Eh I'll ping @BeastlyGerbil too.

@Sconibulus "western" meaning read backwards?

"Study area" makes me think of LIBRARY.

Maybe LIB short for library - that's the "western" or leftmost part of the word.

Anagrams of LIBDUCK and LIBSWAN aren't giving me anything ...

I don't think I used anything that might be an anagram indicator?

I thought "featuring" maybe?

Or maybe I'm just obsessed with anagrams :-)

@Randal'Thor Dictionaries record word meanings, which are determined by actual usage. Like it or not, "literally" is used that way often enough that any description of the language that denies it is incomplete. Their entry does say it's considered irregular, etc.

If there's some kind of waterfowl whose name ends with "ing", then maybe "western study area" (lib?) plus that will give something that means "increasing rapidly".

But the only "ing" bird I can think of is the brambling, which isn't a waterfowl.

oops, I may have mis-tensed turning it into a sentence

let me try , increases rapidly(8)

@GarethMcCaughan I'd rather say most people use language wrong than follow a rule of "if enough people use it, it must be acceptable".

The majority vote isn't always right.

That's prescriptivist talk

resisting temptation to turn this into politics

That wasn't a majority

any chance you can edit my prior statement, oh glorious diamond one

@Sconibulus Wait, you changed the word length as well?

> A western study area featuring waterfowl increases rapidly (8)

?

yeah, to conjugate the verb for the correct tense

I think

@Sconibulus I could, but wouldn't it be easier if you just repost? Otherwise some of our conversation above won't make sense any more.

...that's pretty valid

CCCCC(correction): A western study area featuring waterfowl increases rapidly (8)

SPAM!

Flaggity flag flag.

I swear I flagged that one yesterday

Maybe the same person trying their luck again?

Well, they won't fare better this time...

Unfortunately we don't have a record of what questions (including deleted ones) have been posted here, ever since Emrakul messed up the chatroom feeds :-(

@Randal'Thor I never claimed that the majority vote is always right. Do you agree with the principle that correct usage of a word is determined by actual usage, or do you e.g. think it's possible that the entirety of a linguistic community could agree on how a word is used but be wrong?

What, you like Obie?

@GarethMcCaughan It's not the entirety though, at least in this case.

@Mithrandir Yes!

I even went to the trouble of creating a custom username and avatar for our Sphinx in here :'(

Wait, you did?

I didn't notice.

@Mithrandir It was while you were gone, I think.

I polled the chatroom and then created a beautiful feed for us.

Even when I'm gone, I'm here in spirit..

Then GPR posted to meta about it, and almost immediately after that, Emrak changed it to that horrible dropdown feed :-(

It was pretty good, I liked it better than the top-feed

I'm not seeing any topfeed, was that eaten too?

But it did occupy a lot of space, if there was a way to get a slightly smaller one-boxing, I think that would be ideal

I think it only happens when new questions are posted

Now that we have so much meta consensus in favour of the Obie-feed (not to mention advice from a CM on main meta), I'm wavering on the edge of simply switching it back.

I wanted to wait for Emrak's input, but ...

What's the Obie-feed?

on SFF

@Randal'Thor Would you care to elaborate on your "not the entirety" comment?

@GarethMcCaughan Sorry, 'Obie' is SFF jargon. The onebox feed.

(note: may be AFK for 30-90 minutes in the very near future)

Is that the Sphinx thing? I don't think it's clearly better (or clearly worse) than the dropdown.

@GarethMcCaughan I just meant there was no unanimous agreement among English speakers that "literally" could mean "not literally".

Did nobody notice earlier that the donkey pic is on the Don Quixote book?

@GarethMcCaughan Yep, I recall your answer on meta was along the lines of "shrug" :-) But both the other two answers say Sphinx > dropdown.

(I was searching to see if you were talking about me, and... :P)

...I kill conversations.

@Mithrandir And orcs?

@Randal'Thor And Wargs.

I'm more important than I seem. #Hint

@Mithrandir You are important. You need us to listen.

Thanks :P

</reference>

But it's hard to have a conversation when it's just me talking, so...

nah, that sounds pretty straightforward

It's hard to be the only interlocutor.

I just learned a word :P

See? I killed it again.

What else could "study area" be, if not LIBRARY?

School?

University? College?

Desk?

Table?

Bed?

(Hey - that's where I study...)

@Mithrandir raises eyebrow

I'm homeschooled. :P

@Mithrandir Good for you! :-D

I suspect that "featuring" may mean more than I'm realising ...

It probably clues some wordplay thing, but I'm not sure what.

@Sconibulus said (or very strongly suggested) that anagrams aren't involved.

Someone found another hidden link :)

@Randal'Thor I don't think it was officially added though...

@Mithrandir To the "many memes of SFF" page? No, but it's still an SFF (or Mos Eisley) meme.

If you're the only one, I suppose you're just a locutor. Or perhaps a solilocutor.

(disappointingly, the OED has no entry for "solilocutor" though if you can have a soliloquy I don't see why the person giving it shouldn't be called that; but it does have "locutor".)

er, sorry, that was @Mithrandir -- I hadn't noticed that there were a bunch of more recent comments since the one I was replying to.

Other study areas: den, cell, study :-), lab[oratory]. I suspect there are rather a lot more that aren't springing to mind.

@Randal'Thor If dictionaries are only allowed to include things on which there is unanimous agreement they'll all have to be a lot shorter.

CCCC: BALLOONS. western study area LAB, waterfowl LOONS, increases rapidly (def).

er. sorry. study area LAB, western LAB→BAL, ...

Nice. (just got in and was having a look at that myself)

yeah, that's it

@GarethMcCaughan I know, but you were the one who brought up the entirety of the linguistic community! :-)

Nice one, @Rubio.

Got another one for us?

@Randal'Thor I did. I was wanting first of all to establish whether you agreed that in principle correct usage is determined in some fashion by actual usage, and then try to figure out where (if at all) we differ on how that works. (E.g., different weightings for more and less "prestigious" sections of the linguistic community.)

@JonathanAllan boboquack has edited the patternbot question and now the third and sixth offsets are 1 bigger than before. And this is exactly what it takes to make the A000120 (1-bit count) explanation work.

I gotta think of one, sorry :)

ok this is a little iffy for one part, but I think it's valid.

CCCC: bored sounding music-maker with notable speaker's introduction (7)