English Language Learners - 2014-12-16 (page 1 of 3)

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8:13 AM

Hi! I was taking some online exams. One sentence's correction made me confused so I had to land here to get some help on it. It was saying: "He is at the library studying for his German test on Wednesday. " But I think it should have been: "He is studying at the library for his German test on Wednesday. "

Please tag my name so I will get the notification and it will help me to get the answer easily.

2 hours later…

10:25 AM

I think both alternatives are fine.

10:41 AM

nods

@user62015 both seems correct

"at the library studying"
means "studying at the library"

Nods

user116848

10:57 AM

Hi all

user116848

@skullpatrol In a sense you are wearing two hats :-)

user116848

@snailboat Nice football hat!

user116848

@DamkerngT. How have you been?

Not so great. I wish I got more hats. But this is okay. :-)

user116848

haha. I didn't know you liked them so much.

11:11 AM

(Aztec Hat looks nice. Reminds me of the Cat Hat last year.)

Anonymous

🐌

Ah! What Unicode char is that?

Anonymous

Snail!

Ahh...

user116848

@snailboat Cute!

11:12 AM

We could use some snail hats, I think. :-)

Anonymous

The noun phrase is the China May and I used to see in movies brought to Shanghai from Hollywood. Did you have something more specific to ask about it? — snailboat 3 mins ago

user116848

ELU chat was Jungle last night.

Anonymous

I think my comment is rather missing the point, but I don't know what their specific problem is with the sentence

user116848

:-)

Anonymous

Maybe with the conversion of China into a common noun

11:15 AM

@snailboat Isn't that the answer!?

Anonymous

Um, could be? :-)

user116848

Guess what? :-)

What?

user116848

I just got awarded fanatic Gold badge. And with that I got Treasure Hunter Hat.

Anonymous

Nice!

user116848

11:18 AM

Yee Haw!

Nice!

user116848

Good timings right? :-)

What a right timing!

Anonymous

I don't have Fanatic on ELL yet

user116848

That's what I thought :)

user116848

11:20 AM

@snailboat It is easy. You can get it.

user116848

Although I have been here a long time my days were never consecutive before.

As an aside, this discussion (the comments) is interesting.

0

A: Choosing the wrong sentence in the following sentences

My guess is that sentence 3 might not be right: He looks three times as happy as I had seen. It uses the Past Perfect but there's no another past-time reference in the sentence. And probably it is wrong to end the sentence so abruptly, making no explicit comparison. I would transform...

@Farooq Ahh... How many days do we need? I've forgotten that.

user116848

100 days.

user116848

That's a long time. I know.

user116848

Next one is voting 600 times.

user116848

11:23 AM

I'll let it come to me.

user116848

No hurries :-)

user116848

I think the "most difficult" one is the Legendary Gold Badge.

I don't even know what it is.

@snailboat Good news! WendiKidd is back. Hooray!

user116848

@DamkerngT. Earning 200 daily reputation 150 times

user116848

ell.stackexchange.com/help/badges

11:28 AM

What! That's at least 30,000 rep points!

user116848

Yep

I guess it will need something close to 80,000 to get one.

user116848

I have been rather lazy in answering on the main site. I give answers in a relaxed manner I guess.

user116848

That is how I like though.

Anonymous

-2

Q: Long and other Bureau of Prisons -- what does "Long" mean?

Source: Long and other Bureau of Prisons officials say they are limited in what they can say about Tsarnaev because he is being held under "Special Administrative Measures," known as SAMs. I surely can understand Bureau of Prisons officials. There must be an organization with the name Burea...

Anonymous

11:35 AM

I don't think this deserves as many downvotes as it's gotten

Anonymous

I upvoted

Anonymous

It was at -3

user116848

I'll do it.

Hmm... Maybe the OP was standing too close to the trees.

user116848

Jay gave a good answer. Concise and clear.

Anonymous

11:38 AM

It's perfectly answerable without context

Anonymous

Although the OP may not have been able to tell whether context was necessary since they couldn't understand it

I don't think we need previous sentences.

Anonymous

So giving us more context would have been a good idea, although it turned out not to be necessary in this case

"I surely can understand Bureau of Prisons officials." I think they sure are able to understand the whole sentence, just standing back away about three feet. :-)

Good afternoon everyone(body)!

user116848

11:44 AM

Good afternoon!

Good afternoon!

@DamkerngT. Are you wearing two hats at once?

Anonymous

Hello!

Hi, Snailboat (0:

user116848

It is 4:45 here. After 5:00 I say "Good evening". I hope I am okay.

11:46 AM

@CopperKettle This hat has two pieces!

oh, a two piece hat! Very posh (0:

BBC has launched a "Live Page" on Rouble, it's diving so fast

bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2014/12/141216_live_russia_rouble

dropped from 68 yesterday to 74 today

Oh, it's on the news now!

People say it might reach 100 per one dollar

Ahh

user116848

Here we have 100 Pakistani Rupee per one dollar sadly.

11:50 AM

@Farooq Oh, it will be handy then, one Ruble for one Rupee

I remember at one point Thai baht went down from 25 baht/dollar to 50 bath/dollar in just a few days.

user116848

@CopperKettle :-)

(0:

@CopperKettle Sounds easy to remember, but let's hope it won't happen!

@DamkerngT. Wow! I wonder from what (which?) word baht derives?

user116848

11:51 AM

Yep! Currencies fluctuate a lot.

@CopperKettle I wonder that myself, too.

"rouble" derives from "to cut something (in parts)"

user116848

At one time it was 50 Pakistani Rupee per one dollar.

Anonymous

Ah, a word for a type of division!

Anonymous

Like cent refers to a division of one hundredth, or quarter to one quarter

Anonymous

11:52 AM

Then you have words like yuan which refer to the physical shape of the currency

@snailboat yes! big silver or iron rods were "cut" into rubles with an axe

Anonymous

Or words like nickel which refer to the material

Anonymous

@CopperKettle Neat!

unit of the Russian monetary system, 1550s, via French rouble, from Russian rubl', perhaps from Old Russian rubiti "to chop, cut, hew," so called because the original metallic currency of Russia (14c.) consisted of silver bars, from which the necessary amount was cut off; from Proto-Slavic *rub-, from PIE root *reub-, *reup- "to snatch" (see rip (v.)).

Anonymous

A shilling has a similar origin

11:54 AM

Baht was a unit of measurement for weight in the old days. Maybe that's why.

@snailboat Interesting!

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Ah, like pound!

Ah, indeed!

user116848

Rupee is "‘wrought silver"

user116848

(Origin)

11:55 AM

@snailboat The Russian kopeck (1/100 of ruble) derives from the word "spear", because the first coins carried the image of Saint George with a spear

Anonymous

Groschen was from another physical property (thickness)

Anonymous

@CopperKettle Neat!

What's interesting is in the old days, our units were in the factor of 2! (Except for the smallest one. The smallest one, เบี้ย--sounds close to beer, is 1/6400 baht.)

@CopperKettle Nice!

Копе́йка (устаревшая форма: копейная монета) — разменная монета России, Приднестровья (1/100 рубля), Украины (1/100 гривны), Азербайджана (гяпик, азерб. qəpik, 1/100 маната). Также в Российской империи до 1917, на Дону и Кубани в 1918, в Литве в 1991, Беларуси (1992) и другими эмитентами (трест Арктикуголь, Внешторгбанк — 1961) выпускались бумажные билеты достоинством 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 копеек. == Этимология == Распространённое толкование названия говорит о его происхождении от слова «копьё»: изначально на аверсе копейки изображался Георгий Победоносец, поражающий копьём Змия. Возможно…

There is still the same guy with the same spear (0:

Oh!

Anonymous

11:59 AM

Since they sound so similar

Anonymous

I always imagined rupee and rouble would be related

Anonymous

Japanese used to have more units of currency besides the yen

Anonymous

But they were in factors of 10, like the kopeck, not 2, like the เบี้ย

Oh, I thought it was always in yen. (v-- TYftC!)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It is now.

Anonymous

12:01 PM

Say, you didn't by chance intend that it's as it was, did you? Because that's not possible

@DamkerngT. Interesting! The British imperial system was also quaint..

Anonymous

One rin is one thousandth of a yen

Anonymous

A rin is literally a very small thing

Anonymous

A tiny bit

Anonymous

Left over after separating wheat from chaff

12:04 PM

nods -- Considering how Japanese people deal with large numbers, I think it's not very surprising to hear such a small unit.

Anonymous

But it came to be used for very small units of measurement, including 1/1000th of a yen.

Anonymous

There are no rin or sen anymore

user116848

So everyone compare their currency to dollars. Even in exams :-)

@Farooq In the 1990s, prices in many stores in Russia were in dollars

@Farooq I remember that it was 5 yens a baht. Then it was 3 yens a baht. Now it's about 3.6 yens a baht.

user116848

12:08 PM

ah, I see.

user116848

@CopperKettle So in the European part of Russia do they use Euro?

At some point this practice was prohibited, but shop owners switched to using "nominal units", like "the price of this TV set is 500 nominal units", and everyone understood

user116848

@DamkerngT. Oh, so you compare it to yens. Nice.

@Farooq We keep track of our currency with many others.

@Farooq Well, Ruble is the only legal tender, but personally people use dollars and euros

user116848

12:10 PM

@CopperKettle I see

user116848

@DamkerngT. Yeah, same here.

(I think against might be better than with, but somehow I didn't feel like I wanted to say the word.)

user116848

Dinar on the other hand is very strong.

user116848

Like almost 1.5 dollars in one Dinar (Kuwait)

Ahh

user116848

12:13 PM

Oh sorry, it is 3.43 US Dollars in one Dinar.

user116848

I just checked.

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/energy-environment/…

2

Q: Choosing the wrong sentence in the following sentences

Here is an English grammar question from a certain English learning material I bought at the book store. I am very confused over this. It is said there is only one answer from the five sentences, however, I think there is no answer. All the sentences below seem grammatically fine to me. I hope...

grammar comparison

(I wonder if I picked the right wrong sentence there)

(or maybe I wrongly picked the sentence that was right)

Anonymous

12:30 PM

Hmm, that's a difficult question

Anonymous

"Writing a novel is two times as difficult as I think."

Anonymous

Let's say we can quantify difficulty. x = 1

Anonymous

I think x = 1, so I know x = 2. Therefore, I think x = 2. Therefore, I think x = 4. Therefore, ...

Anonymous

Doesn't really make sense

I think two times is less idiomatic than twice, but it doesn't make the sentence incorrect, grammatically.

Anonymous

12:31 PM

No, two times and twice are both okay, even though the latter sounds much better

Anonymous

"Writing a novel is twice as difficult as I think." ←　This has the same problem

@snailboat I see your point.

Anonymous

Typo: your

Oh, my bad r is coming back again.

Anonymous

Oh, no!

Anonymous

12:33 PM

I think bruised reed has more or less the correct answer

It's all right. I think if I smack the key really hard several times, it will be fine.

@snailboat Oh. Too bad it got downvoted then

Anonymous

@CopperKettle I don't know why it got downvoted

Anonymous

I'm not fond of every sentence in that list...

So I guess in sentence 3 all is okay with the sequence of tenses after all.

12:35 PM

Hmm... I think saying "I love her as much as you." is not a well-formed sentence semantically is perhaps a bit too strong. (I'm not the downvoter, though.)

(I gotta scrap my answer then)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. "I love her as much as you" is perfectly well-formed.

The answer also accepts "Writing a novel is twice as difficult as I had thought." as correct. So I can't tell the difference.

Anonymous

@CopperKettle There's no sequence of tenses problem

@snailboat Thank you! Scrapped it.

Anonymous

12:37 PM

Just imagine there's an unstated time in the past that the perfect is relative to

Anonymous

It's not a great sentence, though

> He looks three times as happy as I had seen.

I think I want at least him after seen.

@snailboat Indeed. I thought about that, but I guessed maybe the authors of the test weren't so refined.

Anonymous

@broccoliforest Welcome to ELL! :-)

broccoli forest

@snailboat Hello :)

I somewhat feel that similar people discussing similar topics everywhere

12:40 PM

"Welcome to ELL" sounds minacious a bit, if pronounced by a cockney

Anonymous

Wow, minacious!

Anonymous

I don't know that word.

or minatory

(0:

> She expected that the relation who bequeathed her this money in his will, would have left her three times as much; and supposed, that if he had, she should have been three times as happy: so that when he died, and she found it was only ten thousand, she went into hysterics; and never seems to have recovered the disappointment!

Anonymous

@CopperKettle I never pronounce ELL /el/, always /iː.el.el/

12:42 PM

> books.google.com/…

@snailboat Oh, in this case its decidedly non-minacious then

"Welcome to eitsh.iː.el.el"

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. You can fix that if you URI escape the quotes, replacing " with %22

Thanks for the tip!

> If you're dunking with only your dominant hand, learn to dunk with the other, you're more than two times as difficult to guard in the pain when you can dunk with either hand.
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=RKqypE6UhY8C&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=%22two+times+as+difficult%22

Anonymous

@CopperKettle The IPA symbol for the sound written <sh> is /ʃ/ :-)

(0:

Anonymous

12:45 PM

@DamkerngT. That's a really difficult sentence to get through my brain

Oh, I got a "fear and loathing" hat for deleting this answer of mine

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It starts out looking like a coordination of at least three verb phrases: "If you ['re dunking with only your dominant hand], [learn to dunk with the other],"

> Losing weight is twice as difficult as official guidelines claim, according to US research that will offer some reassurance to dieters struggling to shed the pounds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9093474/Losing-weight-twice-as-difficult-as-diets-claim.html

Anonymous

Because the second one has no and

BRB

Anonymous

12:47 PM

But then in the place of the third coordinate, you get a consequent

Anonymous

So then you have to backtrack and read it as not being coordination

Anonymous

Hmm… I can't make sense of it

Anonymous

I give up :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. That seems like a reasonable sentence!

I think it's still uncommon, but it's quite like saying "more perfect than" or "less complete than", which is becoming more acceptable nowadays.

Anonymous

12:50 PM

What is uncommon?

twice as difficult, three times as happy, and so on.

Anonymous

Is it? It sounds normal to me.

Anonymous

There's nothing wrong with it.

Anonymous

I don't think there ever was.

Oh, but you mentioned that. -- scrolling back...

Anonymous

12:51 PM

"More perfect than" was never wrong, either, although there are prescriptivists who claimed and still claim that it shouldn't be used

My browser is crawling...

Anonymous

Whereas "very pregnant" is probably still rather colloquial :-)

20 mins ago, by snailboat

I think x = 1, so I know x = 2. Therefore, I think x = 2. Therefore, I think x = 4. Therefore, ...

Anonymous

Right. That's different.

Anonymous

Let's go back to the original sentence.

Anonymous

12:52 PM

21 mins ago, by snailboat

"Writing a novel is two times as difficult as I think."

Anonymous

This sentence tells you what I think.

Anonymous

I think that writing a novel is twice as difficult as I think it is.

Anonymous

x = 2x

Anonymous

Whereas in your sentence: "Losing weight is twice as difficult as official guidelines claim, according to US research that will offer some reassurance to dieters struggling to shed the pounds."

Anonymous

We have y = 2x

12:54 PM

Ahh... Would it help if it'd been "Writing a novel is two times as difficult as I thought."?

Anonymous

If you said "as I thought", everything would be fine

Going to get rid of some windows and tabs...

Anonymous

I mean, aside from "twice as difficult" sounding more natural than "two times as difficult"

Ahh... I see.

Anonymous

Actually, "two times as difficult" sounds like you can actually quantify how difficult it is ... :-)

Anonymous

12:57 PM

So there's nothing wrong with "twice as difficult", it's just that the sentence expresses something that doesn't make sense

Anonymous

There's no grammatical problem, just a semantic one

"I hope the post will deliver by gift before (the?) New Year" (is New Year a proper noun?)

Anonymous

@CopperKettle New Year's is.

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=35676457

I wish I could search for deliver by.

1:01 PM

oh, it's "my", a typo

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. What's stopping you?

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=35676495

before "New Year's day" then (0: Thanks, @snailboat!

Anonymous

@CopperKettle If you include Day, make sure you capitalize it

@snailboat My browser.

Anonymous

1:03 PM

@DamkerngT. Oh, right―The Man with a Thousand Tabs :-)

Sometimes it happens!

@snailboat Thanks! If I don't include it, it would look strange "I want my gift delivered by New Year's".

Anonymous

@CopperKettle It's natural to refer to New Year's Day as simply New Year's

@snailboat Oh, thanks! Live and learn..

Anonymous

@CopperKettle corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=35676546

1:06 PM

@snailboat I think it's not a thousand anymore. Still it's at about 800-900 tabs.

I think it'd work great at ~500 tabs.

@snailboat Using possessive s without the possessor, one tends to feel like a grammatical transgressor. O_o

Anonymous

@CopperKettle Do you mean without the possessed?

@snailboat Yes, indeed. Now the rhyming word should be "transgressed"

Anonymous

Hee

(0:

Anonymous

1:12 PM

Genitive noun phrases are often used in determiner position (his car, the King of England's favorite sweater) but they have other functions (a friend of mine, that egg is hers, an excellent old people's home)

yes, the double genitive: his picture (he is on the picture) - the picture of his (he is the owner)

Anonymous

But we may not want to call it a "double genitive"

Anonymous

Because that gives the label "genitive" to two different things

Anonymous

If we give them different labels, then it's easier to describe their differences without confusing the two

english.stackexchange.com/tags/double-genitive/info

well, it has several names, I only remembered "double genitive" as in the ELU tag (0:

Anonymous

1:16 PM

That's fine, of course, and I know what you mean

Anonymous

In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, it's referred to as the oblique genitive construction

2

Anonymous

They refer to the of-phrases as oblique

nods

Anonymous

Quirk et al. have the nice name "post-genitive"

Anonymous

That is, the genitive which comes afterwards instead of before

1:21 PM

I wonder if they're having some contest for who invents the most new linguistic terms to befuddle the chatting masses

Anonymous

Oh, I've never seen a reference grammar that didn't invent terminology :-)

Anonymous

Martin's Reference Grammar of Japanese (1975) invents about a zillion terms.

Anonymous

The terminology is somewhat less important than the ideas

nods

Anonymous

@CopperKettle I get befuddled a lot!

1:25 PM

(0:

Anonymous

The funny thing about terminology isn't when people invent new terms...

Anonymous

...it's that people use the same terms to describe different things

Anonymous

Like

Anonymous

Some people use adjective to describe a function

Anonymous

So they say that in chicken soup, the word chicken is an adjective, or they say it's acting or functioning as an adjective

1:27 PM

Seems logical

Anonymous

Although it doesn't have any of the morphological features of an adjective, and generally lacks most of the syntactic features of an adjective

Anonymous

So it makes a bit of a theoretical mess

@snailboat That would be the most confusing thing about terminology!

@snailboat Yes, you can't say "This is the most chicken soup I've ever had!"

Anonymous

@CopperKettle Right.

Anonymous

1:28 PM

It doesn't function postpositively or predicatively (at least, not with the same distribution as an adjective)

Anonymous

Nor does it have comparative or superlative forms

I think it's kinda like asking people, "I need to go to the bathroom." -- I think they will point me to different rooms if I ask this in different countries. :D

Anonymous

And the word does have all the distributional characteristics of a noun

Anonymous

And the morphological characteristics, like the plural chickens

Anonymous

In fact, pretty much all nouns can fit into that grammatical slot

Anonymous

1:29 PM

So it makes more sense to come up with a label for that function (CGEL uses "attributive") and say that both nouns and adjectives can have that function

Question of the day: How should we say "This is the most chicken soup I've ever had!" in Standard English?

Anonymous

Otherwise, we lose the ability to use the word adjective to describe the morphological and syntactic traits of adjectives

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. That doesn't mean anything to me.

What if I start with a goof version first: "This is the most chicken-ish soup I've ever had!"

Anonymous

Um. :-)

1:31 PM

It's very simple in Russian: we just add the suffix "NYI"

"This is the most chicken-NYI soup I've ever had"

and voila! it's an adjective

Hehe!

Anonymous

You can derive a nonce-adjective chicken and say "This is the most chicken soup I've ever had!"

Anonymous

But

user116848

What is NYI?

Anonymous

The meaning is unclear... Perhaps in context you could come up with some meaning for it

1:33 PM

@Farooq a suffix, I just capitalized it

user116848

yeah

Anonymous

Chicken isn't standardly an adjective

Anonymous

What would your sentence mean?

"The Sun's not yellow it's chicken" - is this an adjective, I wonder

Anonymous

"Tastes more like chicken than any other soup I've ever had"?

Anonymous

1:34 PM

@CopperKettle Well, there is the colloquial adjective chicken meaning "afraid"

Ahh... I'd understand "the most chicken soup" like that, if someone said it to me.

@snailboat Oh, now I understand

Uncle Bob's songs must be loved by grammarians

Anonymous

Both yellow and chicken are dated slang for "afraid"

Anonymous

You might hear them in old movies

I don't like using yellow in that sense much.

user116848

1:35 PM

But sun is not chicken (afraid).

user116848

I don't follow.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Me either.

@Farooq It's from a song

Tombstone Blues

"Tombstone Blues" is the second track of Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. Musically it is influenced by the blues, while the lyrics are typical of Dylan's surreal style of the period, with such lines as "the sun's not yellow, it's chicken". A live recording of the song, made for MTV in November 1994, was released on MTV Unplugged in 1995. The song was performed by Marcus Carl Franklin and Richie Havens in I'm Not There, the film based on Dylan's life. The soundtrack version is performed solely by Havens. Two lines from the song, spoken by the "Commander in Chief" – "Death to all those...

user116848

I see. Looks like a good song.

Yep, a nice song

Anonymous

1:38 PM

@Farooq Even in context, it's hard to interpret

0

Q: why do we see far more questions about rewriting active as passive than the other way around?

I haven't been on the forum for a long time, but long enough to see that there are far more questions about recasting sentences in the active voice into the passive than the other way around. I assume non-native English speakers find the passive to be the more difficult voice to master, hence th...

passive-voice active-voice

Anonymous

But juxtaposing two slang terms from that era with the same meaning does make it seem like that's what's intended

Ahh... I think this one fits our meta better, too.

user116848

@snailboat It definitely is.

Anonymous

0

A: why do we see far more questions about rewriting active as passive than the other way around?

I think that we see more questions about recasting into passive voice simply because it is more difficult to learn. Some tenses can't be recast into passive voice, and passive voice involves auxiliary verbs, so it requires more practice than active voice in some ways. I don't think the prevalence...

Anonymous

1:40 PM

See? Here, the poster is using "tense" in a way I'm unfamiliar with

Anonymous

Terminology is confusing.

I think the reason is obvious for everyone learning English as a second language. It's because, traditionally, once the learner's learned English alphabet, they will be taught simple sentences first. Typical sentences the teachers would use are something like Horses are animal. He sits. Girls wear dresses.

Anonymous

What CGEL calls canonical clauses, those without subject-auxiliary inversion, passivization, relativization, preposing, postposing, etc.

Anonymous

They're taken as being more basic, with other types of clauses related to them via syntactic processes

nods -- Even the tense of these sentences is always in the present tense, I believe. (Also in the simple progressive, sometimes.)

Anonymous

1:50 PM

That is, people talk about passivization but not activization :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. the English alphabet; Horses are animals

Ahh... Or copula.

@snailboat Oh, the is my mistake, animals is my typo!

Anonymous

Is your 's' key acting up? 'Cause I know what that's like :-)

No, it's just I can't see what I typed really well, due to the responsiveness of my PC.

Anonymous

Ahh

Anonymous

1:52 PM

I hope you can solve your responsiveness problem!

I hope that too!

user116848

@DamkerngT. It can also be a internet connection issue.

user116848

It happens to me.

Probably two in combo!

user116848

chuckles

1:53 PM

"Our family gathers on New Year's Eve to meet (the?) midnight together"

Anonymous

@CopperKettle I'm not familiar with the phrase meet midnight

@snailboat hmm..

Anonymous

Is it from a poem?

to wait until midnight arrives

@snailboat No, it's from Lang-8

Anonymous

Oh, well, the sentence there doesn't look like it's from a poem

Anonymous

1:55 PM

I just thought the phrase meet midnight sounded poetic :-)

But how to express this in English, I wonder. In Russian it's perfectly okay.

The original is "Now our sons are growing and we meet 12 a.m. together."

I think I might say "to pass the midnight together". Probably not very idiomatic, though.

I guess a more correct way is "Now our sons are growing up and we meet 12 a.m. together (with them)" <-- On New Year's.

@DamkerngT. Thanks! But on New Year's Eve people wait eagerly to meet midnight. I'm unsure if "pass" is expressive enough

I'm pretty sure that "experience something together" is possible, but it doesn't sound as plain as I want.

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