Language Overflow

Damkerng T.

07:39

TIL Featheringstonehaugh is pronounced "fanshaw"!

Damkerng T.

08:53

Word of the Day: morose

CowperKettle

> WITHAL a meagre man was Aaron Stark,
Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shrivelled, and morose.
A miser was he, with a miser’s nose,
And eyes like little dollars in the dark.
His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark;
And when he spoke there came like sullen blows
Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close,
As if a cur were chary of its bark.

> Glad for the murmur of his hard renown,
Year after year he shambled through the town,
A loveless exile moving with a staff;
And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears,—
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.

(0:

Good morning, Dam!

Damkerng T.

Hey, pinched mouth! That's a nice word!

13

Q: Verb for pressing upper and lower lips together?

There are some people that would call it to bite, but it is wrong because you don't use the teeth. Is there a verb or idiom for pressing with the lips? Something like this:

Strange that no one thought of pinch.

Hi, @snailboat! How are you feeling today?

Anonymous

09:09

Good morning! I'm doing okay :-)

Damkerng T.

Glad to hear that!

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. The whole poem is great. "cur chary of its bark". What an imagery!

@snailboat - top of the .. oh, it's past midday here. (0:

"and eyes like little dollars in the dark" (0:

Damkerng T.

@CowperKettle I'm not sure about that one. I guess his eyes were supposed to be green.

CowperKettle

@DamkerngT. You could quote the poem in your answer!

Damkerng T.

LOL

CowperKettle

09:18

@DamkerngT. I think 'dollars' represent 'greed'.

Damkerng T.

Ohhh, I think you're right!

CowperKettle

and it reads so easily, just rolls of the tongue. Dollars/Dark

Robinson has a whole series of great 'person' poems

Anonymous

Top o' the past midday, Kettles!

CowperKettle

I'm glad you're fine on this fine midday!

> Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Damkerng T.

Hmm... I heard that line as "gengo-no kino-da soso" :-)

CowperKettle

09:31

What line?

Damkerng T.

"My translator is broken" in Japanese in Tomorrowland.

CowperKettle

Ah

Damkerng T.

I'm not sure what it actually was supposed to be, but I think this is a good candidate: 言語機能が損傷.

CowperKettle

nods

It's all Japanese to me.

Damkerng T.

It's all Japanese to me, too!

Anonymous

09:49

I looked online and it seems like most people heard の between 言語 and 機能.

Anonymous

Literally "language function [is] damage[d]"

Anonymous

Interesting that there's so much variation in the phrase as people typed it online, though!

Damkerng T.

10:04

@snailboat I tried to find a clip that has that line in it, but to no avail.

So I made one myself!

"My translator's broken": drive.google.com/open?id=0B8KKQ0fwLEZ9T296dGZXY2xlVjg

Anonymous

Yep, の is there :-)

Anonymous

Gengo no kinō ga sonshō!

Damkerng T.

Yay!

5

A: What is the meaning of "steep horizontal pressure gradient"?

Presumably, pressure is indicated on the horizontal or x-axis. Steepness is defined by how quickly it changes per unit moving along the x-axis. In the graph, substitute Pressure" for "Distance".

Hmm... it's got 5 votes. That's curious to me.

It's good as a general explanation, I suppose, but I wonder whether the answerer knows what horizontal pressure gradient really means.

shrug

I guess I could've gotten more votes by simply pasting an image on the site I linked to in my answer (which I chose not to do so).

Anonymous

Well, that user often describes things he doesn't understand quite confidently.

Damkerng T.

10:20

@snailboat Sometimes, votes on ELL are inexplicable!

CowperKettle

> According to Mr. Merzlyakov, the discussed project calls for the construction of a facility capable of producing up to 120 thousand tonnes of ethylene a year.

I wonder if able is a good substitute for capable

Or maybe "able" is more proper when we are talking about a person

Damkerng T.

nods -- I think so.

CowperKettle

I meant to ask a question about this on ELL for while

* I have been meaning

Anonymous

a facility that is able to produce but not *a facility able of producing

Anonymous

You're probably right that able tends to have an animate subject. I'm on my phone so I'm not checking corpora right now.

CowperKettle

10:30

@snailboat "a facility capable of producing" is not felicitous here? Nice! I've been using the construction right and left.

Anonymous

Capable is fine there.

CowperKettle

Ah.

Phew.

Anonymous

I was just pointing out you can't substitute able without changing some other stuff.

CowperKettle

Indeed!

@snailboat That was Uly tipping me off on lang-8. He seems to rarely visit ELL.

> The soda ash capacity of the Berezniki Soda Plant (based in Perm Krai) could also be expanded from 500 to 700 thousand tonnes per year.

I often wonder if the the is necessary before constructions like "Berezniki Soda Plant"

It's the name of a company.

On the other hand, in speech you feel the urge to put "the" there.

Anonymous

It does sound better with the, doesn't it?

Damkerng T.

10:42

I guess I'm more comfortable with either Berezniki Soda Plant or the Berezniki Soda plant, but I'd use what the plant uses.

CowperKettle

@snailboat yes

@DamkerngT. the plant could not care less, it's not in Britain, and in Russia there are no articles.

(0:

Damkerng T.

Hmm... maybe it's the Berezniki soda plant.

Anonymous

Imagine "the Berezniki soda plant", where only the proper noun is treated as part of the name. A determiner is required.

CowperKettle

And the translators hired by Russian companies are often the cheapest they can find, so it's usually highly amusing to visit their English language pages.

Damkerng T.

@CowperKettle Hehe!

It's funny and sad at the same time!

CowperKettle

10:52

I guess the main thing is to pass the message, and the(?) grammar is not that important.

Anonymous

get the message across, maybe?

CowperKettle

yes

You see, I have(?) managed to get the message across, even with my non-standard wording.

> Mineral fertilizer reserves accumulated by farmers (including the leftovers from 2015) currently stand at 1.6 million tonnes n.c., which marks an increase of 247.3 thousand tonnes over the same date in 2015.

Damkerng T.

> Main thing, you know what I say. Grammar no important.

2

^It could go like that. :-)

CowperKettle

I wonder if the reader would think that "leftovers" is related to "farmers". (0:

Damkerng T.

@CowperKettle Especially when the reader just read Attack on Titan!

(Farmers? Yum!)

Færd

14:04

Hi @Araucaria. Do you teach students who want to take Cambridge English exams as well? Particularly CAE? I want to take that exam but I'm studying on my own and I wanted to have a chat about it with someone (if they have time and are willing to do so, of course :). I'm not in a hurry; I'm taking my time. Just don't want my course to miss what it shouldn't.

skill patrol

have you done the CPE?

Færd

@skillpatrol Nope! CPE is their highest. CAE is second to highest.

skill patrol

I see.

Araucaria

14:34

@Færd Yes, quite a lot, though not over the last couple of years. I'm a bit busy right this sec, but I'd be very happy to chat with you about it some time and to give you some help if you need any.

Araucaria

14:59

@CowperKettle @snailboat able takes infinitival clauses as a Complement. So you could have "According to Mr. Merzlyakov, the discussed project calls for the construction of a facility able to produce up to 120 thousand tonnes of ethylene a year". But I prefer capable here though.

CowperKettle

@Araucaria Thank you!

Araucaria

@CowperKettle You're welcome! Here's some facility able to's

Man_From_India

16:39

1

Q: She seems to be in a better mood than (what) she was in before. --meaning difference

She seems to be in a better mood than she was in before. She seems to be in a better mood than what she in before. Are both the above sentences grammatically correct? What's the difference in their meaning?

sentence-meaning

> She seems to be in a better mood than she was in before.

> She seems to be in a better mood than what she was in before.

I don't know if any one of them is wrong. I think both are correct. When I try to explain it to myself I feel the first one is wrong, but it sounds right to me. Any explanation? And which one is correct?

Damkerng T.

16:57

@Man_From_India PEU 581 than and as as subjects, objects and complements

Man_From_India

Thanks I will check that :-)

Damkerng T.

No problem!

Færd

17:14

@Araucaria Great. Thanks.

PhMgBr

ell.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/37409

I left this closed. I wonder if I did the right thing.

Damkerng T.

17:55

Sometimes it's not clear whether an OP wants a discussion, arguments, or answers.

PhMgBr

I want disarguwers!

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