43 mins ago, by KitFox

God damned users.

Nice one.

@TRiG hello, you are wolcome :)

13 mins ago, by KitFox

It's making me quite irritable.

This seems a problem.

So what's your hypothesis there @tchrist?

You think the fact that a user sends me a numbers file when I expected an xls file has to do with me getting irritated that everyone was misquoting the examples you gave?

7:25 PM

You’re ornery, and you are taking it out on people who do not deserve your High Wrath.

@tchrist and KitFox I do not understand almost nothing, but your discussion seems over the line. Calm down!

I refuse to argue with you.

Period.

Well Period is a good word

I have doubt.

On the verb "to be"

It's highly irregular.

Can I say "I believe to be agree with you"

7:28 PM

You can, but it sounds funny.

@Kit thanks.

"I believe I am in agreement with you." or "I believe I agree with you."

@Kit super thanks!

@Kit Have you seen David Wallace?

@Carlo_R. Just now?

Yes.

7:30 PM

Well, he's here. I don't remember talking to him though. Maybe while I was coding.

Yesterday I ask him on the situation in NZ. I hope DW return

@Kit Today I worked on the new proposal IL&U. I hope it go in beta.

Great. Good luck with it.

Thanks, actually there are circa 80 followers, but it circa 30 question with a score of 10 or more.

It lack ..

20% of followers are from ELU

Bbl i m going on ilu

Q: 'I thought to myself' vs 'I thought.'

> Believing I had supernatural powers, I slammed into a brick wall.

0

Is there any need for the ending of 'to myself'? How is it different from the alternative? Can you always replace 'I thought to myself' with 'I thought'?

meaning word-choice idioms

Doesn't anyone ask interesting questions anymore?

You could, if you wanted to.

7:46 PM

@KitFox What's the point?

To prove that you can.

:-þ

@Robusto Look! It’s a Cat in a Hat!

> Children's author Dr. Seuss gave a similar hat to the Cat in The Cat in the Hat, to similar effect.

Just teasing.

@KitFox If I haven't proven that by this time, I should give up.

But you can see why it seems confusing the other way, when it is expected to mean something completely different.

I shall probably wind up accepting Andrew’s answer if I don’t hear something more interesting, like from John Lawler or Barrie. I certainly shan’t be accepting Franke’s; he’s too pissy.

@Robusto Not much, no. The only way you find interesting questions is if you get the Reader’s Digest version of ELU, the best-of questions, which get time-compressed out of the dross.

Ah, I just found a U.S. example from the year 1900.

8:03 PM

Whoa!

Brian Blessed (hardon not shown).

I know who it is.

I had no idea he did opera. :)

Well, or pr0n.

Well, it was opera, sort of, after Freddie Mercury got finished with it.

Don’t tell me it’s a Queen video?

Flash!

Forgot.

8:10 PM

How quickly we forget Brian Blessed and his wisdom teeth.

@Robusto Think of it as interesting but with a different set of thresholds. Like "Why do we say 'I think X' when if you say 'X' it's obvious that you already thought it?"

Lower your standards?

8:30 PM

Coming here already represented a lowering of my standards. How low do you expect me to go?

@Robusto lower your standards even more and then things will all look so much better.

@Robusto: you have standards? What's on them? Are they silk? Do they flutter prettily in the wind?