English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2012-10-24 (page 1 of 5)

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12:35 AM

@Cerberus yes, really. on reflection, it could be just bias. In some sense, I bet as a class they're pretty comparable. Different kinds of crap sold in the convenience store. Dodgy bathroom facilities (sometimes clean, sometime not), dodgy people (families on car trips, grungy loners), etc. See? We're all alike in our own different way. I bet you don't get Slim Jim in Europe.

12:47 AM

SNAP INTO IT!

1:01 AM

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@Cerberus: Here's the Greek I wanted you to translate.

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And here's the sumptuous train station I was telling you about.

@Robusto Ugh. :-)

@Robusto Good god, can you make that any bigger?

0

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2012

Anybody feel like giving me a little love?

@MετάEd Just click on it. It gets bigger. That's just the size of picture my smart phone takes.

Or doing something better than this one?

@Robusto I did. It got bigger. Much bigger. I was employing irony.

1:12 AM

@MετάEd Good. Irony can use the work in this post-ironic world we live in.

@KitFox If by that you mean upvotes, there ya go.

Thank you, kind sir.

@Robusto The little people will be happy to know we live in a post-ironic world.

I am happy about that.

@MετάEd You mean hobbits?

Where is @Cerberus? Here, doggy, doggy!

1:54 AM

@Robusto Fairies. Irony kills them.

How ironic.

2:05 AM

@Robusto It’s a dedication.

@Robusto Για την Ελένη, την Κλειώ, τη Λιλή, και φυσικά, τον Σταύρο.

Helen and Cleo and Lily. You can see that yourself.

It’s the very end that’s the interesting part.

@RegDwighт Showing that sometimes less is more.

3:09 AM

@Robusto Hmm that's New Greek.

What is this for/about?

I don't know whether Stauro is supposed to be the Cross or a person by that name.

I have no idea what this is about.

3:57 AM

Oct 19 at 9:55, by Aphex5

It was used in a song title, mostly it was just the sounds of a jungle at night IIRC

Oct 19 at 9:30, by Aphex5

Anyone know a word like warringal or warragal as in "warringal night"?

I wasn't making it up! The song is "Warrigal Night" by Chris Watson. allmusic.com/song/warrigal-night-mt0034669680

4:51 AM

Hey!

Does anybody any metalanguage to describe syllable replacment with numbers/letters in a word? Eg: l8 for 'late'

5:38 AM

Rebus?

6:34 AM

Hmmmm, I don't believe so.

I mean specifically words using homophonic alphanumeric substitutions.maybe I'll just refer to them as such :)

good morning, everyone

2 hours later…

Matt Эллен

8:44 AM

I'm here at the moment.

8:56 AM

0

Q: "Neither of you understands him as I do"

Neither of you understands him as I do Neither of you (more than one) is plural. Why does it say understands instead of understand? It was taken from Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows. Conversation between Voldemort and Severus. When Voldemort says "neither of you" he means Severus and Lucius. ...

Poor Barrie is fighting an uphill battle here.

Lend him a hand.

Matt Эллен

Is an upvote sufficient?

and a downvote to caffeine

bbl meeting.

CU

9:30 AM

Haha, just re-discovered this gem.

Should go straight to the 10k-user-welcome-basket.

10:01 AM

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This is strange. A serial upvoter of everything at 9 or 24?

Matt Эллен

I've answered a Nortonn S question? sad panda

@RegDwighт curious indeed.

user19161

10:20 AM

@RegDwighт Let me divine who it is.

user19161

I checked the usual two suspects. It is not them.

A man whose identity is unknown.

is the pseudonym adopted by a man who has dissociative amnesia. He was discovered unconscious on August 31, 2004, in Richmond Hill, Georgia and is believed to be about 60 years old. He had been unable to obtain employment without a Social Security number. He is the only American citizen officially listed as missing despite his whereabouts being known. Discovery Around 6:00 AM EST on August 31, 2004, a man now living under the name Benjaman Kyle was discovered behind a Burger King at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Highway 17 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He was found by the managers ...

user19161

Hmm, I did not get any upvotes.

user19161

Maybe because all have been upvoted already!

user19161

Also, now that I have 23k on ELU, I may retire! Yay!

Matt Эллен

10:25 AM

you've got over 23K. you'll have to continue to 25K

someone upvoted the nortonn S question, but neither of the answers

how odd

10:43 AM

@Cerberus That’s why I said it was interesting.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus Google translate suggests Stavros

that's a name I know from Mostly Harmless

@MattЭллен My friends have a black cat named Stavros; he’s giant and affectionate.

@RegDwighт I doubt that the scripts will "catch" that one, nor, perhaps, that they should.

@tchrist "For Helen, Cleo, the Lily, and of course, Stavros" is how Google Translate renders it.

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@Robusto Why do you get a different answer than I do?

The "the" in front of Lily doesn’t count. Mediterranean languages sometimes use definite articles for people.

Matt Эллен

is there some randomitude to Google Translate?

10:54 AM

The question is what about the last one. The capitalization suggests a person.

Or at least, a personification.

@MattЭллен Maybe someone suggested a better solution and it "learned"?

I dunno. It is rather odd.

Matt Эллен

perhaps.

Where’s my von Neumann quote?

Matt Эллен

I get "the cross" now, too. Before I got Stavros.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. —John von Neumann (1951)

Portuguese uses definite articles in front of people’s names all the time; Spanish does so, at least in Spain, fairly frequently in the colloquial register. It’s suspected that this comes from Latin when they were actually demonstratives not articles. (ille/illa/illum).

¿Dónde está la María? should be translated into “Where is that Maria?".

Well, with a capital. Lowercase maría would be looking for their stash. :)

(Because maría is slang for pot.)

Or can be.

Matt Эллен

(aye, we got it, like mary (jane))

11:01 AM

There are so many slang words for that hold herb.

adds h’s to keep Matt appy

Colorado has begun voting on legalization. Results in a few weeks. The measure calls it both marijuana and marihuana, and also hemp.

Matt Эллен

:D

@RegDwighт How many of those are we going to endure before we start closing them as dupes? Or tagging with neither-is, neither-either, or-nor, or some such tag?

May 5 '11 at 16:11, by RegDwight

@Vitaly In German, you would be der Vitaly in many situations and dialects.

May 5 '11 at 16:12, by RegDwight

Except in the North, where a proper name prefixed with the definite article would indicate that you're a dog or a cow or something.

@tchrist Right. Well. I'm not seeing votes to close!

Does homage rhyme with rummage? I thought it did, but I’ve been hearing homage show up as though it were French lately, more like mirage.

Homage never had stress anywhere but on the last syllable for me.

Matt Эллен

11:11 AM

I think it depends a lot on who is saying it and how. "Pay hommidge to" vs "an ommaaj to" is a distinction I think I've heard.

I only recently learned of the rummage-rhyme. In high-school plays the word came up, and we were told to give it the omaaj pronunciation.

@MattЭллен I could buy that.

Reminds me of when I heard a friend say paean. I asked him if he was sure that’s how to say it in English. He said how should I know, it’s Greek.

pie-in or pee-in.

There’s a bit of semantic crosstalk if you go for peein’. Risky.

We need more ornery questions.

Matt Эллен

Oxford dictionaries says /ˈpiːən/

@tchrist what do you mean by ornery?

Yes, exactly. It’s the Anglo-Classical pronunciation, where ae goes to i: not to ai. It just sounds a bit yellow.

@MattЭллен or-nor -y.

Matt Эллен

oh :D

On QI the other day, Stephen Fry said antennae with an ai at the end, the way I do. I felt vindicated. :)

Most people say antenny.

Matt Эллен

11:19 AM

He is quite the reference these day! I remember invoking his name a while back in some argument.

Do you listen to his radio program?

It can be good.

Matt Эллен

I haven't. I didn't realise he had one!

Fry’s English Delight

It’s on Radio 4.

You can find it on the web, too. At least for a while.

Matt Эллен

it's been knocked off the iplayer. I'll have to wait for the repeats. I did actually listen to The Story of X, back in September. I remember now

@RegDwighт That reminds me, a book of mine translated into German was confronted with methods getting overridden in derived classes. But they used überschrieben instead of übergehen or such, almost as though it were an eggcorn. I questioned the translator, and he said it wound up meaning the same thing in this instance.

11:26 AM

Not sure I'm following.

Americans pronounce overwritten and overridden the same.

He translated overridden in English to overwritten in German.

Überschreiben means "to overwrite". Most literally, actually. Übergeben means "to pass over", "to hand over"; literally "to overgive". (Reflexively, "to puke".)

He felt that override doesn’t mean anything else that overwrite in this case.

I didn’t argue; I reflected.

No native speaker was ever able to explain to me the difference between "override" and "overwrite" in English.

Everyone and his dog uses them interchangeably.

I only use overwrite. Never need override, and it's hideous anyway.

Overwrite is literal writing. Override means supersede.

11:29 AM

Yeah go argue that with Reddit. I'll wait.

Matt Эллен

override is what you do to someone in power. overwrite is what you do to memory or writing

Exactly.

You override a veto.

@MattЭллен precisely. Which is why I never use override, and always overwrite.

You ride over it.

Matt Эллен

@RegDwighт in programming?

11:30 AM

Of course in programming.

Matt Эллен

of course of course

Certainly not in piano playing.

One speaks of congressional overrides of a presidential veto.

Matt Эллен

@RegDwighт maybe you're a dictator

An override is a noun. There is no corresponding overwrite noun, though.

Matt Эллен

11:31 AM

@RegDwighт well, I can see why that makes sense. I don't know who coined override in programming

At least, not recognized as such.

@tchrist that's a sort of a fixed phrase. As in, if people don't use congressional overwrites, that's by accident, and not because they use their brain.

Matt Эллен

bbl lunches

@RegDwighт You aren’t allowed to use brain and congressional in the same sentence.

Stupid engine won't let me create simple-past-as-past-participle.

Had to go with sp-as-pp instead. Analyze that.

11:34 AM

I saw that.

Spazzy thing.

There should be a one-word name for that anyway.

It's a common feature of enough dialects.

Shakespeare was much less picky about such things than modern copyeditors are.

Things like “he got bit by a dog” are pretty commonly heard in children and other ununiversitied folk.

Good morning.

So this

1

Q: How to write the IPA in Gregg Shorthand?

I've found a way several descriptive images of the various ways to write all of the sounds of the English Roman Alphabet in Gregg Shorthand, but what I have not been able to find is a way to write all of the sounds of American English in Gregg shorthand; therefore, I'm seeking a list or a person ...

Good morning, eventually.

Has no definitive answer.

Is this on-topic? I want to edit it to make it more specific for his needs if it is.

11:37 AM

I think he is seeking an authoritative source, not someone here’s invention.

He is looking for a few very specific phonemes, or whatever you call IPA letters. Sounds.

He just needs the English phoneme set. Posting the whole IPA chart misleads.

Right. But he's included the specific sounds he is looking for.

Oh.

He probably needs the diaphonemes from here:

International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects

This concise chart shows the most common applications of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent English language pronunciations. See Pronunciation respelling for English for phonetic transcriptions used in different dictionaries. *AuE = Australian English *CaE = Canadian English *GA = General American *IrE = Irish and Northern Irish English *NZE = New Zealand English *RP = Received Pronunciation (Standard in Great Britain) *ScE = Scottish English *SAE = South African English *SSE = Standard Singapore English *WaE = Welsh English Chart :Note: An image of the c...

I want to make that clearer, but not if the question is not on-topic.

11:39 AM

It’s offtopic if it is bikeshedding.

I don't think it is.

Bikeshedding, I mean.

Right.

I didn’t vote to close.

But I don't know how shorthand works.

Few there are now who do.

@Reg, what is your thought on migration? I don't think Linguistics would have any better ideas. I could go ask though.

11:40 AM

They wanted Mom to study it in high school, but she said she wanted to be scientist not a secretary.

I think I have my grandmother’s shorthand book.

@KitFox no idea. JSB or nohat are better qualified to make heads or tails of it.

I'm going to edit it then, and see what happens.

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I dunno. Code points?

Brownian motion?

There. Done. Coffee time.

12:03 PM

@tchrist I wish I'd learned shorthand. It would have made taking notes in college so much faster. And I might have actually been able to read them. On the other hand, when I take notes I tend not to think about what is being said, which militates against any real understanding of the subject being discussed.

@Robusto I’ve indeed had all those same thoughts before. I still have to work ridiculously hard if I expect any handwritten notes to be legible afterwards. It’s so annoying.

The problem is I have to think about each letterform, which means I cannot think about what is being said.

Good handwriting can become automatic. But for me, it never did, so requires conscious effort not to be good, but merely tolerable.

0

Q: Should the word "commission" be used in singular or plural in these cases?

I don't know what would be grammatically correct, commission or commissions, in the following sentences: We will pay you commission(s) for each client you refer to us. You can track your commission(s) earned via... Payment of commission(s) will be made at the request...

grammaticality nouns grammatical-number

Surely this is just the plural-complement question we've heard lo these many years now.

We will pay you a nickel for each squirrel tail you turn in. vs We will pay you some nickels for each squirrel tail you turn in.

If it’s a nickel a pop, it’s singular. It distributes.

"For each" means 1:1.

I hate that they pretend this is a "grammatically correct" thing.

It isn’t.

One is paid commission, not commissions.

It’s not grammar, it’s usage.

True. It all depends on meaning. One could conceivably be paid multiple commissions for a single sale.

Commissions are things that commissioners are encharged with fulfilling.

Commission pay is a mass noun, not a count noun.

@Robusto Possibly.

That danged absentee instructor question has been supercollided.

I found another curious possessive: “Whose car is that parked in front of our driveway? I think it’s someone here’s.”

I mean, it isn’t especially curious per se. Just another example of how the apostrophe-s goes at the end.

12:37 PM

The absent teacher is on the multicollider, people throw any pasta they can find at the nearest wall they see, comments asking for clarification, answers starting with "not sure what you mean", and the OP has gone missing in action. Classic.

Absent teacher?

3

Q: What is a nice word to describe someone who is never where they should be?

I had a math teacher in grades four through seven who was never in class. What’s a nice word to describe his lack of presence?

single-word-requests

Huh. I don't see that on the MC.

Because I shot it down.

You're funny.

Luckily I haz cache.

user image

To be fair, I'm afraid to so much as click on the other questions, that's how bad they sound.

The programmers.se question is also lame.

jinx

Is the MC doing more harm than good?

12:45 PM

user image

@tchrist Is it doing good?

@tchrist A little late to the party there.

@RegDwighт Oh I suppose I should have looked at it first.

4

Q: Should EL&U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?

A big issue seems to be that, owing to the nature of the kinds of questions that get asked on EL&U, questions that may be interpreted as 'unprofessional' or 'embarrassing' may appear as 'hot questions' on the StackExchange multicollider (dropdown in the top-left corner of the screen), as well...

Moi, je n’en ai pas.

Feb 23 at 16:20, by RegDwight Ѭſ道

N'oubliette jamais, I heard my mother say.

Reg. Please come to the lounge and talk to me and Alenanno.

Thank you.

12:53 PM

"That's not bad" is an example of litotes. But what is "That's not half bad"? A subverted litotes? An amplified litotes? Augmented understatement?

A euphemism?

It's still a litotes, too.

Litotes with tapinosis?

Tap in whose noses?

Tapinosis. "Giving a name to something which diminishes it in importance." Kind of like meiosis.

I know that. I never got the distinction. In fact, @Kit keeps torturing me with meiosis on any and all occasions.

12:57 PM

Without meiosis, human reproduction would not be possible.

Not my fault I have super gametes.

That's what I say, but then she says it's the other way round.

@KitFox Hmm, nice gams.

Thanks. I just had them buffed.

No gaming this chat.

12:59 PM

I always have room in my heart for fluffy owls. Don't you worry, pretty bird.

I think I'm going to stick with litotes + tapinosis. But the effect of adding the "half" may be to subvert or augment. "That's not half bad" could be said approvingly or disapprovingly, I think.

For some, the tapinosis is half full. For others, the meiosis is half empty.

Yawn.

L'après-midi d'un yawn?

Hmm, my new keyboard has a gamma where the R should be. But it still types an R.

1:01 PM

Gramma?

Granma.

I see. You've arrived at that part of your life where you buy granma keyboards. Mine is by Porsche.

Porky&Bess is such a classic.

@RegDwighт That must be very loud.

Commute.

Ah, I found another galore adjective: proper.

I spent 1:40 and 1:25 on the f'ing commute yester. I’ll be damned if I’m driving in to work again today.

user19161

1:40 PM

@RegDwighт My keyboard is free. I win.

Keyboards who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Freeballing isn't free.

Matt Эллен

Cos I'm Freeeee
Free ballin

user19161

What are you talking about?

@JasperLoy Earworm.

user19161

1:53 PM

@RegDwighт That is why a man must be true to himself.

Matt Эллен

free falling can kill

No it can’t.

It’s the stopping that kills.

Matt Эллен

Stopping free falling can kill

user19161

Free falling can kill too if you fall from too high a place.

No, Jasper.

user19161

1:54 PM

If one drops from a million storey building, for example.

What, of hunger?

user19161

Hmm, actually, I am not sure.

Matt Эллен

yeah, if I were naked at 75km up I would probably suffocate

@tchrist people will also say they are afraid to fly. When in reality they are afraid to crash.

People will also say that AIDS is lethal. When in reality not a single person has ever died of AIDS.

@MattЭллен If you were naked at 14 kilofeet, you would probably freeze to death.

user19161

1:55 PM

@RegDwighт Really?

@RegDwighт Small solace, that.

Matt Эллен

and noöne is warned about the deadliness of air, when most people who have breathed it have died

@JasperLoy this has been discussed in this room before, and I think you were around.

AIDS weakens your immune system to the point that you can die of a sneeze, but you still die of the sneeze, you do not die of AIDS. If you do not sneeze, you do not die.

user19161

@RegDwighт Ah, QED.

user19161

@MattЭллен Smoking is bad for health: do not smoke.

Matt Эллен

1:57 PM

living is bad for your health...

@JasperLoy if you don't smoke, you will die.

That, again, has been mentioned in this room countless times, verbatim.

user19161

@RegDwighт This has been discussed in this room before.

Let's worry about real risks, such as dhmo.org

@MattЭллен that is actually true. It's a great karmic joke, probably the greatest of all time, that you can't live without oxygen, but ultimately it's the oxygen that kills you.

Actually, you don’t need a fourteener to freeze to death today: the tide is on the turn.

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