English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2011-03-05 (page 1 of 2)

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4:15 AM

Greetings!

Nobody here?

If anyone should be interested in exposing a non-native speaker, here is his chance.

In addition to being drunk, I also failed in a major objective of mine. That is why I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, extreme vulnerability. I'd like to say that this website is pretty awesome. And I hope you will forgive me if I say silly things at this moment. If you can't tell that I am Dutch now, then you, eh, wait, etiquette matters at any time of day or night. Suffice it to say that you should. See you tomorrow all!

5 hours later…

9:28 AM

yesterday, by RegDwight

13

Q: Is it acceptable to glean questions from other cooking sites?

I've noticed that AtillaNYC has been copying questions from other cooking sites verbatim. Is this acceptable and/or encouraged? Edit by Dinah: My original question is above except that I did not include any names. Below is an edit by hobodave as is the user link above. I'm not removing his ed...

discussion etiquette

That's the same user, in case you're wondering what this has to do with anything.

1 hour later…

10:36 AM

@RegDwight: I am glad you found out what I was referring to.

Hola

11:02 AM

0

Q: McDonald's' burgers are not as good as Five Guys's

I'm having trouble with possessives sometimes. Take this sentence, I'm quite confident there's a few things wrong with it: McDonald's' burgers are not as good as Five Guys's What would be the correct way to write this? And, even more puzzling to me, how would you correctly pronounce?

Objection, your Honor: asked and answered.

@Robusto: re. “broader that…”, shame on me!

Yes, for shame!

J'accuse!

J'accuse !

Moi? Pourquoi?

Oh, you put a space before the exclamation mark in French?

@FX_ — Is that correct?

11:35 AM

Putting a space before the question mark is called "French style", for some reasons.

12:05 PM

Maybe because the French use it?

12:30 PM

(I wonder what French fries means, then.)

I thought there was already a question about that and which.

2

Q: "which" vs "that"

I'm not a native English speaker and I must confess I'm quite confused about when I should use which in place of that and viceversa. Is there a particular rule? For example, let's take this sentence. The method returns a Whois::Answer instance which essentially looks and behaves like a Stri...

I have no idea why they are called French fries.

@Robusto: It was a joke; I was not hoping you would report why they are called so.

Well, nobody ever jokes in chat, so how was I to know?

I could have also "wondered" about French kissing.

Strange; somebody else reported he was taken seriously when he was joking.

Feb 14 at 11:03, by Robusto

**Franco-American Spaghetti Western**

With Sparkling Freedom (not champagne)
And Patriot Bread (not Au Bon Pain)
We spit out all that beaujolais
To celebrate the U.S.A.

In our Americanized edition
Voila's lost to the magician
Fries are "freedom", never French
Chaise longue is your "American Bench"

Our women never put on rouge
Our winter sports eschew the luge
Our soldiers never camouflage
Our hospitals must not triage

Amid the buzz of language saws
We toss the salad called Niçoise;
We'd not have any strength to boast

When I originally posted that I was disappointed that the entities weren't rendered in the chat.

Check the original link for the whole thing. It's a set of quatrains I wrote when the idiotic U.S. Congress renamed "French fries" to "Freedom fries" after France refused to help G. W. Bush conduct his little war in Iraq.

12:39 PM

Yes; that is disappointing.

If I write Niçoise, is the word seen correctly by all users?

@Robusto yes, in French, we use a thin unbreakable space before ?!;:

@kiamlaluno — It is, yes.

and the same thin nobreak space « inside guillemets »

But I had the poem in HTML form which used entities. If I'd realized the limitations, I would have gone through and changed it, but I didn't see the problem until it was too late to edit.

0

Q: Is "Public Offer" synonym to ToS?

I already asked this question in Is “Public Offer” synonym of ToS? but, I am afraid, an answer will not be exhaustive or authoritative without linguists. 1) One of the use of "Public Offer" is: "2. (Public offer): All products and prices in the Site constitute an offer to the public w...

usage technical confusables jargon legal

Look who's back. Voted to close as off-topic.

It would be better if the chat would render the HTML entities, though. I will keep this in mind.

12:44 PM

@kiamlaluno not by blind users

@Robusto Joy to the world, vgv8 has come!

@FX: Good point, but in that case they would not see &accedil; too. ;-)

Joie de livre ?

Joy to the word!

@Robusto does Martha thwack puns in French?

I dunno.

What does a French thwack sound like?

smack

12:47 PM

I know French ducks speak a different language from American ducks: Coin-coin instead of "quack-quack" ... or something like that.

but it might have been borrowed from English, just like jogging, parking, week-end, …

What? L'Acadamie Française permits loan words now?

@Robusto my two-year old confirms that; he watches The Silly Symphonies a lot, and is sometimes concerned why they don't make the same sound as he learns at kindergarten

When I was in Paris the menu at the airport restaurant listed "hot dogs" as Saucisses Americaines (or something like that).

atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/generic/…;

12:49 PM

The rest of Paris didn't offer hot dogs at all, and had much better food. :)

The official Académie dictionary includes jogging, which is said to be borrowed from American English

they even say it's derived from the verb to jogg

time for someone to propose a corrigendum to the Académie

Mais certainment !

@Fx — Yes, if you use the French for thwack it could be interpreted as a kiss in English, which I assume is not the desired effect.

well, as a noun, it would be interpreted as a kiss

“je lui ai fait un smack” implies a certain level of familiarity

well, the Académie has been notified

let's see how many decades it takes them to get it fixed

regarding vgv8, I'm disappointed

his last three questions (before that one) were good ones

2

Q: What's the difference between client and customer?

I already asked similar question customer vs. client vs. user vs. consumer of on-line service? but, I believe, there may be some differences between technical and legal jargon vs. general usage of English. I'd like to find the distinct most appropriate and unambiguous terms to distinguis...

word-choice meaning writing technical programming

2

Q: What is the origin of "Color me confused"?

I drowned in the search results of articles using "Color me confused" phrase. What is its meaning and origin?

meaning etymology technical

0

Q: What's the difference between "word origin" and etymology?

I see in this boards two tags: word-origin etymology What is the difference in meaning between them?

meaning etymology

and I think closing & migrating the last one was borderline

it is a valid question about English Language to wonder if "etymology" is an exact synonym for "word origin"

1:09 PM

@FX: He is actually asking what the difference between two tags is.

It's a question about two tags used on english.SE; therefore, it's a question for meta.english.SE.

It would have been fine, if the question asked what the difference between "word origin" and "etymology" is. Maybe the question could have been saved by editing it, but he is more interested in why there are two different tags that seem to have the same meaning.

1:30 PM

@kiamlaluno — Actually, it is on met.english.SE

@Robusto: I didn't say it was not on meta.english.SE. I am simply saying it belongs there.

When I say "the question could have been saved" I mean it could have saved as english.SE question. Since he is wondering about two different tags, editing the question would have changed its meaning, though.

Ah, OK.

1:47 PM

Hai.

Q: How do I make a fancy quote, with just text?

@Cerberus: Do you mean here in chat?

@Kiam: Yes!

@Cerberus: I would like to know it too. :-)

@kiam: Hehe damn.

@Robusto and @RegDwight should know it, as they keep to quote text.

1:51 PM

Well I'll make a plain quote then; I hope not everybody knows this one already, but it made me laugh, from Language Log:

"Yesterday, John Powers weighed in ("A Loss for Words", Boston Globe 2/8/2004) with another triadic tirade:

We say "transpire" when we mean "happen." We say "momentarily" when we mean "soon." We say "livid" when we mean "angry." This growing imprecision of usage may not be what fictional professor Henry Higgins declared "the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue." But it does matter if you don't know what you're saying. If you don't, how will I?

Let me be clear -- I'm not asking anybody to document that there is actually an overall "growing imprecision of usage". That's one of the ass…

49 secs ago, by kiamlaluno

@Robusto and @RegDwight should know it, as they keep to quote text.

I got it!

Ah!

Quickly: how?

@Cerberus: When you hover the mouse over a post here, you see an arrow that opens a pop up menu; one of its items is "link", which opens a window on the chat transcription.

Copy that link here, and it gets "boxed".

It works for every transcription link you write here.

I am sorry: the menu item is "permalink".

in Drupal Answers, yesterday, by Greg

since I'm the only one here, I'm off!

Ah Ok thanks!

I see how it works, great.

It works even if the post is in another chat room.

1:56 PM

Nice.

Finally, I got the answer to a question I always wanted to ask. :-)

Haha, this was it?

@Cerberus: Yep.

Well that is a good start of the weekend.

I thought "let me not make others understand I don't know how to use this chat". ;-)

2:00 PM

Hehe, well... is it such a disgrace to not know how it works?

Well, would you trust me after you know I don't know how to use this chat? ;-)

Good point. I'd think you were a thief or a prescriptivist, probably.

I don't know which one is worse, but I see you got the point.

That's what I thought!

Let's add another possibility: prescriptivist thief.

2:04 PM

Hey do you recall what this fallacy is called by which you represent your opponent's argument in a worse manner than it actually is and then crush it?

In Dutch it is called Straw Man.

Uhmmmm… I have that word on my tongue tip.

Lemme look it up...

Ah it is in fact Straw Man.

I think this Dutch version is a literal translation of the English term, and it is ugly in Dutch.

I thought that you were saying "straw man" were Dutch words. :-)

Hehe oh no. In Dutch it would be stroman.

So nearly the same.

It seems Wikipedia has stropop, which is straw puppet.

@Cerberus — Also called a "straw man" argument in English as well.

2:09 PM

Hi!

HI.

Yeah it appears I knew the English term but didn't know the Dutch term, while I thought it was the other way around. Odd.

It can also be a false dichotomy. Read my response here:

5

A: Origin of "he's 6 feet tall if he's an inch"

I disagree that the phrase is meant merely to be entertaining. What "if he's an inch" represents is, first of all, an example of the rhetorical device known as prolepsis, which in one of its meanings is the anticipation and addressing of objections to a premise before they may be introduced, in o...

The only Dutch word I know is druppel. :-)

Uhmmmm… and also dorp.

I know them because of Drupal.

Funny how many idioms we have in English that include "Dutch": Dutch courage, Dutch uncle, Dutch treat, double Dutch, get in Dutch with ...

2:15 PM

(I must remember it's not Dutch tape.)

Dutch courage: liquor
Dutch uncle: to take someone aside and advise them privately
Dutch treat: separate checks in a restaurant
double Dutch: incomprehensible language
Get in Dutch: get in trouble

IDK why we would be picking on the Dutch so much.

Hehe, now that I look at that word "Dutch" it looks wrong to me. I want to spell it Dutsch even though I know that's not right.

@Rob: Thanks for the link. Do you really think "if she is an inch" comes from an implicit sequence of having the objector agree that she is not one inch tall, not two inches, etc.?

@Kiam: Who is this Drupal? Something I missed?

Implicit, yes.

Drupal is a CMS; it's not a person. :-)

Drupal is a Javascript framework.

2:21 PM

Ah ok.

@Cerberus: drupal.org

@kiamlaluno is right. It's a CMS. I'm just thinking of it from the problems it causes with Javascript. :)

@Rob: But do you base that on your own intuition, or have you read that somewhere? I am not saying I don't believe it, but... I don't know.

@Cerberus: Who created it is from Belgium.

I don't know why he picked up a Dutch word for his first site, though.

@Kiam: Hey don't rub it in!

Uh But Drupal != druppel?

2:24 PM

@Cerberus — I've had to integrate things through Drupal before and I did not like it. Where I work now we use Liferay, another CMS, and I hate that one too. I hate all CMS solutions.

(It is still traumatic for us that we lost Belgium in the 1830 war.)

@Cerberus: Drupal has been chosen because druppel. In fact, the logo of Drupal is a water drop.

Hmm are all CMS so bad? A pity.

@Kiam Ah ok I see.

They're just clunky, IMO.

Dries first site was drop.org, but he meant to name it dorp.org.

2:26 PM

It puts a huge abstraction between the developer and the UI.

That is weird.

I mean, we can click a javascript bookmarklet and drag all buttons etc around, change the text, do other stuff, on an existing webpage in the browser, all in a very easy manner; so why can't CMSs do that?

They can do that. But the problems go deeper.

Hmm I have never worked with CMS I think.

I like to use jQuery and vanilla Javascript, plus clean HTML and well thought-out CSS.

I wonder how the chat knows that the messages to @Kiam are for me. :-)

2:29 PM

@Kia: It matches the letters after @ against your username according to some patterns.

I guess it knows it because I am the only user with a username starting with "kiam".

Right.

Probably a regular expression like /@kia\w*\b/gi

If we had Kiamlaluno and Kiamlaluna in this room, it would go to either one of you; but failing any usernames so similar it usually works.

If somebody else would use a username like "kiammami", the chat would be confused.

2:31 PM

Yeah something like that. There is a post about the matching patterns somewhere.

@Kia: Incidentally, what does your name mean and in what language?

My name?

Sorry (edited.)

It means "when the moon", in Esperanto.

I think I know what Robusto means.

Ah, Esperanto! I should have thought of that.

Robusto, not Robosto.

2:33 PM

Arg, my apologies again! That was a typo. I know your name comes from oak wood.

It comes from the phrase I use as signature on Drupal.org: kiam la luno renkontas la sun on (when the moon meets the sun).

That is also the phrase I use in my gravatar; the difference is that in the gravatar is written in Greek.

Are you a fan of Esperanto? I don't know much of it, and it always looks like some Carribean language to me.

Huh would Esperanto use Greek letters? Why?

@Cerberus: I started to study it, but then I stopped.

Ah I see.

Here's what your name makes me think of, @kia:

2:36 PM

I bought two books on Esperanto.

I thought the idea was that it would be a universal language for all; then why use different sets of letters? And how can Greek letters even represent all Latin letters?

@Robusto: I have been said that 4 times, now. :-)

Hahaha

Nice.

A universal language is a nice idea, but it will never happen by creating a synthetic language and waiting for people to adopt it.

2:38 PM

Yeah you're probably right.

If there were a need to communicate in Esperanto, people would learn it. But as there is no need, no one bothers.

Well, except for weirdo geeks like some people who shall remain nameless. :)

Actually, the lyrics says "when the moon meets your eyes". My phrase would mean more "when my eyes meet your eyes" (talking to a specific person).

Besides, one of the most fascinating and fulfilling aspects of language to me is its development, etymology, historical evolvement into current forms; Esperanto would basically cut that off.

Actually, there are 100 native speakers of Esperanto.

Aww that is pretty cute.

2:39 PM

@kiamlaluno — The reference is not accurate to six decimal places, but it is redolent of the Dean Martin image.

@Cerberus: Esperanto has its history too, as it changed from the times of "Doktoro Esperanto".

I think more people speak one of these vanishing languages from Papua-New Guinea or the Amazon rain forest or what have you.

(I hope Imani knows I don't refer to her as a generic person.)

@Kia: Yeah ok but... it is different. It is like flattening Rome, then building a new, very efficient city on top of the old rubble, and then these new buildings will eventually grow old too.

I mean, I can see that it is attractive in some ways. But in practice I wouldn't want everyone to drop their old languages and speak Esperanto.

@Cerberus: The purpose of Esperanto is not to replace all the languages.

2:44 PM

@Kia: Oh! Then it is supposed to be a secondary language? That's better.

I was wrong: native speakers are between 200 and 1000.

Hi F'x; I like your new name.

"The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Bialystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of language […]."

That is the explanation Zamehof gave for creating Esperanto.

Thank you, Doktoro Esperanto.

Esperanto means "who hopes".

2:49 PM

Ah interesting!

I suspected that his inspiration would have been something like that.

@Robusto great minds think alike. Or, as ze Schömans put it, zwei Idioten, ein Gedanke.

Feb 9 at 9:41, by RegDwight

Like a big pizza pie?

Hi, and who is this Schömans? I look him up...

Whoa! @RegDwight rises from his diurnal coffin to link one of his chat quotes.

Careful the sun don't hit ya.

Sure. I will rise from anything to quote myself!

Hey I made a funny mistake there: I omitted " 'll " because " 'll look" is basically a long l.

2:51 PM

Two idiots, one idea.

Or one thought.

Don't let the Sun go up on me!

Umm, I think your namesake inverts the action there ...

literally and figuratively.

Zat's ze schoke, d'oh!

Just seen that Scrubs re-run where Elliott is talking German. Well, in the German version, she talks Danish.

Same with Malcolm in the Middle.

I know dat vas da choke, but I hadda adda leetle more fo' ya!

Wadde hadde dudde da?

2:53 PM

Meh, does anyone know of a good place to find old books, besides Bookfinder.com?

Dem's oben.

@Cerberus — Yeah, my attic. /rim shot

Hehe.

Okay shall I forward the list to you?

Seriously, I have a whole library's worth of old books up there. I have no place to put them, and I keep buying them.

You could sell them on Ebay?

And what's your oldest book?

One of these days I should get the energy together and donate them to the library, but they'd probably just throw them away.

2:55 PM

Aww.

I have no idea. I'm not a book collector, just a reader.

Probably the sensible thing to do.

But I'm also a pack rat. I have trouble throwing anything away.

I lost an edition of a library book when my house burnt down that doesn't exist, if I may believe the Internets.

I know the feeling! Throwing things away sucks.

2:57 PM

Uhh, thanks for sharing @Reg.

Wow that clip is hot, especially the shoes.

God, I never should have clicked that link. There is no way I can unsee that now.

Well, 1.5 billion people saw that live.

Eurovision Song Contest.

Oh dear.

@RegDwight — No wonder our global situation is going to hell in a handbasket.

You can point to the cause.

2:59 PM

Ain't this a dupe, pipls?

6

Q: Is "since" a synonym of "because"?

A few years ago, I was told that "since" should only be used to designate a time period. For example: Since 2 o'clock, I've been waiting for you. However, since creeps into the place of "because" quite often. Since I don't have the time, I won't be joining you. This second example sou...

usage word-choice meaning

Wait, does the ESC really get viewed by 1.5 billion people? Weird.

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