@DamkerngT. AA updated his profile again: ell.stackexchange.com/users/5846/admiraladama

> This site frustrates me a lot. I see a lot of poor or incorrect answers getting upvoted. I think I will take a break from ELL beta for awhile.

I don't know why he feels that way.

But I suppose so

(That is, I expect that what I consider poor or incorrect answers are very different from what he considers poor or correct answers)

I wonder how generally true that is.

For example, maybe he dislikes answers that don't say year-on-year is wrong

His answers seem mostly okay.

Even though I disagree with certain things.

Oh, so he's not taking his break yet.

See, here again I comment-answered because I didn't feel comfortable writing an answer that was (or I perceived to be) not about English

Also, because all I did was search on Google :-)

I've never seen Friends

The actor who played Phoebe guest-starred in The Simpsons as a character named Alex, according to the internet

Girl

There are girls named Alex

(Alexandra, and such)

I haven't seen that movie.

Ahh

I think I heard about that when it came out

The Simpsons is fairly important in terms of pop culture

Everyone knows The Simpsons.

Not only that, but in my youth I was inundated with Simpsons quotes from my brother, and thanks to him was made to watch some episodes as well :-)

That was in the part of my life when I tried to avoid TV as much as possible

But I couldn't manage to entirely avoid The Simpsons :-)

Can I say "yes, it's possible" but give it a probability of like, 0.001? :-)

The reason it seems really difficult to read it that way

I think is human and heart really want to go together

Yeah, it's not specific.

I don't know what comments we're talking about

The honest human heart sounds to me like it's general, not a reference to a specific human heart. Of course, context could always override this, but that doesn't sound very likely

@DamkerngT. Um, I like an honest, sincere, humble human heart

Remember that my commadar is on the fritz with no repairman in sight

Before you go so far as to trust my comma judgments ;-)

But I have read a bunch of stuff about punctuation. I'm trying to mend my ways!

Incidentally, in Nunberg's terms, punctuation is a little different than you might expect.

He considers capitalization a kind of punctuation because it marks things grammatically, for example

But apostrophes are a kind of spelling because they have no grammatical significance

No we don't.

:-)

Well, because it's a human heart that is specifically humble, and it's one that's sincere by the standards of humble human hearts, and it's one that's honest by the standards of humble human hearts that are sincere by the standards of humble human hearts

It's a bit much to fit through one's brain

Commas imply a coordinate structure, no commas imply a nested structure

I think it's possible to read it as a coordinate structure without commas, though

Maybe people would read it that way if you wrote it like that. But it looks funny to me.

Just a moment...

> [v] It has a powerful, fuel-injected engine.

> In [v] itself, then, engine is modified by a coordination of adjectives, giving the meaning "engine that is both powerful and has fuel injection". In a powerful fuel-injected engine, by contrast, there are two layers of modification: engine is modified by fuel-injected to form the nominal fuel-injected engine, and this is in turn modified by powerful, allowing a somewhat different interpretation - "engine that is powerful by the standards applicable to fuel-injected ones".

This is from Nunberg's chapter on punctuation in CGEL

I think maybe it's helpful to emphasize "allowing". I don't think it forces the other interpretation

But I think that the non-comma version is more likely when you aren't piling on as many adjectives

Oh, since replacing the batteries in the fire alarms, they haven't gone off again.

I don't know if that's why or not.

Perhaps it is!

Too bad it's not easier to tell.

It doesn't have a "if you're having false alarms, change the batteries" section

It's s'posed to beep periodically in anger if you don't feed it batteries often enough.

See, s'posed is fine for informal chat. Or sposta or other such variations

But din' isn't appropriate for a question title on ELL

I agree with your belief!

Do you think people actually pronounce /zdt/?

It seems challenging.

But I'm not sure what his notation is exactly.

It doesn't look like IPA

But it's in slashes! ;-)

used to /ˈjustə/ "I used to have a pet frog."

used to /ˈjustu/ "This isn't what I'm used to."

used to /ˈjuztu/ or /ˈjuztə/ "This machine is used to grade papers."

But the last in hyperarticulate speech could have a /d/, I think.

@DamkerngT. They hear people speak and develop their own version, refining it over the years. Some children don't develop what is perceived to be ideal pronunciation, and these children are often sent to speech therapy

Every child is different, of course.

I had trouble developing normal speaking skills.

And now my keyboard is mocking me by inserting extra esses :-)

cries

Bad keyboard! Back in the corner with you!

I got to see my brother's hamster, Solid Color Boy, the other day.

I gave him a cashew (well, part of one!) and I petted him.

It was the first time he let me pet him :-)

He's a good hamster.

Stripey Boy is nicer to me though

Stripey Boy is a nice hamster. He does something that I've never really seen other hamsters do.

Usually when you take a hamster out of their cage to play, they slowly grow more and more excited and keep moving around more and more :-)

But Stripey Boy is content to sit there with you and listen to stuff.

I love hamsters! It's been years since I've had one, though. I think I'm too lazy to clean their cages :-)

In the U.S., hamsters are often thought of as "starter pets", something low-responsibility that can lead up to owning a "real pet" like a cat or a dog.

But that's a bad description.

You have to be responsible to own hamsters. They need cleaning all the time!

Snails don't take much care. You have to feed them fairly often, and you have to give them water each day.

But they don't need cleaning too often or anything like that.

Oh, how advanced!

They are a little bigger now.

I mean, I can't tell the difference, but my brother says they are.

He also says that one of them is bigger than the other, but I forgot which :-)

He also says that they're not names, just descriptions. But I use them like names.

@DamkerngT. You need to look at usage and see how people are actually using them, not just how they'd define them off the cuff

Having said that, here's how I'd define them off the top of my head. (I'm just making an attempt!)

Quick sounds like it describes an action that takes a small amount of time, especially shorter than average or expected, while fast refers to an action with a great speed

So a car is fast. I don't think of quick cars.

But if I got same-day delivery, that would be really quick. (Fast, too.)

In many cases, something with a shorter-than-average or -expected time also has a high speed, so fast is appropriate too.

So you could have a "quick trip to the store"

But your car is probably "fast"

And a package that arrived sooner than expected could be quick or fast

Well, its delivery, I mean.

Anyway, this is just me making up a description off the top of my head without really looking at corpus evidence.

Sure.

I have the video game Skyrim open. I'm not playing it. (I haven't played it for a long time.)

But I opened it in the background, and it's making pleasant rainy sounds for me.

I actually got it because it has a full Japanese localization, so I had an excuse. (More listening practice with subtitled text!)

It's the first game in that series they did that for.

And it's a really pretty game.

But now, it's just making rainy noises at me. :-)

There are at least two constructions to distinguish, I think

composer Richard Strauss, in which the head is Richard Strauss and composer is an omissible modifier

the composer Richard Strauss, in which the head is the composer and Richard Strauss is an omissible modifier

In the latter, I think the name is an appositive

Yeah. I don't think appositives are by definition comma-y.

Their most basic quality is that they're next to each other. (in apposition, ad- + position)

But then we have the non-assimilated version, adposition, used as a hypernym for prepositions and postpositions

They're distinct thingies, but they express something similar. Things that are next to each other :-)

I can't answer that accurately off the top of my head. I'd need to look it up.

Semantically, I think Richard Strauss the composer mean "Richard Strauss, specifically the Richard Strauss who is a composer"

Syntactically, it look like some kind of appositive thingy.

(I'm using technical terms now.)

Hooray

And if we leave, ELL chat will be dead forever.

Its zombie corpse marching on until the day the sun swallows the earth.

Hey, look at all these answers!

And I only just put the bounty up today.

My thoughts aren't exciting enough to put in blogs.

I would say "it's difficult to know when to use what"

Multiple-wh phrases are kind of difficult in English

Er

I meant to say know, not choose

I think "to choose to use what" could be reordered to "to choose what to use" to improve it quite a bit

If you wanted to make minimal changes

I can't explain the grammar of multiple-wh phrases very well

I know that you can't generally front two wh-thingies

(I just edited what I wrote to make it sound more technical)