English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2014-07-25 (page 7 of 8)

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7:05 PM

@DemCodeLines we can't help without context. All of the options you've given us can work but some have different meanings. We can't know which one is more appropriate unless you tell us a bit more about what you're writing.

Matt Эллен

7:16 PM

@DemCodeLines as a subject heading, it seems fine

Anonymous

@MattЭллен The OED departs from general BrE spelling on -ize / -ise

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/bnc/?c=bnc&q=32190438

Matt Эллен

@snailboat oh! that is interesting. I hadn't noticed

There you go @skullpatrol, that's why they said that

@snailboat Thanks pal :)

Anonymous

:-)

7:19 PM

38 mins ago, by skullpatrol

why bring Oxford into it, why not just say 'Non-British Eng'

Matt Эллен

because it is British English. To steal a chunk from ODO:

> 1. The form -ize has been in use in English since the 16th century; although it is widely used in American English, it is not an Americanism. The alternative spelling -ise (reflecting a French influence) is in common use, especially in British English. It is obligatory in certain cases: first, where it forms part of a larger word element, such as -mise (= sending) in compromise, and -prise (= taking) in surprise; and second, in verbs corresponding to nouns with -s- in the stem, such as advertise and televise.

@MattЭллен The OED acknowledges that -ize comes from Greek, which uses -z-. But yes, most BrE spellings prefer -ise.

It may actually be aesthetic.

Z has points; S does not.

Matt Эллен

it's certainly a style thing

Anonymous

We could get all-around pointier spelling if we switched to runes

Or far-fewer-points if we switched to Irish Uncials.

Unca = hook, from the rounded shape of the letters.

7:25 PM

:)

Anonymous

@skullpatrol "But the suffix itself, whatever the element to which it is added, is in its origin the Greek -ιζειν, Latin -izāre; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic. In this Dictionary the termination is uniformly written -ize."

Matt Эллен

I don't think so

It's being hyper-derivational, not hyper-formal.

that^ is what I meant :)

Yay! Everyone agrees!

Something must be wrong.

7:27 PM

for once

wait we didn't ask @MattЭллен?

Matt Эллен

I agree :D

must be a glitch in the Matrix

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

We need to introduce some disagreement.

Like the seed of a crystal.

how?

Matt Эллен

or the dust in the middle of a snowflake

7:30 PM

Who's noticed the new comment links on posts?

Matt Эллен

new?

I guess not :D

comment links?

> add a comment | show 2 more comments

It used to be add/show more comments

So you got the entry box.

Matt Эллен

it is an interesting UI choice

I think the old way makes more sense, to help prevent duplicate commenting

but that probably didn't work as people loaded the comments, ignored them and posted what they wanted anyway

I have no stats

Nor do I, but actually I don't recall any duplicated comments.

Matt Эллен

7:33 PM

Jul 21 at 14:16, by Cerberus

@JasperLoy I don't know of any statistics.

But I have had a Friday evening drink. I may just not remember.

Matt Эллен

@AndrewLeach well, not dupes, but essentially saying the same thing

I can't remember any either, to be honest

Right. Honeshtly, can't shay I've notished.

Matt Эллен

:D

maybe it's better for the servers not to have to load the comments every time if someone wants to just comment

Ooh. Fighting talk from a programmer there.

SE servers can cope with anything,

Matt Эллен

7:36 PM

hmmmm...

I would say @StackStatus reports otherwise :D

It's all a front.

Matt Эллен

We were down for about a minute while 2 load balancers decided to have a keepalive brawl - we’re stable and finding the cause of the issue.

Tweeted by StackStatus on July 13, 2014 at 11:55 AM

see! a whole minute of unplanned downtime!

That's the tamed gremlins reverting to type for a moment.

Matt Эллен

:D

@AndrewLeach That's cheating, you had access to insider information.

Anonymous

7:38 PM

@MattЭллен The new UI is nicer on mobile

Matt Эллен

ah. that's good

I use the app on my tablet, so I don't see the mobile site as much

@terdon My post here was after everyone else had a chance to notice.

Show off. :P

And actually, I noticed on the site before I heard there had actually been a change.

OK, now you're showing off ;)

7:40 PM

:D

I don't know what would happen if I pulled my internet cable out. I seem to be permanently wired in.

Matt Эллен

we'd all disappear

Oh noes!

doesn't formalism usually follow derivation?

Anonymous

Less internet, more books

16 mins ago, by Andrew Leach

It's being hyper-derivational, not hyper-formal.

Anonymous

7:42 PM

@skullpatrol I don't think the (a? any?) concept of formalism really applies very well to English spelling

Anonymous

What is it that you mean by formalism?

Anonymous

It's not clear to me. Maybe I'm just failing to understand what you're trying to say.

formalists tend to derive things from the beginning ...

..unless there are practical reasons.

A plague on all product managers and project managers alike. None of 'em understand anything at all.

@Robusto We share the same world.

7:46 PM

It should be your turn to have it.

Matt Эллен

awww. my product manager understands things.

the project manager on the other hand

My project manager calls two distinct and separate systems by a name that cannot distinguish between them.

And then confuses everyone, including himself.

@snailboat this is getting too deep into linguistics :)

and I can't swim in those waters, yet.

Mine gave me links to a bunch of data I needed to harvest for some examples I'm setting up. He said it was partial, and there would be more to come. Today he tells me it's complete, and I'm supposed to harvest the exact same data (of which there is a larger quantity now). So I have to go through the exact same rigmarole I did yesterday. I could have simply waited and done it today if he told me that is what he meant by partial.

Project managers do seem to have a language all their own.

7:50 PM

When he said partial the first time, he made it sound like a discrete number of examples were finished, and there would be more examples. Oh, and they need everything done EOD Friday. And he just told me right now, after I've been working for nine fucking hours.

!!wiki lingua franca

@AndrewLeach it's COBOL

Fuck people who wait till Friday afternoon to give you their core dump. Fuck them and everybody who looks like 'em.

A lingua franca (English pronunciation: /ˌlɪŋgwə ˈfraŋkə/) also called a bridge language, or vehicular language, is a language systematically (as opposed to occasionally, or casually) used to make communication possible between persons not sharing a native language, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both native languages. Lingua francas have arisen around the globe throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages") but also for diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other...

@Robusto When is EOD Friday? It's 20:50 here at the moment.

7:52 PM

@AndrewLeach I started working at 6:00 this morning. It's 15:50 here right now.

Oh.

I just set some boundaries. Told them they could wait till Monday, when they are supposed to get me the other half (the third half) of the data.

@Robusto if they are average looking, you have a lot of work to do :)

Here I've got most of my work done for the next sprint, which doesn't even begin till next week.

People see you're good and they think they can take advantage. "Give a bear a cookie . . ."

That's the danger of over-achieving :-(

Matt Эллен

7:57 PM

you gave the monster tree fiddy? no wonder he keep comin back

hmmm, maybe that doesn't apply in this situation. curses.

Constipated applies though. 'Don't give a shit about your dump.'

Anonymous

I had to squint to see that that didn't say "constipated apples"

Matt Эллен

I've never seen an apple poop

Anonymous

But they can have their cores dumped.

Matt Эллен

true :D

Anonymous

8:05 PM

This is my new snail

Anonymous

user image

Matt Эллен

he's out of the cage!

Anonymous

Hehe! It's true! :-)

Matt Эллен

I suppose they're easier to catch than hamster

Anonymous

Well…

Anonymous

8:06 PM

Some snails can go upwards of 1mm/s

Matt Эллен

wow

speed demons

Gotta move fast for those then.

How big is that one?

Anonymous

You can't really tell from the picture, but that snail is smaller than an adult. I think maybe six weeks old

Anonymous

I should take a picture with a coin for reference

Anonymous

Here's a fully grown snail of the same species next to a quarter:

Anonymous

8:09 PM

user image

That would help if we knew the size of the coin. How about a ruler?

Anonymous

A quarter has a diameter of 24.26mm

ha

Anonymous

user image

Anonymous

There's a baby next to a quarter

8:11 PM

A quarter is an inch, more or less. Big coin.

Anonymous

And my new snail is about halfway between those two :-)

I take it they eat carrot.

Anonymous

The snail on top loved carrot!

Anonymous

It was his favorite.

Anonymous

They like all sorts of plants. Probably cucumber more than anything, but it doesn't have enough nutritional value to feed it to them very often

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

8:25 PM

Yay, snails!

Speaking of 'unplanned downtime' . . .

Just got an email about something they called an unplanned outage, which will occur at 9PM.

Matt Эллен

who? I hope it's not the oxygen people. I need that minute to minute

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

ELI5: If you can tell me when it's gonna happen, how is it "unplanned"?

Matt Эллен

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 lol. good point

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@MattЭллен sometimes / all I need is the air that I breathe

Also . . .

Matt Эллен

. . .

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

8:28 PM

Who was the first guy who came across an onion (like a red or white or yellow one) and decided he would eat it?

This thing stinks! My eyes are watering just from touching it! Gonna eat it anyway!

Matt Эллен

Oh, yeah, I know that guy. He had really bad breath

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

I'll bet.

Same question for chili

Matt Эллен

probably saw a pig eat one and thought he'd give it a try

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

eew

8:29 PM

> Lets try this red mf

Matt Эллен

well, you know, cave people weren't the sharpest tools in the quarry

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Pygs eat onions?

Matt Эллен

some animals will do. I was guessing at pigs. I'll admit it. I made it up

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

D:

Matt Эллен

society might fall, but it was worth it to get that off my chest

8:30 PM

I ate a raw onion that was 0 minutes unfresh the other week. It was not nasty at all.

Matt Эллен

I like raw red onion.

Di not eat all of it but had a typical apple bite

Matt Эллен

oh

I usually only have it added to something, like a sandwich

Anonymous

Maybe "unplanned" can be construed to mean "not planned very far in advance"

Unplanned = emergency

Emergency = We need it! Now! Not now? Well, when can you do it?

Oh alright then.

8:35 PM

.

@JohanLarsson Well, I understood that. Not sure what that says about me, though.

Matt Эллен

I understood it too

ok I second guessed myself then

felt right when I wrote it but looked strange when I read it

Never read anything in Chat.

#starbait

What is the correct way to say something is as fresh as it can be?

8:40 PM

Fresh as ... a daisy.

Hmm. Maybe not.

Matt Эллен

@AndrewLeach lol

@JohanLarsson that is a correct way

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=32191065

You really don't want to be eating daisies.

Anonymous

I don't know what makes daisies fresh

Matt Эллен

they way they talk

always getting fresh with me, they are

8:44 PM

I do wish Community would stop stirring the pot to see what rises to the top.

Matt Эллен

I'm not sure what the metric is that makes something stir-worthy

That assumes there is one.

It's probably entirely random out of questions with no accepted answer over two months old.

But if they are that old without an accepted answer, there's a reason!

Anonymous

8

A: Community ♦ seems to be bumping new questions more frequently than usual

No change to the configuration value so far as I can see - it's max 1 per hour (which is what you're observing). Note that the posts eligible for bumping have gone at least 30 days with no activity, have at least one answer scoring 0 and none scoring more than that, and no accepted answer (also...

OK, one month old, not two.

Matt Эллен

well, that won't happen again for that question.

@snailboat thanks!

8:52 PM

Vote early, vote often, then.

Matt Эллен

I wonder if I'd learned piano or guitar my fingers would have grown to accommodate

when I was a child, I mean

As in longer fingers?

Coast clear?

@AndrewLeach The once-an-hour thing is a lot of pot-stirring. Maybe not so on SO given their volume, but its rate seems unrelated to anything else. Perhaps it has other parameters though.

@AndrewLeach Check the OED on uncial as in the script. It purports a different origin than your onca hook.

Hmm. Letters an inch long.

But then different size letters are ... different sizes.

Not in uncial: it’s unicameral.

They all fit in the same box, basically.

9:05 PM

> The emendations initiales ‘initial’ and uncinales ‘hooked, bent’, have been suggested.

Oh, I see what you mean now.

Sounds like fence sitting.

> 1885 Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 150/2 The minuscule character is maintained intact, without intrusion of larger or uncial-formed letters.

That sounds like hook to me :-)

I don’t really think so, but I am prejudiced due to calligraphy.

I was about to say...

But I'm just a calligrapher; what do I know?

Hello again.

What is your question?

9:09 PM

This doesn’t look too much like Kells, but still:

user image

I need to find my Lettering by Graily Hewitt.

The d and g and t and u are hook-like.

The A is off.

At least, compared to what I was taught.

It's not a bad modern re-interpretation of Kells.

But A should be a bit more upright.

The A starts with a \ and then you make the rest of it.

But the vertical should be vertical. You'd think that having done that letter he would have simply started again.

Unless the B makes it look off.

9:19 PM

That’s not my uncial B. I’d have to find one of my books.

This is closer:

user image

A bit jaggy, and I don’t have a cross on the top of the A.

And the P is wrong.

It should not have a descender. That’s half-uncial, actually.

No descenders on anything in uncial.

No K there. Hm.

user image

Aha. That looks like Lindisfarne.

Sometimes I find Lindisfarne more legible than Kells.

I cited both on the lettrines posting I made.

user image

That’s more like what I learned. Mostly.

At least there’s no question of s-rotunda versus the other one.

This is ok, but doesn’t have the insular G:

user image

A crossed z???

I don’t recall that insular hands ever did that.

But of course (not). I think I would be inclined to use Lindisfarne as a model.

If only because it's hook-like. :-)

But actually, it's beautiful and regular and ancient and shivers

The regular thing, so nice.

That W is nutty.

I do the one from Lindisfarne.

Uncial should be round, not pointy.

Strange gif

.

9:33 PM

Self propelled bikey.

OK. People have got fed up with letters.

sigh

Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings, is all I know.

The semi-fake uncial I dislike is the most common of all of them: so-called American Uncial. It’s ubiquitous, and bogus.

@AndrewLeach What do you mean?

The minor but obvious distraction

‭ ȝ  021D       LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH
        * Middle English, Scots
        x (latin small letter ezh - 0292)
        x (latin small letter insular g - 1D79)
‭ ᵹ  1D79       LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR G
        * older Irish phonetic notation
        * uppercase is A77D
        x (latin small letter g - 0067)
        x (latin small letter yogh - 021D)
        x (latin small letter script g - 0261)
        x (latin small letter gamma - 0263)
‭◌ ᷘ  1DD8      COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D

Good luck if those resolve for you.

9:35 PM

@AndrewLeach i did not mean to interrupt, just respammed a random link

Oh. OK. It was amusing!

some of those are pretty normal looking, but the insular R and S are interesting. @Cerb Have you ever seen those forms?

Here’s the paste without mono:

‭ ȝ 021D LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH
* Middle English, Scots
x (latin small letter ezh - 0292)
x (latin small letter insular g - 1D79)
‭ ᵹ 1D79 LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR G
* older Irish phonetic notation
* uppercase is A77D
x (latin small letter g - 0067)
x (latin small letter yogh - 021D)
x (latin small letter script g - 0261)
x (latin small letter gamma - 0263)
‭◌ ᷘ 1DD8 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D
‭ Ꝺ A779 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR D
‭ ꝺ A77A LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D

It’s the ones towards the bottom that draw my eye.

I assume that the COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR D is for a scribal abbreviation, something that would take a superscript D.

I don’t know that I have any fonts with insular R and S like that.

user image

This hurts mine eyes:

user image

@AndrewLeach Oh, alas and alack!

user image

@Andrew Are you on a Windows box?

Alienware laptop with Windows 7

SSD. Brilliant macine. Crap at fonts.

9:44 PM

I see.

@MattЭллен No daisy has ever made a pass at me. sulks

Spent 4 hours on phone interviews today. I’ve now had 5 with the same company. They just called me out to arrange for a cross-country flight next week so I can finally interview in person.

blames unfashionable eye glasses

They kept trying to get various video chats working, but everything either locked up or say that my MacOS 10.5 was too old for supporting the plugin.

@tchrist ugh. couldn't they video chat? or skype?

oh

9:45 PM

However, if hired, they ship me a company laptop that’s either MacOS or Linux at my choice; the dev and prod boxes are all Linux.

fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a782/fontsupport.htm

@tchrist Which ones?

EversonMono is reasonable for a mono. A bit thin, but it has full coverage.

user image

@Cerberus Look at my picture paste for the insular R and the insular S: straight shots.

@Cerberus Yes, that looks right. My question was not your computer’s support, but whether you had ever looked at palaeography with those forms.

In manuscript form.

I have seen those letters, yes.

9:48 PM

Ah.

But notice how one of them isn't rendering for me.

The combining one, yes.

It is a Unicode 5.1 code point.

Before then, it was not assigned.

Any way I could get it?

But I think those others might also be 5.1 characters. Hm.

@Cerberus Probably. Let me look.

Font support for U+1DD8 here.

Wow, almost nobody!

user image

9:51 PM

I believe that GNU Unifont is an unusable bitmapped font, if memory serves.

I prefer the LastResort font for the fallbacks.

I suppose that font does support it, but...

Hmm.

So which of those fonts do you recommend that I install?

Looks like FreeSerif is best: I believe that is a variable-width font. EversonMono you should install for a Terminal/Console application.

So you would want FreeSerif for a proportional font, and EversonMono for the monospaced one.

Oh right, I’m not supposed to say proportional. :)

That’s my recommendation.

OK thanks!

So on a web page, FreeSerif works, and in the Console, EversonMono.

You’re welcome.

What’s all this lion business?

If you come here, we can try to find some. I will stake you out along a deer-path during the crepuscule as bait.

Best bring Matt’s amulet.

9:57 PM

user image

Looks like it has a mono version too.

Matt Эллен

@Mitch you just have to water them and make sure they're fertilised

@tchrist It originated in some meaningless pun.

I thought you deemed puns beneath you.

Hmm. OK. FreeSerif is better, but not complete.

Woohoo now it works!

@tchrist I kind of do. Unless they're hilarious.

Matt Эллен

9:59 PM

all puns are hilarious. I win by default

@AndrewLeach What do you mean?

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