English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

My mother-in-law has asked if she can take our eldest son to Santa's Village with some friends and my initial reaction was "Child molesters paradise! No way!"

Mahnax

ꙭ

David Wallace

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Reg Dwight probably looks like the one in the black jacket.

2

KitFox

1:26 PM

"Activities include Find The Elves" and "Our Elves love to take family photos!"

Effing pervs.

@Mahnax I can't see that.

Mahnax

@KitFox Aww.

KitFox

What is it?

Mahnax

My new version of a smiley face.

KitFox

What font do I need?

David Wallace

A smiley that only you can see!

Mahnax

1:27 PM

Let me see…

David Wallace

For when you

re smiling inwardly.

Damned enter key being right next to the apostrophe like that!

Mahnax

ꙭ
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DOUBLE MONOCULAR O
Unicode: U+A66D, UTF-8: EA 99 AD

So probably cyrillic.

Or some sort of cyrillic extension.

David Wallace

Now if "double monocular" isn't an oxymoron, I don't know what is!

@Mahnax It's not Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian or Bulgarian Cyrillic. Must be one of the less common ones.

KitFox

Odd. I have cyrillic fonts installed.

Hmm.

Matt Эллен

I can see it

Mahnax

1:29 PM

@DavidWallace It's possible. It' in the Cyrillic section of my special characters but I didn't recognise it.

@MattЭллен Yay!

David Wallace

Yeah, but look at the unicode number - it's way out of normal-font-land.

Mahnax

ꙕ꙼

It's a fish with a hat.

David Wallace

It's half past freaking one. I'm going to bed. Good night everyone.

Matt Эллен

good night!

Mahnax

Good night, Mr. Wallace.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

1:33 PM

0

Q: 'Kill' vs. 'cause to die'

The processes available to the speaker if a particular unit, say a vocabulary item, does not fit the message context, are (I think) the following: 1) Get another lexical item. 2) Modify the first one, or the context. 3) Combine lexical items. For example, if something caused something ...

linguistics

Mahnax

I've got to go as well. Bye!

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

What in the world is that person trying to say?

"Sometimes certain words don't seem appropriate. Should I use them anyway?"

RegDwight Ѭſ道

He is trying to say, "I am not aware of Linguistics.SE".

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Is what he wrote something that would make sense on linguistics? Cuz it barely makes sense to me.

but IANAL

Matt Эллен

UANAL?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

1:38 PM

@MrShinyandNew安宇 you don't see me migrating it, do you.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwightѬſ道 well, linguistics questions are not off topic here unless they are supposed to be applying to all languages.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Actually we have lots of closed questions that were too linguisticky for our tastes, even though Linguistics.SE didn't exist back then, and even though they specifically mention English, which this question does not.

Then, when LSE went live, it was too late to migrate them so they are just sitting here gathering dust.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

isnt' "for linguists" in the site description?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Yeah. But it was precisely the linguists who said it was too linguisticky.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

hm

Matt Эллен

1:44 PM

mmmm, dust

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Here's one that's still open.

This may be too linguisticky to fit on this site. I will leave it to others to decide if it is "English" enough. — Kosmonaut Dec 29 '10 at 5:18

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

well, either way. That kill/cause-to-die question sounds a bit impossible to answer if I'm reading it right.

Mitch

@RegDwightѬſ道 can we migrate them now? I remember making a ton of suggestions of the sort 'let's wait for LSE and post them then' but I couldn't gt the SE search to relly find them.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 it needs a lot more explanation.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

@Mitch no, they are too old.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@RegDwight that question you just posted is a good example of the kinds of questions I wish this site had more of.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

1:47 PM

Yeah. And it's still up.

Robusto

@DavidWallace Actually, not true for several days.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

But there are others that are closed or deleted.

Unanswered, too.

Robusto

@KitFox More important to have the use of one than to have one, to my way of thinking.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

@Mitch if you want to actually repost them, be my guest. But automigrating is not an option at this point.

And yeah, searching for them is hard now.

user19161

We have surprisingly few unanswered questions compared to the other sites.

Matt Эллен

1:49 PM

that's because lots of people know English

user19161

Currently there are only six.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

Thats because we close just about everything.

Robusto

I wonder what our SQR is compared to other sites.

Matt Эллен

SQR?

user19161

R must be ratio.

Robusto

1:49 PM

Stupid Question Ratio.

Matt Эллен

oh

KitFox

@Robusto Agreed.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto is that the ratio of "stupid" to "questions"? Gotta be close to 1.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

5

Q: What's the difference between grammar and syntax?

I've never understood the difference between these two terms. I understand the difference between semantics and syntax, or between semantics and grammar, but I'm not sure what's the difference between the meaning of the words syntax and grammar.

synonyms linguistics

Here's one that's closed.

Robusto

Stupid Questions to Basically OK Questions.

I guess technically that would make it the SQ/BOKQ Ratio.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

1:51 PM

Thing is, I have no idea which questions have or have not been asked on LSE already.

Robusto

Goddamn but I am tired. I'm almost hallucinating from lack of sleep right now. I have no idea how I was able to drive to work.

user19161

@Robusto Because you believed in yourself. QED.

Matt Эллен

single-word-requests phrase-requests nouns Q: What do you buy people for engagements presents?

Robusto

@JasperLoy That's not enough. Any drunk believes in himself.

Mitch

@JasperLoy there are only six people who know English?

Matt Эллен

1:53 PM

lol

I'm not one of them

user19161

@Mitch I was expecting that, so I had loled in advance.

Mitch

touche.

Robusto

-1

Q: 'Kill' vs. 'cause to die'

The processes available to the speaker if a particular unit, say a vocabulary item, does not fit the message context, are (I think) the following: 1) Get another lexical item. 2) Modify the first one, or the context. 3) Combine lexical items. For example, if something caused something ...

linguistics

Wow. I don't even understand what is being asked. But thankfully, someone caused this question to die.

Mitch

or 'touchay'

I'm sure that's an interesting question, somewhere underlying it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@MattЭллен what's an "engagement present"? Something you give when people announce that they are engaged to be married?

Mitch

1:55 PM

way below.

Robusto

@Mitch Or 2shay

Mitch

@MrShinyandNew安宇 yes

how do people do those accent thingies?

Robusto

I think I need to get another lexical item. I wonder where I would go to get those.

Mitch

when I say 'do' I mean 'easily do'.

I don't want to have to pull up some Unicode alterante screen keyboard.

KitFox

There Finally found enough fonts to cover the entire Cyrillic Extended-B block.

user19161

1:56 PM

@Mitch That's why I never do them in this room.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch In that case I can't help. I'm not sure that's a thing here.

Mitch

thesaurus. duh.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Mitch what accent thingies

Mitch

was the engageent present thing an actual question on ELU?

KitFox

The accented e on a Windows keyboard can be entered by using Alt+130.

Thusly: é

Mitch

1:58 PM

like accent grave/aigu, umlauts, cedillas, etc when you just have a generic ascii keyboard.

KitFox

Do you use Windows?

And do you have a numeric keypad?

Mitch

@KitFox: I realize that the alt thingy has been around for ever, but it's like wiggling your ears or whistling, the explanations just don't translate to doing. for me.

Matt Эллен

@MrShinyandNew安宇 aye

KitFox

@Mitch I don't understand. Do you have both of those tings?

Mitch

so I hold down the alt key, then press in sequence 1,3,0, then release the alt key and it should appear?

KitFox

1:59 PM

Yes. But you have to enter the numbers on the numeric keypad.

Mitch

yes numeric keyboard.

KitFox

Try it. :)

Mitch

of course, if you successfully teach me how to do these things, everything I write will then have an accent.

é

woo hoo!

KitFox

It doesn't work for all unicode (on my keypad) because I can't do letters.

Mitch

bbut that's only with the keypad, not 'normal' numbers on the top row.

KitFox

2:00 PM

Alt+138 is è.

@Mitch Right.

And you are using dec instead of hex.

Mitch

I just typed this sentence all with alt-(ascii code).

KitFox

Yay!

Vitaly

Alt+130 gives “В” for me. And Alt + 130 gives “İ”.

Mitch

successful day. I can go home now.

KitFox

irongeek.com/alt-numpad-ascii-key-combos-and-chart.html

@Vitaly Very interesting.

I forgot about the plus sign. That gives me İ as well.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

2:03 PM

In Character map, if you turn on the "advanced view" and pick a character, at the bottom it will say "Keystroke: Alt+0231" and with that you can enter many Unicode characters.

ç

Vitaly

However, Alt + E9 gives “é”, as it should.

Mitch

Klingon and Mayan are next.

Matt Эллен

éèàé

KitFox

I had a chart somewhere...

Well, there's one on the page I linked.

Vitaly

And in any case, I'm using a custom keyboard layout:

Apr 16 '11 at 20:37, by Vitaly

On a tangentially related note, is there any easier way to input not-very-widespread characters than custom keyboard layouts? I am using two custom keyboard layouts and a simple Autoit script. The latter lets me press a hot key, enter the name of a character I want in English—e.g. ‘alef’ or ‘rune-eihwaz’—and it will paste it into the active window; but it's just too slow.

KitFox

2:06 PM

Oh. I see.

I can't enter letters in mine, so some characters I have to just copy-paste.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

yeah but Vit, in some ways, you're worse than Cerb for this sort of thing. Normal people don't customize their keyboard layouts.

Robusto

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Has associating with @Vitaly taught you nothing about him not being a normal person?

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto Oh, that was clear from when I first met him.

KitFox

What?

incredulous

Next you will tell me he is some kind of Russian pineapple.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

He's the only kind of Russian pineapple

KitFox

2:10 PM

Mmm, pineapple.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

It's strange but for some reason my default mental representation for people from russia is "male, large build, 10 years older than me". I have no idea why that is.

Robusto

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I think about young blonde women. Maybe it's a cultural difference.

user19161

@mrs There was once you mentioned "price of tea in China" and I had no idea what you meant until I saw a recent question on it.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@JasperLoy It's an idiom

I guess they don't use it much in your neighbourhood.

@Robusto Well, I guess if I have some reason to imagine some person as a russian female, I might go with blonde, tall, thin but not skinny.

Mitch

@KitFox -and- remember to have num-lock on.

KitFox

2:16 PM

@Mitch Oh that too.

Mitch

which is funy because I was getting the weird characters just fine, just my windows and tabs were moving all around too at the same time.

Robusto

@Mitch Sounds like a virus. Or cancer.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

@RegDwight I have just spent the last 5 minutes trying to find a grammatical or spelling mistake in that comment :). — JakeJ 4 hours ago

Hahaha. Fail. I never makes error!

2

Vitaly

@Reg I've been using Thunder Crag for a day in my LtW faction deck. I find it useful, especially against Sundering Ogres. 3 base attack and Burst 3 gives 6 attack, when weakened by LtW or Dracorex it's still 5 attack, and faster than Sundering Ogre on Surge.

Robusto

@Vitaly I guess that's one reason to get a 6K arena rating.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

2:25 PM

I was just going to ask where I get that.

Vitaly

It's actually easy if you are willing to go through the pain of waiting for someone special to play their card. I've managed to earn about 700 rating in under 1.5 hours with multiple losses using a LtW strike/rush and then Dracorex, 3xUB, 3xMissileSilo, BoD, etc.

Robusto

@Vitaly Not sure what special means in this context.

Vitaly

@Robusto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Olympics

Robusto

Ah.

That context is not always understood without extra help.

Vitaly

Well, I assume everyone who participates in live battles in WMT knows the context.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

2:31 PM

Huh, just got 29 ratings for a win.

Had to wait for the battle forever, though.

Nobody's online or something.

Another 24. This is faster than I thought.

Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 I'm at about 5300. I presume it gets harder as you approach 6000.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Another 18. But now I'm kind of bored.

+29.

And I only played one card.

Vitaly

@Robusto It got harder when I got past 6000. At 6001, it suddenly started to match me against some insane decks like Sycophant spam, EQGs+UBs, Hover Pod spam, etc, etc.

It's been a day though, so those crazy WBers might have already gotten 7500 rating and stopped.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Oh, so 6000 isn't the limit? Now I'm even more bored.

Vitaly

The reward card for 7500 Arena rating isn't useful anyway.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

2:41 PM

+22, +18, +23... I wanted to stop as soon as I lose, but I don't seem to be able to!

I should be in a WB tourney or something.

KitFox

I was fighting Blue Note.

Robusto

> Surprisingly, I like the general idea and I very much like the reasoning. Implementation may need to be a little more sophisticated than 50 LP = any component, but the reasoning is excellent, so the implementation would be relatively trivial if synapticon pays attention to the reasons for such a system.

@Vitaly must be glowing. ^

Also, what is "catfacing"?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

+15 +16 +20, WTF, I would have Hades by now.

@Robusto waiting to become an officer and then kicking everyone who isn't.

The first guy to do that's name was catface.

Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 Oh. Like a human trojan horse?

Or trolljan horse

RegDwight Ѭſ道

More like a nerdinbasementian trojan horse.

Robusto

2:48 PM

@RegDwightѬſ道 nerdinbasementian is a tautology. The basementian is implied.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

I am told they sometimes leave said venues to meet up at LAN "partays".

Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 Don't forget Comic-Con.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Sorry, I always do.

Robusto

That's why we go over this stuff.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Most of the time this stuff goes over me.

Matt Эллен

2:51 PM

like waves over an elephant

RegDwight Ѭſ道

My head in particular is guilty of having stuff go over it.

Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 If by "goes" you mean "comes" ...

RegDwight Ѭſ道

@Robusto no, this stuff, not that stuff. Duh.

Look up the difference between "this" and "that" in a dictionary of your choice.

Robusto

@MattЭллен Answer: An elephant. Question: What's gray and comes in quarts?

@RegDwightѬſ道 Hmm. I doubt there's much of a difference.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Quarts? I prefer clay.

Robusto

2:52 PM

In math, we could just cancel the th and arrive at is/at. Which does have a demonstrable difference.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

17 hours ago, by RegDwight Ѭſ道

QED. QED.

Robusto

Let's not play The Crying Game again.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Is that the one in which Sean Penn cries all over Michael Douglas?

0

Q: "What led to you doing this thing" grammar?

Well, as the title said, I'm current curious about this sentence's grammar "What led to you doing this thing?", it sounds like "you doing this thing" is noun. What is this grammar? thanks :)

3:11 PM

Interesting. So Snoop Dogg is available in my country, but Sir Mix-A-Lot is not. What moron invented this system?

►

Damn it, "what is this grammar" puts a smile on my face every single time.

Why does the Internet contain this?

Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 I don't know, but please make it stop.

Matt Эллен

@RegDwightѬſ道 because this chat room is on the internet and this chat room contains everything

RegDwight Ѭſ道

0

Q: What is the difference between "image", "picture", "photograph" and "illustration"

Possible Duplicate: What is the difference between “photo” and “image”? Difference between “picture” and “photo” For my magister dissertation I need to rely on an accurate definition of what an image, a picture, a photograph and an illustration refer to. Ther...

meaning

Robusto

Either that or ping me when it scrolls off the page.

Off

the

page

RegDwight Ѭſ道

4

Q: What is the difference between "photo" and "image"?

What is the difference between photo and image?

word-choice differences nouns

Robusto

3:19 PM

now

RegDwight Ѭſ道

2

Q: Difference between "picture" and "photo"

When should I use one or the other?

word-choice nouns

Robusto

please

Moar

RegDwight Ѭſ道

I couldn't find one for illustration, but really, asking 6 questions in one is a bit over the top.

Robusto

Even moar.

Jim Yong Kim

Jim Yong Kim (; born December 8, 1959) is a Korean-American physician and the president-elect of the World Bank. He has been President of Dartmouth College since 2009. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health. On March 2, 2009, Kim was named as the 17th president of Dartmouth College, a position he formally assumed on July 1, 2009, becoming the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League institution. On March 23, 2012, President Barack Obama announced...

There. Jim Yong Kim has saved us.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

You have a looong page, my friend.

What is the difference between "Jon", "Bon", "Jovi", "Lennon", and "Marx"?

Robusto

3:21 PM

Jan 17 at 21:55, by Robusto

@RegDwightѬſ道 — Hey, to be as big as you I would have to fold mine in half.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

That was about egoae's. Not about pageae's.

Robusto

What do you call a transliteration where the host language uses characters that look like characters in the target language?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Moronic.

It was old the veЯy day it was invented.

But yeah, I suppose Wikipedia has a name for it. My money is on portmanteau.

Robusto

It is annoying. Just ask Groucho Madyax.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

German has the nice word Zwiebelfisch, but that's something different.

It refers to a letter set in a different font.

Erroneously.

Well I don't seem to be able to find anything. But somehow I think I saw a Wikipedia article about it once. Could be a deja vu.

Why don't you ask on the main site, @Rob?

Robusto

3:33 PM

@RegDwightѬſ道 Nah. I don't have a burning desire to know, only an idle curiosity.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Well I'm thinking about asking it myself, then.

Robusto

Go for it. Just make sure you put that royalty check in the mail.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

I'll put it in the same envelope with the royalties for using this sentence.

Oh damn. Halfway through composing the question, I find this:

Faux Cyrillic

Faux Cyrillic, pseudo-Cyrillic, pseudo-Russian or faux Russian typography is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia, regardless of whether the letters are phonetic matches. For example, R and N in RUSSIAN may be replaced by Cyrillic Я and И, giving "ЯUSSIAИ". Other examples include Ш for W, Ц for U, Я and Г for r, Ф for O, Д for A, Б or Ь or Ъ for B, 3 or Э or Ё for E, ☭ for G, Ч and У for Y. This is a common Western trope used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging which are set in or wis...

And this time I only went to Wikipedia to fetch me a screenshot of the TETЯIS start up screen.

Bah.

Robusto

Oh well. But Faux Cyrillic could be a subset of a larger concept.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Yet somehow it isn't. Nobody uses Hiragana, Arabic or Hebrew letters. It's always Я.

I suppose that's because Я am so cool.

Mar 4 '11 at 17:14, by RegDwight

@Kosmonaut Excellent. And thus, another amazingly awesome question was asked and answered behind the scenes.

I start sniping BTW.

Vitaly

3:48 PM

I am at 40 stam after levelling up.

Spent.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Slug Borg was a most excellent suggestion. Suddenly I have a fair chance against rainbows again.

Vitaly

Hm. I'm still using my strike/rush. 1283/232.

Why the heck do I keep referring to strike/rushes as LtW even when I have Daedalus as the commander?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

How does that perform against walls?

Vitaly

I win against about 2/3 of them thanks to Hephatat. Hopeless in the Arena against manual walls, of course.

RegDwight Ѭſ道

Well I'm 1068/289 with Gorelesup, no idea how much of that is on passive, which would be LtW.

And I have stopped with 40 stam left.

Robusto

3:57 PM

0

A: What word describes a person who signs an official document?

NOAD, M-W, and Dictionary.com suggest the use of signee. NOAD: a person who has signed a contract or other official document. M-W (sign): a : to affix a signature to : ratify or attest by hand or seal sign a bill into law, sign a confession b : to assign or convey formally signed over hi...

I forget, are people allowed/encouraged to make multiple answers to questions?

RegDwight Ѭſ道

No idea. I've heard good arguments either way, and IIRC Joel himself made a 180 on that one once.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…