Language Overflow

CowperKettle

06:48

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He sends his precepts from on high
In sixty-four bit form

David Mulder

10:40

Friend is writing her dedication for her thesis and asked me for help with how a sentence should be worded in English. Is it "For my father, who passed away in the hope of the resurrection" or "For my father, who passed away with faith of the resurrection" or how in the world is that worded in English?

CowperKettle

11:17

@DavidMulder I would write "For my father, who passed away in the hope of resurrection".

But I don't understand the meaning.

Was he a devout Christian who believed that all people will be resurrected at an appointed time?

David Mulder

@CowperKettle Yeah, he was a devout Christian and believed there would be a future resurrection (never met him or anything, but that's at least how I understood what she wanted to write).

SmokeDetector

13:04

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Shortened url in body: Subject complement "Noun phrase + Be + (to) bare infinitive" by Lahza on ell.SE

userr2684291

^ solved.

@CaptainBohemian It refers to mathematics, of course. Not the head of mathematics, or something. Its means mathematics'.

@DavidMulder I'm not a native speaker of English, but I'd say faith in resurrection. Hope in resurrection is also okay. (You can google these verbatim (enclosed in quotation marks) and go through the results.)

But don't rely on the estimated number of results Google reports; for actual numbers look up Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Captain Bohemian

13:33

@userr2684291 I think head therein means "The foremost or leading position: marched at the head of the parade." from thefreedictionary.com/head

userr2684291

@CaptainBohemian You're right.

@CaptainBohemian Oh... wait. Sorry, I didn't see the little arrow. I thought you were referring to your example.

I think CowperKettle misread your sentence and got a little confused. They were busy, after all.

By saying turn X on its head, you assign this metaphorical head to X.

You personify X, basically.

You wouldn't normally consider maths to have a head of its own.

Captain Bohemian

@userr2684291 Quanta Magazine likes to use this kind of metaphor to confuse me. I have seen them a couple of times.

userr2684291

@CaptainBohemian It's just a way of saying something. People might or might not imagine a head there. Just like when people say I'm going to bed. They might think of a bed, but they don't necessarily lie down in a bed.

People might even tell you go to bed when you're already lying in your bed.

(And they know you're lying in bed.)

Captain Bohemian

@userr2684291 really? I only say "I am going to bed" when I plan to actually go to a bed to sleep. If I just plan to sit somewhere to sleep, I wouldn't say that.

userr2684291

I think you can say it then as well.

Captain Bohemian

13:51

@userr2684291 the further metaphor in that Quanta Magazine article I find is "You could assemble an ark’s worth of mammals without coming any closer to understanding where hair comes from." Do you know what "an ark’s worth of mammals" means? and what does "hair" refere to?

userr2684291

I think this is a situational analogy/hyperbole.

It definitely paints a nice picture, however.

It's simply comparing that doing something closely related to something doesn't translate to understanding how everything works.

Or how much of something you're doing, or how many times you repeat that.

They're referring to Noah's ark: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark

Captain Bohemian

indeed. the context is "Over the past 27 years, mathematicians have found hundreds of millions of examples of mirror pairs: This symplectic manifold is in a mirror relationship with that complex manifold. But when it comes to understanding why a phenomenon occurs, quantity doesn’t matter. You could assemble an ark’s worth of mammals without coming any closer to understanding where hair comes from."

userr2684291

"Noah is instructed to take on board his wife, his three sons, and his sons' wives. He is also to take two of every living thing, and seven pairs of every clean creature and of every bird, together with sufficient food." (I don't know what clean creatures refers to.)

By the way, an ark's worth of mammals doesn't mean an ark; it describes the quantity of mammals.

Just so it's clear.

So you put a male and a female animal in a pair, and you do that with every animal and you still won't know where hair comes from.

Obviously, right? The ark thing is just a reference to the well-known story.

Captain Bohemian

so what does "hair" represent?

userr2684291

Literally hair; presumably on those animals.

Covering their bodies.

As I said, it's related: you're touching these animals, moving them around (you're in contact with hair), a huge number of animals, and you still won't know where hair comes from.

At least I think that's what they're referring to.

@CaptainBohemian Another reason the author might have chosen this metaphor is because the pairs are "mirror pairs" – i.e., a pair of these animals consists of a male and a female – just like symplectic manifolds and complex manifolds.

Captain Bohemian

14:07

the author takes ark for the purpose of metaphor, but I didn't know what ark is until I looked it up in dictionary. I knew the Noah story, but I read it in Chinese in my childhood. I don't know how people translate that boat in English though I know how that boat in Chinese is called.

userr2684291

Right.

We say it the same way in my first language (arka).

Captain Bohemian

14:20

@userr2684291 Hungarian?

userr2684291

@CaptainBohemian Close. Hrvatski.

CowperKettle

16:36

Don't be shocked now. Some amazing research coming in.

Parental controls do not stop teens from seeing pornography, new research finds

userr2684291

18:45

Haha.

userr2684291

19:00

From what I've gathered after reading about this is viewing "bad" kind of pornography develops different kinds of unrealistic sexual expectations in kids.

It's not pornography by itself that's causing this.

Pretty sure a naked woman won't hurt anyone.

> At times, attempts to decipher the mood of the president and other heads of state felt akin to studying a very sophisticated and multilingual high school cafeteria.

For starters, there appeared to be cliques, with a grimacing Mr. Trump often on the outs. As leaders prepared for a so-called (and perhaps dysfunctional) family photo, Mr. Trump’s contemporaries walked ahead and chatted together while the president hung back with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president.

What does on the outs mean here? I looked it up and it means "in disagreement or dispute", but could it be that it was used more literally in this case; i.e., he was on the outs of the cliques?

I'm not sure if that (on the outs of the cliques) even makes sense, but that's how I understood it there.

> That puts Lucas on the outs of a tight-knit group that drinks together and hunts together, and soon he's the worst kind of pariah, verboten even from grocery shopping, unless he wants to catch a stray fist from the butcher.

This fits, I think.

Anonymous

19:16

@userr2684291 I understand on the outs and on the outs with X, but I don't know what on the outs of X means. I can't understand it because it seems to be using half an idiom and outs is not a lexeme on its own for me.

Anonymous

I guess some people say it? But I find it confusing to read.

Anonymous

I couldn't find any examples in COCA.

userr2684291

I know, but how do you understand the sentence then?

He's often in disagreement. Eh?

I found the other example in iWeb, by the way. I mean I could've just googled it, but who cares.

Anonymous

I dunno. Your guess seems okay to me.

Anonymous

I just wanted to mention that, from my point of view, I have to guess too.

Anonymous

19:20

He's often on the outs with those cliques I suppose. Like, not on good terms with the in-groups?

Anonymous

Something like on the outside.

userr2684291

Yes, but with would imply these cliques are a thing.

Anonymous

I'm probably not focusing very well. We just had the house de-ratted.

userr2684291

Ah.

Anonymous

I feel really bad for the rats. The rat people think our neighbors put out rat poison, and that's probably why they were bleeding all over.

Anonymous

19:22

I don't like rat poison. It goes up the food chain and poisons other animals too.

Anonymous

I have a friend who's a falconer who deals with it.

userr2684291

Do you mean he actually sends his falcon to hunt 'em down?

Anonymous

I mean falcons get poisoned by rat poison.

Anonymous

Anyway, the rats went under my house and died, and then my whole house smelled of decomp.

Anonymous

It was about five days before the rat people could make it out here to deal with the problem.

userr2684291

19:28

The rat people get a bad rep because of rat people.

Also mole people.

Sorry to steal the spotlight and all, but my roommate decided it was best to dump all the garbage he collected into a small garbage can in the kitchen next to the stove. When I came back the whole house smelled like a dumpster a few days after I took it out. That's how I learned why people take out the garbage.

I was gone for maybe 3 days for the smell to get quite intense, and it took maybe another 3 days to clear the air.

Anonymous

19:51

That sounds exciting.

userr2684291

20:04

Oh yeah.

I was so frustrated because the guy doesn't live there anymore, and that was like a farewell gift from him.

Anonymous

20:19

@userr2684291 Oh. Sounds pretty gross, as far as farewell gifts go.

userr2684291

Yep. It could've been worse.

Anonymous

When my housemate moved out, she left all sorts of stuff. She's a bit of a hoarder, I think. I didn't realize until she moved out that 90% of the stuff in the house was hers.

Anonymous

The stuff she chose not to take with was still pretty significant in terms of the total house clutter.

userr2684291

That looks a lot like this guy, except he's not a hoarder; he just leaves stuff around for his new parents to pick up after him.

And he's 30.

And now I have skeeters flying around me in the manner of scavengers.

Anonymous

I moved out when I was 18. I don't think my parents would pick up after me anymore.

userr2684291

20:27

Yeah, that's not really common here.

Anonymous

It ends up the other way, I think. My sister takes care of my mother now.

userr2684291

Mhm.

Anonymous

If we still expected my mom to take care of us, we'd be in trouble.

Anonymous

But I'm 36, and I'm the youngest of the family.

userr2684291

I mean, obviously. Even by our standards 30 is too much; 25 is still alright, but that's about the time you oughtta find a job and get out.

Anonymous

20:30

I have heard that it's becoming more common in the U.S., though.

userr2684291

My immediate surroundings have been successfully de-skeetered.

Anonymous

I just looked up skeeter.

Anonymous

2

Anonymous

This is Skeeter.

Anonymous

I'm glad you got him out of your immediate surroundings. I hear he's a vampire.

userr2684291

20:37

I believe vampires are always a she?

Anonymous

Oh. Maybe he doesn't bite.

Anonymous

Just as well. He looks like he'd be into hemocyanin anyway.

userr2684291

Haha.

I just got it.

Apparently a female skeeter's straw by which she takes blood is called a proboscis. Just like the elephant's bendy straw.

New Meta Question

21:57

0

Q: Fixing question titles beginning with "How to"

The topic of correcting grammar in a question has come up before, and there doesn't seem to be a clear consensus. Some argue that it's better to leave things how they are, to give an accurate representation of the asker's English ability, while others suggest that it's important to have correct ...

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