English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

8 hours ago, by tchrist

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Microsoft Unicode bug.

HackToHell

ooooh

6:38 AM

Hip hip hooray, I'm the first to register for happy hour :-)

The Tragically Hip - Little Bones

6:54 AM

Two fifty for for a highball, and a buck and a half for a beer: happy hour is here...

7:08 AM

Omg, 24 years old :O

8:52 AM

@Cerberus nope. I know that comedian, but not this particular series.

@Cerberus as my father would put it, "damn stupid, but funny".

9:20 AM

room topic changed to English Language & Usage: The prequel, and sequel, to English Language Learners [lando-kaaarlissian]

9:33 AM

Why does droid take the article an, shouldn't it be a?

Mar 10 at 12:23, by RegDwigнt

Using Android is just wrong. You should be using Adroid. We get questions about that every day. Check the "most frequently asked" tab.

Hope that helps.

kthx

9:48 AM

0

Q: Article used with "droid"?

Why does "droid" take the article "an", shouldn't it be "a"?

@RegDwigнt: look what you've done!

No. You mean Matt.

No. I mean you :P

Oh.

No. Wait. You mean Matt!

Darn. Looks like it's too late to delete that.

skill patrol thinks that a hundred reps is too damn high, tries hard to lose them all at a whim

9:54 AM

Should I delete it?

Well, I guess Josh61 will answer any question, no matter how ridiculous:

0

A: Article used with "droid"?

It is not an article, the original term is android, droid is a later variant. Android: "automaton resembling a human being," 1837, in early use often in reference to automated chess players, from Modern Latin androides (itself attested as a Latin word in English from 1727), from Greek and...

@skillpatrol If I upvote Josh's answer, you won't even have that option, right!

Thanks pal.

@skillpatrol Huh? I never actually upvoted... but it looks like someone else did...

I'll put you out of your misery, for once.

Next time wait till April 1st.

You guys!

10:10 AM

Of mice and guys.

Anguys?

Ang Lees.

Aka cheap entertainment

:-)

Stewart Lee - Ang Lee

No Way You will not make Australia home English hd720

Confusing title is confusing.

Just like that Australia video yesterday.

21 hours ago, by RegDwigнt

No way you will not make Australia home. Even if you want to stay in Yorkshire, fuck you.

10:14 AM

:O

Look at that stern man. If you're from Swaziland, hide your family, for he will ship them all to Australia without even asking you. What a jerk.

A country that forgets how it became a country.

I will not make Australia home English.

All countries became countries in the same way.

One idiot drew a line on a piece of paper, and a million idiots said nothing.

Some countries had to fight for their freedom.

10:24 AM

No, some idiots had to fight over whose line was the longest.

But then again "freedom" is just another word for nothing left to lose...

Which reminds me: where's my Mercedes Benz?

You drive a Benz?

His friends all drive Porsches

So they all have a lot to lose...

10:30 AM

He's worked hard all his lifetime

in The h Bar, 2 days ago, by skill patrol

"Freedom" is just another word for nothing left to lose...

Oh I see we now randomly mark words in sentences.

Now

Or even letters

10:53 AM

some of those letters aren't the even ones

Odd.

can I embolden a ** ** space?

no

I don't even know what that would mean.

Duh. It would mean to boldly go where no man has boldly gone before.

it would make the space more difficult to read

10:55 AM

Yes, the final frontier would become illegible.

I don't think I ever had a front ear

If a space bolds in your text, do anybody’s ears cry out in shock?

What if a pope shits in a forest and no one is around to hear it?

Does it still smell?

The pope that dealt it, smelt it.

11:19 AM

Newly discovered religious tract by Dr. Seuss: Hope on Pope.

Damn, I got an upvote on a question I thought was years old but seems to have been asked on May 19. Can that be right?

It seems impossible that this question is not a couple years old.

Elaiza - Is It Right! (Germany) 2014 Eurovision Song Contest

11:40 AM

@tchrist: It seems odd to me to say Él es una persona buena. Why isn't persona a gender-bending word?

Because words have their own grammatical gender irrespective of human sex.

She is a good husband.

He is a good ship.

Works in English, so why not elsewhere.

Una persona simply could never be masculine. It twists up my head trying to see how it could be.

Un personito.

I was just about to try that.

Funny how it becomes mildly pejorative used that way.

11:43 AM

Sie ist ein guter Pilot.

Er ist eine dumme Sau.

Robusto ist ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln.

@tchrist Well, but we saw in Maria y el araña that the feminine araña was altered to express that the subject was male.

See. I just made Rob neuter.

@Robusto This is a bit of a weirdness.

My point exact.

That's because araña is totally gay.

11:45 AM

And other nouns are gender-mutable.

Abogado/abogada, etc.

@RegDwigнt Campy gay people switch gendered pronouns in ways that can annoy some.

"Campy gay people"—is there any other kind?

@Robusto A little-known fact about languages is that different words behave differently!

@Robusto Because -ado can do that.

@RegDwigнt Thank you, Captain Obvious.

11:47 AM

@Robusto I am noticing you are thanking me.

@tchrist So can others.

Al lado de. A la lada de. Yup. Works.

Some can. Most cannot.

Stupid language.

It's English that is dumb.

terdon

11:48 AM

Pretty sure that's how it works in all gendered languages.

I know, right!

Come on, it's not even a proper gendered language. It's only two genders.

terdon

Some words have two sexes, some have but one.

Next up you'll call English a properly tensed language.

English reproduces asexually.

11:49 AM

@RegDwigнt Lo incorrecto en todo ello es que no queda verdad en cuanto a los pronombres.

@Robusto explains things like Texan.

¿Ves? :)

Yo no sabe lo que es ver.

@RegDwigнt *Texican

If you wanted to say that your maid is really a tree, you would not change the gender of tree to match that of maid. Gendered languages just do not do that.

11:51 AM

@Robusto Hah! That was me. Well, it raised the score of your answer above the one that was entirely about the non-sexual use of "hand job," which kind of missed the point.

Objects like books and rocks and shirts shouldn't have gender. It's that simple. Language gender is a throwback to a primitive time when gods and goddesses inhabited all manner of things.

Again, tell that to English ships.

@sumelic I agree. But I somehow feel like I answered that question a couple of years ago, not four months.

Love is a bird, she needs to fly.

@RegDwigнt You make a virtue out of a necessity. Just because your main languages have three — count 'em, three — genders, you wish that mess on everyone.

11:55 AM

Stuff and nonsense.

I do not wish anything upon anyone.

You're the one going around dictating things and calling names.

3 mins ago, by Robusto

Objects like books and rocks and shirts shouldn't have gender. It's that simple. Language gender is a throwback to a primitive time when gods and goddesses inhabited all manner of things.

@RegDwigнt I see you favor masculine idiocy.

Always. Why should I favor feminine idiocy?

Like, seriously.

@RegDwigнt Listen to yourself, man! You just called what I said "stuff and nonsense" and now you accuse me of name-calling. For shame!

@RegDwigнt Uh, because it might get you laid? That's my excuse.

I didn't know either of these words was your name.

I apologize for my lack of knowledge.

@RegDwigнt Sophist.

11:58 AM

Don't call me Sophie.

I am Shirley.

@RegDwigнt He’s either pulling your leg or else he's on acid.

Why can't he be both?

That's his usual modus operandi.

A: Connotation of gender of pet names/diminutives in Portuguese

People always trip and fall.

2

Olá... I'm a Brazilian native, let me see if I can help you with this. When we give a pet name to someone using a word that doesn't inflect for gender, such as "o açúcar", for example, the correct form would be to keep the gender as it is. If you want to call a girl little sugar, you would say: ...

You would not call a girl a feminine version of sugar, since sugur is masculine.

And French cabbages are feminine.

Ma petite chou.

Rob forgets about articles again. Just because his main language has three — count 'em, three — articles, he wishes that mess on everyone.

But it's okay. Because articles are not genders.

This comes up like twice a year. I'm used to it.

I’m pretty sure that the last time it came up for me, I was 13.

12:05 PM

I'm still waiting for him to wish Katakana upon the Dutch, though.

That'd be cuil.

I'm serious about that.

It weirded me out as a kid learning Spanish at first. And then it stopped weirding me. Forever.

But German has genders, so I don't understand the complaint.

That's because it's not weird at all. English is the odd one out.

English is pretty much always the odd one out, frankly.

And that's how you get Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.

Such a lovely First Couple they'll make.

Imagine they had to think which gender Alaska had, or Mexicans. Their heads would assplode.

Perhaps Palin can get him to erect a wall to keep out the Russians.

Q: Imperative at the end of the sentence

12:14 PM

0

I would like to say a sentence with and the imperative verb at the end. How can I do this. For example: "Start the topology with 4 things." should be transformed to something like "Topology with 4 things, start." (which sounds strange). Another option might be "Start topology with 4 thing, now....

imperative

I do not understand this.

@RegDwigнt Spoken like a true pineapple.

Exactly. Only a person with sufficient knowledge of other languages can compare English to other languages.

Englisch über alles.

@tchrist I'm not complaining, just puzzled at certain inconsistencies. I suppose that will pass.

I suppose you'll also collect $2000.

I don't see the inconsistencies. If you said your cat were a fly, you would not swap genders.

Q: Punctuation! Semi-colon use in a list?

12:18 PM

0

Can anyone help with this sentence? Is my punctuation here correct? If you sell bicycles, sell as many accessories as you can; water bottles; pumps; and biking gear, such as shoes, gloves, caps and more.

semicolon

This must be a dupe.

> Mi gato es una mosca hoy.

That is not considered weird in the least, at least grammatically.

@tchrist If, on the other hand, Jeff Goldblum were a fly, you'd swap most everything.

You would not ever say "un mosco" just because your cat were male.

@RegDwigнt Wait, he is. Or was.

Nouns are not adjectives anyway.

12:20 PM

@Robusto But were he?

Additional exercise: what if he was phone?

Es un problema extraño.

What of it?

How's your wife the hat doing?

Mi esposa no es un sombrero.

Una sombrera entonces.

See why that's nutty? :)

Look, I see all this stuff. I just thought persona would be a special case, and mutable. OK?

12:23 PM

Persona grata on my ears.

Persona au gratin.

I like 'em with cheese. That's all.

I'll grate you that.

Remember that "la presidente" was historically the wife of "el presidente", and the word "presidenta" did not exist. "El policía" is a policeman but "la policía" means police force, so you have to say "una señora policia" (same with "guardia"). Or "una rata macho" for a male rat.

Un ratón.

That's a mouse.

Which is weird, because it's an augmentative. But that's how it is.

12:31 PM

Un ratón muy grande.

Still not a rat. :)

NOTU

Raton, New Mexico

Raton is a city in Colfax County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 6,885 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Colfax County. The city is located just south of Raton Pass. == History == Ratón is the Spanish term for "mouse" (literally "small rat"). The Raton Range and Raton Peak are located immediately north of the town. The Raton Range is a 75-mile-long (121 km) ridge that extends east from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Raton Pass and the Raton Basin are also named for the Raton Range. Raton Pass had been used by Spanish explorers and Indians for centuries to cut through...

Looks like a rat to me.

A: Connotation of gender of pet names/diminutives in Portuguese

It does look pretty chiquitico in that picture.

1

Well, and here's the perception of someone from Portugal. You say tu és o meu amor, a minha paixão, o meu tormento no matter whether you’re addressing a male or a female. With meu/minha + vocative only (no tu és o/a) sticking to the noun’s gender sounds natural. I’d say it is compulsory when the...

He's addressing Rob's concern.

Is it common for Spanish to narrate something in past tense, then switch to present tense for a few sentences, then revert to past? I'm speaking of passages where English would keep it all in past tense.

> Now with nicknames without the possessive, you go with the person’s sex. So you can call a man o Barbas, o Banana (can be derogatory), o Águia, o Luas, o Corneta; and a woman a Trombone, a Escadote (both sound very uncomplimentary). Again feminised versions of masculine nouns sound better than masculinised versions of feminine nouns. Men are also more often nicknamed in this way, and often get feminine nicknames. All of the above sound very plausible.

See also "el araña". :)

@Robusto Not especially.

So "Here comes el banana" for a guy.

So you use "el" even though bananas are feminine. That's your "el araña" case.

12:38 PM

Like this. (Note that I have accidentally used a semicolon for a comma in one place.)

I see. I think you sometimes see that in English, too.

@tchrist Yeah, but it doesn't feel right here.

No disagreement.

I just wanted to know if that looks right to you in Spanish.

12:40 PM

No more than in English, nor any less.

I suspect that a lot of these articles are not written by professionals.

I suspect that may even be an understatement.

@RegDwigнt So the gender of das Bier contaminated that of "der König" there?

Sactly.

Enjoy!

Of course this is an extreme example. Done on purpose by the marketeers.

12:42 PM

We have a local chain called "El Rey de la Tortilla".

Reminded me of that.

I guess The King of Queens could only be a joke in English.

Романс черепахи Тортилы ("Приключения Буратино")

Here's Tortuga Tortilla for you.

Aww, and here I'm working at home, missing Bagel Friday.

My God!

@RegDwigнt Wait, they had bass guitars in the 19th century?

12:48 PM

Moreso than in the 20th century.

Aug 11 '14 at 20:33, by RegDwigнt

I mean, to this day not a single studio in Eastern Europe can produce anything remotely resembling the actual sound of an electric guitar.

They have the accordion. What do they need with electric guitars?

Rephrase it as "They have the Lada. What do they need with Cadillacs" and you have the answer.

WTF is it with all the Russian?!?!?

Ну, хорошо. Michal Swan, который написал Practical English Usage (это 650 страниц описания английской грамматики, издание Oxford University Press), – он-то носитель языка. Погугли эту книгу. И он пишет, что оба варианта возможны. Я думаю, что у человека, пособия по грамматике которого публикует Oxford University Press, побольше авторитета в области английского языка, чем у простого учителя. Учителя тоже люди, тоже могут ошибаться. — Siegfried Zaytsev 1 hour ago

And a buttload more.

Kindly please do the needful.

@tchrist I didn't know you could buy Russian by the buttload.

Hahahaha, Google Chrome offered to translate that page for me!

Fragged.

@RegDwigнt That one has your name written all over it. Somewhere.

1:06 PM

@tchrist: is feria used much to mean handsome, the way English used to use fair?

@Robusto Don't think so!

IT IS TOO EARLY FOR BOOZE!

Hmm, then how do you explain "Arquero de feria, de carácter noble, fue malinterpretado por la policía"? This describes Hawkeye, a character who was way more than a fair archer in skill.

Una feria is a fare.

From the fare?

Hmm, I don't know his back story.

That's a noun there as the object of the preposition anyway.

1:09 PM

Ah, that is it. Wikipedia confirms that the character was a trick shot at the circus.

Oh good.

@tchrist Yeah, I thought it might have been some kind of archaism or something. I still don't know enough to be able to tell reliably when constructions are out of the ordinary for stylistic reasons.

@tchrist they are talking about how Julia and sumelic might or might not be speakers of the language, while RegDwight might be.

No news there.

Господа хорошие, у нас тут типа англоязычный сайт. И вам англоязычным языком было англоязычно сказано, что вы слишком много думаете впустую о пустых пустяках. Потому-то голова и не варит. Вот вы русский выучили без всяких правил да профессоров. Так учите английский таким же макаром, и будет он вам таким же родным. А будете везде искать правила, нигде ничего не найдёте и только время попусту потратите. В исходном предложении всё в порядке, вот и всё правило. Других правил нет. — RegDwigнt ♦ 2 mins ago

There. Hope that settles it once and for all.

I imagine buttloads of Russian are cheaper in Moscow. We might be able to profit from the difference in the exchange rate, having had several buttloads land upon our shores for free.

A most excellent handling of frags.

1:18 PM

> Good Lord , we've got the type of English site . And you are English-speaking language was English speaking said that you think too much is wasted on empty trifles . That is why the head and not cooking . Here you learn Russian without any rules so professors. So learn English in the same Makarov, and he'll be in the same family.

> And you will always look for the rules anywhere will not find anything and just spend time in vain . The original sentence is all right , that's all rule. No other rights

Hm. I think my Russian is crippled.

That does not even make sense!

No. Google Translate is.

I sure hope what you said makes better sense in Russian.

For starters, I thought I was saying "dear gents". But apparently I praised the Saviour.

genuflects

And the British Saviour, to boot.

1:19 PM

Well, actually.

No American Savior deserves praise?

All praise Hypnotrump!

Thank you.

You know I'm praising him 24/7. Your whining is most unjustified.

Q: Did English have any plural articles in the past?

1:21 PM

0

I am curious as to whether English had any plural articles like in French with "les" and "des".

articles history definite-article indefinite-article

Opportunity for a canonical. (If there isn't one already.)

Many churchy Americans still use Saviour with an u.

Some is a plural indefinite article.

And French is a poor example de unos artículos míos.

Les bians.

1:39 PM

Holland is officially crazy.

This guy spends day after day running like that through his home town near Rotterdam, simulating war combat.

(Photo nominated for LeadAwards 2015.)

Jez

2:21 PM

i just saw a cup in the kitchenette with tree leaves in. not tea leaves. tree leaves.

i think someone misheard something somewhere

3:40 PM

I'm almost ready to let the cats out to go after those saucy finches, which are now pecking at my house at ground level. I walked right up to one, and he was like "Hey, get out of here. I saw it first."

Release the lions.

s/finche/woodpecker/

> The word 'beau-pot' is an erroneous Frenchification of 'bough-pot'.

Finchification.

Cerberus

@RegDwigнt Is that even legal?

The girl has a gun too.

4:18 PM

4:38 PM

The House just lost its Boehner.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 The old softy.

Heh.

We expect the Democrats to mount a flaccid response.

No more of his spouting off.

As the golfers say, never up, never in.

4:51 PM

It isn't hard to make dick jokes.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 But a hard man is good to find, no?

5:11 PM

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 keep 'em coming

5:47 PM

@JohanLarsson :D

@Robusto yes.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 related

@JohanLarsson omg

It is lame but I laugh when I watch it, guess I'm lame.

I think it is c) dikk

5:55 PM

I'm a self-taught, I learned everything from yahoo answers

what did the answers say?

ah I prefer not to google this :)

before meaning what it means, dick was quite a compliment... derived from German, French, and English "ric" (ruler, leader, king) and "hard" (strong, brave), and therefore meaning "powerful leader"

and many men are still controlled by their dicks

you have a friend who has it like that right?

:D yes

6:09 PM

:)

Dick Van Dyke

Richard Wayne "Dick" Van Dyke (born December 13, 1925) is an American actor, comedian, writer, singer, dancer, and producer with a career spanning almost seven decades. He is the older brother of Jerry Van Dyke and father of Barry Van Dyke. Van Dyke starred in the films Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in the TV series The Dick Van Dyke Show and Diagnosis: Murder. He recently starred in Night at the Museum (2006) and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014). Recipient of five Emmys, a Tony, and a Grammy, Van Dyke was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in...

still alive, nice

slang

ok dockey

6:29 PM

Okey-dokey Artichokey

6:44 PM

@MattE.Эллен You act like there are men who are not.

Men acting like they are not is a reason to be suspicious.

hen-fjantar in Swedish

Most likely they do it to get laid.

@JohanLarsson I have reached the point in my life when sex is merely my default thought pattern, not my only one.

It's called maturity, I suppose.

That is star material, lemme think for a while.

it is friday

Du har bra språkkänsla min vän.

@JohanLarsson Tack.

Do you say more rucksack or backpack or knapsack? for the bag in your back ("sac à dos" in French)

6:57 PM

I use backpack

ok thanks, I've the English version at least :)

np pal :-)

Isn't Tesla a unit in Physics?

Yep

ah right, I just googled Tesla and found a car brand.. I can't google well anymore

7:02 PM

Magnetic flux density.

yep I remember playing with induction coils...

He was a very smart guy too.

@crl I say backpack, mostly. I grew up saying knapsack, though.

yeah ok, knapsack seems like the 'educational' term (the knapsack problem)

I would have known backpack, but we called it a knapsack in Boy Scouts. I didn't hear rucksack until I became aware of German, I think.

A: What can I do to make my writing fit the 1950s?

7:13 PM

@crl there was a question on writers.se that mentioned something about backbpack vs knapsack

3

Your reader's intuition about the word "backpack" seems right on; that word appears to have skyrocketed in popularity after the 1960s: You can use ngrams and a thesaurus to identify words that didn't seem popular, or to verify which of several words were more popular during a certain period. No...

oh, nice explanation

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Question for you about Android: I'm considering a new LG G3 which will accept a 2TB SD card. I'm thinking of getting a 128GB version and dumping my iPod at last. But will the OS (Lollipop 5.1) really address all that storage without constant re-indexing, etc.? Does that much storage cause more battery use?

@Robusto I don't know. I've only ever used small SD cards, and only one of my android devices ever had an SD slot.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hey, I answered that one too.

@Robusto yeah I saw that, upbvoted

7:18 PM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Likewise.

Now, if I can only find a music app on Android that works as well as iTunes. I insist on gapless playback, easy song list creation, etc.

oops, phone rang, now I can't edit my typo

@Robusto I've always hated itunes.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 The institution or the app?

all of it.

but the app especially

I had an 8gb ipod nano back in the day.

Well, it does have certain advantages.

it was excruciatingly painful to get it to sync the desired subset of songs.

7:21 PM

I use the 160 GB iPod classic. That means I just dump everything on it.

It would've been great if I had only 8Gb of music. but I had 60.

Yeah, I have over 100.

And I rip for high fidelity.

LAME -alt-preset-standard, around 192K VBR.

There are better out there now, but I want to keep everything MP3 so it translates from device to device.

FLAC is supposed to be the best, I guess.

weird, now it seems I have 33GB of music. So something is off, either my recollection, or my data, or my computer's way of counting the data.

Perhaps it involves block size?

I dunno. Perhaps I was counting things that didn't belong? Perhaps I removed unwanted files that were cluttering things up? Who knows.

either way. still more than the 8gb nano could hold. And itunes drove me crazy.

I was so glad to be rid of it.

I switched to a linux-based ipod loader and life was good.

7:42 PM

The first iPod(s) I had did not have gapless playback. That was horrid.

There is an advantage to being able to take all your music anywhere you go.

8:32 PM

got a laptop for 250€ (279$) for work (not even paid by me) (Lenovo G50, Celeron N2840) it seems pretty descent in perf, so it looks like an amazing quality/price ratio

MετάEd

9:21 PM

@Robusto Gapless playback?