> 2013-02-01: The "close as duplicate" process has been updated: the interface to search for duplicate questions has been improved, and users may no longer vote to close questions as duplicates of questions that do not have an upvoted or accepted answer
As you may have noticed, Jarrod's been hacking away at some design changes to the "close as duplicate" UI. These are the first fruits of some discussions we've been having internally regarding the "close" UI as a whole, with the goal being a smoother, easier-to-understand experience for all invol...
@BillFranke: Which USA are you talking about? Where I live you could do that all day and not lose your camera. People would think you were a doofus, though. — Robusto2 mins ago
@Robusto He’s just scaremongering with Asian-friendly propaganda against America as a culture of thieves. People are forever asking me to do this. I always give them back their camera when I’m done. :)
Then again, maybe they realize I have no incentive: the camera I’m carrying is always better than theirs. :)
It had been old when Babylon was new;
None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,
Where in the end our questing shovels found
Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.
There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,
And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew
Fantastic beings of some long ago
Past anything the world of man recalls.
"None knows" are two strong beats. You can do that now and then, but the whole thing just doesn’t have that Xanadu feel to it either.
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.
That is the whole sonnet.
The one entitled Nyarlathotep.
I note that he in many—maybe most, and possibly all —places uses what today is called “British” spelling. A hundred years ago it was hardly so cut and try.
And this is not even that old.
Then again, he also writes “shew”, so there is plenty of musty odour about the thing.
Er, I mean odor.
Perhaps he did not smoke enough opium.
Until this morning, I had only read the prose versions of those sonnets.
When I say to increment the PC by one instruction, everyone knows that I have meant to reset your computer’s program counter, so this is a clear abbrevation.
But if people began to forget what PC meant, it would stop being an abbreviation.
Then I get things that are not on the list. I ask my boss what they mean. And he has no idea. But they are the names of projects that have zillions of people using them. And nobody can expand the initials.
Are you a NASA person or a Nasa person?
Then there is “UTC”, which has no expansion, for which we have the damned French to unthank.
We wanted Universal Corrected Time. They wants Temps Corrigé Universel.
Please do not ask why temps is masculine singular. Better to ask why it didn’t lose its s.
> Singapore adopted a conscription model drawing on elements of the Israeli national conscription schemes. This was done with the help of Israeli military advisers, who were closely involved in the establishment of the Singapore armed forces.
I guess Jasper’s Corporal-Klinger ploy didn’t work.
> In 1911, the French Parliament sulkily abandoned Paris Mean Time and moved in line with the rest of the world. But rather than acknowledge the British source of their new time, legislators simply announced that the new official time would be ‘Paris Mean Time’ . . . retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds. This neatly avoided mentioning the non-French word ‘Greenwich’.
A patriot is somebody who says “My country right or wrong”, and is just as wrong as someone who says “My mother drunk or sober”, except that it incites entire populations to committing nonsense.
> The second president of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that “English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not before the end of this one.” It is destined “in the next and succeeding centuries to be more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.”
Thanks a lot, Robusto. This explains much! I occasionally see or hear sentences using "zero article plus a singular abstract noun" where the use of "a" or "the" seems appropriate and have become really confused. Your answer is a great help! — Fairdinkum4 mins ago
Una regla graduada que mide pulgadas, es decir, una que viene con graduaciones en pulgadas tiene que ser una regla (de) pulgada(s) — o sea, un “thumb rule”. Hence, a 12” ruler.
Hi guys. I need your help. I wrote a motivation letter for the scholarship programme which I want to apply. Since my first language is not English, I need some volunteer whose first language is English to check its grammar. Today is deadline. It's very important for me. Could you help me please?
In your "cessation" and "registration" examples, the omission sounds fine, and I agree that it is probably best characterised as ellipsis. The question is, in which situations is this ellipsis acceptable? Ellipsis like this evokes head-line language, or a cursory style. If the sentence contains elements that are the opposite of such a style, ellipsis is either judged incongruous or not recognised as such. In the original "reduction" example, there may be some elements that seem to clash with the required cursory style; I, for one, find the ellipsis less palatable there than in your examples. — Cerberus41 secs ago
@Rob I'm not sure how to vote.
You plead a nuanced case, but I'm still not sure about the OP's example.
Se cuenta del marqués nombrado que si intentases hablar con él en inglés, cambiaría al francés, y si lo (per-:)siguieses en francés, entonces cambiaría al castellano — y si todavía lo entendieses, ese cambiaría al catalán. ¿Y que haría si hablases también el catalán? Pues en ese caso el pintor se callaría la boca esperando a que lo dejases en paz.
I am utterly astounded. Safari didn’t red-line that, and in fact, found a spelling error, which I corrected. I didn’t know it did simultaneous polyglot spelling correction!
It says "French authorities have declared war on the English word "hashtag" in its continuing drive to keep its language as free as possible from English loan words." which sounds incorrect to me.
It should use their continuing and their language not its.
@code4eight The writer probably subconsciously shifted to singular because they thought of "France" instead of "French authorities", and possibly also under the influence of singular "hashtag". It is called grammatical or syntactic or morphological attraction.
@Rob I am weary of that user’s questions, where he asks all these ridiculous super-extra-hyper-technical things that no native speaker every concerns himself with.
@tchrist so ancien regime. hm... did they have one in Spain? when did they go to metric?
@tchrist Oh I woud only ever use dollar bills. Sorta like when you want a reinforced fist, use a pack of nickels because they're cheaper than quarters. Dimes are just wimpy.
> Until the ascent of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain in 1700, each of the regions of Spain retained their own system of measurement. The new Bourbon monarchy tried to centralise control and with it the system of measurement. There were debates regarding the desirability of retaining the Castilian units of measure or, in the interests of harmonisation, adopting the French system.
> Although Spain assisted Machain in his meridian survey, the Government feared the French revolutionary movement and reinforced the Castilian units of measure to counter such movements. By 1849 however, it proved difficult to maintain the old system and in that year the metric system became the legal system of measure in Spain.
Couldn't this be considered an example of a subject predicate? "Her teeth gleemed white" is structurally very similar to "her teeth were white" and "her teeth looked white." — Tobias Patton10 mins ago
@tchrist That is impressive because done totally without your thinking about it, an interesting design strategy (reched withou some intermediate knowledge phase). iPhone spellcheck changes according to keyboard chosen so it is by choice.
> Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naïve but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.
I think the progress is pretty steady. even with chinese. usually you at least get the right words (if you get the right encoding) and you just have to read it like a bag of words and make up your own synta.
> In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.
> Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.
> People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.
> [It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.
> Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
> Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
@tchrist that's the way -all- news has been. I think it's a testament to modern education that people are much more skeptical of the claims of news.
@tchrist it is funny though.
the overload of information is just giving us a lot more opportunity to hear non-elite voices, which have their place but also are not attempting to be authoritative and so don't have the effort of thought behind them.
Except for the fact that there's no subjunctive mood in English. But tags are irrelevant anyway. — John Lawler50 mins ago
@JohnLawler Perhaps you might someday please explain precisely what you mean by “English does not have a subjunctive mood” by first explaining what a “subjunctive mood” (not to mention a “subjunctive” or a “mood”) is intended to mean or not mean. Otherwise it is impossible to evaluate the truthfulness, let alone the usefulness, of such a controversial statement as you have just made. — tchrist1 min ago
I would like to know whether 'I park my car 'on the porch' or 'in the porch' is correct?
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…