English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2014-09-13 (page 2 of 3)

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12:40 PM

Hi.

Hi.

Hey.

I have no idea what Mari-Lou means either.

Given that I specifically discuss on in the answer, I'm not sure what distinction she is attempting to draw.

She sometimes does that.

12:43 PM

She's Italian or something, right? NNS?

No, her English is good. I think she grew up in America.

It is rather her...linguistic analysis that's odd sometimes.

Very odd.

Wow, +7/-5 for both question and answer on IceBoy's renaming of ELL meta question.

I believe this usage is more abstract or figurative, as it's often seen with other nouns (rolls, for example) to suggest something public, something blazoned onto a forum wall for all the citizenry to see. It doesn't refer to the bare act of inscribing text into a more-or-less esoteric record. — Robusto 12 mins ago

1:01 PM

That's IceBoyz :D

1:21 PM

@Cerberus London

Oh.

Well, some such place.

It's off the continent, it's very exotic!

1:35 PM

London? is exotic?

that^ reads funny :-)

Depends on where you're from. Everywhere is exotic if you're from far away.

far away is exotic too

People in City of London have a police that works for companies, not citizens. The city council is mainly elected by companies, not people.

I call that exotic.

Not to say dystopian.

> The City has a unique electoral system. Most of its voters are representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City. Its ancient wards have very unequal numbers of voters. In elections, both the businesses based in the City and the residents of the City vote.

The principal justification for the non-resident vote is that about 330,000 non-residents constitute the day-time population and use most of its services, far outnumbering residents, who number around 7,000. Nevertheless, the system has long been controversial. The business vote was abolished in all other …

London != City of London

The “City” means the financial district. As though Wall Street were called the City of New York.

Or the Board of Trade called the City of Chicago.

Its very nomenclature is an oddity.

Hence "The City of London" and not "London".

But the City is in London, which makes the latter an odd place.

1:50 PM

I dunno. You were talking weird up there. It was confusing.

How do you mean?

You omitted the the before City.

I specifically capitalised the words in order to avoid confusion.

Oh, that was a mere typo.

Had I said "the city of London", it would have been different (but I never would have).

It made me at first wonder if you were talking about the city of London instead of about the City of London.

You think I would capitalise that?

1:52 PM

Well, if you were citing Documents sufficiently Ancient, you might. :)

It is hard to commit a typo by means of capitalisation!

Untrue.

THis is really easy.

Had I been citing, I would have used quotation marks.

@tchrist Yes, but you know very well that that is different.

Meanwhile, the City police are not confined to the City.

All arguments serve a common end.

They arrest website owners across the country for merely posting links to other sites. They threaten and intimidate registrars to close down domains. Etc.

1:54 PM

Do you people know of a way to change Firefox's white loading screen colour?

Firefox has a loading screen?

What you have cited above reminds me a great deal of what is sometimes called “company town”, if you have heard of those.

Nope. But the City is a corporation.

The gendarmes are company cops.

@Cerberus When you go to a website.

1:55 PM

Oh.

No, I don't know of a way.

OK.

Another example is how a large university campus will have its own police force.

A company town is a place where, at least initially, practically all stores and buildings are owned by the one company that has a geographically-linked business need and so provides employment and infrastructure (housing, stores, transportation, sewage and water) to support the effort. Typically, such towns are founded in a remote location, so that residents cannot easily commute or shop elsewhere, and as often, once a community takes hold and begins to grow (attracting other non-company residents, relatives and small business entrepreneurs, and people with other employment, such as railroad or...

How is that allowed?

A private police would not be allowed here. Private guards, if that is what they are, may not carry arms or use force other than what ordinary citizens may do.

Well, such universities are typically not run by the cities which have grown up around them.

University police officers are sworn officers of the peace, just like national park rangers.

However, company cops are not.

Are they allowed to carry arms?

1:57 PM

Those ones are just security guards.

Because they are sworn officers, yes.

(Off topic: what does the word security add to guard?)

It is jut a different police jurisdiction, if you would.

I see.

But the situation with company towns is weird.

I guess it makes sense historically.

1:58 PM

@Alraxite forums.mozillazine.org/…

The company-town thing is happening again here.

Because of the fracking boom.

@terdon I have been to that site. And it doesn't work.

And there are these things called “man-camps” which are extremely vice-infested and violence-prone.

At least, it doesn't change the white colour when you open a link in a new tab.

I haven't tried that Chrome edit program thing.

So there is no police near the fracking site?

2:00 PM

But as far as I remember, I've tried putting all the lines of code into my CSS file there and none worked as well.

Are they allowed to have their own police then?

I am checking.

But I will try again later, I might have missed one or two of them.

@Alraxite That's the only one that will work.

@terdon You mean this webdesigns.ms11.net/chromeditp.html?

2:03 PM

in userChrome.css:

tabbrowser tabpanels {
background-color: rgb(220, 220, 220) !important;
}

OK, I don't remember the codes I've tried, but I'll try yours.

Not mine, straight from that page.

I see that it is complicated. Some of these man-camps, which are in effect modern company towns, are completely lawless, because they are on Indian reservations. Which means the state and county cops can’t go there, and there is some agreement with the corporation that the tribal police, who should have jurisdiction, stay out.

@Alraxite actually, this should be even better since it's simpler:

 browser { background-color: #000 !important; }

> "There's been a spike of violence in North Dakota and so when the Attorney General's office in North Dakota talks about these increased risks, or the local police officers talk about how their resources are completely drained because of these man camps, that's just a reality," said Jane Kleeb of advocacy group Bold Nebraska.
If sex crimes happen on a Reservation, holding perpetrators accountable can be difficult. Tribal police do not have the authority to lodge or prosecute non-Indians. However, two acts of congress are aimed at changing that.

2:06 PM

@terdon That's what my usercontent.css contained before I put yours.

And this too doesn't seem to work.

So the Indian cops can’t prosecute non-Indians? That’s bizarre. In the Navajo Nation, the tribal police are just like the county sheriff.

@Alraxite Not usercontent, add that line to $FIREFOX_DEFAULT_FOLDER/chrome/userChrome.css

No Kids, No Booze, No Pets: Inside North Dakota’s Largest Man Camp and also the smaler "Man Camps" brought by oil pipelines concern Tribal leaders

The two biggest scourges on man-camps seem to be alcohol and meth, an explosive combination if ever there was one.

And even if booze is verbotten inside the camp, they just go raiding and pillaging neighboring communities. This is similar to the Indian Reservations that prohibit booze. Although I have never heard of a meth scourge on the Navajo Nation. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, of course.

@terdon It works if I open a link in a background tab and then switch to it.

Otherwise, the white screen's there.

> The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t deliver the mail to where Smith lives, but the family made the interior of the 1,400 square feet unit into a home. It’s quiet, clean and colorful, and stays warm even on days when temperatures outside dip 20 degrees below zero.

2:11 PM

But I will try it when I do a fresh install of my browser.

Remember that that is F not C, so like -30C.

It might work then.

But thanks.

@Alraxite What do you mean "otherwise"? When?

I cannot believe they get all these people from the Gulf Coast to come up there. I’m even more surprised they stay. The money must be incredible. We regularly have drunks found frozen solid in the mornings here, and we have much much balmier weather than they do up round the border there.

When you open a new tab? That's a different thing.

2:13 PM

If I click on any off-site link without holding down any button in this room, it opens the link in a new tab and switches to it. It is white then.

Anywhere there is petroleum mining, man-camps spring up. That means also in Wyoming and Colorado, not just North Dakota.

Reminds me of a cross between the miners’ towns of the Gold Rush and the company towns of the Industrial Revolution.

Except that company towns weren’t shanty towns.

@tchrist Regularly, really?

@Alraxite Ah, I see. That might just be that it hasn't reloaded the css. Try restarting the browser. It should work the same whether you open on this tab or another. Also have a look here:

6

Q: How to make the about:blank page black or any other color in Firefox?

Is there a built-in way in Firefox to blacken or to colour the about:blank page? Will I maybe save some energy by doing so?

firefox background

@Cerberus 6–12 a year in Boulder city limits alone. These are virtually all homeless drunks.

@terdon Yes, I've also been to that page :-)

2:16 PM

Don't they have shelters?

Wow.

Yes.

Too drunk to reach those?

But I must be off. Bye!

Bye.

But they are not allowed to say there by day, IIRC, and so by the time night falls, they are too drunk already.

2:16 PM

Most unfortunate.

Then there are these places that hold big parties in the middle of winter. Nederland’s Frozen Dead Guy Festival has historically been self-propagating, and not in a good way.

Its first two years each had a fatality of that sort.

Kids get drunk. Fall in snow. Fall asleep. Never wake up.

Natural selection at work.

Looks like Colorado counties near me are doing better at discouraging man-camps than those on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide have been having.

I guess our county commissioners aren’t so in the pockets of the petro barons here.

Anti–man-camp county action near me versus Man camps in Western Colorado.

Hmm.

Why not let them have their camps?

Because of the lawlessness?

It’s an ugly, lawless, impermanent shanty town that doesn’t really get taxed like normal homes would and which brings a lot of crime to the communities.

> Man camps, often far from town — one EnCana site is reachable only by helicopter — not only provide housing, but also help keep other problems at bay.

> Gas workers have helped double Rifle’s sales tax revenue during the past three years. They have also contributed to a double-digit rise in crime. “It’s not like an old hick town anymore,” says Melissa Sparkman, bartender at the Sports Corner Saloon, where the crowd has gotten bigger but rowdier and the list of “86’d” patrons has doubled.

I’m guessing 86’d means people forbidden from those premises.

Think of these as glorified trailer parks.

But without the glory.

2:28 PM

Hmm so they should only be allowed far away from towns?

So that they can do little damage.

That’s one way of thinking. But it is its own problem, too.

@tchrist Comparisons to Old West cow towns are probably apt.

New York Times article on the man-camp problem.

Also mining camps.

> And in late February, the local newspaper ran an article saying that the number of registered sex offenders in the area had doubled over the previous year because of the influx of newcomers.

Ick.

2:31 PM

Hah.

Well anybody is a registered sex offender, right?

Well, I myself don’t know any. Or know that I do, at least. But yes, it is a common and crippling court action which in some jurisdictions is levied very unfairly.

I thought there were like millions?

I don’t know.

> Sex offender registration does not exist outside of the Anglosphere, however. The United States is the only country with a registry that is publicly accessible; all other countries in the Anglosphere have sex offender registries only accessible by law enforcement.

Why only the Anglosphere?

I know that in some places, you can be lifetime-branded a sex offender for being part of these silly naked bike-ride thingies. Or at least, that’s what some communities have used to scare people away with.

And we thought Hester Prynne had it bad.

2:34 PM

> Total number of registered sex offenders nationwide in the U.S.: 747,408

@Cerberus Perhaps you do not have sex offences?

@tchrist Hilarious.

@tchrist That must be it.

So man-camps are classic boom-towns that have existed since time immemorial.

So one in 400 people is a sex offender.

If you exclude kids and older people, probably more like one in 200?

I am assuming that registration has boomed in recent decades.

Kids are not exempt.

2:36 PM

They are far less likely to be branded.

If you are 16 or older, the judge can waive your minority status.

Especially kids under, say, 12.

Well, yes.

Old people are also far less likely.

I wonder why. After all, the “dirty old man” stereotype was not borne of a vacuum.

2:37 PM

So I think a man in his 20s is far more likely to be a sex offender than 1 in 400.

Apparently you can be branded a sex offender for public urination, even if witnessed by nobody who might be a target of a sexual offense.

Haha.

@Cerberus Brushing up on your numerology I see. Good for you!

That would never fly in the pissoirs of Paris.

And then people will think you have raped a child or something.

2:38 PM

@Robusto Yes, that is exactly true. It is very common.

I peed in public once.

@tchrist Numerology?

This is basic statistics.

@Cerberus Your battle against innumeracy.

@WillHunting OMG we have a sex offender in the room!

I could not find a toilet.

2:39 PM

@tchrist I don't see a battle?

@Cerberus I did get into trouble for saying gspot to a woman once.

Haha what?

What happened?

Never mind, it was a stupid incident.

It showed me how stupid and evil people here are.

Actually, now that you mention it, I did once know someone who received the ugly branding due to peeing “in public” on his way home after bar time, down a back alley by some dumpsters in the dark where he was sure no one would see him.

It is difficult to understand how that counts.

As an offence, let alone as a sex offence.

Wow.

Well, an offence I can understand.

I hate biking or walking through stinking alleys.

2:41 PM

I once saw a man giving a bj to another man in a park at 5 am.

And somebody has to cart away those dumpsters and smell the stink.

@WillHunting Wow.

@Cerberus The battle against innumeracy is seldom waged with the same gusto as the one against illiteracy sometimes is.

@Cerberus It wasn't you, was it?

@tchrist The relevancy escapes me.

@WillHunting Which one was you?

2:42 PM

@WillHunting I have never done that, no.

@Cerberus I was saying that you were demonstrating a better understanding of numbers than most people show.

Ah.

Thank you. You were so cryptic.

But I assume most educated people understand the basics of statistics.

I would not take that bet.

Another NYTimes article on man-camps, showing a remarkably clean one in the photo.

> “There is a testiness that’s developed in this last year because it’s so intense,” said E. Ward Koeser, the longtime mayor of nearby Williston, with about 14,000 people, the largest city in the region.

That is so ironic!

I mean, testosterone being the root of so many problems in such places.

Perhaps they should only hire eunuchs.

Wait, that won’t work.

Why not?

NPR: 2014-02-01 Booming Oil Fields May Be Giving Sex Trafficking A Boost.

@Cerberus Because Windows.

No self-respecting Unix guy would ever go there.

2:48 PM

Hah.

There is no schwa in Unix?

Maybe a schwi.

It is a pun on Multics.

Hah.

I do not know that.

> Percent of sexually molested boys who are molested by someone they knew 93 %
Percent of sexually molested girls who are molested by someone they knew 80 %

Which, I think, no more has a schwa in its final syllable than economics. It depends really on phonemic representation versus phonetic ones, and fast-speech rules would tend to draw that.

@Cerberus Who molests boys?

@Cerberus Paul Harvey: "And now . . . you know . . . the rest of the story."

2:51 PM

People who know the boys.

@Cerberus Are they usually men or women?

@tchrist I still don't know it...

@WillHunting I think usually men.

Huffington Post 2013-08-05: Man Camps and Predator Economics Threaten Heartland Native Communities

But I have to say "they knew" is a bit vague.

@tchrist He doesn't know Paul Harvey. I'm kind of surprised you do. Page Two . . .

2:52 PM

@Cerberus Once someone was spying on me in the toilet. I looked up in the cubicle and saw his head.

@Robusto Your surprise astonishes me. Who the cluck do you think I am, some uncultured spring chicken?

@WillHunting Really!

I have never had that.

@Cerberus And you know what I was doing then? I was doing something naughty then...

STOP!

@tchrist Well, It's not like Paul Harvey is some esoteric cultural paragon. Just an older-generation news reader/commentator with a particular style.

I don't mean "particular" there necessarily, but I can't think of the word I want which means "having a unique characteristic" . . . or something of the sort.

Not idiosyncratic, but that's closer.

WTF am I trying to think of?

2:55 PM

@Robusto unique is the word you want

Peculiar

@WillHunting No, it is not.

@tchrist Almost, except with the nuance of pertaining to a particular individual.

His cadence also marked him.

Emblematic isn’t right.

Maybe individual would do, but I'm not satisfied with it.

Singular?

2:57 PM

Distinctive?

Hmm, distinctive or singular are both good, though they weren't what I was trying to think of.

Sui generis.

Ape-like?

I don’t know why I wouldn’t know Paul Harvey. Have you forgotten that I know more radio than ever have I known television?

Brilliantly eccentric?

2:59 PM

@tchrist Forgotten it? I don't think I ever knew it.

@Cerberus Eccentric. That is it! Thank you.

Ah.

Wow, we are getting ground tremors around here lately. My home office is in the middle of the upstairs, in a spot that is particularly susceptible to shaking. So I notice them a lot in here.

Maybe there is a dinosaur underground.

@Robusto Think E.G. Marshal and you will hear my childhood (not that I was legally a child, but still).

@Robusto Fracking or Parkinson’s?

Oh, dear.

3:02 PM

@tchrist No fracking around here that I'm aware of.

A major earthquake in Boston would be a disaster

> It's not the likelihood of a major earthquake that makes experts tremble -- though it's worse than you think. It's the damage one would do -- because it's MUCH worse than you think.

All the CBS Radio Mystery Theater episodes, individually downloadable and gratis.

@Robusto Surprised the decades of the Big Dig caused none.

When I was in primary school, my parents imposed a strict bed time. So TV watching was cut off rather early. However, we were allowed to have the radio on to a drama station “to go to sleep by” even after that curfew hour. So of course we did.

@tchrist Oh, but you grew up in Chicago's environs. So it might not be odd for you to have heard Paul Harvey.

Forgot that clue.

He was local not national?

Well, not forgot. Just didn't think of it.

@tchrist Syndicated, but I think his biggest following was around Chicago.

> A few years ago, in the pages of Chicago magazine, radio storyteller Garrison Keillor fondly recalled his run-in with Harvey at a “stuffed-shirt” dinner in Chicago. “When the salad plates were whisked away and the entree brought in, he leaned over toward me and said, ‘Page … 2,’ just like he does on the radio,” Keillor wrote.
“In fact, Mr. Harvey was exactly as he is on the radio. He read me a number of stories from a script in his pocket, most of them about ordinary Americans and their struggle to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world, and du…

Talk about two unmistakable voices!

@Rob Did you hear the NPR clip this past week of Meryl Streep doing Eleanor Rooseveldt?

3:10 PM

No.

Very impressive.

She is an excellent voice artist.

I don't find that surprising in the least.

> to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world

?

For her role on Altman’s last movie with Keillor, Streep took voice lessons from her mother-in-law up in Oshkosh.

@Cerberus He was a right-wing commentator.

3:12 PM

Funny.

Why do I keep spelling Roosevelt with an extra d?

-d, -t, and -dt exist in Dutch.

There is no real difference.

Isn’t a veldt spelled with a d?

NPR stories with Streep as Eleanor: Fresh Air broadcast from 2014-09-10 and others.

The Streep clip is towards the end of the audio in the first link.

@tchrist Not in modern Dutch. In older Dutch, they varied the spelling of such words.

-dt is now reserved for verbs with a stem ending on -d and an inflexion -t.

Like the verb vinden, "find".

Ik vind, jij vindt, hij vindt.

Who would have thought that an American could have played the Iron Lady herself, and to such stunning affect?

I never would have.

> Despite the accolades accorded to her, Streep has emphasized that adopting accents is an element she simply considers an obvious part of creating a character. When asked whether accents helped her get into character, she responded, "I'm always baffled by this question... How could I play that part and talk like me?" When questioned in Belfast as to how she reproduces different accents, Streep replied, "I listen" - in a dead-on Ulster accent.

Could have been dead-pan there for dead-on. :)

@Cerberus What did it settle on them, just -t?

OED has zuur-veldt.

3:21 PM

@tchrist Veld happened to settle on -d. But you never know with other words.

OFFS it is now spelled veld normally. Why in the world was I thinking it was still spelled veldt?

It all depends on the plural: if you hear a d in the plural, it is -d (sg.), -den (pl.). If you hear a -t- in the plural, it is a t everywhere. Never -dt.

@tchrist There are probably many names of people and places spelled -veldt.

So it might just as well have been Rooseveldt.

Note that the double o is also archaic.

2 hours later…

5:01 PM

@GraceNote All I know is that our current naming setup leads to confusion, frustration, and bad feelings. People don’t get answers; they get mad and leave. English alone of language sites—but like Math or CompSci—is so huge that its several communities don’t fit comfortably under one tent. Unlike all other SE lang sites, the current EN-site naming scheme is a deceptive garden path that misleads struggling learners to exactly where they’ll be least well-served. This is the problem I would see fixed. The “how” doesn’t matter to me: anything that improves the newcomer experience gets my vote. — tchrist 15 mins ago

5:17 PM

The only downside I can think of of renaming ELL to "English" is that it'll confuse some users of both sites. But I can't think of any other name for ELL that is just as simple for it to appear as the default go-to site for learning basic English.

Also, all posts that linked to anything on ELU and ELL would need to be corrected.

But they did it for Meta.SE. So should be possible.

I am surprised that anybody needs convincing that the current setup is problematic.

You guys could have a community question for the best site name these sites should be renamed to.

Since some people don't seem to like EnglishOverflow.

Nor English for ELL.

@Alraxite It certainly is not research level questions. cf Math Overflow.

how do you do research in English?

@WillHunting Yes, but still it is meant to be for advanced questions.

And what skull said.

5:24 PM

@IceBoy No idea.

we could name this site Advanced English

I will say again that I think both sites should be merged.

and called what?

Just called "English Language"

how does that help the learner?

5:29 PM

Most questions can certainly be put into two categories of Advanced English Q and Basic English Q.

And people who like to discuss and answer Advanced English Qs probably will like a site solely dedicated to that.

I do not find the questions on ELU advanced and those on ELL basic. I find them all the same --- about English, full stop.

Yes, me too.

And that's not how it should be.

Which is why the name change is important.

the objective is to help the beginner in learning

yes?

And why can't a merged site achieve that?

too big

5:35 PM

A merged site can achieve that. Except all experts will be driven away.

So, the merged site will just become ELL.

Well, I think that's the only reason a different site was proposed.

Who do you consider an expert on ELU?

All high rep people. Many are in this room.

Lawler

I can tell you that Kris is not an expert.

i am no expert

5:38 PM

Though rep doesn't always correlate with expertness, I believe it does hold for a large number of people for this site.

I am a banana.

For Maths.SE, it doesn't.

My enemy on Math has a very high rep, but she often gives stupid answers.

See?

icic

5:41 PM

At least she has stopped saying stupid comments, such as +1. She does that so that others will upvote her, lol.

live and let live

hello everyone

6:04 PM

42

A: Impose a re-entry delay on users kicked out of a chat room

This has been implemented now. The short story is: room owners can kick abusive users, who will then be banned from re-entering the room for a certain time. Of course you want not just the short story but all the dirty details, so here they are: In the user popup that appears when you click on ...

^ @Robusto

@JohanLarsson I don't see myself using that much. In all my history here, I've never seen a situation in which I would have used it.

true, not much need in this room

but good to know

how is your C#?

About as good as my Java.

I'm stuck on a microoptimization issue

I use both indifferently, and would quit if I had to do that kind of work.

@JohanLarsson Afraid I won't be of any help there. You'll need to talk with an expert.

6:12 PM

ok I'll rubberduck any way

I'm subscribing to a feed over a socket

six types of messages comes randomly over the feed. I'm trying to find an efficient way to deserialize it

don't want to read lines into temp strings cos GC

I could go all low level & manual but feels fragile and painful

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