@Lawrence @Cerberus thanks!!

You are geniuses o.O

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes Miss Baker's eyes as sun-strained. I wonder what he meant by that.

> Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity

Injured by the sun? Hmm, doesn't make much sense to me.

@Færd Yes, more or less, although injured is too strong.

tachyonwriting.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/sun-strained-eyes/…

Yeah, I read that. Thanks.

I'm thinking maybe sunlight can change eye color.

Or damage one's sight.

Or cause lines around one's eyes.

It's bed time, adeus!

Bye!

But he doesn't seem to point to a flaw in her eyes; he's describing her beauty or pleasantness there. So I don't think damaged sight or wrinkles is what he meant.

@Cerberus So I guess this gives a better answer:

> The iris is a muscle that expands and contracts to control pupil size. The pupil enlarges in dimmer lighting and grows smaller in brighter lighting. The pupil also shrinks when you focus on near objects, such as a book you are reading.

> When the pupil size changes, the pigments in the iris compress or spread apart, changing the eye color a bit.

> Certain emotions can change both the pupil size and the iris color. That's why some people say their eyes change colors when they're angry or loving.

allaboutvision.com/conditions/eye-color.htm

@HotLicks Here's something for you. english.stackexchange.com/questions/327944/…

yes

thx .. just to be sure, "you were"?? or (you was) ?

were

ok :)

you were right the first time

I see

Mornin.

Well, hello.

gets out troublemaker deterrent stick

sticks it in back of closet

@KitZ.Fox Damn. I left my paradox at home.

look at these two images: image 1, image 2. What do you see?

... is this a joke?

@MattE.Эллен Doc Brown

@MattE.Эллен Want to hear a weird dream?

You were staying with me at my parents' house.

Why? No idea.

@KitZ.Fox yes

@Cerberus that's weird. at least I wasn't a slug

Is it because it's a pair of docs?

@KitZ.Fox yes :D

Yay! I figured it out!

a time travelling pair o' docs

I stole the joke from here:

@MattE.Эллен Indeed not. Why would you be a slug, though?

Oh, that looks inter--Nope! No rabbit holes!

@Cerberus google's deep dream produces a lot of slugdogs

Wow.

You were a human.

I do think you wore something green.

And I had to find you a towel, and I came up with a green one.

:D

a towel, eh? On Towel Day, of all days

@MattE.Эллен There are no coincidences

Urban dictionary has an entry for "epenthetic-r"

How did their editors not remove that?

I guess it's OK, they mention 'insert' and '#caucasus'

@Mitch only things that seem unlikely to happen at the same time because of cognitive biases.

Pfft... you and your 'thinking' and 'knowledge' and 'reason'. You know why it's called germ theory? Have you ever seen them? I thought not. It's not called the 'evil eye' theory. Because it is right there doing its evil... thing.

the cure for the evil eye is to have your friends spit at you, apparently

That sounds not good.

it's meant affectionately, right @terdon?

??

@terdon It's what my Greek girlfriend was telling me. I assumed it was a universal Greek thing. You spit at people to remove the evil eye?

Ah, yes actually. Although when it's actually done it tends to be more air than actual spit. You don't literally spit on people.

yeah :D

I guess you used to but these days (in the rare occasions when you'll see this) they just sort of direct a rapid movement of air at you. More commonly, you do it to yourself, "spitting" down the front of your shirt.

lol

Something about this sounds made up.

Like when a bird craps on you is supposed to be good luck.

@Mitch careful. you can catch the evil eye if people stare at you too much

looks down at ground

wait... if they stare at me?

tries to look non-chalant

@Mitch good plan

@MattE.Эллен here's an example:

argh... but I'm not usually non-chalant, so now I'm out of character trying to blend into the background, so people are starting to notice!

That asshole is actually in parliament, by the way. Hell, he's the VP of the main opposition party.

@terdon No no no no no...that guy is just cleaning his tie.

@terdon I don't understand but it's funny :D

I wish... He's actually making a whole point about how the Swiss wouldn't understand this, but us glorious Greeks learned it from our grandmothers which directly connects us all the way back up the generations with ancient Greece.

Sigh.

wouldn't understand the spitting thing?

The swiss don't spit

it goes all the way back to their ancestors in ancient swissland

That guy they found preserved in the ice from 4000 years ago? Didn't spit.

at least not down his shirt like those heathens

@Mitch He tried to but he kept breaking windows.

Damned frozen spit.

"Radio boot, Adonis spits in his bosom"

@MattE.Эллен That might even make more sense in English than in Greek :)

:D

"Radio Boot" is the name of a satirical tv show. Adonis is actually that guy's name.

He's not much of an Adonis ;)

De gustibus Adonem non disputandum

Eggcorn of the day: I would never step foot in that place.

@VitaminC That's a virtual buffalo.

@TRiG You never set foot in the same river twice

@VitaminC Here's a wild stab at it. Words 1&2 are a collection of programs, namely, program programs (analogous to word processing programs or useful programs, at least syntactically). Add words 3&4: these are the programs that programmers program. Rename words 1-4: call those programs "Ps". Last 3 words: programs (belonging to programmers) that are used for programming. Call them Cs. Then the sentence reduces to "Ps program Cs".

If you twist just so and squint a little, as it were, Ps could be considered compilers, as could Cs. So these are compiler compilers. And so we witness the beginnings of a new buffalo. :)

Hi @VitaminC. I'm heading off now, but I hope you enjoy the buffalo.

:)

@Cerberus: How would you pronounce "Goetia" in English? I've been trying to figure this out.

@Cerberus: Since the "i" was "ει" in Greek, I'm assuming it was long and stressed in Latin (like the "i" in "Darius") which I think would give the English pronunciation /̩goʊɨˈtaɪə/. All the Internet sources I've found disagree, but most of them give clearly ridiculous pronunciations like /̩goʊˈɛtiə/ or /̩goʊˈeɪʃə/. It looks like outside of the title of Ars Goetia, the anglicized goety is more commonly used, so Goetia is barely used in English.

@MattE.Эллен A pair o' doxies.

oh my!

@sumelic Gosh! That is a difficult question.

I must admit that I had never heard of Ars Goetia.

Nor am I proficient in the pronunciation of Latin in English: in my mind I pronounce it either as the Romans did, or as in Dutch (which is more like French).

The rules you mention probably apply to English words that were adapted from Latin but Anglicised. But I wouldn't be surprised if they also apply to pronouncing actual Latin, as you say.

I’d either pronounce it as it’s spelled, or else use the once-standard mapping from Latin to English.

Also, I don’t see why one might look to γοητεία to pronounce goetia.

@sumelic I know long i should be pronounced like /aɪ/ in English words adapted from Latin, and Darius is a good analogous example, so your pronunciation is probably what I'd pick as well.

@tchrist In order to determine whether the i should be short or long in Latin.

@Cerberus Who in the world puts an /aɪ/ in Darius?

You wouldn't?

I would.

When I was ten years old, it was already dare-ee-us.

But I know two pronunciations are common in Dutch.

I've never heard it pronounced any other way. I swear.

I don't remember what I've heard, but I'd pronounce the i long, which is also regular.

If you mean by that, the English diphthong, no, never heard it.

Yes.

Do you disagree that the standard pronunciation of long Latin i is /aɪ/?

@Cerberus Example.

Note: I didn't learn to pronounce Latin when I was learning it using those old Anglo-Latin rules. So I may be a bad example. However, I did use them for the Greek heroes.

Only ae in Latin do I ever pronounce like /aɪ/ and that may be because of sloth.

Remember that my brain for the most part "hears" Latin sounds for Latin letters in Latin words, not English ones, because of the much stronger Romance than English background I have for those words.

Greek words Latinized to -eia are [e(i)ə] to me.

@tchrist But I think the -i- in -ion is always short. And the other endings were normally Anglicised in English, into -y or similar.

@tchrist But when the e has disappeared?

Perhaps I should have said: stressed i, not long i.

@tchrist Many people. It's in the dictionary: dictionary.com/browse/darius

I always forget the rules.

@sumelic That's insane. And I studied Ancient History. I never ever ever ever ever heard that.

How do you pronounce nasturtium or dahlia?

[ˈdæɹi.əs] is the only way I have ever heard it said: I swear by all that you hold dear.

@tchrist /nəˈstɜrʃm̩/ and /dɑliə/. They had short i in Latin.

@Cerberus Can you think of an -eia word that's now spelled -ia?

@sumelic ok good

@tchrist I only learned about this pronunciation of Darius from the comments in this Languagehat post: Pace. But I like the sound of it so I adopted it in my own pronunciation.

I can only think of pariah for a word that ends in [ˈaɪ.ə].

Here they say /'dæ.ri.əs/:

Or perhaps that's a different r.

@tchrist I tried, but it was hard.

@tchrist "Mariah" is also etymologically the same name as "Maria." The long "i" in Latin doesn't come from Greek ei though. Apparently the Greek ι here was long.

@Cerberus Agree. That's a flap r, from the clipped old "classy" British accent, which Tolkien and others of his age had. But modulo that, that sounds like mine.

@tchrist Josiah?

@Cerberus Yep.

Good.

howjsay.com/pronunciation-of-darius

He gives all three pronunciations.

But gives aɪ last.

Surely that's not rupaɪa?

@tchrist There is the name Thalia, for which apparently one Greek variant was spelled Θάλεια. Although it has various other pronunciations.

That's the spelling. It's not from Latin.

@sumelic /ˈθɑlɪə/ or perhaps Anglicized to /ˈθeɪlɪə/.

@tchrist: Also Deidamia, from Greek Δηϊδάμεια, according to Wikipedia is pronounced /ˌdeɪdəˈmaɪə/. Although the diphthong /eɪ/ for Greek "ηϊ" is odd, so I'm not completely sure I trust that article.

Is this correct? "you are one of the perfect SO's users"

@Shafizadeh That depends what you mean.

There is a meaning where it would be fine, but that is unlikely to be the one you intend.

@Shafizadeh It doesn't sound right to me. I would expect to hear something like "one of the perfect users of SO" or "one of SO's perfect users"

> You are a perfect SO user!

That's what sounds most natural to me, if you want to say that person x follows all the SO rules and posts the best answers and questions.

One other note: I would only use [adjective + possessive + noun] if the combination of [possessive + noun] were a fixed, idiomatic combination, which is uncommon.

SO's users is not a fixed phrase.

So I would not use an adjective before it.

Ah got it .. thx guys