English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2015-06-11 (page 2 of 2)

« first day (1673 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3250 days later) »

3:00 PM

Krypton is no ones kryptonite.

Matt E. Эллен

Radon, on the other hand, was Marie Curie's kryptonite

@MattE.Эллен Nice, I've been asking around all morning. There's a mess on the floor in the lobby, could you mop that up? I think you'll need some bleach too.

@MattE.Эллен she had heavy gas

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch if by mess you mean supervillain and by mop and bleach you mean freeze with my freeze breath, then I'll consider it.

Radon my French.

user116848

Firefox browser is saying "FoxYeah" these days.

user116848

3:05 PM

Seems kind of funny.

Matt E. Эллен

I think I took offence to that campaign for some reason. I can't remember why. probably doesn't matter

user116848

@MattE.Эллен "FoxYeah" sounds like the swear word, maybe that's why?

Matt E. Эллен

no, it was something else. I'm not normally offended by swearwords :D

user116848

Ahh okay, haha.

@MattE.Эллен So you are abnorally offended by swearwords?

Matt E. Эллен

3:11 PM

@Robusto That's offensive. Your grandmother was a swearword.

Offense is the best defense.

You dildo.

Matt E. Эллен

I don'tdo

A pickle is a dilldo.

Or can be.

Dilldodobeedo was so exciting, pickle in your eyes was so inviting.

3:25 PM

Oh! You know the lyrics?

@MattE.Эллен OK, your hallucination, you can name it what you want. Unless I'm hallucinating that you're hallucinating, which cancels out, so just watch where you step in the lobby.

@MattE.Эллен Oh so it's your fault the slippage of taboo words to acceptable. "What ho, Jeeves, you cunt, where'd you fuck off with my redacted tea? Shit."

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch only partly my fault, old bean

'redacted' = 'goldurn', too ecclesastical for mixed company, tabarnak!

Matt E. Эллен

don't say it out loud! the Queen might be reading

she can be a fucking bitch about blasphemy

Huhuh, blas is German for "blow me".

@MattE.Эллен sent to the authorities

3:36 PM

Huhuh, sent is Mongolian for "you're very, very gay".

fabulous storm troopers dispatched

Huhuh, Patch is Robin Williams for "very, very bad rôle".

Matt E. Эллен

@RegDwigнt huhuh there's a user with first name Blas in the Spanish L&U chat room

El roomio del chatio, por favor.

Se hablo Angleterrski.

@MattE.Эллен We should make 'Queen' to be the blasphemy.

3:38 PM

"Queen" already sounds as blasphemic as it gets.

"well, queen me! I just ran over myself with a snow plow"

Seriously how come this queaky sound is in any way shape or extent worthy of a monarch.

@RegDwigнt Queen you and your blaspheming.

It should be Troglor. Now that'd make her rule.

@RegDwigнt The etymology is from the french 'quinoa' for 'nummy'.

3:40 PM

Nummy nummy nummy I got quinoa pig in my tummy and I feel like queening you.

Nice! That was blasphemous.

Troglor! Troglor you all to the opposite of Valhalla! Troglor you all to Valkilmer!

Matt E. Эллен

Translate: quinoa

(from English) quinoa

Yeah, that's what it means.

Matt E. Эллен

no no no. Keenwah

3:42 PM

So. Queen's English is the slang of rice munchers. I always knew it.

@MattE.Эллен Thank you it was wonderful, but no, I've had enough.

@RegDwigнt and rum punchers.

No, that's Scots. On a good day.

There are no good days. Again, thanks Scotland.

Matt E. Эллен

You'll never take our Oats!

It's always Goodday in Iceland.

@MattE.Эллен Aye. You put the "oats" in "coats".

Matt E. Эллен

3:46 PM

to keep them warm

Well, Bill Gates is back at #1 richest man in the world.

Yeah, like anybody knows how much money anyone else has.

This is like those statistics that say that on average, in your lifetime you eat 5 spiders in your sleep.

Who ever comes up with such rubbish, and why does nobody ever question it.

You can't hide that much money.

And why does nobody note that it doesn't even matter.

Bill Gates could be the #10423 richest man in the world, and it would change exactly nothing at all.

Incidentally, @Mitch, that is my only problem with that question you discussed yesterday.

The percentage of idioms shared by AmE and BrE.

It is asking for useless trivia that has no use even as useless trivia.

The asker will learn absolutely nothing at all from it. He will have wasted our time, and his. He already has.

@RegDwigнt Oh, right, I forgot. You are Patient Zero for earworms.

3:52 PM

@RegDwigнt Can't deny that.

Yes, Patient Zero pending.

I still find it kinda strange that Moscow has the the most billionaires in the world?

How is it strange?

Some place must have the most billionaires.

Moscow is some place.

I would think New York

Also, whenever they say "Moscow has", they really mean "them's in London because Putin's hating on them".

3:54 PM

@RegDwigнt All the roubles in the world won't do you any good if you piss off Putin, though.

Kinda jinx.

Yeah.

@RegDwigнt Well, it was an inferenced question based on a practical situation. The OP learned an 'idiom' that is supposedly labeled American. They want to know probability wise how likely it is that someone in the UK would understand it. so %70 likely that Matt would understand the idiom 'slicker than two Queens in a bucket of snot'.

I for one have not seen a single billionaire in Moscow. I have even seen a black man once. But not a billionaire. Stuff and nonsense.

Anyways, I'm noticing I should be running.

Bis morgen.

Later pal

This could do with some upvotes:

6

A: Why is "our today's meeting" wrong?

Usually, a noun phrase in English must have exactly one determiner: you can say "I drove the car" or "I drove my car", but not "I drove car" or "I drove the my car". Certain nouns (such as plural nouns and proper nouns) don't need determiners: "I love bees", "I love milk", "I love Paris", "I lov...

3:58 PM

Done.

Yeah. I grumbled, but upvoted.

I like upvoting :-)

@Robusto Why did you grumble? That's a good answer as far as I can tell.

And cheers

@terdon Grumblers gonna grumble. I'm a grumbler. QED

Just wondering if you disagree with the answer.

4:00 PM

Anyway, precisely no grumbling shows up in the vote.

@terdon No, it's just that since @Reg left the room somebody has to supply the non sequiturs.

Grumbling is fine. Not a problem. I was just curious as to whether you took issue at something in the answer. I kinda got that you don't like the question :)

@Robusto I'm grumbling because I stepped on your toes. Does that count?

in Mathematics, 12 mins ago, by Chris's sis the artist

"The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished." Thus wrote Alfred Adler in an article "Mathematics and Creativity" in The New Yorker Magazine (1972) echoing a common belief that mathematicians tend to do their best work before the age of 30, physicists before the age of 40, and biologists before the age of 50 (though there are exceptions!).

@skillpatrol Hilariously a load of horse shit. Oh. I should comment there. BBIAM

:-)

4:21 PM

@Mitch Are there any examples of mathematicians doing important work after their thirties?

I know it's true, or accepted as such, anyway, in chess. The kids are almost always better than the old farts. Experience notwithstanding.

@terdon go to the math chat, we're giving examples there.

@terdon different areas have different ages. and different variability

@terdon Gauss, Euler, Hilbert, Poincare, Cauchy, Weierstrass.

[ SmokeDetector ] Nested quote blocks in body: meaning of "I'm so in my head" by Rwy5 on english.stackexchange.com

Those aren't nested. don't match single quotes with double.

@Mitch DIdn't all of them do their most important work at a young age?

I mean, if you're that smart, sure you'll keep doing stuff but can you beat your younger self?

4:40 PM

@terdon That may be because it was asked by two different users, one of whom was not you.

@terdon Gauss kicked ass as a teenager then kept going all through his life. Euler started strong but became stronger and stronger til his old age. Hilbert every ten years literally wrote the foundations of another distinct branch of math (and of math in its entirety).

@Robusto It was? Oh you mean the original one? OK, but that was different, I was asking why not whether.

@terdon That's begging the question. Or tautological. Or amphiboly. Or something.

@Mitch But how would they compare to their younger selves? I mean, Feynman would have been able to blow me out of the water at any age, but how about a young Richard?

At some point you'll never do as well as what you did before and before yo were younger (that's how time works. There's nothing that says 'younger' has to be 'young'

4:44 PM

@Mitch The premise is that mathematicians have a clear peak in their late 20ies. That doesn't mean they should be put out to pasture, only that they won't be quite as good as they were.

@terdon Little Richard? I don't know, how well can you scream?

Heh

@terdon The clear peak is only from a handful of examples, Newton, Galois and some other dudes.It's a good story but just isn't true. It's not false, it's just that there are examples of people who didn't do good work until they're old, and also people who did good work early middle and late.

Huh, OK

Odd though. Hell, I'm not yet 35 and I can feel that I'm not quite as quick on the uptake as I was 10 years ago.

Still fiendishly intelligent, of course. Just lessened.

Didn't Newton publish Principia in his 40s?

4:49 PM

@Robusto I think he was considerably younger.

Or, at least, that's what I seem to recall from The Baroque Cycle.

Hmm ". . . a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, in Latin, first published 5 July 1687"

Newton was born in 1642.

So he was 45 when he published that.

Granted he must have done much of the work at an earlier age, but still . . .

See? Told you. 10 years ago, I'd have remembered that correctly.

Well, I'm older than you and I did remember it. sticks out tongue

Damn

@Robusto Act your age!

May 27 at 15:55, by Robusto

Remember, you're only young once but you can be immature forever.

4:51 PM

Yes, I do remember, that's a good line :)

As a biologist @terdon do you recall how long it takes to replace every cell in the human body?

Seven years, I heard.

I heard that like 30 years ago, too. And remembered it.

That^ is what I thought.

Haha, we just got an intern named Yoni!

And it's a dude.

Yoni (Sanskrit: योनि yoni, literally "vagina" or "womb") is the symbol of the Goddess (Shakti or Devi), the Hindu Divine Mother. Within Shaivism, the sect dedicated to the god Shiva, the yoni symbolizes his consort. The male counterpart of the yoni is Shivaling. Their union represents the eternal process of creation and regeneration. Since the late 19th century, some have interpreted the yoni and the lingam as aniconic representations of the vulva and a phallus respectively. == In Indian religions == In Hinduism, the ancient Indian texts contain the word yoni in various contexts. In Hind...

So Andrew Wiles worked alone for seven years on fermats last theorem and when he finished he was literally a different person :D @Robusto

5:02 PM

@Robusto Where's he from?

India?

No answer @terdon?

Probably Israel

Does The Human Body Really Replace Itself Every 7 Years?

@skillpatrol " some things never ever get replaced, like heartache"

And she's not even blonde ;-) @Mitch

5:16 PM

@skillpatrol To what?

19 mins ago, by skill patrol

As a biologist @terdon do you recall how long it takes to replace every cell in the human body?

@skillpatrol Oh, sorry, missed that. And no, not only do I not recall, I have no idea.

And it can't replace everything, we'd have no scars if it did.

Np pal, the video^ answered it :-)

Most scars do fade though...

I still have scars from my teens.

Hell, my mother has one from >50 years ago.

But they must be lighter, no?

I did say "fade."

5:25 PM

@terdon I've thought about that, and that's not really a counterexample. The shape of your nose is preserved but (mostly) replaced.

:-)

@Mitch And scars are not actually cells so probably irrelevant. Hmm.

I don't do organisms, ask me about genes and evolution :)

Why aren't scars actually cells?

Matt E. Эллен

@terdon what genes are evolution?

So the answer is not 7 years, but 15 years and it is not 100% of your entire body according to the video.

5:37 PM

@MattE.Эллен ALL OF THAM!

@skillpatrol That makes more sense.

Sense is good :-)

Thanks for the input.

Matt E. Эллен

@terdon interesting and useful

I aim to please. Glad to see all those years spent getting those letters after my name weren't wasted :)

@terdon Israel.

Are you a hawks fan @Robusto?

I think the lightening are gonna do it.

5:53 PM

You wish.

The Lightning look awful damn good. I just hope the Hawks can do their usual come-from-behind act.

Like they're doing. :)

THe Lightning are unbelievably fast. Like . . . well, lightning.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

6:05 PM

Grease lightning?

Chain lightning?

Bolt lightning?

Bud Lightening

@RegDwigнt When driving a tank, never go away from the keyboard.

@Cerberus hi!

@RegDwigнt What game is this again?

Have you added this bloke as a friend in the game, or is that not comme il faut?

@Jez Hi!

6:17 PM

@Cerberus can you join the room i created

Ah, I see it.

Hello! Sorry to interrupt again. I was about to ask a question of why do we describe the dress as black and blue not blue and black, but I'm not sure what tag it falls under. Is meaning in context suitable (since it's in the context of this dress)?

Black & blue is an idiom.

Try ngram

oh yeah, I noticed that when Googling

Idioms don't have any real reason, they are just conventional uses.

6:27 PM

indeed both black and blue and white and gold are always more common than the other two

So there's no rule, so every time I want to say a combination of two colors, I'd have to look up the convention?

@RexYuan No, there's nothing wrong with saying blue and black dress, it's just not what a native speaker would say.

Still, it's 100% correct grammatically.

Example: white, red, blue. You say them in order: blue, white, red :)

Huh?

Actually, those are usually red white and blue.

sarcasms

Ah :)

6:31 PM

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Wtf^

I was confused when I try google results. Google returns 55,600,000 results for "black and blue", 16,800,000 for "blue and black", 10,400,000 for "white and gold", and 27,500,000 for "gold and white". I assume it's because black and blue is also an idiom

It's interesting that English has conventional ordering of colors

It is what it is.

But, yes it is interesting.

books.google.com/ngrams/…

What^ is going on?

:/

I would have guess black and white is more common because it's also an idiom. Guess it's not always the case

You shouldn't trust those Google numbers too much.

It used to be that it would say 100,000, but then change into "78" as you went to page 8 of search results.

Etc.

6:47 PM

@Cerberus I didn't know that. Thanks for the heads up!

On second thought I found that there's conventional listing of color in Chinese(my native language, too) I wonder if there's some linguistics in these

I suspect that any conventional ordering you find in English will just be because of some famous expression or some famous building/object where the description is repeated, not because of some inherent ordering.

How does the ordering work in Chinese?

There is also metre.

I think metre is important too

In general :-)

Some orders just sound more natural than others

People always say: x and y, not y and x.

Not to mention abc not cba

The order of the colours in the rainbow should be some how preserved in everyday speech, I guess.

7:10 PM

@skillpatrol Yes, but those are alphabetic orders, they're easily explained.

True @Cerberus also the rainbow depends on which way you "read" the colours, right?

I think there is a conventional order in the colours of the rainbow, from red to violet.

roygbev or vebgyor

user image

@skillpatrol Indigo with an i.

I think it's always from red to violet, the way we say it.

Top-down or bottom-up are two different problem-solving strategies, right?

7:15 PM

It is about linguistic convention, not what you actually see.

I say what I see.

Because why is it split up in 7 colours, not 4 or 20?

Newton decide that^

The order in which we say the colours is a linguistic convention not immediately depending on what we see.

@skillpatrol ROYGBIV

7:17 PM

The 7 colours are a tradition, not a scientific fact.

When he made the mnemonic device.

And different color strata are perceived differently by different cultures.

9

A: Do people see the same seven colour bands in the rainbow?

You can think of the seven colors as being nodes in the spectrum of visible light, those which are striking enough for human beings (at least English-speaking ones) to have assigned names. There are other colors, of course, even named ones, but those stand apart from the familiar named colors of ...

The 9 colours of the rainbow are burgundy, red, orange, ochre, yellow, bright green, dark green, blue, purple.

@Cerberus You are talking about the gay rainbow, I think.

Oh, add turquoise, that's 10.

@Robusto You're talking about the redundant pleonasm!

7:19 PM

There are infinitely many wave lengths. :-)

Exactly.

@skillpatrol There are not infinitely many Planck lengths in the visible spectrum.

Define "visible"

Is that^ an exact length?

For everybody

I am not admitting quantum mechanical arguments into visible observations.

In physics, the Planck length, denoted ℓP, is a unit of length, equal to 6965161619900000000♠1.616199(97)×10−35 metres. It is a base unit in the system of Planck units, developed by physicist Max Planck. The Planck length can be defined from three fundamental physical constants: the speed of light in a vacuum, the Planck constant, and the gravitational constant. == Value == The Planck length ℓP is defined as where is the speed of light in a vacuum, G is the gravitational constant, and ħ is the reduced Planck constant. The two digits enclosed by parentheses are the estimated standard err...

It's the absolute resolution of the universe, the smallest distance it makes any sense to talk about.

The same is true for time.

But can we measure them?

7:26 PM

I don't know.

> The size of the Planck length can be visualized as follows: if a particle or dot about 0.1mm in size (which is at or near the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe, then inside that universe-sized "dot", the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1mm dot.

wow!

3

Q: Equivalent for a Persian idiom

We Persian speakers have a common idiom, Khaste Nabaashid, and usually say it to someone who finished a task or is in the middle of doing that. The literal translation of the idiom is something like don't be tired or hope not to feel tired. Most of time non-Persian speakers who learnt Farsi be...

idioms idiom-requests

@Gigili what do they mean? Literally sure it's I hope you aren't tired (I guess), but was is it's intent? All the answers given seem to be almost too much 'Keep on truckin' ... wow.

@Cerberus Not only a tradition, some are even made up! Indigo was made up by Newton just to make the ranges come out more evenly.

Or maybe I just made that up. I didn't but maybe I'm just remembering wrong.

I wouldn't know!

8:18 PM

@Cerberus ha ha! My memory hasn't failed yet!

Indigo is a color that is traditionally regarded as a color on the visible spectrum, as well as one of the seven colors of the rainbow: the color between blue and violet. Although traditionally considered one of seven major spectral colors, its actual position in the electromagnetic spectrum is controversial. Indigo is a deep and bright color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine. The color indigo was named after the indigo dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. The first known recorded use...

Thanks, Newton.

8:30 PM

nice google-fu

3 hours later…

11:13 PM

@Mitch Well remembered!

« first day (1673 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3250 days later) »

Transcript for

Jun '1511

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...

phrase-requests pronunciation single-word-requests synonyms

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile