For some reason, destroying spam accounts is the most satisfying part of moderating on SE.

@Cardinal Yep. You're right.

@M.A.R. I always thought leftside-right smilies were cute. I recently encountered a claim online that :) is more comfortable than (: to readers of languages written left-to-right, like English. It sounds plausible, although I'm skeptical. I wanted to ask some people who are literate in right-to-left languages.

I always thought (: was cute.

@userr2684291 Complex topic, I think.

There is no easy answer because this sort of yourself probably started life as a hypercorrection, but became so common among speakers of Standard English that it can't really be rejected as non-standard.

Sometimes people learn that it is incorrect and this influences their attitudes about it if you try to solicit judgments.

@userr2684291 Do you have a copy of MWDEU?

amazon.com/Merriam-Websters-Dictionary-English-Usage-Available/…

@Cardinal I see! I got used to :) too. I usually type that sort.

I wonder if we're all more comfortable with :) simply because that's what we're used to.

@userr2684291 There is a rather long entry about this in MWDEU under the heading myself.

I'll type up a quote from the conclusion of the article:

> In the course of this article, you have seen examples spoken or written by some forty-odd people—poets, politicians, playwrights, novelists, essayists, diarists, statesmen, even lexicographers. The evidence should make it plain that the practice of substituting myself or other reflexive pronouns for ordinary personal pronouns is not new—these examples range over four centuries—and is not rare.

> It is true that many of the examples are from speech and personal letters, suggesting familiarity and informality. But the practice is by no means limited to informal contexts. [. . .]

> You will have to decide for yourself when such substitution is appropriate in your writing, and the examples above should offer you sound guidance if you are attentive to them. You will note in the examples that the context in which each reflexive pronoun appears seems natural to the writer or speaker. Use it only when it seems natural to you.

As usual, MWDEU is excellent.

Wait, isn't :-) rotated counter-clockwise?

Oh, you mean you mentally rotate them when you see them.

I understand now :-)

(-: won dnatsrednu I

Do you guys consider thanks very much correct English? I hear it isn't.

@AnastasiaDunbar I call that a "song" but some people also prefer "instrumental".

@AnastasiaDunbar You could also try backing music or backing track I guess

Or karaoke track.

@AnastasiaDunbar "Classical piece" is fine.

@Cardinal I used a program to do it.

@Ghalib I think it is too common to be called incorrect.

@AnastasiaDunbar I just ran rev on the command line :-)

But thanks, that's neat too.

You can see examples of thanks very much here: corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=57675951

@AnastasiaDunbar I know, but I didn't want that, so I edited it.

@AnastasiaDunbar What does "X" in your avatar represent?

@AnastasiaDunbar Yes, I usually say piece for classical music. Informally, people use song for everything, even when there's no singing, but for classical music in particular piece tends to be used.

Heh funneh.

If I'm not talking about classical music, and I still wanted to avoid using song, I'd probably go for track instead.

But native speakers use song for things without singing all the time.

I do it too. Song seems very natural to me, although in the back of my mind sometimes I think "Hmm, maybe I should say track or piece."

Sure. People do that.

I mean, you could argue that it's being a bit imprecise, but people say it.

You can always choose your own words more precisely if that's what you want to do.

"How was the melody" looks good.

What's your native language?

@AnastasiaDunbar I guess you could use "How did the melody go?" as well, it is not ungrammatical but seems unnatural to me somehow.

@AnastasiaDunbar Um, no. You see, you always use first form of verb with "did" so it will always be "go" not "went".

For example: "How did it go?" Not "How did it went?"

And "How did the test go?" Not "How did the test went?" etc.

@AnastasiaDunbar No you can't. That's incorrect English.