Well, I think I may have got to the bottom of my surprise restarts.
Someone (namin' no names) hasn't cleaned the ventilation filter in quite some time. That seems to have been causing the graphics card to overheat. Silly supposition, I know, because graphics cards never overheat — but still ...
The mods and rockers were two conflicting British youth subcultures of the early to mid 1960s. Media coverage of mods and rockers fighting in 1964 sparked a moral panic about British youths, and the two groups became labelled as folk devils.
The rockers considered mods to be weedy, effeminate snobs, and mods saw rockers as out of touch, oafish and grubby. The rocker subculture was centred around motorcycling, and their appearance reflected that. Rockers generally wore protective clothing such as black leather jackets and motorcycle boots (although they sometimes wore brothel creeper shoe...
@KitFox Haven't been in ages. So long that it's off my history.
Right now, I am alternately writing notes for a useless training tomorrow and revising my story.
I am trying to write an authentic journal entry, which is funny in two ways.
One is that I (used to) keep a journal, so you think it would come naturally to me. Two is that I had a very self-conversational journal style, which keeps making it sound like I'm just speaking out the plot.
I never have a problem writing in another character's voice, because I can't even write the character until I get their voice. I can't write at all, in fact, until I hear the voice of the narrator.
Hmmm, let me see, if I were writing in Kit's voice I might say:
giggles
Damn .Net won't give me any peace!
Does anyone know regular expressions? bats eyelashes
And I was going to say SQL but I thought better of it because I don't know enough SQL to continue in a convincing way. But I guess that would have been in character, wouldn't it?
(Perhaps this only happens to me, but I doubt it.)
Sometimes after looking at a word for a while, I become convinced that it can't possibly be spelled correctly. Even after looking it up, sounding it out, and realizing that there's simply no other way to spell the word, it still looks wrong. ...
Remember the feeling you had after you learned how to read, and you wondered how those markings on the page ever didn't mean anything to you? I did. And when I tried to make them not mean something, that's what would happen. I remember laughing that the could mean something, and be spelled with those characters, those lines ... ah, but it was easy to get high when you were five years old, wasn't it?
Based on this NGram...
...I'm tempted to suggest semantic satiation is a 'failed coinage'.
Personally I think it's misleading to imply the phenomenon is restricted to the issue of semantics in the first place. In my experience it's not so much that the word 'loses its meaning'. It's more a matt...
I found a great imprecation to put in my pocket for the next time ɥɔʇᴉƜ or ℲℲ go off on one of their postmodernista rantings: “Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time!”
Yes, this is the poetic device known as hyperbaton. It is quite common. See also its treatment here, which discusses the devices of lyric poetry, including in Le Guin and Tolkien.
Speaking of whom, in Letter #171, J.R.R. Tolkien, responding to criticism of his ‘archaic’ style, wrote the follow...
I use Aegis (heals all 2, Imp), Poseidon (Imp, heals all 1, siege, anti-air, 6 hp), the Raider siege thing (speed 1 / attack 1 / hp 5), and Chaos Wave (because no EMP).
I propose, as a matter both of policy and principle, that any tag name that exists in one of the major spelling variants (loosely, US-vs-UK, but not so limited) should also exist in the other as a synonym.
Here is the list of current-as-of-this-writing tags which this would apply to, along wit...
You live in the prairie, don’t you, not the forest?
The Montana cherries are in right now.
The wild berries native to Cascadia are many and “exotic”, and delish. Things you just don’t get elsewhere, nor which are grown commercially nor distributed.
@tchr I should expect them to use stone? I'd personally not use pit, possibly because of that, or because I'd subconsciously avoid the Dutch word, which is, you guessed it, pit.
@Mahnax What berries grow in your forests? Blackberries and raspberries, and strawberries, and blueberries and huckleberries, and cloudberries and thimbleberries, and choke cherries and wild grapes?
@tchrist We have raspberries that grow in some places, as well as little tiny strawberries that pop up near the ground. We don't get blueberries or wild grapes, but we do get chokecherries and cloudberries. We also get saskatoons.
You and FF both seem to think that newest and currentest is bestest in a way that seems to suffer from a parochialism of time that does unjust injury to the wealth and range of expression that English embraces.
The syntax of "N V not" ("I know not") in English is called simple negation. It was much more common in Early Modern English.
The negation pattern that is more commonly used now, "N do not V" ("I don't know") is called just plain negation (it is the unmarked (expected) form).
@tchrist Why do you wish that I did not? I can see why you might have that attitude towards me. I am particularly annoyed by answers to obvious second language learners containing obvious archaisms.
The verb 'to be' is not special here.
Your examples are correct but only in a stilted, overly formal, hardly used context. In the rare context it would be incorrect to use the simple present.
But if you used those forms nowadays, it would sound strange to most English speakers of most current ...
It's not a particularly common phrasing when used as a descriptive, which might give it the air of archaism, and you particular example is somewhat poetic, adding to that nuance. It sounds like a poetic elision of 'the afternoon was all...' where 'all' is an adverb, modifying the predicate.
But...
In AmE, the use of 'Sir' (or 'Ma'am') in speech is deprecated, even in formal situations.
Though a fifty year old 'Amy Vanderbilt' (etiquette guide) might still be followed for addressing mail, it is just not used in speech.
Except in Southern English where it is usually used for someone older o...
Standard word order in English is SVO (subject, verb, object). The given sentence (with a bit of complexity due to the helper verb) is more SOV.
In one sense it is totally incorrect grammar. In another, if you went around talking in SOV order like the above, you'd have the tendency to sound like...
Yes, this is the poetic device known as hyperbaton. It is quite common. See also its treatment here, which discusses the devices of lyric poetry, including in Le Guin and Tolkien.
Speaking of whom, in Letter #171, J.R.R. Tolkien, responding to criticism of his ‘archaic’ style, wrote the follow...
People ask questions about how to say things, and I try to respond with what I hear, noting where there are differences and what the nuance of that difference is.
How did I get the hyperbaton question wrong? Are you saying that using it does -not- make one sound poetic?
I think I see where you are coming from. I only just saw this:
...read your recent answer. Sure...Tolkien all the way. but that's not how most people speak or write nowadays. If second language learners spoke like that, they'd be laughed at by native speakers of all varieties. If you want to write like that, then great, but that's the nuance I ...
...try to add what the drunken truck driver does say, in whatever variety is relevant.'
Sure the Tolkien answers are great but the truck driver isn't going to understand, not because of some proletarian innocence, but because that ain't his language.
It is only fit and right that someone must at whiles oppose those who would strip our language of all vestige of lyric beauty, of stirring rhetoric, of diversity of syntax and vocabulary.
Perhaps I have stumbled upon the wrong site. I keep hoping this will be something better than the perpetually plaguing ESFL&U that has now almost entirely become.
But it isn’t, and those who beggar our language into a second-class pidgin patrolled by texting teens behind truck consoles do grave injury to us all.
But so be it. Let us embrace our ESFL&Usery once and for all.
For much of the world is forced to speak in a language that is not theirs but ours.
I'm not trying to be disparaging of refined speech. In all the examples you gave of mine, I'm trying to give the unmentioned actual speech. If it is factually incorrect then please correct and comment. If the particular facts are not appealing, or you fel are teaching to a lower range, then that nuance might be welcome too.
Here is but one pathetic example of the sort of dross that these miserably incompetent ESLlers bring us: “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.”
@tchrist the site is what you make of it a long with everybody else. I'm guessing you're not toeing the prescriptivist line but pushing erudition. That's good and great.
@tchrist OK (I don't know who said that). So you're trying to teach English literary writing. I'm only trying to add the alternatives that might or might not be used in casual speech.
@tchrist OK, but that seems contrary to everything you've said so far. You're for erudition, and that's what those tests are after, not for the truck-driver vernacular that you call what I put forth. I don't recommend all the answers I give for ESLers on their tests.
You said we're not here to help pass an ESL truck driving exam, but from what you said before, that leads me to believe that you think we -are- here to help ESlers pass a higher register exam. And So I ask that as a question. Are we?
@cornbreadninja you're missing everything.
@tchrist Why? I'm (usually) being descriptivist of casual English. I don't denigrate the higher register, just want to give the additional perspective of what people actually tend to say.
I don’t want to help people pass their ESL exams. I want to encourage more Nabokovs from non-native speakers, and more Tolkiens from natives speakers.
Sure, it’s asking a lot.
But so be it. See the aiming-low thing again.
@Mitch “I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th. C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as ‘contemporary’ – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one’s friends shudder or feel hot in the collar.”
Yes, this is the poetic device known as hyperbaton. It is quite common. See also its treatment here, which discusses the devices of lyric poetry, including in Le Guin and Tolkien.
Speaking of whom, in Letter #171, J.R.R. Tolkien, responding to criticism of his ‘archaic’ style, wrote the follow...
You can do general-purpose programming in it, although not at the machine-language level. But all its domain-specific shortcuts and idioms relate to text strings.
Surpassingly few are the non-native speakers whom I would steer thither and hold some hope that they might parse out the words in that particular accent.
@Mahnax I was just saying that you should go to my answer on the 'sir' question and add your statement (that you use it all the time in the service industry) as a comment. Or maybe better, as an answer.
A Picardy third is when you raise the third at the cadence, switching a minor-key piece so that it suddenly ends on the major. It’s somewhat cliché if overdone.
"Here is but one pathetic example of the sort of dross that these miserably incompetent ESLlers bring us:" then followed with the Nabokov quote. Were you just being sarcastic?
@tchrist So can you set me straight? You said 'here is a pathetic example' then quoted something, but were you agreeing with what was said -in- the quote?
If the writer has been brought so low that he can only produce such dross as that, so devoid of cultural references as he would feign pretend it to be, what then of his infinitely docile mother tongue that we are forever denied?
(Perhaps this only happens to me, but I doubt it.)
Sometimes after looking at a word for a while, I become convinced that it can't possibly be spelled correctly. Even after looking it up, sounding it out, and realizing that there's simply no other way to spell the word, it still looks wrong. ...
Yes, this is the poetic device known as hyperbaton. It is quite common. See also its treatment here, which discusses the devices of lyric poetry, including in Le Guin and Tolkien.
Speaking of whom, in Letter #171, J.R.R. Tolkien, responding to criticism of his ‘archaic’ style, wrote the follow...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…