Language Overflow

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Nat

02:44

I noticed that a lot of my comments were being deleted below my own answer. Is that a common thing, or is it likely a consequence of someone selectively flagging 'em?

ColleenV

@Nat Comments are ephemeral, so you shouldn't expect them to stick around. Information that should be preserved should be incorporated into a question or answer. There is more about when and when not to comment in the help center: ell.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment

Nat

03:08

@ColleenV Definitely, I'm just noticing that responses to critical comments are disappearing while the critical comments remain, leaving me to suspect that the folks leaving the critical comments are flagging responses.

Anonymous

In this case, that's not what happened. If enough comments show up underneath a single post, the system automatically flags it so it can be cleaned up, which is what happened here.

Anonymous

We don't really need (for example) an off-topic discussion about 'til versus till in the comments section. Your post says one thing, a comment says another, and we don't really need a back-and-forth discussion in the comments section when that's not what the question is about.

Anonymous

Remember, we're primarily a Q&A site, and comments are to help the posts improve and to help the questions get answered. Comments aren't intended for lengthy discussion.

Nat

Gotcha; that makes sense. It wasn't problematic so much as a strange enough thing to wonder about the causation of.

Is it generally the case that comments left as a response to another, such as those that start with an @ to respond to another user, get selectively flagged by the system?

ColleenV

@Nat Comments aren't selectively flagged by the Community bot

The mod team looks at them

either because the post was brought to our attention for some other reason, or there was a flag

If you think a comment is no longer needed, flag it

In general if you get feedback on an answer, it's better to clarify your answer than to get into an extended discussion in comments. If someone is violating the "Be Nice" policy, feel free to flag it.

8 hours later…

yolo sora

10:51

Hi brothers and sisters!

2 hours later…

userr2684291

12:37

@snailplane ell.stackexchange.com/q/161950/3395 Is this coordination-of-unlikes?

Well, I've edited it in, so whatever!

CowperKettle

13:17

I have a table describing a future drug product. One cell of the table says "Storage: from 2 to 8 °C". The next column provides justification. It says: "The storage conditions are based on results of experiments."

I wonder how to put it more nicely..

Less clumsy.

I first wrote "The storage conditions were deliberated experimentally" but that is odd.

1 hour later…

ColleenV

14:35

@CowperKettle The storage conditions are based on analytical test results. (?)

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

15:55

Thank you!

4 hours later…

Anonymous

20:19

+1 The Economist's own Language Blog actually had a piece about readability scores (possibly pay-walled) a few years back (in the context of criticisms of then-President Obama's speeches). The Flesch-Kincaid scores found for their own three sample Economist articles ("which I hope we can all agree is a reasonably well-written publication") were 10.3, 10.6, and 10.8 (years of education). — 1006a yesterday

Anonymous

headdesk

Anonymous

Flesch-Kincaid isn't a very good measure of anything. I think the main reason it's gotten so popular is that it was included in some word processing software a long time ago, and people got used to the idea that you can come up with a meaningful "grade level" automatically.

Anonymous

It has the advantage of being easy to calculate. It has the disadvantage of not telling you anything useful.

Catija

I think that's what Word uses?

Anonymous

Yeah.

Anonymous

20:28

If you tried to calculate readability based on, for example, relative accessibility of vocabulary items and processing difficulty of grammatical structures . . .

Anonymous

> The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt.

Anonymous

You could say "A sentence like this is very difficult to process but uses only simple vocabulary".

Anonymous

Flesch-Kincaid says "This sentence has only one-syllable words, which makes it easy, and it's not particularly long, so it's appropriate for a grade schooler".

Anonymous

Which seems to be false.

Catija

so... the rat ate the malt, the cat killed the rat and the dog chased the cat?

Anonymous

20:32

Yep. That's an example of multiple center embedding, something that human brains don't really process very well.

Catija

Is that actually acceptable in English?

Anonymous

Well, no. To most speakers, the example above is pretty much unreadable and unacceptable.

Anonymous

But there are real examples of multiple center embedding.

Anonymous

That is, people do make sentences that way sometimes.

Catija

I'd be fine with it if it only had two subjects and verbs.

Anonymous

20:35

But it's too hard to process. We hit the limits of our mental stack after two, usually.

Catija

> The rat the cat killed, ate the malt.

Anonymous

So you sort of get confused halfway and lose track of what's supposed to be connected to what, and you end up somewhere near the end of the sentence without really knowing what it's supposed to mean.

Feeds

Q: Questions with "does"

Can you please help me better explain the structure below to my student? "Does beauty has standards?" Isn't the rule that the second verb (have) goes in the infinitive form in questions with do/does? She understands the agreement in the structure "Beauty has standards" and is trying to apply i...

discussion

Anonymous

Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses (Karlsson 2007)

Anonymous

Thanks, Feeds, I already moved it over :-)

Anonymous

20:48

I'm not sure what the best way is to get through to people spreading this kind of ignorance: ell.stackexchange.com/a/161978/230

Anonymous

I left a comment:

Anonymous

Please read: African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with mistakes — snailplane ♦ 1 hour ago

Anonymous

I was playing through some possibilities in my head, like "-1 Please don't spread this kind of ignorance." and imagining the poster shutting down and rejecting anything I have to say on the topic.

Anonymous

So in the end I just posted a link without any further comment.

Anonymous

I should probably think of a more positive way to express the idea without it sounding like an attack . . .

Catija

20:54

Eh... they're being pretty negative about it.

1 hour later…

ColleenV

22:13

@snailplane I thought the link was appropriate - it explains in detail the problems with viewing dialect differences as mistakes. I like the "who/whom" example that explains how the different versions ARE following rules, just not the same ones.

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