English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

12:48 AM

@tchrist Is that so?

tchrist

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 She lives and works there, and has science-geek sons cusping teenagerie.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

1:04 AM

@tchrist Nice! Well, not the teenagerie.

@Rigor Why did you stop?

tchrist

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 No, these are good kids. None of that nonsense, honest.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

1:30 AM

@tchrist but puberty.

tchrist

1:44 AM

So?

I know families where that doesn’t destroy things.

Quite a few of them, actually.

Cerberus

Hello.

What did you do when you were a pubescent boy?

tchrist

I never fought with my parents, never fought with my teachers, never got in trouble, worked hard in school and at jobs, and always got straight A's. What did you do?

Robusto

I fought with my parents, fought with my teachers, got in lots of trouble, fucked off in school and jobs, and always got straight A's.

tchrist

Too much dope.

I had a good time.

Isn’t this a dupe?

3

Q: What is the difference between an infinitive and a gerund as subject of a sentence?

To run is good Running is good What is the difference in meaning?

grammaticality

Or does its being a subject make it nonduplicative?

It’s an object in the old “I love to sing. I love singing.” non-difference, but I don't know know that moving it to subject position changes the matter.

Cerberus

2:00 AM

@tchrist I fought with my parents, but I didn't do any crazy stuff. Nothing dangerous and no drugs.

Robusto

I did lots of dangerous stuff. And drugs.

Cerberus

We did not have "A's", but my grades were always high.

@Robusto Well, well, well.

Robusto

Kind of a miracle I survived, actually, when I think back on it.

Cerberus

Why did you do all those things?

Robusto

Because I came from a dysfunctional family, not to put too fine a point on it.

Cerberus

2:02 AM

Oh, okay.

Makes sense.

Robusto

And they sent me to Catholic grade school and Catholic prep school. So how could I not become a rebel?

Cerberus

Heh.

Do you think most children who do crazy things come from dysfunctional families?

tchrist

If I wanted to do drugs, I had my folks bring me home booze, or on rare occasion, take me out to a bar. But those almost never happened. They did if I wanted, but I just wasn’t interested.

Cerberus

And vice versa?

tchrist

I think I was 16 when I first went to a bar on my own. Not too interesting.

Robusto

2:05 AM

@Cerberus No idea. But I did.

Cerberus

Sure, but that's alcohol... not much you can do with alcohol to upset parents, right?

I suppose it's different if you have a car...

@Robusto I'm sure you were the strong-minded type...

tchrist

I had my MS before my drivers licence.

Cerberus

MS?

tchrist

Oh never mind, the duplicate is actually to the subject one, so it is truly a dup.

@Cerberus Graduate degree.

Masters.

Cerberus

Oh that.

tchrist

2:07 AM

So no, cars were immaterial.

Cerberus

Then alcohol is unlikely to upset parents, right?

Maybe unless it's in primary school. There was such an incident in my school.

tchrist

What could you do to upset your parents on booze? You could hurt yourself or others.

Cerberus

But how?

tchrist

Falling off a porch. Getting arrested for unlawful sexual contact. Drinking at school.

Cerberus

Haha.

The former can always happen, I suppose, but the relation to alcohol is hard to prove. And it's rare anyway.

Unlawful sexual contact? Like what? Never heard of that.

Robusto

2:09 AM

@Cerberus I don't know what I was. Kind of a tumbleweed, actually. I didn't go to college right out of high school, but hitchhiked around the country and did all kinds of things, trying to find myself.

tchrist

Pushing someone off a porch. Waking up realizing you've been raped. Blowing chow on the teacher's shoes.

Cerberus

Drinking at school would be inadvisable, granted. But not such a big deal. A short suspension, probably?

@Robusto That's kind of cool.

tchrist

And it could be worse.

Cerberus

@tchrist I have never heard of any of those things happening. Must be exceedingly rare?

tchrist

You could wake up realizing you'd been the abuser not the abused.

Cerberus

2:11 AM

Meh.

tchrist

There's a lot of fights, a lot of sex, a lot of stupid accidents.

And not all consensual or well thought out.

Cerberus

Fights, really?

Robusto

@Cerberus What settled me down was, one day I picked up a flute at a friend's place and discovered I could play it. I taught myself, and a year after that I auditioned at a conservatory and got a scholarship.

Cerberus

Such things never happened here, fights between kids.

tchrist

What, no trailer parks?

Cerberus

2:12 AM

No?

tchrist

I find it unbelievable that the Dutch know no white trash.

Cerberus

I am talking about children growing up in the kind of background I presume you and I shared.

tchrist

I am your father, Luke.

Cerberus

@Robusto That is a very short term for being able to prepare for a conservatory!

tchrist

I'm just telling you how the kids who got in trouble got in trouble.

Cerberus

2:13 AM

Of course we have white trash.

Robusto

@Cerberus I was an adult prodigy.

Cerberus

But not anywhere near where I grew up.

tchrist

I was never anything even vaguely like that, and I can recall no fights with my parents. I've talked about it with them, too.

Robusto

Seriously, music is what saved me from a dissolute life.

Cerberus

@tchrist I was talking about you and me.

@Robusto That's a nice story.

Robusto

2:14 AM

Whenever I'm at my lowest, music comes back like an old friend, who never judges me and always knows how to save my ass somehow.

tchrist

I like to think I brought my parents up well. You have to understand that the age difference was not as great as in many families.

Cerberus

@Robusto Even sad music?

@tchrist How do you mean?

tchrist

My mom and dad were twenty years older than me, my stepmom and stepdad each only ten.

Robusto

@Cerberus There is no such thing. Music may be poignant or tragic, but never sad.

Cerberus

My mother was 35 when I was born. when my brother was born, she was 39.

@tchrist Wowie.

@Robusto No metonymy for you?

tchrist

2:17 AM

My grandmother was nearly that latter age. She was the same age as Mom when she had her.

Robusto

Sad music is bad music.

Cerberus

Sad people are bad people?

Robusto

Listen to Beethoven's late quartets to hear the spirit rise through suffering.

@Cerberus Not what I said.

If all a piece of music can be is sad, well, that's pretty sad. It qualifies for country & western at that point.

tchrist

Rostropovich plays the Sarabande from Bach's Cello Suite # 1

►

Easy to cry.

Just close your eyes.

But this is worse:

Bach - Cello Suite No.2 iv-Sarabande

►

Is that sad music?

Robusto

Music can make you cry, but it's not sad.

Berlioz - Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem): Sanctus (6/7)

►

tchrist

2:22 AM

No requiems. Sorry. Just. Can't.

Robusto

It is balm on your soul.

tchrist

Not in the way that a soft purring kitten is.

Robusto

Listen to how the female chorus backs the tenor.

tchrist

The second Bach tears me up every single time.

I wept when I performed requiems, some more than others.

Britten.

Robusto

War requiem?

tchrist

2:24 AM

Yes.

Robusto

Berlioz's Requiem is also a war requiem.

tchrist

Tears I have for a lifetime.

Robusto

If you can't find joy in music, life will be pretty bleak.

Cerberus

> Zumbis, soldados e um FDS lotado de ofertas

(Funny Portuguese.)

tchrist

> So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,

That isn't what did it.

This is what did it.

> But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

@Cerberus Dunno FDS.

Cerberus

2:35 AM

No idea.

Abbreviations paralyse the mind and hinder understanding and progress.

tchrist

Fim De Semana.

Cerberus

But anyway, i got this in my e-mail:

Apparently, I am a man baby.

tchrist

I can't stop doing that. Sigh.

Cerberus

Doing what?

tchrist

They are pronounced the same but spelled differently.

Writing -n for -m.

Cerberus

2:37 AM

Ah.

Sure.

Although words like sim sound much like a nasal si to me.

tchrist

It is.

The -m is nothing but a marker for nasality.

Cerberus

And não sounds much like naum.

tchrist

It is in Spanish, too, especially in Spain, but there is liaison where it reappears.

Cerberus

Makes sense.

Just as in French.

tchrist

The word pan is just pronounced pã unless there is a vowel after.

They never teach you this in America in high school.

It wasn't until I took phonology with linguists in Madrid that this was clearly spelled out.

Technically, there is an archiphoneme there, like /paɴ/.

I had a roommate who could not pronounce my name. He said /toɴ/ which sounded disturbingly like "dong" but with the vowel closer to the one in broke without a diphthong.

Because the -n versus -m didn't matter.

2

Q: Difference between a gerund acting as subject and an infinitive acting as a subject?

I am wondering whether there is any difference between a gerund acting as subject and an infinitive acting as a subject.

infinitive-vs-gerund

First, Kris was actually funny for once.

Second, this is incontrovertibly an exact duplicate of the former:

3

Q: What is the difference between an infinitive and a gerund as subject of a sentence?

To run is good Running is good What is the difference in meaning?

grammaticality

Please dupclose the later one for the earlier one.

@Cerberus I thought you were past the man-boy stage a good decade ago, or more.

Man-baby is regressing.

Cerberus

2:51 AM

@tchrist Oh yeah, in Spanish? I didn't know that.

tchrist

If you say it more like French it will sound better, at least in Spain.

They want open syllables very badly.

Just let it nasalize. Unless you have a vowel after.

Well, something like santo has a very faint n perhaps. Depends on the speaker. But it is more like a sãto with a dental t and no diphthong on the o at the end.

Cerberus

All right.

tchrist

Germanic speakers tend to put too much consonants into that. They aspirate the t and don't make it dental, and they make you hear the n as a big closed syllable. It barely does that.

Listening to Italian is good for the dentals.

Here's the key thing: once you move the placement of the tongue so that the t is more dental than alveolar, there is no longer anywhere noticeable to go between an n and a t.

So regressive assimilation colors the a nasal and you just tap the t with the point of your tongue.

You will never speak Italian or Spanish or Portuguese with a tolerable accent so long as the t and d are the big alveolar Germanic versions.

Cerberus

3:18 AM

I think Dutch has a lot less aspiration of the t.

Which is typical of a Dutch accent in English.

tchrist

That may be so.

I haven't thought about it much because I haven't spent much time with Dutch. The German t seems as aspirated as in English, in the same places.

Cerberus

Yes.

The Dutch t is more like French.

tchrist

Please kill this with fire, damn it:

@tchrist. The issue here is that you completely don't know what an infinitive is. An infinitive is indeed a noun, a form of a verb that is is modified like a verb (with adverbs) but that only functions as a noun. I'm not making this up. — William 2 mins ago

I’m pretty sure that after my first half-dozen or so languages, I knew what an infinitive is.

He doesn't. He thinks it has a tense, too.

He also thinks that be is a first person singular form.

Sheer nonsense.

And it's a damned exact duplicate.

I'll tell you who doesn't know what an infinitive is: people who call be first person singular.

He obviously is conflating Latin citation forms like pereo with English ones like be.

Cerberus

You're not applying the principle of charity.

What he really means is an aspect, not a tense.

tchrist

I tried.

I started out kindly.

But what am I going to do with somebody who thinks the infinitive is a “present tense active first person singular”?

Nobody talks like that without a veiled Latin reading on the whole spiel.

I think it might be a high-school kid with a couple years of Latin.

Cerberus

3:32 AM

An infinitive is externally a noun (can function like a noun, as in it can be an object or subject), but internally it is a verb (it can have typical verbal arguments internally, like adverbs or objects). Infinitives normally are not tensed, but they can have an aspect, which I think is what William means. Incidentally, all of this applies to gerunds too, in general. — Cerberus 1 min ago

tchrist

He also pretends that you cannot have an infinitive as a subject, that this is “wrong grammar”.

Cerberus

You can have an infinitive as a subject in Latin.

tchrist

I thought you could.

But not a gerundive of course.

So I don't know where he is getting the idea from that infinitives cannot be subjects.

Surely anyone knows that's not true?

Hitting him is a bad idea.

To know him is to love him.

To act is better than to dream.

To see is to believe.

Seeing is believing.

I see no difference.

Cerberus

No, a gerundive can be subject too. A gerund, though, cannot.

tchrist

Ug.

I knew one of them couldn't.

Cerberus

3:38 AM

A gerund is an infinitive but in a substantive form (the normal infinitive is also a substantive noun, but it cannot occur after prepositions, nor can it exist in any case but nominative and accusative).

So you basically use a gerund instead of an infinitive if you can't use the infinitive for the reasons stated.

A gerundive is an infinitive but in an adjective form. It modifies something, normally. However, as all adjectives can also be used substantively in the (older) Indo-European languages, unfortunately the gerundive can also be used as a substantivised adjective in the neuter.

tchrist

> Well I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee,
And I'm bound for Louisiana, my own true love for to see.

Apparently banjo players can use infinitives as prepositional objects. :)

Or perhaps Alabamians. I wouldn't know.

> It happened one day, that there came to him two young gentlemen, (that were countrey men, and neighbors children) for to know of him by his glasse, how their fathers did= Hee being no niggard of his cunning, let them see his glasse, wherein ...

Sure talked funny back then.

> Blair. No. I am sure she did not. L. C. J. Did that gentleman thrust himself into your company, or did you desire him for to come to you ? Blair. No, he thrust himselfinto the room. Courtney. The sink- was hard by, and I heard captain Blair groan, ...

So many extra words.

Don Santiago, ¿qué te lleva por aquí? :)

I think I rather dislike all these for to verb things.

santiago

hiya, how you all be?

tchrist

Thinking about having myself una copa.

There's leftover sherry from the party last night.

santiago

sounds like a good plan

tchrist

Did you have an Englishy thing or were you just looking for a not-quite-dead chat? :)

santiago

3:48 AM

am just floating around

tchrist

heh, ok.

santiago

I am intrigued by how each community is very different

tchrist

There’s chat communities and there’s site communities, and these are not always aligned.

santiago

that too

tchrist

This is a very odd room because it's Reg's. It is normally the Incomprehensible Room. Most of us are multilingual.

You can see by his topic that it is still incomprehensible. :)

santiago

3:51 AM

I am multilingual as well

tchrist

Ya lo dijiste.

santiago

though my friend is trying to teach me Klingon

but my favourite is Kilikili

tchrist

There's no need to learn Klingon just to clear your throat in the morning.

santiago

lol, yes

tchrist

You can just talk about the city of Gijón in their particular accent. :)

santiago

3:53 AM

I said that to my friend, and they muttered something

tchrist

It sounds like a cat with a hairball to me.

santiago

pretty much

English is my 3rd language

tchrist

What is the second? French or Portuguese?

Cerberus

Catalan?

Galician?

tchrist

Are those questions or answers? :)

Cerberus

3:56 AM

Do they have question marks?

But it is time for bed.

Adeus!

German

Hasta mañana mía.

Schöne Sprache.

Not thine.

@Cerberus Kinda hairballish still. Wait no, that's Dutch.

Cerberus

À bientôt.

santiago

3:57 AM

I have 9 languages

have a good night's rest

tchrist

If you hang around Iberia it's easy to quasi-pickup more languages, but unless one of them is Basque, it is less work to learn them all than to learn German.

German and Latin are both largely gone from my mind by now.

Only English and later Romance remain.

Reg may well have that many. I can think of like six of his without trying.

santiago

most of all languages are gone from my mind

tchrist

And his are pretty unrelated.

santiago

Science has replaced it all

tchrist

@santiago I have this refrain that if you can still count how many languages you've studied, you haven't studied enough of them. This is true for spoken languages and programming languages alike.

santiago

4:01 AM

I can agree with that

tchrist

In school I thought I would remember everything forever, because I still did. But that was a long time ago.

And I was wrong.

santiago

Science is a language in itself

tchrist

In some ways.

Here, talk to him about that stuff while I wilt. :)

Rigor

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 change of heart

santiago

anyway, I must go

great chatting!

tchrist

4:06 AM

Hasta.

Which was American, not Spanish. :)

Matt E. Эллен

9:31 AM

I fixed an answer :D

user116848

Sup!

Matt E. Эллен

2

A: What is the English idiom about "expensive" that expresses the idea that "It is so expensive that you feel like you got ripped-off"?

Robbery is arguably a more common expression than exorbitant. Robbery (in ODO) carries the definition: Unashamed swindling or overcharging It is often used in this context with the prefixes highway or daylight. Daylight robbery and highway robbery (in ODO) both carry this definition: ...

hi @Arrowfar

user116848

Hi @MattE.Эллен.

crl

12:21 PM

Would you say:
- I did eat more than 50 peaches in a day
or
- I have eaten more than 50 peaches in a day

of course I want to insist on the result, so I guess #2?

skill patrol

What's the question?

crl

which proposition is correct? and which is better in this context?

skill patrol

That's what I'm asking: What is the context?

Have you ever eaten more than 50 peaches in a day?

Nobody eats 50 peaches in a day.

crl

yes, or which fruit do you eat "en masse"? (like tchrist says)

@skillpatrol well I do :) I eat between 4 and 7 kg of fruits daily

and I'm only 57kg (before eating) (for 1m84)

skill patrol

12:37 PM

I would go with #2 also.

crl

ah thanks

skill patrol

:)

crl

but now I can say I'm a bit nauseated with peaches so I'm varying

skill patrol

keep everything in moderation

crl

trying to, gonna eat some fish today, but my food changes some years ago really changed me..

Orthorexia nervosa

Orthorexia nervosa /ˌɔrθəˈrɛksiə nɜrˈvoʊsə/ (also known as orthorexia) is an eating disorder characterized by an extreme or excessive preoccupation with avoiding foods perceived to be unhealthy. The term orthorexia derives from the Greek ορθο- (ortho, "right" or "correct"), and όρεξις (orexis, "appetite"), literally meaning 'correct appetite', but in practice meaning 'correct diet'. It was introduced in 1997 by Steven Bratman, M.D., to be used as a parallel with other eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa. Orthorexia nervosa is not considered to be an eating disorder according to the American...

skill patrol

12:46 PM

interesting...

Robusto

1:05 PM

@MattE.Эллен Were you trying to skew the betting?

skill patrol

welcome @Josh61

Robusto

1:34 PM

@skillpatrol I see no Josh61 in this chat.

he was here?

Was he?

Fuzzy.

I saw him...

@tchrist You really ought to listen to that Sanctus.

@skillpatrol Uh-huh.

tchrist

1:38 PM

It’s shtumping me again. It had shtopped doing that days ago. I wonder why.

Robusto

What is shtumping you?

BTW, it has a very nice fugue in it. Proving that Berlioz even as a young man could write counterpoint.

tchrist

This chat is shtumping me with its pings. It had stopped doing that for a while.

Robusto

Not sure what that means.

tchrist

I get auditory notifications on at-pings again this morning.

That had stopped.

Despite settings.

Robusto

I didn't know you could set that.

tchrist

1:43 PM

I think it restarted when I was forced to re-authenticate.

Yes, it's up there to the left of the "all rooms" bit.

Robusto

Did you try resetting it just now? I will ping you to see if it worked.

Hey, @tchrist . . .

tchrist

Ouch.

No, last night I had to reauth all my SE sessions. Then it started pinging me again.

Robusto

Try pinging me.

skill patrol

shut it off and go with the visual

tchrist

@Robusto From Hell'’s heart I stab at thee.

Robusto

1:51 PM

No sound that time.

Try now.

tchrist

@skillpatrol What's visual?

@Robusto For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.

Robusto

Sound that time.

skill patrol

the notification is visual

Robusto

But seriously, Ahab, I am white but I am decidedly not overweight.

tchrist

2:04 PM

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

Robusto

2:24 PM

I took the survey. When do I find out if I won a prize?

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

That thing is long.

Robusto

I thought of all African animals.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

2:46 PM

That's nice of you.

terdon

I'm sure they think of you too.

Robusto

Toto- Africa

►

Influenced by Peter Gabriel? You be the judge.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

18

Q: What does "great good" mean in tutorial title "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!"?

There is site learn you a haskell with title "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!". Does "Great Good" mean "very very good"? Does the whole phrase mean "learning Haskell is good for you" or "learning Haskell is good for whole world" or something else?

meaning

Top answer. Why delete and not deleted?

tchrist

Dunno.

He probably changed his name to "delete" before deletion.

Although I would have expected user1234.

I'm fuzzy on how this works with account deletion.

Robusto

room topic changed to English Language & Usage: How can we sleep while our beds are burning? [member-since-today]

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

2:59 PM

Hmm.

tchrist

Ask @terdon; he might remember.

terdon

Yeah, I was thinking about it, don't really know. I'd guess it's a bug.

Or, more likely, what tchrist said: that was the user's name.

The timeline also shows the name as "delete"

english.stackexchange.com/posts/165/timeline

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

Is timeline new?

I know I've seen delete before.

tchrist

24

A: What EXACTLY happens when I ask to delete my account?

There are two options: Delete and Destroy. Destroy is an option used on spammers. Their account is anonymized (the user's account information is all removed, including their name, email, website, about me, etc) and all of their posts are deleted. This can only be done to users with a very low...

terdon

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 No, but there's no link to it. It's http://site.url/posts/POST-ID/timeline

tchrist

3:05 PM

I've seen delete before, too. I don't know the circumstances.

terdon

Normally, delete users are shown as "userNNNN" (I think).

tchrist

Yes.

terdon

I think they probably just set their user name to "delete"

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

A request. Delete me.

(please don't delete me)

terdon

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Sure. Hang on a sec. I can only delete your chat user, is that OK?

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

3:11 PM

;_;

Matt E. Эллен

@Robusto what's the point in being a mod if not so I can upvote my own answer ;)

OK, I don't get reps from the vote, but...

tchrist

@MattE.Эллен Or star your own post.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@tchrist this is the best part.

Couldn't I do that as a room owner?

tchrist

Yes.

It makes sense for a room owner to be able to pin and unpin things.

Mitch

3:28 PM

@Robusto I thought of dog and cat and then stopped.

It just doesn't feel right to pet a pet lizard.

Ooh .. rat. there's another one.

does mouse count as a different animal? or is it just a small rat

tchrist

I sure do with I'd kept a copy of my response.

Mitch

Randall Monroe is now hacking all our answers to get our SSNs and credit card #'s and take over the world. But then he'll use it to buy us all t-shirts with an XKCD comic.

And he'll know the best one just for each one of us.

Anyway, EMACS and all the rest can all go to hell!

I haven't used emacs in years .... sniff

I do all my programming in iPhone's IM app