Starred posts | chat.stackexchange.com

Anonymous

Jul 12, 2015 18:03

→ Please visit Language Overflow. That's the new general-purpose chat room for English Language Learners. ←

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RegDwighт

Jan 24, 2013 10:14

TPTB will be watching this very closely and if we basically create a copy of ELU, they will shut ELL down before it sees the light of public beta.

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Shog9

Apr 16, 2015 17:28

I don't wish there to be discord here; we're all here to learn.

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tchrist

Mar 8, 2015 20:32

No native speaker has ever been quizzed on “What is the passive version of Mary is nice to me?” — never ever.

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Anonymous

Dec 19, 2014 17:43

That's called reduplication

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user62015

Dec 15, 2014 07:32

Yes. I am from India. And it comes from Hindi.

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Anonymous

Mar 15, 2014 21:13

@DamkerngT. Set has 430 senses in the OED.

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Shog9

Apr 16, 2015 17:25

You gotta learn to pick up on that. Sometimes, folks just have a chip on their shoulder, and any attempt to lighten the mood knocks it off.

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Shog9

Apr 16, 2015 17:17

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Anonymous

Apr 6, 2015 23:13

It'd be nice if ELL could get an integrated audio player of some sort

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StoneyB

Apr 5, 2015 18:00

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

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Anonymous

Apr 2, 2015 15:12

> No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

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Anonymous

Mar 31, 2015 12:51

Contrastive focus reduplication, they call it.

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RegDwighт

Jan 24, 2013 15:10

Yeah. For example, it's not okay to ask "which armchair should I buy", but it's fine to ask "which armchair should I be wearing while learning English".

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Anonymous

Feb 23, 2015 16:44

In fact, in the 19th century some grammarians called it the negative article

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StoneyB

Feb 18, 2015 02:26

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don’t matter, anyhow
An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don’t know by now —*Dylan*

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Hanaa

Feb 13, 2015 10:54

Fine , praise be to Allah

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Anonymous

Dec 26, 2014 23:10

Lyrics are usually planned and under constraints that spontaneous speech is not

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Anonymous

Dec 13, 2014 10:46

Welcome to the jungle

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Anonymous

Oct 1, 2014 20:07

The indicates that the speaker thinks the listener will be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase it marks. There should be no pragmatically relevant distinctions about the identity of the referent that the listener is unable to make.

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StoneyB

Jul 12, 2014 18:35

I love writing, too. But we have a saying: "Never stifle your imagination - that's what clients are for."

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Anonymous

Jul 8, 2014 16:44

Homophone air oars don't enter fear much with calm pre hent shin, butt they look kine dove silly :-)

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F.E.

Jun 12, 2014 23:36

A voice-over doesn't allow for this kind of effect, or ending. Voice-over is cheap. It tells how the audience ought to feel. It doesn't do the hard work, that of slowly, steadily, influencing the audience into a certain direction so that the audience naturally comes to that wanted conclusion.

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Anonymous

May 30, 2014 20:40

Anyone can join noun club, no membership fee required. No shirt, no shoes? Join noun club!

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Anonymous

May 22, 2014 11:36

"We're having a coup at the moment. Maybe a spot of tea later on--oh, and the kids have soccer practice this afternoon."

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Damkerng T.

May 22, 2014 11:00

Of all of our avatars, I think only one is edible.

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StoneyB

Apr 3, 2014 01:24

@GATA Well, here it is 2061 ... whip is a complicated word. From its first appearance it's had two distinct meanings: to beat (and hence to drive as if by beating), and to move swiftly, which merge in a third sense, to cause something to move swiftly - "The wind whips her hair into her face". I think the use with 'past' implies the third sense: her strides drive the air past her, like a boat's wake.

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Anonymous

Mar 20, 2014 04:34

He has to patrol skulls.

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Anonymous

Feb 7, 2014 22:53

And some people here struggle just to formulate their questions, and they're doing their best, so I don't feel it's right to ding them on minor technicalities

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RegDwigнt

Jan 14, 2014 19:32

And look, we only just mentioned Holland and already various stoneyed people show up.

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Anonymous

Nov 26, 2013 04:05

I'm reminded of the joke: "Linguists love ambiguity more than most people."

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Matt

Aug 27, 2013 23:10

My fundamental objection is that old texts - and particularly classic old fiction texts are not everyday English. And in my mind, that is what ELL is about. The question is perfectly good, as it stands, for ELU. But questions that are asking about uncommon grammatical structures in old literature are always likely to be a better fit for ELU than ELL.

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StoneyB

Mar 11, 2013 21:22

@WendiKidd My impression was that mods spent about 40 hours per day editing, looking for dupes, and closing. I've always seen them as prematurely greyed prisoners chained to their keyboards, struggling to remain afloat above a rising flood of improprieties, hoping desperately for interesting flags to relieve the frantic tedium.

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Jim Reynolds

Apr 17, 2015 12:13

If snailboat had seen that, we would have been hit with A Compendium of Authoritative and Quasi-Demonstrative Referant Contingencies Acting upon Selection of Emphatic Stylicization Nomenclatures as Evidence of Symbolic Evolution from Middle Germanic to Proto-Indonesian, Volume XXVI

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Jim Reynolds

Apr 16, 2015 09:48

It seems there was a military rank. Adjunct-lieutenant?

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Catija

Apr 15, 2015 18:10

@Lamart The only age restriction is what's required by COPPA in the US, 13. But that's not for content reasons. COPPA restricts the ability of companies to retain the contact information of individuals under the age of 13.

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Iplodman

Apr 14, 2015 18:10

Open letter to Stack Exchange: 59ca9c4f320039c35372-220cf57a3c6f9dfac4b554f7d759a34e.ssl.cf5.r…

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Jim Reynolds

Apr 14, 2015 16:47

In the end, you know, we're all just continues philosophically, leaving room inspired, yet reflective in a bittersweet rhapsody.

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Iplodman

Apr 14, 2015 14:48

Ah, that's in time's nature! You can't be sure about how tommorow's yesterday will end, unless it's today's tomorrow!

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StoneyB

Apr 12, 2015 16:56

You doubted me? You doubted me?

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StoneyB

Apr 11, 2015 18:34

"1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.13 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. " --Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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Anonymous

Apr 10, 2015 18:02

Method of loci

The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places"), also called the memory palace or mind palace technique, is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). In basic terms, it is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information. A lot of memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. These champions’ successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to...

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Anonymous

Apr 9, 2015 13:46

According to Comrie's definitions, progressive is a subtype of continuous

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Anonymous

Apr 9, 2015 12:24

Everyone knows that after DDR9 robots go on to DDRA, DDRB, DDRC, ...

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Anonymous

Apr 9, 2015 12:17

You're making lots of nonstandard derivations lately :-)

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Anonymous

Apr 7, 2015 18:34

@DamkerngT. smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3689

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Anonymous

Apr 7, 2015 15:57

It's a bare role NP

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Anonymous

Apr 7, 2015 13:54

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Q: Embed an audio player

Questions about the pronunciation of a word as heard are probably common for a site for people learning a language. I can imagine questions similar to the following ones: I listened to this [link to an audio file, or a video] but I don't understand what word is being said at the beginning, and ...

feature-request

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Anonymous

Apr 6, 2015 17:02

Don't worry, it's not contagious.

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Anonymous

Apr 6, 2015 16:41

You can post comments with a neutral tone instead:

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