The Reading Room

1:47 AM

@bobble What's NLN?

No Longer Needed, one of the standard reasons to flag a comment

A.K.A. obsolete/chatty

@Randal'Thor Yes, right as Republicans in the House proposed forming an Anglo-Saxon Caucus. Coincidence?

@bobble ah. Thanks!

2 hours later…

4:18 AM

@Bookworm HNQ

5 hours later…

Q: "Though fully aware that to his well-known interest in psychical things was partly due his presence..". - meaning of the sentence

9:35 AM

Reading an old story by A. Blackwood, I am unable to decipher the sentence in bold: He had told no fearsome story. He had evaded, indeed, many openings expressly made for him, though fully aware that to his well-known interest in psychical things was partly due his presence in the week-end party...

Q: What does "Not that that’s any shade on what you do" mean here?

10:22 AM

I am wondering what "Not that that’s any shade on what you do" means in the following sentences: ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Funny you should say that, but I did actually do a try-out for the show.’ ‘You did?’ Hannah asks. ‘For Survive the Night?’ ‘Yeah.’ Ah, Christ. Why did I say anything? Stupid Johnno, a...

Q: What does "He’s a natural on screen." mean here?

I am wondering what "He’s a natural on screen." means in the following sentences: ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Funny you should say that, but I did actually do a try-out for the show.’ ‘You did?’ Hannah asks. ‘For Survive the Night?’ ‘Yeah.’ Ah, Christ. Why did I say anything? Stupid Johnno, always shooting ...

Q: What does "the better versions of the sort of school we both went to" mean here?

I am wondering what "the better versions of the sort of school we both went to" means in the following sentences: ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Funny you should say that, but I did actually do a try-out for the show.’ ‘You did?’ Hannah asks. ‘For Survive the Night?’ ‘Yeah.’ Ah, Christ. Why did I say anything?...

Q: What does "from the school, deep into the grounds" mean here?

10:47 AM

I am wondering what "from the school, deep into the grounds" means in the following sentences: ‘Survival?’ Hannah turns to him. ‘This game we used to play at school,’ Femi explains. Duncan’s wife Georgina chips in: ‘Oh God. Duncan’s told me stories about it. Really awful stuff. He told me about ...

Q: What does "a big tradition" mean here?

11:15 AM

I am wondering what "a big tradition" means in the following sentences: ‘Survival?’ Hannah turns to him. ‘This game we used to play at school,’ Femi explains. Duncan’s wife Georgina chips in: ‘Oh God. Duncan’s told me stories about it. Really awful stuff. He told me about boys being taken out of...

Speaking of Anglo-Saxon, here are some of Peter Glassgold's translations of American modernist poetry into Old English. He has a translation of Marianne Moore's "O to be a dragon," but sadly neither the original nor the translation appear to be online.

5 hours later…

Q: Evidence about pronunciation of ευ and αυ in Homeric Greek?

3:55 PM

In modern Greek, a word like ευχαριστώ is pronounced like "ef-." The combinations ευ and αυ sometimes have the upsilon pronounced like β and sometimes like φ. (I'm not sure how variable it is when it comes to β versus φ, or whether there is any phonetic rule.) Do we have any evidence about whethe...

pronunciation ancient-greek

^ another off-site HNQ which may be of interest to Literature users

Bookworm

4:20 PM

Q: Lily of the valley used for murder (Agatha Christie)

I am looking for a novel by Agatha Christie in which she describes a murder with the water of Convallaria majalis (lily of the valley). Does anyone know the title?

identification-request agatha-christie

3 hours later…

7:02 PM

@Tsundoku "For these novels [agatha-christie] is the appropriate tag; [mary-westmacott] can at best be a pseudonym."

did you mean "at best be a synonym"?

race-issues? literature.stackexchange.com/q/68/11259

7:39 PM

@bobble Thanks. Fixed.

@bobble Perhaps that tag should be reworded a bit. Unless everyone agrees that Jews are a race rather than or in addition to an ethnoreligious group.

I'm not sure of the proper terminoly around this

8:01 PM

@bobble *terminology

1 hour later…

9:04 PM

We have exactly 4598 questions and exactly 4598 visitors per day, i.e. on average one per question.

2 hours later…

10:45 PM

@Tsundoku Fascinating! How did you manage that?

It's in the little box on the right side if you scroll down a bit on the homepage

@verbose (Late response) Those annotated Rabelais editions have notes in present-day French. See the editions published by Gallimard or the Livre de Poche editions. (See my short bibliography.)

@verbose Not me. We!

@bobble Well I was asking how he managed to make it so that the two were exactly equal

@Tsundoku ah. Very generous of you to share the credit!

We, the Lit SE community :-P

and also schoolchildren who want someone else to do their analysis for them

10:52 PM

So not Zamyatin's We ;-)

If anyone could approve the suggested edit I stuck into the queue, I'd be most pleased

@Tsundoku ah.

Would give me a nice round 3k :)

@verbose Don't ask him to make the "users" figure exactly equal too. He'll delete four thousand users before you can eat a spam sandwich :-P

@bobble done

10:54 PM

Congrats on 3k, @bobble!

\o/

@Randal'Thor well, I'm vegetarian, so 🤷🏽‍♂️

@bobble Congratulations on 3000 reps!!

@verbose Oh hey, me too!

I only munch on spammers virtually.

10:55 PM

@Randal'Thor 'ere is a spam user for you literature.stackexchange.com/users/8040/… :P

A crowning glory?

@bobble 🎉

@Randal'Thor Chouette! 😎

@Randal'Thor that's funny

funny ha-ha I mean, not funny peculiar

huh, for some reason there are several spam profiles for poker or somthing

jinx @Tsundoku :-)

@bobble A particularly dedicated Area 51 watcher might have noticed that our site's total users count decreased by around 200 last week.

@Randal'Thor I left one for you; same IP as the one bobble identified.

11:00 PM

Asides from the poker ones I just found (searching "web"), there are four spam profiles found by searching "market"

@Randal'Thor hah, so I was right that a mod was personally responsible for ensuring numUsers == numQuestions. I was just wrong about which mod 'twas

rolls up sleeves

@verbose It was numVisitors == numQuestions; numUsers is still way higher.

@Tsundoku Now that @bobble has 3000 rep, do her tag wiki edits still need to go through the approval queue?

@Randal'Thor oops

@verbose Yes, until she hits 4000.

11:02 PM

@Randal'Thor ah. Too bad. Hey @bobble hurry up and post some HNQs and/or answers thereto

I have several [meaning] answers in the pipeline, but (especially for old Unanswered questions) those will likely only garner +3 or so at the most

@verbose 4000 reps, aka trusted user.

We trust bobble already, though. It's the system that doesn't yet.

I'm surprised @Randal'Thor and @Tsundoku are still up. Particularly Randolph ... he's usually more an early-to-rise type, it appears

I'm cooking spam.

ah. I thought one ate spam right out of the can. I didn't realize it needed to be cooked.

11:05 PM

If you want me to get you more links to more profiles I can :) We apparently have a lot of construction/landscaping spammers recently, according to the recently awarded Autobiographer badges

@bobble I guess we (all active users) should make a coördinated effort to answer old unanswered questions ... that 76% rate makes us look bad. And I don't think that one in four questions stays unanswered these days, so it's probably just a backlog from early days of the site? Or am I wrong?

@bobble Thanks, just destroyed 15 poker spammers.

burp

@bobble Autobiographer badges is how I came across a whole load of spammers recently, although mods also have better tools for sniffing them all out once we've found one.

@verbose Yep, I'm about to sign off for the night.

g'nite Randolph!

Night all :-)

@bobble time to cast your charmed circle around the 'doku perhaps?

11:09 PM

sleeeeeeeeeeeep

zzzzz

@verbose yeah I'm wrong

Four of the 10 most recently posted (not closed, not migrated) questions are unanswered. Though admittedly that's not a great way to extrapolate since some questions just take longer to answer

It'd be fairer to look at the last month, then exclude the latest week, I think

@bobble yep

Alex

11:31 PM

@verbose There are 34 sites on the network with equal or lower answer percentages.

Though that does put Literature somwhere around the bottom 20% of the network.