English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@Mazura pinned

10 hours later…

9:57 AM

thuglife anteater short

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10:34 AM

11:19 AM

Białoruskie Miechaniki

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^ an engineer at VW

11:54 AM

Great example of what engineers will do in the name of "science."

choishine.com/Projects/giants.html

12:20 PM

What nuance would you see between 'template' and 'layout' ?

I would think that a "template" is more of a cookie cutter approach.

If you know what I mean :-)

Cookie cutter

A cookie cutter in American English and biscuit cutter in Commonwealth English is a tool to cut out cookie/biscuit dough in a particular shape. They are often used for seasonal occasions when well-known decorative shapes are desired, or for large batches of cookies where simplicity and uniformity are required. Cookie cutters have also been used for, among other uses, cutting and shaping tea sandwiches. == Types and variationsEdit == Cutout Most commonly made of copper, tin, stainless steel, aluminium, or plastic. Cutouts are the simplest of the cookie cutters; the cutter is pressed into cookie...

a model, pattern?

Yep

For mass production

Template

The layout is more like the overall plan.

12:40 PM

Layout means orientation of subparts to me

For layout, I think of page layout, the way pages are structured (margins, headers, etc...)

For template, I think of templating engines (things that replace placeholders inside a page, with some actual data)

ok, I think template can be seen as 'model', that can be customized later on

a template has already a layout

Indeed, there is an overlap of meaning...

indeed, to sum up can we say?
layout ~ graphics, design, style
template ~ data

"data" is bit vague imo

1:01 PM

sorry, I mean when restricting those 2 terms to the context of text documents

@crl Not really. A template is already set up, all you need to do is add your data. It already has a layout.

For example, a template is what you get if you create a new presentation in powerpoint and use one of the preconfigured, well, templates.

Each template has a different layout.

just like each cookie cutter has a different shape

printf("A %s has a %s.\n", owner, item); /* first argument is a kind of template */

That's also a good example of why programmers shouldn't attempt human language. :)

1:08 PM

yes I see it like that too

@tchrist yes doesn't work well with item=orange

Doesn’t work with item=item or owner=owner either.

"A %s has a %s."
"A %s has a %s."
are 2 different layouts of the 'same' template?

yep, I even read it in my head with owner and item

And if you passed a string like "A {owner} has a {item}." to your translation team, they’d throw it back at you because since you don’t know the gender of those placeholders, you cannot pick the right article in languages where that matters.

Just like how in English you cannot pick the right article because you do not know the next sound.

Enough of my team has at least a little French or Spanish, so they’re getting better with this, but they still forget about it often enough.

Basically, interpolation is evil when it comes to internationalization.

it should be "{(undetermined article) + orange} has {(undertermined article) + item}" (pack the word with its article in translations)

And the you have to ucfirst the resulting interpolated article.

But yes, it's all harder.

1:19 PM

yes capitals

The bigger the stuff to translate, the easier, and the shorter, the harder. Throw in interpolated unknowns, and it may well be next to impossible.

Labels for UI elements are especially annoying.

Oh man. Chatting with someone who considers Robert Jordan a good writer is a surreal experience.

There's a lot of that.

I wish those people would go back to reading Harlequin romance pulp.

And if I might be discreet, if I were you I wouldn’t get into a row with certain numbskulls.

1:35 PM

Hey, what's wrong with skulls?

\joke

While one can certainly find exemplary adolescents with their heads on straight who display sound judgment and a balanced perspective, it is even easier to find counter-examples, perhaps in part because the former are louder and stick out more than the latter. Plus not all wines mature with age.

well said

Q: Novel where one of the characters is a sentient starship?

Unfortunately, some whines do.

By the way, does anyone have any idea on this?

I read this sometime in the 90s but it may well be older. I remember A female character had been fitted with a system that allowed her to induce physical pleasure (orgasms at will if you like) as restitution for a crime committed against her1. Part of the story arc was another character's atte...

story-identification

@terdon HAL in 2001 was a sentient spaceship.

But the orgasms he gave were, shall we say, disappointing.

@terdon Pretty sure I’ve not read that one.

1:39 PM

True, but no floating woman with click-to-orgasm®.

@tchrist Damn, as I recall it was pretty good. The orgasms thing was just mentioned in passing, it wasn't a central theme or anything but I read it when I was about 14 so...

Click 1 to sneeze, 2 to hiccup, 3 to orgasm, 4 for petit mal, 5 for grand mal. Use shift-click for continuous repeats.

I remember that the last chapter was the narrator coming out as the ship.

So there are trolls everywhere, even on Duolingo Immersion. Some asshole is pasting unrelated garbage into the translation fields to get the momentary boost of XP.

And he even posted a discussion regarding the "problem" of people pasting garbage into translation fields. What a pathetic, lonely life he must lead if he is this desperate for attention.

Computers are magnets for those with such disorders.

I feel unclean even criticizing people like that, because no matter what I say I am feeding their desire for attention.

The only thing I can do is report them to the mods, who so far have been quick and efficient: "Thanks! We've reverted the latest bogus translations and warned this user. He will also be banned from translation for another week. Please let us know if you notice anything like this in the future."

2:07 PM

@Robusto what happened to the pin on this?

2:19 PM

@skillpatrol I removed the pin on the football player quiz. I figured it was time to let it age out of the starboard.

1 hour later…

3:27 PM

My work here is done: I’m out of close-votes.

And there are a good dozen more new questions without any close votes at all which merit them.

And the queue needs to be run.

3 hours later…

Vini Vasundharan

6:37 PM

@skillpatrol Hi.. It was a typo actualy.. I dint mean to type anythn..

@RegDwigнt I dint miss anything..

dint

Noun: dint ‎(countable and uncountable, plural dints)

(obsolete) A blow, stroke, especially dealt in a fight.
1600, Edward Fairfax, The Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, XI, xxxi:
Force, power; especially in by dint of.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
The mark left by a blow; an indentation or impression made by violence; a dent.

(4 more not shown…)

Verb: dint ‎(third-person singular simple present dints, present participle dinting, simple past and past participle dinted)

To dent

6:57 PM

@tchrist Requited close votes should be returned to you upon the post being closed. How many other users use all of them, daily?

You’d have to ask Shog.

Mitch

7:18 PM

@Mazura Oh, now I get it. Also, you can make your comments in chat more relevant by responding directly to a coment: click on the down arrow directly between a commenters name and the comment and choose 'reply to this message'

@Mitch Heh, you know I've never used that. Lets see what it does.

Ah that's what an arrow over there means.

Mitch

@Mazura nice!

@Mitch There are other things about reference you can

Like I can refer to comments of my own, and from the past, not just the future.

I wish I could link other peoples comments.

Mitch

LIke that. I just pinged myself from the past.