English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@rest_day Eh... I voted to close it :P

The title needs to be worded to avoid the impression that it is asking about a sequence, but even the act of rewording it answers the question.

Oh, wait, I just realized that is the edited title...

Kit

@RegDwight By the way, I did this to show solidarity with you.

aedia

12:27 AM

@Robusto I have fixed my mobile view! I learned from this blog post that one need only append "/mobile/on" to the URL. Whoda thunk it.

@aedia — Grats. I actually saw the mobile stylesheet for the first time this evening on the way home. So I thought what I had before was the mobile, but it was actually the screen CSS.

trg787

tempfile.ru/download/b6f31b3941ba8c2d40ad269dc1f8706a hahahahahaha..................... 18-barking_dogs_vs_minimalists_laushie_sobaki_pro.mp3

So, have we applied the choke to EL&U.SE so that only four approved questions may be asked and answered within any 24-hour period? And those asking and answering must be doctoral candidates (at least — post-doc researchers preferred) in English?

Yep

rest_day

@Robusto what about people who have authored books referenced by the doctoral candidates?

12:35 AM

@MrHen — That is, like, the most egregious overstatement anyone has ever spoken or heard. Like, ever.

@rest_day — I dunno. Feels a little thin.

@Robusto Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

@MrHen — Now that is hyperbole. This aggression will not stand, man.

@MrHen — You mean coitus?

rest_day

Jim: (reading) ... the egregious Jim Hacker. (to Humphrey) What does egregious mean?
Sir Humphrey: Um, I think it means outstanding, in one way or another.
--- Yes Minister

@RegDwight — Here, this is for you:

As you can plainly see, Robusto > RegDwight. Like, it isn't even close. Flatliner.

@Robusto You're doing it wrong:

ngrams.googlelabs.com/…

Hm. I'm doing it wrong.

12:44 AM

— +1 for Yes Minister reference. But here:
**egregious** |iˈgrējəs|
*adjective*
1 outstandingly bad; shocking : egregious abuses of copyright.
2 archaic remarkably good.

@MrHen — Obviously. Here's what you really meant:

@Robusto Yeah. I done goofed it up. :(

But notice that rob comes out waaaaaay on top.

Stupid NGrams and their yellow-line bushwah.

@Robusto Yeah. Now I just have to figure out who Rob is.

It'll come to you.

I don't know. I am kind of stupid when I want to be.

12:49 AM

Well, I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of ass.

I have a feeling you'd do well at a quote trivia game

I do good at trivia, period. My mind collects useless information the way a blue-serge suit collects cat hair.

Also anagrams. Damn, I wish that skill was worth money. I can complete any Jumble™ puzzle in my head in under a minute.

I sort of do the collecting part; the recall part is what gives me trouble

@Robusto Ooh... I suck at those

I can look at a scrambled word and just see it. Like instantly. I don't know why.

That's pretty cool, though

So you kick ass at Scrabble?

12:55 AM

I do all right, unless I'm playing people who have memorized the Scrabble™ dictionary. There are sooo many words that are just freakin' made up, and if you don't know them you can't win.

I kill at Boggle, though.

Yeah, that's true. I used to have most of the 2-letter list memorized and that alone won me most of the casual games I played

@Robusto Heh, I do okay there because I am good at searching. The order isn't messed up so I can find things.

And I was the world champion at TextTwist back when I and others had these prehistoric devices known as PDAs.

Haha, PDAs.

Seriously, I started a game and I couldn't lose. So I looked up on the Web what was the high score at the time, and it was like 12 million, so I ran my score up to 12.1 million and never played again.

Nice

12:57 AM

It took days.

I suppose that officially qualifies for the Useless Super Powers category

Totally. Right up there with my "highest rep score evah on EL&U.SE" ... an ersatz achievement if I do say so myself.

But ... soon to be even shinier.

Yeah. I remember someone coming in here talking about catching you and I was all like... do you understand how this works?

Now, of course, I could just show him the yellow line.

Yup.

Actually, I am very close to retiring from active competition. So there's hope for everyone else.

Mmm... one sec, I think someone just started up the DVD I had paused and now I am losing my place

I was right. :P

1:05 AM

@RegDwight, @Kosmonaut, @nohat, @Dori, @Rebecca: So ... are we answering Yoichi Oishi's questions anymore or not? Which side of the line are those on?

I mean, seriously, are we going to tell him "Sorry, but your questions are rubbish because you are not a native speaker and you don't understand the subtleties of English that we all take for granted"?

@Robusto Well, you certainly wouldn't word it that way

@MrHen — No, but however you word it, that is how it will be understood.

@Robusto I don't agree with that.

See the aforementioned comment about hyperbole.

Martha

@Robusto Have I pointed you at wordsplay.net yet?

And here's another data point: if we lose Yoichi-san, I'm not going to stick around. I like the old guy.

1:09 AM

@Robusto You sticking around or leaving because of someone else's involvement is your fault, not EL&U's

hey gaiz

@MrHen — It is what it is.

Trying to hold a site hostage by threatening to leave isn't productive.

anyone wanna fill me in real quick on the past several hours until i have time to read the log

?

@JSBangs Hello.

1:10 AM

I'm not trying to hold a site hostage. I'm just stating a fact.

Mmm... Kosmonaut is still considering leaving

i left shortly after Dori entered

Seriously, nobody cares if I leave. Or if they do they'll get over it in about 15 minutes. This is teh Internetz.

Dori and Rebecca didn't really address Jeff's actions directly but tended to agree with the ELU reaction

@Robusto But the yellow line! What will happen to the line?!

@Robusto that's not going to alert anyone if you don't include spaces...treats those as one long nothingness.

1:11 AM

Oh, here is one of them

Feel free to correct me or add something @RebeccaChernoff

Kosmonaut is considering leaving because of legitimate concerns. He is not trying to hold the site hostage.

@Robusto I was responding to JSBang's query for a summary, not the hostage thing

I think both Dori and Rebecca maintained that some improves could (or should?) be made to the quality of ELU questions as a whole

@RebeccaChernoff — Ah, any chance you can edit in some spaces for me? It's too late for me to do it myself.

And... I think that more or less went in circles after that

@Robusto sure

1:12 AM

ok, then. that'll suffice for now until i have time to read the whole thing

Too long at the NGram viewer, where spaces are edited out.

A few minor points about mod flags; some talk about mod chat

i haven't gotten any actual response to the email yet, which sort of relieves me, actually

i'm glad to see we haven't actually burned the place down, though

I doubt if you will get any. I think it will be left to the minions to deal with.

Q: Why do people say "break a leg" to actors?

Okay, so as long as we're all peeving, allow me to get annoyed by this:

0

Frequently, before going on stage, someone will say "break a leg" to an actor, which is a peculiar acting saying meaning "good luck!" How did this expression come about?

etymology idioms

Seriously?

1:15 AM

The truth? I have no idea now what constitutes a legitimate question on EL&U. None whatsoever.

2

So, this is the user you want me to look at? Care to fill me in or am I starting from scratch here? (;

Q: Are we not doing a good job in closing questions that should not suit EL&U?

Also, there is a relevant meta question up regarding the whole thing:

11

In the past days, a question has been deleted by a diamond user (not one of our moderators), and some questions have been closed as off-topic because of something that was added to the FAQ (again, not by our moderators). Does that mean we are not doing a good job in closing questions that do not...

discussion vote-to-close

@RebeccaChernoff Are you referring to Robusto's earlier comment?

The user has come up in chat a few times

@RebeccaChernoff yoichi's question are almost all some variant of "explain to me this paragraph of english text"

The questions are usually well voted and received and they are worded and presented nicely

we basically invented meaning-in-context for him

1:16 AM

But JSBangs is right

@RebeccaChernoff — That is the user I'm talking about. I do not wish to see him go. He's a 78-year-old Japanese man learning English. He lived through the firebombing of Tokyo when he was 13 and he pops in to ask us smart people what this or that odd expression means from time to time.

They are all of the same basic form

If we can't answer his questions, then what kind of people are we really?

@Robusto So... the relevant part to ELU is the "pops in to ask what this or that odd expression means" part

Is he asking high quality questions that fit the scope of the site? Are his questions receiving high quality answers?

1:17 AM

@MrHen Allow me a little leeway in stating my case.

@Robusto Sure. Sorry.

(I'm not familiar with the user, so I'm trying to understand the context in having me look at the user...that's all.)

@RebeccaChernoff — I have no frickin' clue what you all mean by "high quality questions" now. Seriously. Not after today.

@RebeccaChernoff his questions are basic but don't otherwise violate our standards regarding form, objectivity, and indicating a little bit of effort on his part before asking. he gets uniformly good answers

@Robusto questions that make the internet better.

1:19 AM

@RebeccaChernoff — Oh fer chrissakes! Really? You're going with that answer?

lol

sorry q:

@RebeccaChernoff it's unlikely that very many people will land on a yoichi question by googling. however, any beginner to intermediat non-native speaker running across one of them is likely to learn something

Q: When can two questions be in the same question?

3

What do “socially imposed judgments” and “Keyboard, face, keyboard, face.” mean? The differing opinion here seems to revolve around the idea that the two questions are coming from the same source. The asker didn't know what two phrases meant and decided to ask us. Should EL&U enforce a one ...

discussion appropriate-questions questions

There is a meta topic on one of his questions

I am trying to find other info; let me know if this isn't helping :)

@JSBangs learning sounds like the right track.

@MrHen reading...

Q: What is an English counterpart to the Japanese signal word, “Dokkoisho” uttered unconsciously in such case as sitting down on the bench?

this IMHO is an excellent question

21

When you get old, it becomes tough to move your body. We Japanese, particularly old people and the middle-aged use to utter a signal word or interjection, “Dokkoisho” when we sit down on the chair, bench or stone on the roadside and when holding up a bulky and heavy thing like heavy luggage. It s...

single-word-requests idioms onomatopoeia

and it got very interesting answers

the sort of thing it would be hard for a non-native to ever find out otherwise

1:21 AM

@JSBangs — And look, he even gave 3I a courtesy vote out of politeness.

Q: What does “She was young and blithe, 22 going on 16” mean?

most of his questions are more like this, though:

10

I found the phrase ““She was young and blithe, 22 going on 16” in the article of the Time magazine (July 6 issue) dealing with the Casey Anthony Verdict, under the title, “The Casey Anthony Verdict The Jury Did the Right Thing.” I know Casey Anthony was 22 when her 2-years old daughter was kille...

phrases

Q: What do “The great whatever this is,” “It can’t double dip if it never comes back up.”mean?

Here is another example of a double question:

7

The surreal world in the New York Times article depicted by a seasoned editor at Harper’s Magazine who was laid off recently and experiencing bitter world, under the title, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Unemployment’ was entertaining as well as relevant to me. However I can’t understand phrases, “The g...

catch-phrases

I think that is a legitimate question.

So... the reason the name comes up a lot is because he walks an interesting line between the differing opinions on things

Some questions are universally accepted

Some are of great debate

Some... just go unnoticed

I think we can suffer a few (to us) foolish questions. Where I would draw the line is on questions that are deliberately arch and provocative.

1:25 AM

@Robusto Arch?

arch 2
adjective
an arch grin: mischievous, teasing, saucy, knowing, playful, roguish, impish, cheeky, tongue-in-cheek.

GenRef, @MrHen. GenRef.

@Robusto I thought you were my dictionary... :(

(At least I looked up the pronunciation myself ;)

@MrHen — I think you mean Webster:

Emmanuel Lewis

Emmanuel Lewis (born March 9, 1971) is an American actor, best known for playing the title character in the 1980s television sitcom Webster. He is tall. Lewis graduated from Midwood High School in 1989 and then Clark Atlanta University in 1997. He is often compared to the late Gary Coleman, star of Diff'rent Strokes. Early life Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York. His mother, Margaret Lewis, was a computer programmer. Career When Diff'rent Strokes became a hit on NBC with Gary Coleman in the starring role, ABC tried, with some success, to duplicate that show's formula ...

also, as a smaller community with < 10K questions, we can afford to be a little more lenient than a metropolis like SO with > 1M questions

since it's still possible for the mods to personally look at every single question

i myself look at close to 75% of all questions

Yeah. SO has to be the Augean Stables for mods.

1:29 AM

While I don't disagree, it is different to be lenient out of not wanting to make a decision and being lenient because we want to be nice

@MrHen — Where you say "nice" I would say "welcoming" — and I think we should err on the side of welcoming unless someone takes advantage of us.

@MrHen i don't think either of those describes our leniency, though. we ruthlessly close questions that actually are off-topic, gen ref, etc. but we're willing to take a more forgiving view of what counts as on-topic than some other sites

@Martha: A belated thanks for the WordsPlay link.

@Robusto Yeah, sure. "Welcoming" works in there. I don't have a problem with nice or welcoming. My point was that being leniency for those reasons is fine; being lenient because we don't want to define our own definitions of good/bad questions is not fine.

@MrHen well, i agree with that

1:31 AM

@MrHen Seems like this is what voting is for, is it not?

until very recently i didn't think that our close reasons were poorly defined

@JSBangs Sure. I can understand that, too.

it only became an issue because Jeff decreed that the guidelines should be interpreted in a different way than the community had been applying them up until now

If there is a question that is a bit poor, and you think you can improve it, use the edit button.

@RebeccaChernoff — Word. And if we get too doctrinaire about our definitions we will stop looking at the questions qua questions and start looking at them as fodder for our dogmatic checklist.

1:33 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Right, but when the same user keeps being the focal point we start referring to questions of a particular type as "Yoichi" questions.

@RebeccaChernoff To be clear, I have nothing against Yoichi or his questions

@Robusto I'm not sure I understood a word of this, heh. |:

I didn't particularly care for the double-question questions so I asked meta to get clarity about what I should do.

@RebeccaChernoff — Maybe you don't belong on this site then. :P

Keep in mind what the faq says: english.stackexchange.com/faq#questions

@RebeccaChernoff maybe you should ask a question on EL&U. be sure to include meaning-in-context

1:35 AM

@RebeccaChernoff I interpreted it as, "If we start analyzing the questions to see if they fit we stop looking at the questions for the reasons we started the site in the first place."

Oh I certainly don't! I am by no means a linguist, etymologist, or serious language enthusiast. q:

(Correct me if I am wrong, @Robusto)

@MrHen — Are you really replying to my arch comment to @Rebecca?

@Robusto Apparently so.

;)

I'm so confused now. ):

1:36 AM

Hey, I have time to kill while I wait for the pizza to arrive

Martha

@RebeccaChernoff That's ok, so am I, and I practically live here.

QUESTIONS WE CAN ASK HERE INCLUDE: "Problems encountered by people learning English."

@RebeccaChernoff By the topic or the words?

The faq seems a bit contradictory, honestly. |:

Is a linguist interested in ESL questions?

just shooting out thoughts here...

Martha

Depends on the linguist.

1:37 AM

@RebeccaChernoff "Linguist" seems more of an archaic target, nowadays

@RebeccaChernoff ESL questions are occasionally extremely interesting

@RebeccaChernoff No, it's brilliant - see, I'm not an expert, nor am I learning English, so I'm excluded from the site. You gotta either be really good, or really bad to play.

I think a question on ESL is obviously off-topic

What, pray tell, is "a question on ESL"? Please ask one so that I may see.

the problem with linguisticky questions is that if they get too advanced they also become off-topic, candidates for migration to the eventual linguistics.se

1:38 AM

"Spelling and punctuation" is still in the FAQ but I don't think we want spelling questions anymore

> linguisticky

tell me this is in a dictionary

please

q:

Q: where I can improve my gramatical skill?

0

I am very bad at English Grammer! Because it is my second language and in School i was not a attentive student. Now, I want to improve my gramatical skill. How and where i can get some instruction to improve my gramatical skill? Mr.Moderator plz don't close this topic or close after some valua...

resources

I meant those types of questions

@RebeccaChernoff — Linguisticky is what your tongue becomes when you lick a frozen flagpole.

hahaha

@Robusto I was suspecting something involving noodles

1:40 AM

@MrHen — This is totally covered as a DON'T ASK question in the faq: "How to improve my English"

@MrHen er, but this is off-topic as a resource request, as per the FAQ

jinx

Bah! Here's your damn Coke.

Really, at this point, it may be good to just ask the community to rethink who our target is.

3 mins ago, by MrHen

I think a question on ESL is obviously off-topic

here's a very good ESL question

4

Q: Pronouncing W vs. V

This something may be innately obvious to native speakers; however, to many outsiders, the difference is elusive. I only recently realized the difference and still have a hard time to distinguishing them. Please explain how to pronounce these two letters correctly, specifically lip/tongue movemen...

pronunciation

So how do you differentiate between "How to improve my English" and "Problems encountered by people learning English"?

1:42 AM

@Dori A lot can be said about the approach taken in the asking. But that isn't really an actual answer to your question.

I think that that may be the crux of the issue

@Dori i think we mostly just want to exclude requests for resources

the one MrHen posted was clearly off-topic, since it was a generic "how do i lrn kthx"

@JSBangs Honestly, though, ESL is completely irrelevant. A question about English may arise due to an ESL perspective but the question itself is still about English, not English as a second language

And here's another thing. We have been talking about questions exclusively. But how about people who come in here and give craptastic answers time after time?

@MrHen tru dat

1:44 AM

@Robusto Or comments. I haven't seen anyone else bring up some of the bad, bad comment behavior that can be found.

I think a lot of it can be resolved via flagging but I suspect that much of the ELU user base isn't too familiar with the SE software

So... they don't actually know what the appropriate response is to bad content

Bad answers should be deleted. Bad comments should be deleted.

And the FAQ doesn't teach them that

@Dori the key as i see it is specificity. if you ask "i'm a native speaker and I don't understand when I should say X as opposed to Y", that's very much on-topic. we get a lot of those kinds of questions and i don't want them to go away

I think comments are to the right of the decimal point. Rounding gets rid of them. What concerns me more is the answer to a question.

@Dori I guess the topic is, "What is bad?"

1:46 AM

I am all at sea now.

@Robusto Eh. Sure, I can go with that.

@Dori In other words, it is easy to say, "Delete bad stuffs." But... it isn't fun trying to get bad stuff deleted and having the community respond by saying, "Be nice to people!"

We have zero consistency in our approach right now. It is no better than random.

I have no problem with deleting crap. But people get bent about it and no one wants to step on toes.

delete gently, tenderly, with love

@Dori wouldn't it suffice to start with "bad answers should be downvoted"?

1:49 AM

@MrHen I've heard a number of comments today along the lines of "yes, I know we have a problem" "yeah, we need to do some cleanup," etc.

@Dori I think the "core users" agree with this.

@JSBangs That doesn't happen now you mean?

So if the consensus is that there is something identifiable, then it comes down to the community identifying it.

@Shog9 No. Our community just upvotes things that they think are funny or have references to things they like.

@JSBangs How bad? If it's really bad then deletion is too good for it.

Q: Adorable adjectives for referring to a (beloved) person

1:50 AM

Case in point: This question and answer:

1

I would like to know some adjectives to refer to a person, possibly a partner. Some of them are well known, such as my love sweetheart honey etc.. Beside the classic ones, I wondered if anyone knows some that are less often used, or that are particularly funny/cute. I heard, for example, b...

adjectives synonyms greetings phrasal-adjectives

Right before our very eyes.

@Dori Sure. I would agree with that.

@MrHen Your community sounds like a warm fuzzy afghan

@Shog9 Yeah, which is great if you want a warm, fuzzy afghan.

Any question that can be answered with "I looked in a thesaurus and found…" is a bad question.

But, then again, I only really know SE through ELU

So... it is possible this is just a universal thing.

1:52 AM

I mean, there should be a stipulation in the faq that questions and answer that set off your gag reflex should be excluded.

@Robusto This is a good example. It has been up for minutes and already has an upvote.

I would personally kill both question and answers with fire.

@Robusto Hmm... so ungood avatars make everything off-topic?

@MrHen it has an upvote... and two close-votes

three

1:53 AM

"+1 for being so mushy-cute – simchona 7 mins ago"

Exactly the problem

I suspect simchona of being another one of Mr. Pork's sock puppets.

@JSBangs Well, sure. But nearly everything on this site can get upvoted.

regarding bad questions and bad answers both: downvote. flag if appropriate. there are mechanisms in the site that if someone is consistently getting downvoted, flagged, posts closed or deleted, the site will block them from asking. or answering, if it is on answers.

@Robusto Was the puppetry ever confirmed?

@MrHen this is true. is there a solution to this?

1:54 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Yeah, I do. And then people whine about ELU getting not nice.

@MrHen — No idea.

one thing i've noticed: downvotes attract more downvotes. so if we had a core of people committed to downvoting the noise, it would catch on

The issue isn't solvable by just voting

Use your flags, use your votes, show the community.

@Robusto Three users were merged into him.

1:55 AM

(IMO)

let me grab a link...it isn't just about being mean, but lemme find this link.

english.stackexchange.com/users/flag-weight/6006

13 hours ago, by Robusto

@MrDisappointment — Yes. I think his "accepted" rate is, like, six standard deviations from the mean. That's more than a little suspicious to me.

My last four flags were disputed

@RebeccaChernoff Flags and close votes are always appropriate if you think the post shouldn't be on the site.

1:56 AM

@Dori — And that is the only consequence of gaming the system here? I would have thought banning would be in order for that kind of shenanigans.

The issue is that I am not a person of authority on ELU so I am not going to buck the whole community

I post something on Meta and ask what people think

You can correct new users and still be nice about it: rallydev.com/agileblog/2011/06/life-in-the-stackexchange-lane

They tell me the answer

Now what?

@Robusto I think so too, but that's part of why I'm trying to get your mods to be more pro-active.

@Robusto Especially for a 10k+ user

1:57 AM

a thought: we have have grown to the point where we need to be "meaner", just like SO got a lot more strict about its policies after its first few months. even though i was one of the ones who called for leniency, i'm willing to accept that the time for leniency has passed if that's really the case

being strict about quality doesn't mean you have to be mean.

73 moderator attention flags
31 deemed valid
3 deemed invalid
4 disputed (do not affect your flag weight)

@RebeccaChernoff that's why i put "mean" in scare quotes

and being nice doesn't mean you have to let crap collect

I mean, I can flag the hell out of things. I am good at that. But I don't get the vibe that this is what the people who actually use the site want.