English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

5:00 PM

I'm happy to say I know of no authors whose style is in any way akin to yours. Luckily, such butchers of the language are rarely published. — terdon 18 secs ago

tchrist

I am left bewildered and bemused by many of these befuddled concoctions. — Mari-Lou A 9 mins ago

She’s funny.

As in graciosa.

So in a charming sort of way.

@terdon nutjob

Cerberus

@terdon I understand your emotion, but you're very harsh.

terdon

@Cerberus Yes. That was kind of harsh but did you read that?

Cerberus

It's just something he likes, and you destroy him?

I did.

tchrist

Betrolled is such a great word.

Cerberus

5:06 PM

What good may come of your comment, and what bad?

terdon

Pompous posturing without even the good grace of supporting it with a basic understanding of the language.

Cerberus

Pomposity is not immoral.

terdon

@Cerberus No, no. And I deleted the comment.

Cerberus

Yay!

terdon

I honestly got pissed off while reading that though.

Ugh.

tchrist

5:07 PM

No shit.

Cerberus

I understand.

I sometimes do the same thing.

Although I am usually more insidious.

terdon

What is it with people who want to sounds erudite and whom anyway?

Robusto

@Cerberus He likes trolling?

Cerberus

I was going to say whom was wrong, and pallet, etc.

@Robusto Nah, he likes that style.

A deviant love of language should be cured, not killed.

terdon

@Cerberus And 30% of all commas. And just plain nonsensical.

Robusto

5:08 PM

@terdon I love when they use whom in nominative constructions.

Cerberus

@terdon Haha. Have a drink!

terdon

@Robusto It drives me up the wall. If you're not sure, just use who. That will never sound as bad as a misplaced whom.

Robusto

@Cerberus I hear there are places you can go in Amsterdam to hear illicit language. Plenty of folks kink that way, I understand.

tchrist

Whom is formaller, of course. Just use it wherever you want to sound formaller.

Cerberus

@Robusto Me hate when them do that.

@Robusto Nah, it is perfectly licit here!

Robusto

5:09 PM

@terdon Rule of thumb: use who everywhere and nobody will call you out.

terdon

@Robusto Exactly. How hard is that?

Pompous idiots who want to sound cool.

Robusto

More to the point, nobody will care.

tchrist

@Cerberus Licet Jovi != Licet Bovi

terdon

Nobody cool says whom anyway. That's nerdspeak.

Cerberus

@Robusto points at room description

@tchrist The vowel change only happens if you add affixes!

Robusto

5:10 PM

@Cerberus room topic changed to English Language & Usage: Horton Hears a Whom (no tags)

tchrist

Damn it.

Cerberus

And endings don't count as affixes.

Better.

tchrist

Of course not.

Cerberus

Well, sometimes they do.

tchrist

Whoomer.

Cerberus

5:11 PM

Whom is Horton?

tchrist

Whoom’s book is this?

Cerberus

Vrooom!

Robusto

Horton Hears a Who!

Horton Hears a Who! is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel under the name Dr. Seuss and published in 1954 by Random House. It is the second Dr. Seuss book to feature Horton the Elephant, the first being Horton Hatches the Egg. The Whos would later make a reappearance in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. == Plot == The book tells the story of Horton the Elephant, who while splashing in a pool, hears a small speck of dust talking to him. Horton surmises that a small person lives on the speck and places it on a clover, vowing to protect it. He later discovers that the...

Cerberus

Ah.

Robusto

room topic changed to English Language & Usage: Horton Hears a Whom! (no tags)

Left out the exclamation mark.

tchrist

5:16 PM

@Mitch Be nice to Louel: he comes from a poor city impoverished of vowels.

0

A: What does the word 'Joll' mean in 18th century English?

What a delight to find such an erudite place, as in a dream, I stumbled across an English garden, and there, on the lawn, beneath a shading elm, I find a deck chair and a book to the side, with a marker which some scholar has but minutes past put down, and it opens to a world of rich enchantment ...

terdon

> Geisel began work on Horton Hears a Who! in the fall of 1953. The book's main theme, "a person's a person no matter how small", was Geisel's reaction to his visit to Japan [...]

Wow.

tchrist

Sigh.

Cerberus

@tchrist Hence the surfeit thereof in his name?

terdon

@Cerberus see I can too be gentle!

tchrist

@Cerberus lul

terdon

5:19 PM

Please use the Post answer button only for actual answers. This is a Q&A site, not a forum. — terdon 13 secs ago

Robusto

@terdon got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Him seem crabby.

Cerberus

@terdon Haha very good!

terdon

@Robusto Oh come on! I said please and everything. And I'm sure that the same guy who wrote the faux-Victorian crap above.

tchrist

@Cerberus Anything sounds better said with a smile.

Robusto

Seems like the site is editorializing now.

Cerberus

5:23 PM

@tchrist Absolutely. We should take that to heart.

terdon

@Robusto You have too much time on your hands.

tchrist

@Cerberus Did you see his profile? :)

Robusto

@terdon Either that or I'm really fast at that sort of thing.

Cerberus

I saw Brno.

terdon

@tchrist Really? How about "Time for your colonoscopy Mr. Smith!"

tchrist

5:24 PM

@Cerberus Yes, but it was Brno with a smile!

Robusto

No surnames in chat, por favor.

terdon

I'd rather that be delivered deadpan.

@Robusto Better?

Cerberus

Oh, that's good.

Robusto

Wait! My name is Smith!

terdon

Tough.

Cerberus

5:25 PM

@terdon It depends.

terdon

@Cerberus Not really.

Cerberus

Does too.

terdon

Explain.

Cerberus

I'm not sure what to explain? For all the standard reasons?

terdon

@Cerberus I don't want anyone being happy to give me a colonoscopy. Not in a medical setting at any rate.

Cerberus

5:26 PM

Sure, it's bad in that situation.

Although a smile might still work.

Just not any appearance of happiness.

Robusto

Hey, @tchrist: A shutterbug friend of mine says a good lens used to cost at least as much as a camera, but that isn't true anymore. True in part, whole, or not at all?

tchrist

@terdon You need a friendlier nurse.

terdon

@tchrist I'll stick with a professional one, thanks.

tchrist

@Robusto Cameras are more expensive now than before. But glass is always more.

Robusto

@terdon A colon should be a one-way street, IMO.

tchrist

5:28 PM

@terdon You don’t have to tip them, you know. But they can still smile.

terdon

Heh, which reminds me of the time my father was having a prostate exam and the doctor asked him if everything was OK. My father replied that yes, though it wasn't particularly pleasant, at which point the doctor stopped and, in all seriousness, told him "Mr Smith, the day you start enjoying this is the day you find yourself a new doctor".

Huh, my Dad's last name is also Smith. Maybe I'm related to @Robusto.

Robusto

If you go back far enough, we're all named Smith.

Besides, you made that story up. It didn't happen that way, Mr. Smith.

terdon

@Robusto Did not!

I just changed the name.

Robusto

So the question for the day is this: ride the bike with or without balaklava. The temperature is just on the cusp where such apparel is a good idea.

tchrist

@Robusto Price a Nikon D810, for example. Now price a zoom set (14-24/2.8, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 200-400/4) and a fixed focal set (24/1.4, 58/1.4, 85/1.4, maybe a 135/2, 300/2.8, 400/2.8, 500/4, 600/4). The body is the least of your concerns. True, it is more than anything below 300mm, but not that much more. And you can always get the new 300/4 for just under $2k.

Robusto

5:33 PM

Hmm, /ɻ/ sounds more like my r than does /ɹ/.

tchrist

@Robusto Correct.

@Robusto I was unaware that smithying was the oldest profession!

Robusto

Oldest male profession.

Hmm, I just spotted about 50 MacAddict CDs from 15 years ago on my shelves. They are now in the trash.

tchrist

I have so so so much of that sort of shit in my house. I need a dumpster.

terdon

@Robusto Hardly. I think you'll find that's the same as the oldest female one.

tchrist

@terdon He lives in a house with a white picket fence.

Robusto

5:41 PM

I'm still keeping up my pace on duolingo even though I've finished the course. Now I do the timed exercises. Before I had no hope of going through them that fast, but now it's easy. Good way to keep vocab under my fingers (or tongue) too.

Hmm, /ʟ/ is the Tom Brokaw l.

tchrist

I was wondering what you were doing there having finished.

Robusto

Kind of a mindless little game now, but its very mindlessness helps insure that the lessons are embedded deep in the sub-rational space that is necessary for automatic comprehension.

tchrist

Indeed.

Robusto

The frozen wall of incomprehension that used to be Spanish for me is melting away like this winter's snow. I'm rather surprised how much I understand now. Not everything, of course, but a fair amount.

Cerberus

in lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks, Mar 18 at 23:18, by Otavio Macedo

La leçon d'Orthographe — Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme — Molière

►

in lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks, Mar 18 at 23:19, by Otavio Macedo

French pronunciation in the 17th century.

Quite nice.

Robusto

5:46 PM

@Cerberus Sounds more like Italian, kinda.

Cerberus

Yes!

Older or more formal French sound somewhat more like the other Romance languages.

Robusto

French with an Italian vocal cadence.

tchrist

It is easier to hear one word from the other.

I think there may be some speakers in the south who still have a rolled R, but of course not so strong as that.

Robusto

Then it's settled. The French should roll back their pronunciation by 350 years.

tchrist

Duh.

Robusto

5:49 PM

Who will inform l'Academie?

Cerberus

Affected French has the rolling R...

Like opera.

tchrist

I just find it refreshing to hear everything.

Cerberus

Sure.

tchrist

Effect, not efe.

Cerberus

?

Oh.

Now Portuguese...

tchrist

5:52 PM

They have the same problem.

terdon

@tchrist Yes, there are. You also have people like Brassens who, at least when singing, rolled it even more than that.

tchrist

Your leçon doesn’t need subtitles. That’s nice.

terdon

@tchrist And less effete.

tchrist

> En fait, ce n'est pas "l'accent du Sud". Jusqu'au XIXe siècle en France, les "s" étaient roulés, c'était le bon usage. De la même façon, "oi" était prononcé "oué" (cette prononciation tire son origine au Moyen Âge, où toute les voyelles étaient prononcées; "oi" se prononçait donc "oï" au Moyen Âge, puis a été transformé graduellement en "oué" à partir de la renaissance).

Les r, il veut dire.

> Excerto de Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, de Molière, pela companhia Poème Harmonique, dirigida por Vincent Dumestre e Benjamin Lazar, responsável pelo trabalho de pronúncia restaurada. Esta peça de Molière é, precisamente, um documento que nos dá informação sobre a pronúncia do francês no séc. XVII – pelo que faz ainda mais sentido que seja representada com a pronúncia da época. Além de traços como a pronúncia dos ss finais, alguns notarão a semelhança com muito do francês canadiano.
De facto, é um lugar comum dizer que o francês canadiano parece francês antigo e é, em grande medida, certo: c…

True, the final s's are there. But they are not rolled as the first commenter said.

> Effectivement, c'est un accent plutôt italien, mais exagéré. Interpretation personnelle: les choses venant d'Italie étaient vues comme très culturelles en France depuis la Renaissance, parler italien ou avec un accent italien était en quelque sorte montrer que l'on était de la société haute, cultivée.

Robusto

Off to tempt the weather gods on my bike.

tchrist

6:55 PM

Anyway, here are the actual words used: Sex and sword swallowing beg some pretty obvious comparisons, but the similarities aren't as clear-cut as you might think, at least according to professional sword swallower Brett Loudermilk. The flowing-haired, bemustached 26-year-old sat down with HuffPost Weird News to chat about this history of sword swallowing, making a living as a sideshow performer, and exactly how you get something so long and hard down your throat. huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/29/… — Louel 1 hour ago

Cerberus

7:28 PM

Stop making me click things.

Robusto

Which is correct strikes again.

Cerberus

That was a quick ride.

Cerberus

7:48 PM

Look how far England has fallen. What department do you think the universities and schools fall under?

> The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Business first!!

The island is lost.

> “Labour instituted this policy, the Tories implemented it and the Lib Dems have taken the blame. It would be funny if it weren’t so dreadful. There’s nothing to choose between them. They’re all fixated on the marketisation of education and the university system.”

theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/…

> I’ve interviewed a dozen humanities academics for this piece. The majority were downcast, pessimistic, reeling off vivid administrative nightmares and harking back to Edenic earlier academic careers, when they’d been immersed in their research and enthused by their students. Few of them would let me quote them by name, fearing the faceless technocracy that had them under constant surveillance, the gagging orders in their employment contracts.

> ... Steve McQueen duly spent his 10 minutes with the prime minister talking about the need for a renewed focus on the humanities in schools and universities. At the end, Cameron, distractedly, said: “Oh yes, the arts, you should talk to Sam about that – she’s interested in all that kind of thing.”

And I thought we had it bad.

tchrist

8:28 PM

Ok, this is far as I dare go with this one:

5

A: bemustached versus mustached

I think you are right that this word was meant to draw attention to itself. It amuses. The entire article is quite tongue-in-cheek — or even sword-in-cheek. Or perhaps even something-else-in-cheek, given how it starts and ends: Sex and sword swallowing beg some pretty obvious comparisons ...

@Robusto Running out of close votes. Again.

Mitch

8:51 PM

@tchrist Entwhistle is Louel?

tchrist

Nay.

But Entwhistle did have a sock.

I have discovered several new signals for shitty questions.

> Am I right?

> In the above?

> In the below?

In fact, every single case of "the above/below" except for one "none of the above" is lame.

And I have now edited like 30 of them in the last 20m.

Often it should just be that. Sometimes it should be "the cited" or "the preceding/following".

It is very interesting. It is a very good marker of poor writing overall.

I wonder why!

I have not found a single instance where it cannot be rewritten into something stronger, save alone for the two none of the above.

Many are never answered at all, either.

Mitch

9:13 PM

They would be if this were a grammar service

I think that would be a money making enterprise. for half the world. "Can you proof read my resume?" "I'm doing my English lang homework. Is this right?" "I want to complain to the TOEFL people!"

tchrist

9:29 PM

You really need get out more, @Mitch.

tchrist

10:05 PM

The 'frognado' as it were, would indeed bedwarf the toggle makers art. — Frank 1 hour ago

Frognado!

And we thought bassomatics were bad!

Robusto

10:32 PM

1

A: "To include" vs. "including"

I agree wholeheartedly with the other answers here, but I have a few other notes to add (referring to the points below). BTW, I sourced the original PDF file from wikisource and the Senate. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the report in HTML format, only as an unwieldy 66MB PDF Duplicat...

@tchrist: I thought from the length this might have been you but for the subject matter.

tchrist

What the hell IS that?

Robusto

I still don't know.

tchrist

10:46 PM

I’ll probably delete it.

0

A: How is 's/he' pronounced? Do we say 'She or he should ..." or "He or she should ..."?

I’m pretty sure that sh/e is pronounced /ðeɪ/ in English. However, the more-inclusive version, sh/e/it, has a rather more vulgar pronunciation. But that’s what political correctness gets you; vulgarity.

However, I am getting terribly tired of her questions.

Andrew Leach

@Robusto It appears to be data supporting the premise of the question. I'm not convinced it's a complete answer -- although perhaps he forgot to write the answer which should be based on that research.

tchrist

@AndrewLeach Yeah, I finally figured that out. Took a while though.

Andrew Leach

@tchrist Don't worry, you're not the only one. Personally, I wouldn't answer any of them, but how you approach the problem is up to you.

tchrist

I kinda broke down.

I know that.

I CV’d. It’s rude of me to “answer”.

Andrew Leach

Clever answer, /ðeɪ/.

tchrist

10:53 PM

My blessing and my curse.

terdon

I just read your sheeit answer. I wonder if the OP will get it.

You got an upvote for the they though.

tchrist

Unlikely.

Some people need to have it shovelled at them.

@Andrew She has to be pulling our leg now.

I refuse to countenance any other possibility.

0

Q: If "can't" is the contraction for "cannot," is "don't" short for "donut"?

My English tutor said: If "can't" is the contraction for "cannot", "don't" is the technically correct contraction for "donut". I thought it was the contraction of "do not".