> So why DO we close these questions on occasion? ... You should be a bit wary about calling on others to write up a great answers when you haven't formulated a problem statement that assures it can be answered correctly by folks from whom you are seeking help.
This is his explanation of why questions lacking research are closed "on occasion" (so not always: research is not always needed): when the question cannot be answered correctly. Not just because it lacks research.
@englishstudent Not immediately, but it has been occasionally known to change its sources from one to another. It may even vary from user to user and region to region if I recall correctly but I'm not completely sure that I do.
That is such an odd opinion to have, at least in isolation. If I thought a question was unanswerable I would generally prefer another reason for closure, like P.O.B. or U.W.A. The only time I might suppose that demonstrating research would make the nature of the question clearer is if you had done research, but won't describe what you have done to at least the degree where we understand what confused you about it.
In such cases, we may just repeat the efforts already performed, which is of no help to the questioner, but I would suppose such cases are exceptionally rare.
Recently a translation question was asked ("need translation of latin quote, pacis puella") that didn't show any research effort. This lead to a discussion in chat, where the question was raised – which close reason best applies to such questions?
I suggested "unclear what you're asking," but t...
> As to "you don't show that you have done your research" as a closing-reason: "not enough research" is only a supporting condition to close certain kinds of questions, not a sufficient condition to close any question. The actual, complete closing reason for the question above should therefore be, "because it is unclear what you're asking, as you don't provide enough context, your question has been closed; if you had shown that you had done research, it might have remained open, but that is not the case". That seems a tad long. But the most important component of the reason is "unclear beca…
@Cerberus Given the nature of the closed question, and the fact that it is now March, it seems like a convenient time to remind you that I wanted you to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Would you do me the small favor of watching the first few episodes as soon as you have the chance?
I also wanted you to read Shoulder-a-Coffin-Kuro, but Volume 2 is still out-of-print, at least in hardcopy form anyway, which is odd because volume 1 and 3-5 aren't. Sigh!
@Cerberus Hmm, I probably would have suggested the question in question should have been closed a "resource request" if it was here. Granted, we don't really have a formal close reason for resource requests either, so that is problematic.
You are correct. This is the way these things are done: only the
paragraphs following the first are indented.
I can little hope to better express why we do this than
Robert Bringhurst does when he explains in his widely acclaimed
“typographer’s bible”, The Elements of Typographic Style:
...
> If you're putting minimal effort into asking a question you expect someone else to spend hours or even days answering, you're showing some major disrespect for the folks you're directing the question at.
@user8469759 If you specifically want to find synonyms and antonyms in an online dictionary, you'll want to check Oxford Living Dictionaries. However I would strongly recommend using thesaurus.com for synonyms instead, which uses Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition, as a source and cross referencing a dictionary of your choice.
In any case, I wasn't advocating closing these, necessarily. I said as much yesterday. The discussion was about whether or not something should be migrated here. And there, the quality issues are important. First rule of migration and all that. So no, I don't think that trivially answerable questions should be migrated.
@user8469759 I think using a thesaurus is best for synonyms and antonyms since that is a reference work meant expressly for the purpose of listing them. You'll find more of the words in question that way.
However a thesaurus is not a dictionary. It does not contain definitions. They are usually separate works that you have to cross-reference together to find useful synonyms and antonyms.
It's The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure if the thesaurus part is actually available online. I know the dictionary half is.
@user8469759 I don't think there's such a thing as "a single dictionary with it's own thesaurus". Thesauri and dictionaries are two different resources, it doesn't make much sense to bundle them together.
The only thing I can recommend is double checking the actual definitions. Every thesaurus I have ever seen gives some odd suggestions, so you really need to be careful when selecting synonyms and antonyms from one.
If you are using the cambridge dictionary anyway, you can probably just use the provided link to the word to open a new tab in your browser and see its definition.
It's probably to show how common the words are relative to each other. Anyway, test doesn't really have any good antonyms. Thesaurus.com suggests conclusion, as in the data derived from a test as an antonym of the word. However that only works with the word in the sense in which it is synonymous with experiment, with test seeming to be the much more polysemous word.
@tchrist Then instead of using a whole bunch of nonbreaking spaces in your answer, I would like to suggest you use an en-space to replicate the expressed suggestion in that answer. You can do that with a Hyper-text Markup Language escape character,  
@Tonepoet I was emulating the book that I was quoting from, in which Bringhurst appears to use 5n.
1n isn't going to be sufficient separation without also increasing the leading.
I've sent the question over to Graphic Design if they’ll take it, as it had accumulated four out of the requisite five close-votes as purportedly being off-topic on ELU, based perhaps on some premise that the English language is spoken not written. Writers and Literature I found absurd suggestions, however.
I sometimes wonder what Stack Exchange site people expect the questions they vote to close for being about punctuation or spacing ought to be forthwith banished to.
@terdon Thanks for that. Wouldn't you think that that stupid little daemon who grafitis our computer texts with a Christmas tree pageant of wavy red, green, and blue lines could once be bothered to indicate that a duplicate word might a duplicate be?
@tchrist Hmm. That little detail doesn't actually cross over very well unless you have the book in hand. I suppose that somebody might though. Still, it might be better to use five actual en, or two em ( ) and one en, than to approximate it with non-breaking spaces though.
One thing I did for that answer is set the line length to the same reasonable number of ens as Bringhurst uses in the book I’m citing, rather than allowing Stack Exchange CSS to draw out ponderous lines of infinite measure that so weary the wandering eye.
@Tonepoet Very well, although I see no appreciable difference: I have replaced my (" " x 8) indent with one that’s now (" " x 4 + " " x 2).
@tchrist Hmm, one of the reasons I mention it is because one of the earliest bits of typography advice I remember comes from a computer help book. I'm not sure which but it may have been Macs for Dummies by David Pogue. It suggested using tabs instead of spaces because even if it looks fine on the screen when you use spaces, things look maligned in actual print if you use spaces. I do not fully understand why that is, but I am supposing that might be due to the nature of variable width fonts.
And I miss Georgia’s elegance, lost upon migration, as more representative of a printed book than that of the functional but sterile lettering of architectural blueprints.
@Tonepoet That is correct.
There was only a single indented paragraph there, so I had no cause to worry that the indent of one paragraph would fail to match that of another. In theory, however, at U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE is not itself considered to be a variable-width one. In practice, though, I have sometimes seen situations that I can find no other ready explanation for.
@tchrist Hmm, perhaps if you and other people would join the "Obsolescent" Side of the Grammar definition, punctuation and spacing could be salvaged as orthography questions, but I won't get my hopes up for that.
I have no qualms about fitting punctuation and spacing under the rightwriting umbrella, along with the more obviously included matters of casing and graphemic variations.
Now I have to find a Germanic for umbrella. (something)-screen, perhaps.
German Regenschirm has there, whose closest cognate would likely be rainscreen.
But a rightwriting rainscreen might be too suggestive of fallout from the heavens.
In Roman America, a ramada is that protective covering placed over picnic tables and patios to guard against sun and rain alike.
That word is related to our word ramify meaning to branch out, both from the Latin word for branch.
Sticks and branches, twigs and boughs, shoots and shafts, trunks and stumps, sprouts and sprigs, buds and blooms: why is it, do you imagine, that English has so many “native” words for all things arboreal that it need borrow none from Romance here?
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, even more like Chinese when you glance over the ten closely related languages sampled here that terdon and I were referencing. That there probably there is no language as close to English as any pair of those are makes us anglophones less likely than Romance speakers to think of cousin-tongues, Scots potentially excepted.
@tchrist It's more-so the orthography as grammar part which causes my doubt. Even the grammar tag defines it as just syntax and morphology here, and people often complain about usage of the word that contravenes that definition, as I'm sure you're well aware.
Also I think it's rather strange that people are trying to close punctuation questions given that our help center expressly allows them at the moment.
@englishstudent You were supposed to say something subtly clever so that I could respond 'I see what you did there'. Instead all I can say is 'I know what you mean. Because I so often don't exactly see what was done there, but to show I'm one with the gang, I laugh nervously. As much as can be done in typing.
@englishstudent On TV. Maybe real life. Or maybe it's a reconstructed memory from Rikki Tikki Tavi. Sounds mystical.
@M.A.R. 2 opposite things 1) as currently worded, I find the question entirely misleading. all of it. from all the background discussion, what I read there isn't what I think that you think it is about. It is hidden in there, true, or rather in plain sight but overwhelmed by everything else, that If I were to try to answer it, it wouldn't even mention the term 'grammatical' which is entirely what you care about.
2) The question is super high voted which means it is popular and therefore strikes a chord (or nerve) and so is important. The question in the title is beautifully provocative and is worth all of it.
so you get some sweet and some sour
But since you are sort of asking, I only suggest fixing some very minor (but niggling) things.
@Mitch Ahh, but I don't think it will attract future answers. I'll ask someone to ask on meta whether we should make it a canonical post, then if approved we'd turn it into a Community Wiki answer.
@Mitch Huh, but ''pragmatical'' is a word I checked
The problem is what to call ''of or pertaining to semantic''
@M.A.R. most likely not because you created the question to answer it the way you wanted (with only one real answer possible, yours). so yes. canonical
@M.A.R. pragmatical may be a word but it's not the preferred way to say something is 'about pragmatics'
also 'pragmatic' is the preferred form of 'pragmatical' but it means something like 'utilitarian' rather than 'related to the linguistic field of pragmatics'
“If this is not Too Broad, nothing is”
I did not believe that the question under discussion is a good one for our site or format, and I think this for more than one reason alone, but I can honestly assure you that its number of views forms no part of my reasoning and position in this.
Its asker...
@Mitch I made the edit to the answer. I don't remember mentions of 'pragmatical' in the question. O.O Anyway, the point is, the post got everyone that needed to learn something by reading it to learn something.
Recently a translation question was asked ("need translation of latin quote, pacis puella") that didn't show any research effort. This lead to a discussion in chat, where the question was raised – which close reason best applies to such questions?
I suggested "unclear what you're asking," but t...
You are correct. This is the way these things are done: only the
paragraphs following the first are indented.
I can little hope to better express why we do this than
Robert Bringhurst does when he explains in his widely acclaimed
“typographer’s bible”, The Elements of Typographic Style:
...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…