English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@GratefulDisciple I'm going to coin a phrase here to describe Connections categories that are NWT3K: "Not Worth the Trouble to Know." That certainly describes today's purple.

If I have a very bad headache, toothache, what have you, I will take high doses of paracetamol only. If you haven't turned your liver to stone with alcohol, you can take 4 g of paracetamol a day. That's much superior to these kidney-killing painkillers.

@Cerberus research melatonin? Well, there's a sort of bias that I can't name . . . Obviously it's supposed to be 'evidence-based medicine' so my typical retort for cash grabbing placebos in the market is "where's your RCT? Huh huh huh?" But realistically people that can do good research avoid what's already built on shaky ground like the plague. There's nobody out there to do some Mythbusters work on whether if any of the hundreds of supplements I sell at the pharmacy actually do something

@M.A.R. An expensive hairy style.

In my youth, I could imitate Dylan imitating Loretta Lynn singing Coal Miner's Daughter, drunk.

Word of the day: attrit (verb). "To weaken or reduce by attrition." Backformation from attrition.

@Robusto Google "Facebook Apple Microsoft Amazon."

I will pin the first message that makes a sentence composed only of brand names. There has to be at least five words.

Good morning, happy 2025

@Mitch Where did they think you may have acquired devices?

@Robusto This is kind of amazing. It has instructions like "use your judgment". It's for adults.

@DannyuNDos so how's the government doing lately?

@Cerberus I mean, I can't decide what you consider important, but it seems like you're picking your parts of speech based on tradition and the etymology of terms, not based on how English works.

@CowperKettle Please run that by @M.A.R. before you do anything so dangerous as taking mifepristone.

Nitpicking has evolved as a principal part of ELU chat culture. Due to isolation.

I quite seriously wonder whether several venerable ELU users have died and we didn't notice; Greg Lee, Rogermue, and BillJ all come to mind. There are others.

Modiri, a comedian, made fun of that memorably. In one of his sketches, he played the part of an embezzler, and when asked if he's packed his things and is ready to depart, said "I need to go to the bathroom but it's okay I'll do it in Canada"

@GratefulDisciple there's always more to the story of course, but the gist of it is people are sick of theocrats who are using Islam as their only anchor to power. They blame the current dire financial situation on the extreme views of said theocrats. They didn't realize those views were extreme until they heard what the world thinks of them after the advent of internet.

Vote for Oxford word of the year

I am exhausted by the CLOSE ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME mafia.

Mark Twain.

Ten years ago we were getting ten times the weekly questions that we're getting today.

@alphabet scare it into submission with tariffs.

StackOverflow looks to be dying faster than its users.

Even mushrooms know that.

Korean idiom of the day: Over the running people, there are flying people — means not to overestimate oneself.

We did it! New world record!

Now I think we're supposed to just glare at each other for more than seven minutes.

Shameless plug: I highly recommend Robert Greenberg courses from the Teaching Company, which I could borrow from local libraries. That's a substitute for attending undergraduate college music courses.

Always trust the AI to repeat the Internet's most common superficial talking-points!

So you just eat a lot.

Makes things simple. Occam's Razor, if you will.

@M.A.R. I'm pro jaywalking. It's very annoying to have to walk all the way to the corner to cross, and then have to walk all the way back.

@CowperKettle I know you're loath to take my advice, and I obviously can't assess your situation satisfactorily from behind a screen, but from what I've seen:

Would it be grammatical to three-head you?

I was pretty bummed out when I saw how much money African Americans had contributed to Trump's re-election, but then I saw that that was mostly all just from Elon.

The Babylonians were geniuses. All number bases since theirs have been worse.

Did you know: Every “C” in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently.

@think_meaning_buildß Next year will be a special year, only the third such in America's existence. Its previous such year was 88 years ago, and its first one was 175 years ago. What makes next year special in this way, and when will be the next such?

"The boy who cried nuke."

@tchrist Let's promote desenshittificationism!

I get so confused by the differences between what in American we call "Mexican rice" and what we call "Spanish rice".

Happy birthday to me. To celebrate, I'm releasing a simple Literate Programming tutorial based on the classic C "hello, world" program. metaed.com/papers/hello This is in the nature of a draft. Suggestions welcomed.

@DannyuNDos The Farsi equivalent is "there is many a hand above every hand."

Definitive version of the Connections game I made: connectionsplus.io/game/8cITdt It may be a bit easy now.

Word of the pre-Reformation: Lollardy By the mid-15th century, "lollard" had come to mean a heretic in general. The alternative, "Wycliffite", is generally accepted to be a more neutral term covering those of similar opinions, but having an academic background.

They made fetch happen

@Mitch Oh, we already have a Mel Gibson. I forget.

@Conrado hey, what are chat friends for, if not for judging each other severely about superficial stuff?

This is why Sisyphus was happy. You go and roll that boulder, because if you don't, you die.