English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mitch

1:58 AM

Why is Araucaria such a jerk?

Cerberus

Hi!

I recall her being slightly unpleasant to me too.

What is she doing this time?

tchrist

3:09 AM

0

Q: Windows Install Failed on phone

moffbear is here with unfortunate news. moffbear tried to install windows xp on moffbear's windows phone but it tells moffbear that it fails this makes moffbear feel very depressed as moffbear's phone was special to him please help moffbear

terminology

Note in particular just which SE site that was posted on.

Cerberus

Hilarious.

skullpatrol

lol

Cerberus

Of course XP is entirely unrelated to phones

skullpatrol

Of course :-)

😎💀👂

📵

Cerberus

3:30 AM

skullpatrol

4:36 AM

@Cerberus strange how only the "smiley" came through

😄😳

😃😎

Mr_Green

5:30 AM

Hi all

"I work in xyx pvt. ltd.."

Is this sentence correct? I mean the sentence is ending with two "full stops"

one is of "ltd." and other is of sentence end.

Jasper Loy

5:50 AM

@Mr_Green No, only one full stop is needed.

Matt Эллен

8:17 AM

mernin

skullpatrol

Howdy

Andrew Leach

9:39 AM

Someone I know has just sent an email to say he's trapped in the Ukraine having been robbed AT GUN POINT [sic].

And the replies go to a subtly-different address.

And the originating IP address is in Mauritius.

I guess he's still in the UK.

skullpatrol

Never trust the internet.

Robusto

10:42 AM

I trusted the internet once, and it broke my heart.

3

Robusto

10:59 AM

0

Q: Semantics of the article “The” in formal logic

This question has some cross-over into Formal Logic. Take the sentence "The man is never wrong". Let m stand for a man. Let NW(x) stand for x is never wrong. We can interpret the English meaning in a number of ways: 1) Something like: The man of the house is never wrong. (i.e. a man in gene...

articles translation logic

Wut?

@MattЭллен You misspelled merkin.

Andrew Leach

@Robusto That's his second go at that question. He deleted the first one.

I commented on the first.

> Using symbols isn't helpful, in my opinion. I think you're comparing "the Sun" being a definite concrete reference to "the day" meaning "any day" or "every day", but that's by no means clear.

Robusto

Making a hash of it again, then.

Matt Эллен

@Robusto neither people from the USA nor pubic wigs are at the beginning of my day :Þ

Robusto

And I have no idea what Kris is going on about. Get him into a room with anybody else and the conversation goes way off the rails.

@MattЭллен So you're saying mernin is the BrE spelling of merkin? Interesting.

GnomeSlice

Today's Listening | Deep House / Dance

Matt Эллен

11:07 AM

my internal dialogue about Kris most often goes
"What is Kris saying?"
"I don't know"
"Oh well."

Robusto

Similar to mine.

Matt Эллен

@Robusto I am saying quite the opposite!

Robusto

No, you are saying the oppousite.

Andrew Leach

@Robusto I think it's probably a duplicate of this one...

3

Q: "The (Cobra)" vs. "An (elephant)", articles with nouns denoting a class

[ 1 ] tells on p.5 that "Singular nouns denoting a class" are preceded by the definite article "THE" (Example: "The Cobra is dangerous"), while on page 7 (Table 6. THE INDEFINITE ARTICLE) it tells that "Singular countable nouns denoting a class" are preceded by indefinite articles ("An elephant n...

indefinite-article definite-article uncountable-nouns

Matt Эллен

at least I'm not saying the opozit

Andrew Leach

11:10 AM

Ooh. And guess who the accepted answer is by on the cobra/elephant question!

Matt Эллен

Kris?

Andrew Leach

Robusto.

Matt Эллен

oh :D

whata mistakea to makea

Robusto

I didn't even remember it.

Anyway, how do you get from "a man" to "the man of the house"? You are conflating things that shouldn't be considered together, and drawing faulty conclusions from that. — Robusto 9 secs ago

@AndrewLeach If I could fathom what the OP is talking about in this case, I might agree. But he loses me at "Let NW(x) stand for x is never wrong."

Matt Эллен

that's meant to turn "[x] is never wrong" in to the function NW(x)

Robusto

11:18 AM

And we all know that English is just another programming language.

Matt Эллен

quite :D as you say, a question built on a faulty premise

Andrew Leach

And why is it tagged translation?

Robusto

I almost suspect the OP is having us on.

Andrew Leach

Well, I've added a comment directing to the cobra question. Feel free to upvote the comment to unhide it.

Robusto

Unhidden.

Robusto

11:35 AM

And . . . self-deleted his own question. Wonder if he's going to try for three.

Mitch

2:31 PM

@Cerberus Nothing flaggable, nothing personal, in fact she's just being honest about her intellectual opinion. She uses words like 'ban', 'prevent', 'embarrassing' (in the meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/5185/…). Basically saying "don't link to this page".

Jasper Loy

2:42 PM

The pinned message should be unpinned to make way for genuinely starred messages.

Cerberus

@Mitch Right, in the Meta genre, I guess that tone is perfectly acceptable.

Matt Эллен

@Mitch what I would find more embarrassing is the huge number of people who keep coming after apparently being taught English, still not being able to use tenses properly.

Jasper Loy

@MattЭллен You can unpin the pinned message.

Matt Эллен

I know. I find it useful

Jasper Loy

Useful? Geezis!

Matt Эллен

2:48 PM

a healthy reminder

that people seem to ignore

Jasper Loy

Who removed my star?

Matt Эллен

but one to which I can easily point if I start getting complaints about crap being unstarred

@JasperLoy I did

Jasper Loy

Haha, lol. Nvm.

Matt Эллен

:D

Jasper Loy

The starboard should only contain my messages.

Matt Эллен

2:50 PM

ah. of course

Jasper Loy

I wonder what people think of the term whole number. Does whole number include 0? How about -1?

skullpatrol

{0, 1, 2, 3, ...} is how it is taught today.

Jasper Loy

If I write a textbook, I would probably avoid the use of whole number.

skullpatrol

what would you call the above set?

Jasper Loy

@skullpatrol I would call it natural number, lol, following Bourbaki.

Cerberus

2:56 PM

@MattЭллен *having been

Dan Bron

IME, there is no good, unambiguous term for "non-negative integers", except "non-negative integers" itself or <b>N<sup>+</sup></b>.

Cerberus

Or wasn't that a tense...

But I agree.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus I meant being

Cerberus

Oh, okay.

In a way, it could be argued that you only know the tenses well enough once you start using them intuitively.

And you don't sound "natural" before that day.

skullpatrol

@JasperLoy then what would you call {1, 2, 3, 4,...}?

Jasper Loy

2:59 PM

@skullpatrol I would probably call them positive integers. Of course, all this is just a preference.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus perhaps

Cerberus

Perhaps, perhaps!

skullpatrol

@JasperLoy there is a "natural order" of the integers

order from least to greatest

Jasper Loy

@skullpatrol There is no least or greatest integer, lol.

skullpatrol

true

because there are infinitely many...

but they can be put in a natural order

3 mins ago, by skullpatrol

order from least to greatest

Jasper Loy

3:06 PM

0 is the only nonnegative and nonpositive integer.

skullpatrol

true, zero is neither positive nor negative

Jasper Loy

However, in French-to-English texts, positive often means nonnegative and negative often means nonpositive.

Just like sometimes increasing means nondecreasing and decreasing means nonincreasing.

skullpatrol

i have enough trouble with english thanks :)

Jasper Loy

Me too, lol.

skullpatrol

i find the extremely concise stuff so hard to read reasonably fast

Jasper Loy

3:11 PM

@skullpatrol Are you good at LaTeX? I only know very little, would be good to read a book on it.

skullpatrol

@JasperLoy not me, there is a LaTeX.SE

Jasper Loy

@skullpatrol Yes, I once had 2k on it from answering some lhf.

skullpatrol

they have a very friendly chat room

Jasper Loy

Yes, Paulo and Joseph are both ducks.

Their site is friendly too, almost no downvotes.

The norm there is to only downvote utter rubbish.

skullpatrol

can't they help you find a book?

Jasper Loy

3:15 PM

I don't need help on that, thanks.

I merely said above that I know very little, lol.

skullpatrol

"...would be good to read a book on it."

Jasper Loy

Yes, and I know exactly what to read, just that I haven't read it.

@skullpatrol Would you like me to recommend you a free book on it?

skullpatrol

sure

if you don't mind

Jasper Loy

@skullpatrol tug.org/twg/mactex/tutorials/ltxprimer-1.0.pdf

username901345

hi

skullpatrol

3:22 PM

@JasperLoy thanks

hi

Jasper Loy

3:36 PM

Hi @JamesJenkins you look very serious there.

Jasper Loy

3:48 PM

@skullpatrol The Buddhism chat is dead.

Robusto

4:25 PM

A simile, like, puts the i in smile.

@skullpatrol And yet you can have +0 and -0 in computing sometimes.

I can't remember where, but I've come across that situation before.

Faheem Mitha

"The focus on Robin really aloud her character...". What kind of spelling mistake do this call this in English?

In case anyone cares, this is from thetvcritic.org/reviews/comedies/how-i-met-your-mother/…

I thought if anyone would know, the people here would.

Maybe this should be a question on the site? Opinions?

Jasper Loy

@FaheemMitha Yes I think you should post on the site.

Faheem Mitha

@JasperLoy Ok.

Suggestions for a tag?

Robusto

4:42 PM

@FaheemMitha I think that ~~would~~ wood be an eggcorn.

@Robusto Thanks.

Made a joke.

Maid a joke.

4:56 PM

@JasperLoy seriously?

Jasper Loy

@JamesJenkins Yes. You should smile more, lol

Faheem Mitha

@JasperLoy Excellent!

@Robusto I see what you did there. :-)

@Robusto Do tell.

Robusto

True story.

Jasper Loy

Story time

tchrist

5:13 PM

Most pleased - more pleasing would have been to attribute that lovely photo of the red-tailed hawk to the works creator but none the less, if complete and correct attribution is to be achieved then we all need to play our part, whether it's text or images or anything else that someone else created. — Frank 52 mins ago

Frank is being a pest.

That comment is not constructive.

And I am sick of it all.

Robusto

Frankly, my dear . . .

Jasper Loy

Dearly, my Frank...

@tchrist You should take it easy. It's just someone on the internet.

4

Robusto

Wow, I can't believe the lengths Mari-Lou A went on answering the same question—and after tchrist had already answered it exhaustively.

@tchrist: btw, the bird that tap-tap-taps on my house has an orange blaze behind its eyes.

Zoe

5:30 PM

@JasperLoy I think I found what you were talking about meta.christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/1602/… Though, It is frozen for inactivity and I believe the reason for the inactivity is a flawed understanding of what exactly constitutes prayer requests.

Jasper Loy

@Zoe Aha!

tchrist

@JasperLoy It’s clear that the Community has decided to nitpick until those it disagrees with come round to their perspective.

Here’s another example:

Uncomplainaboutable. — Edwin Ashworth 7 mins ago

But about the reference thing, it seems that the current tactic is to annoy people to death by ridiculousness until SE changes its references policy.

I find that unlikely to be a profitable tactic, but I am clearly no expert in these matters.

Case in point:

1

A: What to do about missing source attributions?

It is nice to see that even though the rule now is that "moderators are instructed to delete on sight without further warning any content that is not properly attributed", practice shows that editing extra text is still an option, as in this ELU question. The moderator's comment suggests this is...

The snark is not going to help.

Jasper Loy

At most I link to a dictionary but I always rewrite in my own words what it says.

tchrist

Is there any reason I should not simply delete all images from that posting?

I actually would like permission to do that.

Jasper Loy

I don't know. I have not been following this copyright issue on meta, and I do not want to read all about law.

tchrist

5:42 PM

Because if I don’t delete them, I am going to continue to be henpecked by dorkheads.

And if I delete material, that might be construed to be sabotage.

I therefore request formal guidance in this area.

Jasper Loy

Do what you think is right.

tchrist

No.

What I think is right is to ignore them.

Maybe they’ll go away.

Jasper Loy

I do not always do what I think is right, which is sad.

tchrist

But the reference issue seems to make people so upset that they go to ridiculous lengths to try to "prove" it is not a workable SE policy.

This is not constructive.

This is not my hill to die on.

I believe that what Frank did with his OED edits constitutes a form of vandalism.

It is intentionally in-your-face.

It is not constructive.

And he used ugly blue monospace just to make sure you couldn’t miss it.

Jasper Loy

Thinking about this issue is not constructive.

We should just abandon it and ignore it.

tchrist

5:50 PM

You aren’t being continually pinged because of it.

I am.

Jasper Loy

I don't think OED will sue anyone for it.

Cerberus

6:08 PM

Why do you care so much about plagiarism? It is a faux pas at worst. No doggies die.

Mahnax

Hello.

Today is my first day of uni, how exciting!

Mitch

@tchrist ITYM dorkpecked. Now it's a word.

@Cerberus But what if a dog is saddened by the intellectual posturing? I don't want that to happen to any dog.

Wait, did you have homework to hand in on the first day of class? Worst nightmare ever.

@Mahnax Woo hoo!

Matt Эллен

6:33 PM

@Mahnax wow! congrats :D

Cerberus

@Mitch I assure you, dogs have more important things to worry about, such as doggy treats and unusual smells.

Faheem Mitha

And dogs of the opposite sex.

Stack Exchange

6:56 PM

Limerick Machine: One time at a fabulous party A devious and cunning smarty Found their holy grail Was spiking the...

posted on September 03, 2014 by sgdi

One time at a fabulous party A devious and cunning smarty Found their holy grail Was spiking the ale With something that made people farty

Mitch

7:17 PM

@Cerberus Look, we're disgusted at dogs sniffing each other's butts. Maybe their similarly disgusted at or wanton lack of creativity, namely plagiarism. Now that stinks.

Cerberus

Well, you are talking to one.

Mitch

I totally meant 'their'; it's just a garden path sentence that peters out towards.

... the end.

@Cerberus I'm pretty quiet at the moment.

Cerberus

@Mitch Better plagiarism than illiteracy!

Mitch

punches self in face

Ow!

Now it's getting pretty heated in here.

@Cerberus Better plagiarism! Improvise when you copy-paste!

Cerberus

@Mitch Hey, that was uncalled for!

Mitch

7:23 PM

I do blame myself for the violence. But am pretty forgiving.

Cerberus

@Mitch Your first sentence is 67% my plagiarised words.

Mitch

In fact, I think I'll reward myself for such honesty with a snack.

@Cerberus or 50% if you're using math.

Cerberus

Actually, I meant 100%.

Mitch

I have a patent pending on operations involving 2.

Cerberus

100% of your sentence is my plagiarised words.

I have a patent on "1" and "0".

Mitch

7:25 PM

I didn't use 'than illiteracy'

augh! Dammit!

You got me.

Cerberus

Good luck with your computing.

@Mitch Still, your sentence was 0% original and therefore 100% plagiarised.

Mitch

I use binary based on 2's and 1's (it's a real thing). I can easily convert that into 2's and 3's .

@Cerberus You know how people say that the human body is worth $(let's say under 20) nowadays? I think if you sold the organs you'd get thousands of dollars. Or even better, convince people that they are working 'for themselves' when in reality they are slaves. Millions!

Cerberus

@Mitch But 2 consists of 1 and 1.

You need to license my patent.

It's only 1 cent per use.

@Mitch Umm but who says it would be under 20?

Mitch

@Cerberus I'm not using 1. I'm using 2 as itself and deriving 1 from it. Ha. You thought you were all safe with your 1's but you've been scooped.

@Cerberus You might have platinum tooth fillings, but the rest is mostly carbon and water. a few trace elements. Traces of loratidine from the other day (woo! that was a party!). Is DNA resellable?

Cerberus

7:44 PM

@Mitch Nooooo....I am lost!

@Mitch Well, if split all the cores of my atoms, I'm sure the resulting energy will be worth billions!

Not to mention the highly valuable loose protons and electrons.

Mitch

@Cerberus I might explain but that would ruin all of it. So let me do so. I'm assuming you understand how binary works. Well, suppose you don't have a '0' but you do have '2' (which means 2). Then you count like this: 1, 2, 11, 12, 21, 22, 111, 112, 121, 122, 211, 212, 221, 222, 1111, etc see?

@Cerberus works out business plan

uses mass of single sheet of paper for business plan to create thimble sized black hole

warms tea with it

Robusto

@Mitch II likelike regularregular binarybinary betterbetter.

RegDwigнt

8:00 PM

Holy crap, so much cleanup on aisle everywhere.

And it's not Sunday.

Everyone back to school, eh.

I have to fear the upcoming Sunday, then.

Robusto

@RegDwigнt Alles Erworbene bedroht die Schule.

RegDwigнt

Wie jetzt, auch mein LEGO?

Cerberus

8:23 PM

@Mitch No, no, I meant that as in "I am ruined".

May cause is lost.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

8:38 PM

@tchrist I think part of the issue is that the attribution policy for textual quotes seems to disallow non-plain-text attribution, yet your post has the attribution for the images in the alt-text, which would appear to violate the policy. Or maybe the policy is different for images, but your post didn't address those?

Anonymous

@Robusto Wow! +7 -10

Anonymous

oerkelens brought the attribution policy discussion over to ELL meta, too: meta.ell.stackexchange.com/questions/1169/…

Cerberus

0

A: How do we handle source attributions that do not conform to the new rules?

Since it would be bad for the website and for its users, including the moderators, perhaps this is a good candidate for civil disobedience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience : Of course editing it is even better, if you have the time and the energy.

I felt disoboedient.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

8:55 PM

Since the policy is silent on image links, your answer fails to actually disobey it. Nice try though. — Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 2 mins ago

Cerberus

+1

TRiG

There really is a difference between baggy and saggy.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

what direction it faces?

TRiG

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That's baggy.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

it is?

TRiG

9:01 PM

This is saggy:

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

ah

Anonymous

@GnomeSlice Different people draw boundaries for colors in different places.

Anonymous

And it varies from language to language.

TRiG

►

tchrist

@TRiG That wouldn’t be so freaky if the lime were on the left and the indigo on the right.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

9:04 PM

I recently saw a video that tried to explain that it was unknowable if two people saw red the same way, or green. But the example they used was of a red vegetable turned green. It was a bad example, because the person who say colours in the original way would see two colours: the red part, and the green part, and the person who saw red as "green" would see one colour, the green part, and the other green part.

tchrist

But seeing text that says blue written in a red font is always going to freak your brain.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Actually, you kind of can. The CIE color model was developed for standard human vision.

Now, people with color blindness have learned to assign names of colors to something other than you might.

They use the same names, but they will fail to make distinctions that you will make.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Yeah, I have a bit of colour blindness.

I have a hard time distinguishing certain colours from other ones. Like, the link text on ELU is sometimes hard for me to distinguish from the main text.

In fact that was my main complaint when the site's theme first launched.

Anyway I must be off.

Apparently so. :)

10:02 PM

@snailboat Lotta controversy, I guess. しかたがない。

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That's a flaw, IMO. The red in the link is the color of dried blood, far too close to black. I kinda hate the whole color palate, myself. It's too fusty and dowdy and schoolmarmish for me. Other SE sites have cool color combos, but ours has to look like a decaying first edition of Fowler.

Few people seem to agree with me, though:

-2

Q: Bored with the dowdy colors, I seek solace in drink

Blessings on thee, little man, Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! Yeah, that's how it starts. The John Greenleaf Whittier poem, that is. From 1855. Last time I looked, it was 158 years later. We don't write poetry like that anymore, and we sure don't talk the way they did back then. Hell, th...

discussion feature-request

jinawee

Could someone clarify the use of "for" in this Yeats poem?

>For England may keep faith
>For all that is done and said.

tchrist

@Robusto Blackish red is what they used to call purple.

jinawee

Is it in the "because" sense?

Robusto

@tchrist The color of a bruise.

@jinawee The first one is, the second probably is not.

tchrist

10:22 PM

Could someone please tell me how what he has done with his footnotes makes any sense at all?

18

A: -phobia word for fear of hearing speeches

The Greek word for speech being ομιλία (omilia), I would suggest something along the lines of omilophobia. As aronisstav mentions in his answer, there are good reasons to leave the i in. It means the word refers to fear of speeches (plural) and avoids up to some level confusion with other possib...

Robusto

@jinawee It's a complicated couplet in an otherwise straightforward poem. The enjambment makes the second for ambiguous, and indeed the poet seems to indulge in the ambiguity of it all.

tchrist

Those are two different kinds of for.

Andrew Leach

@tchrist oerkelens has an odd idea of how things are to be attributed, or what it is necessary to provide an attribution for.

tchrist

@AndrewLeach Okay, okay. So it wasn’t supposed to make sense. :)

Andrew Leach

I think it's supposed to make sense...

tchrist

10:28 PM

Oh. I just read your new metapost.

I see.

Attributing link-outs is . . . peculiar.

Does this need editing, or flagging as LQ for being unsavable, or flagging as NA for being a comment, or something else?

-1

A: When is a gerund supposed to be preceded by a possessive pronoun?

What happened to the 1st person possessive pronoun? Example What do you think of me buying a new car? Would also say me bought a new car? the proper way is What do you think of my buying a new car? Wholesale misuse of this 1st per pos pronoun in the media!! Thanks Larry

It sure doesn’t add anything to nohat’s answer. :(

Andrew Leach

10:45 PM

I would say that's NAA.

In fact, I have.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…