English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

RegDwight

19:00

Benny

101

Flotsam N. Jetsam, Deep South

295 4

@Robusto No data dump yet. Sniff.

data.stackexchange.com

Robusto

@RegDwight — Awww, poor baby. Maybe we can get @Martha to nibble your ears for you.

RegDwight

I am a bit skeptical about that, what's with her insufficient love for communists and all.

Martha

My ear-nibbling has a strict infants-only policy.

Robusto

I bet she'd be all over baby Communists ...

... like white on rice.

RegDwight

Or communist infantry.

Robusto

19:03

... like a bum on a baloney sandwich.

Martha

And before you ask, no, infantile behavior doesn't count.

Robusto

No, Communist infantry would be all over her.

And not in a good way, either.

RegDwight

Feb 9 at 15:24, by RegDwight

We'll be seeing a bunch of Scots in kilts going commando with my wife.

Only four days left.

Robusto

@RegDwight — Remind me what the occasion is? Or did the Scots just make an appointment?

RegDwight

Musikschau Schottland. With like five hundred pipers and cannons and whatnot.

"Gänsehaut garantiert!", the handout insists.

Martha

19:07

As long as the pipers know songs other than Amazing Grace and Scotland the Brave, sounds fun.

RegDwight

I will be making notes.

But it's like a four-hour show or something.

Robusto

@RegDwight — I've got goosebumps already just thinking about it.

RegDwight

Oh, and them's actual Scots, @Martha, touring 'round the world. Not some local Kindermusikverein or anything.

Martha

Well, I hope being actual Scots helps. In America, bagpipes seem to have some sort of parental control which means that if there are more than two pipes being played, and if the pipers are wearing kilts, then those two songs and only those two songs can be played.

RegDwight

19:24

I fixed a typo in your answer, oh mighty @Robusto. Me hopes your don't mind.

BTW, this is one of those questions that would be likely closed as "noise or pointless" on MSO. Probably with Aarobot commenting, "Pointless is certainly one way to describe somebody who won't accept an explanation even after being beaten over the head with it three times."

Robusto

@RegDwight — Was fuer ein Typo hast du gefindet?

RegDwight

@Robusto I suppose you're messing with me again, but anyways: gefunden.

Robusto

Oh, I see. Yes, thanks. I wish I had never answered that stupid question.

RegDwight

And the edit was here:

english.stackexchange.com/posts/16453/revisions

Robusto

You know, I thought it might have been gefunden, and almost wrote that. But in the end I went for epic fail instead. As I have said before, my German is very rusty.

RegDwight

19:40

Well, you can always say it was on purpose, and I would buy it.

Robusto

Nah, I always tell the truth.

"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering." — Carl Jung

RegDwight

Besides, there are enough dialects where things such as gedenkt (instead of gedacht) or gekennt (rather than gekannt) are common or even the norm.

Robusto

BTW, that Jung quote is maybe the smartest thing anyone ever said.

RegDwight

I like Wilhelm Busch's Dummheit ist auch eine natürliche Begabung.

"Stupidity is a natural gift, too."

Robusto

Yeah, and after viewing the OP's comment in that question I realize how true this is.

Nice comment, btw. I started to write one but then realized I was too tired and still haven't fixed a problem with stupid IE.

RegDwight

19:53

The thing is, it's only on the surface that it's snarky, but it's on every level and in every way that it is true.

Wilhelm Busch's quote, that is. Not my comment.

Robusto

The smartest thing I ever said was this: "Every good thing is a gift."

RegDwight

I have forwarded that to TPTB. You deserve a t-shirt for that. And two American Dad DVDs.

Ah, nohat at his best.

1

A: What's the adjective form of "sauce" as "salty" is to "salt"?

I'm not sure what the objection to using saucy is all about. Merriam-Webster says: saucy adj 1: served with or having the consistency of sauce 2a : impertinently bold and impudent b : amusingly forward and flippant : irrepressible 3: smart, trim <a saucy little hat> The very...

Robusto

20:09

Wah, it is such a slow day on E&U.SE. I don't think I'll even hit the rep cap.

Haven't missed one for almost a month.

RegDwight

2

Q: Suggested new badge: "Solid Week"

This badge could be earned for hitting your rep cap 7 days in a row. It doesn't have to be any specific days, just so long as for those 7 days you always hit your rep cap. I quickly came up with Solid Week, but I'm sure something better could be thought of.

feature-request badge-request

Hahaha, dig this @Martha:

3

Q: Eeeek! What happened to the envelope question?

The eeeek what happened to my envelope? question is gone.

support deleted-questions

Now you will most certainly get onto that meme list.

Robusto

@RegDwight — Meh, who needs another badge?

RegDwight

Hooray for editorial mentions:

observer.com/2011/tech/…

They even link to @Martha's semantic satiation.

Robusto

20:25

Boofus McGoofus represents us to the world!

Martha

Oh, my. Does this make me famous?

RegDwight

@Martha It does make you awfully rich. You are at 31 tögrögs already.

Martha

Eh. I just looked at the dateline of that editorial, and it's old. Thing is, I didn't notice much of an uptick in interest in that question around January 25th.

RegDwight

@Martha I only just noticed it via the super-secret site stats section in the mod tools.

@Cerberus there you go:

-2

Q: How about a new stack exchange site about understanding women?

No.. seriously! :) Think about it! Different cultures, different points of view and a mature community. If just one relationship could be saved it would be worth it!

feature-request

@Martha There has been a noticeable uptick, actually.

english.stackexchange.com/posts/6170/timeline

Look at January 25th through 29th.

Martha

Eh, I guess...

RegDwight

20:39

2 days ago, by RegDwight

Vorsicht! ArthurRex ist wieder da!

And he is talking to his esteemed attorneys already...

Which makes me think that "bucket shop" refers to Stack Overflow.

Martha

20:51

Well, "Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe" is a CarTalk reference, innit?

RegDwight

You tell me.

I'm only proficient in non-English car talk.

Anybody using Safari here?

4

Q: SE Editor Toolkit

There's been an onslaught of rather difficult to read questions on SO lately. A lot of them are just plain close-fodder, but many are just from d ppl ,who spk teh internetz lingo and hence make my eyes bleed are pretty much incomprehensible without extensive parsing/editing. They also somehow do...

script editing

@Martha yup, you're right.

Feb 24 at 20:31, by Kosmonaut

http://www.cartalk.com/content/about/credits/credits.html

Robusto

21:24

@RegDwight — Oh, btw, I finally realized why it was er laeuft in the VW ad. They weren't referencing das Auto but der Wagen ... cuz it's, like, a Volkswagen ... duh!

RegDwight

Grats!

Robusto

Sometimes it takes me a while to perceive the obvious.

RegDwight

But most (all?) cars are masculine for much the same reason.

Der Audi, der Volvo, der Mazda, der Lada, der Mercedes, der Toyota...

Can't think of any that aren't masculine... nope.

@Robusto And now I finally realize what you were talking about here:

Mar 8 at 22:18, by Robusto

Isn't it das Auto?

I thought you were referring to the current VW slogan, which happens to be "Das Auto".

►

Martha

I can think of many cars that aren't masculine. In fact, all of them. They're all "it" - neuter, neither masculine nor feminine.

RegDwight

That discussion is futile. You will find (and have found) yourself on the exact opposite side of the debate when it's about articles rather than gender.

(Not that I haven't found myself on any side of any debate at one time or another.)

Robusto

21:47

Grammatical gender is stupid.

Martha

Definite vs. indefinite articles serve a purpose, meaning-wise. What purpose does grammatical gender serve?

(Other than making it difficult for the non-natives, of course.)

Robusto

Grammatical gender, she is stupid.

RegDwight

Grammatical cases serve a purpose, too. So does dual, trial, paucal or distributive plural. Why doesn't every single language on this planet have them? And what purpose do 33 letters serve (or 50,000, for that matter), if you can get away with using just 26?

@Robusto And you, Robusto, should really know better, as a poetry fetishist. Having grammatical gender can, and often does, add a whole another quality to poems.

Just let Wallace Stevens get his hands on grammatical gender, and you would weep at the sight of the sheer beauty.

And if you think I am evading a direct answer to your question, @Martha, well, I am not. "Alex is tired" or "Alex is smart" is ambiguous in English. You can't tell whether Alex is a woman or a man. In many other languages, you can. A simple "I am tired" in Russian, or a simple "thanks" in Portuguese contains much more information than it does in English.

In English you would have to say something like "Alex, who is a man, is tired" or "Alex is tired and btw, he's a she". Now that's not succinct, innit?

And I'm not even talking about how weird it would sound.

Martha

22:08

Remember, I'm coming at this from Hungarian, where you can't even say "he" vs. "she", and yet everyone functions perfectly well.

RegDwight

Precisely. And I am coming from a language where you can't even say "a" vs. "the", and yet everyone functions perfectly well.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

That is true of every single language out there.

Martha

I think my point re: articles vs. grammatical gender is that the former has a well-defined meaning, and thus - with a little knowledge of the language - you can deduce which article is appropriate. Not so with grammatical gender. I mean, for heavens sake, the same item can be masculine in one language and feminine in another! How is anyone supposed to learn which is correct?

RegDwight

Jan 29 at 19:42, by RegDwight

Otherwise you quickly enter a world of pain. Book is feminine in Russian, neuter in German, masculine in French, and God knows what in English.

See? It's not like I don't feel your pain.

But the thing is, if articles are so simple, then why do all those non-native speakers face such awful, insurmountable problems learning them?

Martha

Didn't say articles are simple, just well-defined. (If you could substitute "one", use "a". Otherwise, use "the".)

RegDwight

Yeah, well, these are the basics. And that's pretty much what I recommended here:

13

A: Are there any simple rules for article usage ("a" vs "the" vs none)

Well, if you insist on the rule being simple, here you are: a = some, any the = this, that Two simple examples. Note that you just wrote "...if a person knows which item you are talking about...". You didn't write "...if the person knows...". And that's correct, because you are not pointing t...

But note how that doesn't even begin to explain the whole situation.

The rules for article usage are much more complex than that. And there are lots of exceptions to them. You cannot always deduce which article is appropriate. Sometimes you just have to learn it by heart.

Much like with spelling.

(Not that any of that is a bad thing.)

Martha

22:23

@RegDwight I think that for almost all article usages, a competent linguist can explain why that particular case uses that particular article. (The explanation might fly right over a normal person's head, but that's a different subject.) Not so for gender. (Unless of course the language bases gender solely on sound, which I understand some do. But of course in that case gender is easy to learn, even for a non-native.)

RegDwight

In German, every noun that ends in -ung is feminine. Every noun starting in ge- and ending in -en is usually neuter. There are exceptions, but a competent linguist can explain them away, too.

And so on and so forth.

And note how a developed from one, and the developed from that. So, at some point in time, people actually used to say "give me one apple"/"give me that apple". Well, you can say that in contemporary Russian, too!

Martha

Ok, this is all fascinating and stuff, but I gotta go. TTYL.

RegDwight

CU!

Robusto

22:43

@RegDwight — Yeah, a bad quality. A foreign quality.

RegDwight

I'm so glad we're back to that level of conversation.)))

Robusto

@RegDwight — Read "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" and tell me if you think that's how Wallace Stevens would react.

RegDwight

Excellent. Thanks for the pointer. See, if he had grammatical gender at his disposal, he would just use two different words for light, and it would be much more subtle, and we would be patting each other on the back for noticing, and laughing at those who wouldn't.

Robusto

**Of Hartford in a Purple Light**
A long time you have been making the trip
From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,
Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.
A long time the ocean has come with you,
Shaking the water off, like a poodle,
That splatters incessant thousands of drops,
Each drop a petty tricolor. For this,
The aunts in Pasadena, remembering,
Abhor the plaster of the western horses,
Souvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are
Lights masculine and lights feminine.
What is this purple, this parasol,

RegDwight

Yup, read it elsewhere already.

Robusto

22:48

@RegDwight — status-by-design

RegDwight

Absolutely! That's what I'm saying the whole time, really.

Robusto

Now I gotta go drink beer. TTYL.

RegDwight

Okay. Have fun!

Haha, and now the "Eeeek! What happened to the envelope question?" got killed with fire, too.

2 hours ago, by RegDwight

3

Q: Eeeek! What happened to the envelope question?

The eeeek what happened to my envelope? question is gone.

support deleted-questions

Mar 4 at 16:27, by Robusto

So it is a conspiracy.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…