English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Q: An idiom for deriving pleasure from another's suffering

9:20 AM

1

I believe it is what the German's call "Schadenfreude". English has no such equivalent word. But does an idiom exist that describes it?

idioms

In other news, English has no equivalent word for Kindergarten und Rucksack.

12:19 PM

@MattЭллен Maybe next week.

@aediaλ Are those for me? Thank you! They are pretty!

Good morning

Morn!

♫ Morning! ♪ ♫

so congrats Kit, on your launch

@MrShinyandNew安宇 OH, thanks!

Only one minor post-launch bug that my boss fixed last night apparently.

And one other that I am having a hard time convincing him is not a bug.

3:03 PM

And it's taco salad day!

3:49 PM

mmm tacos

It was good.

Really, really good.

Unfortunately, I am kickboxing in about 15 minutes. I may feel differently then.

heheh

Gotta run! Bai folks!

bye

4:28 PM

@Kitḫ Enjoy the kickboxing!

@Cerberus Middag!

Afternoon t'ya too, @MrShiny an' @Matt, if y'all awake out there :)

Huloo @aedia :)

@MattЭллен How's your Friday so far? Done with work early?

You usually have half-Fridays or something like that, right?

@aediaλ oh yes! I'm sipping on some cool cider

been out an got myself a hair cut

how is your friday going?

@MattЭллен nice! I haven't had one of those in a while.

@aediaλ you have long hair, or no hair?

4:37 PM

My mane is probably all uneven, but, meh.

Long-ish.

I had really long hair when I was young, cut it all off for years, and now it won't grow to the same length at all.

crazy! Unicorn hair must be difficult to mane-age

I wonder why it won't grow so long

@MattЭллен It would be better without the work part! But it's pretty good. I'm excited that for lunch I get to sample a variety of leftovers from a party we had yesterday.

@aediaλ sounds tasty. what was the party for?

I'm a little bummed the tuna and egg salads I brought weren't a bigger hit, but I guess there's a lot left of everything. And I am a very novice cook.

@MattЭллен Hahaha :)

@MattЭллен Just a fall work party to get to know some new suitemates and try to show them we're not scary.

@aediaλ sounds like you'll have a feast for lunch then :)

4:43 PM

I am!

So far I've also had some pasta salad and some sort of peppered beef roast and some crackers. I'm waiting to see if I have room for sweet potatoes.

I think all the desserts are gone though. Everyone claims to be eating healthfully so there were leftover cookies and things after the party, but then when you leave things in the kitchen for people to take, they will eventually disappear anyway.

That's true. Especially when it's cookies

When we have baked goods, people seem to take a half of something, like a half a donut or cookie, so that there's often one lonely piece left at the end of the day. It amuses me.

To be honest, I guess I sometimes take a half of a baked good if I am kind of full, but then I don't come back for seconds ;)

Such controversy! Leaving half a baked good. I don't know. ;)

5:06 PM

@MattЭллен Is that just not done on your side o' the pond?

@aediaλ People do it. Well, I call them people. I can barely tell between them and hogs :p. Nah. It's fine, really. I just can't start eating and not finish. You know how programmers are - everything is black or white :D

@MattЭллен It's the whole "start eating and not finish" problem that causes me to occasionally take a half of a dessert! I know if I took the whole thing, I'd make it fit...

5:23 PM

Good afternoon/evening/morning/night/day/week/hour!

@aediaλ It's been delicious chatting with you. I must depart to celebrate a friend's birthday!

HI @MrShinyandNew :) cya later!

@MattЭллен You said that just because I'm back, didn't you

@MattЭллен Enjoy!

@aediaλ "dessert", is there ever only half? It's like "half a hole".

@MrShinyandNew安宇 You and I are in the same time zone, or close, I think :) Good afternoon!

5:25 PM

Eastern, right?

Yep. I'm UTC-5 except right now on daylight savings so UTC-4.

Is it you that is in Washington?

Mmhmm!

The DC, that is, not that funny one out west.

@aediaλ yeah. Although TBH I've never been to either so I can't say which is funnier. But with the federal gov't in DC I'd have to guess that lots of funny stuff happens there.

There was a girl in my residence who came to Toronto from DC to study music. Sadly, she did not leave a good impression on us about what DCians are like :)

Though upon reflection maybe our categorization of her should have been "singer" and not "DCian", since other "divas" I met were a lot like her and from such diverse places as ... toronto, I guess.

so what is it REALLY like in DC?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Like this

But perhaps all transit systems worldwide are filled with bratty, uncivilized idiots.

5:35 PM

@aediaλ yeah. They are.

At least, the Toronto one is.

(I spend a lot of time commuting and our bus/subway is shamefully bad in many ways, usually meaning it's broken and causes me delays, so I'm a little jaded.)

So does DC have its own government for local stuff that is normally handled by states?

like, "education"

I should tell you I actually live walking distance from DC, but over the border into Maryland, so I'm not as familiar with DC local issues as I might be otherwise.

But yes, we have a DC public school system. It has issues.

Enh, what school system doesn't

here in Ontario we have two school systems, the public and the Catholic system. It's... interesting.

The DC local government is a little strange; it's divided into I think 8 wards, and they choose councilmembers. They get to make decisions but Congress holds the purse strings, so it's not always a friendly relationship.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The federal district is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. It was formed from land along the Potomac River donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion was returned by Congress in 1846. A new capital city named after George Washington was founded in 1791 ...

This isn't a bad explanation.

There is more in the home rule article that explains how we got to this weird condition.

DC used to have even less self-governance and depended on the surrounding states for more:

> Following the Civil War, the city experienced a large increase in its population; by 1870, the District's population had grown to nearly 132,000. Despite the city's growth, Washington still had dirt roads and lacked basic sanitation; the situation was so bad that some members of Congress proposed moving the capital elsewhere.

5:46 PM

wow, it's quite an unusual situation. I wonder if maybe the Founding Fathers were (gasp!) mistaken about the need for the capital to be external from any specific state

Most countries seem to get by without this DC-style arrangement

@MrShinyandNew安宇 In many places, there are Catholic schools or other religious schools here for the primary grades at least (high schools are less common I think), but I think only a very small portion of kids go to any sort of private school. Private school is usually expensive (religious education sometimes a little less so).

Are the Catholic schools somewhere a large proportion of kids go?

@aediaλ The Catholic schools are publicly funded. We also have private schools

Wait, really?

@aediaλ Yes, a fairly large number of kids go there.

The Ontario constitution specifically allows for state-run Catholic schools, and a secular public system.

As a taxpayer you can choose which board gets your money

Publicly funded religious education? I somehow missed this in the like, zero classes I had to educate me about Canada.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 That's crazier still!

Q: Should I use `a SSTP` or `an SSTP`?

5:50 PM

0

Possible Duplicate: Do you use “a” or “an” before acronyms? First of all let me clarify that SSTP is an abbreviation of a technical term. I want to know, when using in a sentence, should I use a or an before SSTP and such terms? If I'm right when letter s is at ...

indefinite-article

We don't get to choose where any of our taxes go really. Maybe locally, if you're very active, you might influence something, but you don't get to check a box. (Except on your income taxes where you do check a box about a dollar going to public campaign financing, but that's it, a token choice.)

I am a bit tired of people answering obvious dupes.

High-rep users at that.

I am considering just deleting all such answers.

It's not as bad as it sounds. I went through the Catholic system, it was ok. I no longer support the idea, but I don't see it as any kind of danger, more of an ineffeciency (and also, unfair to the other religions who didn't have enough clout at Confederation to get their own boards)

Not even merging, just deleting.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I really think in fifty or a hundred years it'll be its own state (it would get absorbed back up into the others, except that will never happen, 'cause, bickering and stuff) and people will look back and think it was insane.

5:53 PM

@RegDwightѬſ道 I sympathize. I'm not sure if that's too heavy handed or not. Maybe the system should just down-rep upvotes for dupes that get closed and not merged.

So according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ontario the public board used to be Protestant.

@RegDwightѬſ道 I want to say just do it! but every once in a while there's a really much better answer than the existing ones.

And 4 years ago one of the provincial parties running for election was running on a platform of "faith-based schools", so that essentially the private schools which do religious education could be brought in under the public board's umbrella, and they could teach their religious classes but they'd also have to stick closely to common funding guidelines and curriculum

Needless to say, that party lost (they were creamed despite the governing party's several screw-ups), and so that idea is thankfully dead.

@RegDwightѬſ道 Does the whole question have to get merged or can you merge like, one good answer in with the others? I don't really know the difference between closing and merging.

@aediaλ It's just that we are starting to have 4+ questions for every single letter an abbreviation can begin with.

Is it “a SSD” or “an SSD”?, an SQA or a SQA?, “An SQL Server database schema” or “a SQL Server database schema”?...

Yeah uh not those ones. Kill them all with fire.

The less obviously dupey questions, I would be more generous with, I guess.

5:57 PM

@aediaλ Closing means no further answers will be accepted. Merging means closing, plus moving all the answers to the original question. Where they can happily collect upvotes etc.

So if we merge all of our acronym dupes into a single question, we will end up with 100+ answers on it. All saying the exact same thing. I am not exaggerating.

In this case we certainly don't need the other answers

so I would be opposed to merging

But answers to a question that should never have been asked should probably not gain rep for the user. Can you CW them and undo their rep? or something

Now, obviously there are certain cases that are special. Like SQL which actually has two different pronunciations, which people don't know about.

@RegDwightѬſ道 two pronunciations, the right one and the wrong one.

)))

Must run to meeting! Ack!

6:06 PM

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I can delete them and undo their rep, yes. I can also convert them to comments and undo their rep. This time I opted for merging, cause both answers happened to be worded in a way that allows them to survive on the more general question "as is". But it's not like they really add much to it, so I'm only leaving them up because I'm nice like that today.

CU aedia.

But one day I plan to go through all those Oxford-comma questions, all those a vs. an questions, all those verb-agreement questions, and mercilessly weed stuff out.

@RegDwightѬſ道 I'm in favour of the automated, economic approach: penalize answerers who answer bad questions by not assigning rep.

Well, the question is not bad. It's just been asked before. Answers to off-topic questions, say, are getting deleted much faster.

So, if a question is closed as "this is a crappy question" or "we already answered this, yo", or the question is voted below zero, then I'd say an answer would need a lot more votes before the rep counts at all.

so maybe someone asks a dupe question, and if your answer is mediocre, you get no points. but if your answer kicked ass, and got lots of votes, you'd get points even if the question wasn't merged (which it should be).

And if a Q was voted, say, -5, you get no rep for an answer until you reach +6

at which point, it must be such a good answer that you deserve the rep even though according to the rules of the game you shouldn't have answered it

If I weren't lazy, I'd download the data dump and see what this rep change would entail

Well, that's kind of what the Reversal badge is there for. Not that anybody will ever get it on this site. Not that that is a bad thing.

@RegDwightѬſ道 well, a question can be bad for a variety of reasons, moreso with other topics than the increasingly narrow EL&U topics.

6:32 PM

So a buyer backed out of a house purchase because the agent didn't tell him that the house was the scene of a murder recently: thestar.com/news/article/…

The buyer says "It's a safety issue, the murder is still unsolved!" ... Um, murderers are not like termites, or mice, they are not INSIDE the house at all times. Geez.

Well, then again, this particular house is unsafe as you have proof that a murder can happen there. No murders in my house so far, so statistically it is like 100% safer.

(Not that that is his argumentation.)

@RegDwightѬſ道 by that logic it's infinity% safer.

I know, I didn't want to scare anyone with such numbers.

More to the point, it's dividion-by-zero safer, which is not even defined that's how awesomely large it is.

I think someone should have told him about the likelihood of two unrelated murders at the same property being 0%, so his house is actually safer than yours, because it's had its murder and yours hasn't yet.

You sound like a Vegas gambler.

Jul 1 at 12:17, by RegDwight

You can't convince people that chance doesn't have a memory.

6:40 PM

did you ever study conditional probability? it DOES have memory :)

Well, you did expressly state that the murders were unrelated. :P

And yes, I have studied maths.

So put your murder in a pipe and smoke it.

Sure, but two coin tosses are unrelated. And the probability of two heads in a row is different than the proability of one head given one head.

mmmm smoked murder

Actually I know I'm doing the math backwards and that the risk is the same because the past murder doesn't affect the future one. Although actually it might, because the homeowner might take precautions that the previous one didn't

@MrShinyandNew安宇 But we are not looking at the probability of two coin tosses in a row. That house buyer only cares about the second toss.

@RegDwightѬſ道 Yeah I know, I was trying to be funny. In reality both your 100% safer argument and my "his house is safer" argument are both bollocks. The risk is completely unrelated to those things

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah, if you change the setting you also change the probabilities. No arguing about that.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Oh, I'm being funny all the time. You're not noticing though.

6:44 PM

Alright, this joke has died. ... Oh no! It's another murder!

@RegDwightѬſ道 Orrrrrrr... you're only TRYING to be funny :)

Notice my being all funny! Notice it already! <bes all funny>

I finally got a spam/offensive ping!

@simchona I got it too. I wasn't sure if it was offensive or not until all these people flagged it and so I guess if they were all offended then it was offensive :)

so... don't feed metal poles to your dog

thestar.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bf8f353ef015391f6d64a970b-pi

So @RegDwight why is your avatar an owl? any special reason?

Feb 9 at 13:55, by RegDwight

I have actually seen that owl in person.

Feb 9 at 13:58, by RegDwight

He was so cute, wearing those fluffy pants and all.

Ok, do you like have a pile of bookmarks to old chat messages? Or what

Q: How do I describe these emoticons? ☺

6:52 PM

0

One of my friends showed me this chart of emoticons. It was interesting to me because of the way it demonstrates how different angles of the features connote different emotions. I can readily imagine the attitudes that each face displays. I can sort of self-identify myself with the face in th...

word-choice

Overly broad?

Jun 17 at 12:36, by RegDwight

Tab number 4166624. Note the 666. Easy to remember.

@simchona Nine questions in one and subjective and argumentative. IMHO)))

@RegDwightѬſ道 ok I'm not sure what that is meant to mean :)

@RegDwightѬſ道 Yay! I voted.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I have every chat message open in a separate tab for quick and easy access later.

ooooooooooh ok I get it

6:56 PM

You should try it some time. Saves tons of work.

frankly it wouldn't surprise me

I can't stand to have more tabs open than I need

I am not here to surprise.

right now I have 4 open and I'm itching to close one

@RegDwightѬſ道 given that half of what you say is what you've already said, I guess it's good that "surprise" isn't one of your primary weapons

Apr 26 at 14:50, by RegDwight

Yes, yes.

:)

6:59 PM

I can quote other rooms, too, if you want. Even more so if you don't.

I think I may open that lego box this weekend, to celebrate finishing sorting through the photos this week

in The Back Room, Oct 22 '10 at 7:05, by Brian Ballsun-Stanton

Royal Monarchy, Despotic rather than constitutional, but still quite a nice place to be. Good bureaucracy, mostly city-based governance. Richard acts like hobbes Leviathan, making sure that those who want anarchy, themselves, live nasty, brutish and above all, short lives.

in The Comms Room, May 14 at 1:13, by Bart Silverstrim

I was on the roof of the house, straddling the apex of the roof, reached across my body to hammer in a piece of flashing and felt a <squish> inside my abdomen just under the bottom of my right side, under the rib.

wow, your powers of copy and paste are incredible!

2

Jul 8 at 13:21, by RegDwight

I no, rite?

Now tell me. Why is gay marriage a minefield in Canada?

This conversation is rather like one I always imagined I'd put into a movie, if I ever wrote one, where one of the characters suffers from some kind of mental problem and can't speak, but can sing the lyrics of songs he's heard.

7:02 PM

That's like, um, every movie ever.

@RegDwightѬſ道 It's not a minefield in Canada. Mentioning it is a minefield in this chatroom. And presumably in other places

Ambiguous statement is ambiguous. Hence the question.

And yes, this chat is full of song quotes, too.

Don't ask me to find them cause you know I will.

I suppose JSB and Cerb might think it's a minefield in Canada. But they did not convince me that my understanding of the situation isn't sound. So... I dunno. I am still wondering at what went wrong with that conversation, and am thinking of a blog post.

I wasn't there to witness the end of the conversation.

18 secs ago, by Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

I'm not sure I've actually requested any quotes from you recently, or maybe ever.

7:05 PM

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I probably deserve that, somehow

Anyhow, I would be surprised to learn that a conversation with JSB or Cerb can go wrong. It can be heated and long, but that's all. And I'm not even sure about the heated part.

So the gay marriage conversation kinda started going in circles, with JSB and Cerb saying "your reasoning is bad, it's circular" and me saying "a leads to b leads to c, what part doesn't make sense to you?" , and repeat, with no new ground covered for a few iterations, and then JSB said "I've said enough, i'm out"

Ah well.

Doesn't sound too bad to me.

And it's not like they mean to hurt anyone on a personal level.

It's more like I thought I was being perfectly clear, and I think they did too, and we seemed to all agree that gay marriage was not bad, but somehow they were still disagreeing with why it should be legal, when it is obvious to me that it clearly needs to be as legal as straight marraige.

Oh, no, nothing like that.

7:08 PM

Well, Devil's Advocate and all that.

I have driven Cerberus nuts myself on quite a few occasions.

No, I don't think it was. Because we kept going around the same arguments

Then perhaps it wasn't the unwisest thing to just cut it off after iteration N.

Probably not.

Or, probably.

Your statement didn't have a small number of non-positive clauses so I got confused.

or maybe I confused myself.

anyway

Jun 17 at 10:27, by RegDwight

It's a litotes!

I find it amusing that Cerb now seems to think that I am some kind of mathematical stickler for the Law, whatever that is.

7:11 PM

Nah, I don't think he thinks that, or anything at all for that matter. He forgets everything instantly.

Maybe that's why he got a bread maker, so that he won't forget to bake it.

He holds the record for forgetting the most stuff in the shortest time.

It's like, "set it, and forget it"

We make fun of him because of that, in other rooms. Not so much in this one, cause he constantly forgets to visit it.

in War Metal Tyrant, Sep 23 at 15:01, by Cerberus

@RegDwightѬſ道 I don't remember ever forgetting stuff!

You've made fun of him in this room too. I'd quote the relevant passages, but you're probably already doing that.

brb

8:08 PM

well, it's been a blast. Have a good weekend everyone.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 You too!

8:51 PM

knocks on screen anyone in there?

No, you are all alone.

@RegDwightѬſ道 pouts

You might be real and not just made of owly looking pixels glued to an extremely clever chatbot.

9:17 PM

Why do you say that I might be real and not just made of owly looking pixels glued to an extremely clever chatbot?

sighs I don't know, ELIZA. Maybe I'm just too hopeful.

May 27 at 10:12, by Third Idiot

Why?Why?!Why!!!?

9:37 PM

@RegDwightѬſ道 Because I said so? No, wait! It's starting already. I'm turning into my mother. Too soon!

9:50 PM

I think something is wrong with this sentence : "Which places in Dusseldorf I can take courses to learn German?"

Does it need an "in" at the end?

(it should be an "in" or a "in"?)

2. An in.

1. Yes.

@Gigili The first thing I see is that you need to switch the order of I can to can I since it's a question.

And the second, please?

Which places in Dusseldorf can I take courses to learn German in? works ok in speech, but if I were writing more formally, I might try something like Which places in Dusseldorf are there where I can take courses to learn German? to rewrite around the in at the end that seems... lonely.

@RegDwightѬſ道 Cause of "I" or? it shouldn't be a someword?

9:56 PM

Reg! It's your favoritest favoritest question!

@aediaλ Sounds reasonable, thanks.

@Gigili "an in" because "in" starts with a vowel sound

Oh, I do beg your pardon?

Got it. I doubted cause I thought it referred to a word there so it's not vowel but that was a silly thought I have to admit. thank you anyway.

Q: When should I use "a" vs "an"?

19

In the following example, is it appropriate to use "a" or "an" as the indefinite article, and why? He ate [insert here] green apple. I know that in the case of just "apple", it would be "an apple," but I've heard conflicting answers for "green apple," where the noun is separated from the ar...

word-choice articles indefinite-article