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Mitch
Mitch
12:07 AM
@Tonepoet What did you want to say? Here is fine.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@mitch Sigh, I wrote a bit in the other chatroom already and there's much to be said. What I'm trying to say there is that:

1. Merriam-Webster's definition is suspect even by today's standards, since leaving the statement unqualified makes their statement absolute. The A.H.D. actually has a qualifier. I thought I mentioned their definition but I didn't.

2. Not everybody is equally likely to use the same dictionary. If you want to know why a psychiatrist is saying that somebody isn't a pedophile, even though they lust after underage teenagers, you would consult the D.S.M. 5 as a sort of te…
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
12:54 AM
@mitch Perhaps you think nobody else cares about point no. 3. There was a point that I didn't either. However I was swiftly corrected by Little Eva very early into my membership on this website.
 
Mitch
Mitch
You lost me on the pedophile analogy...your using webster's 1828 version is like using, not even DSM I but some other prior work called 'Diagnostic Manual'
The wayback machine link strategy is interesting... but that's the first ever I've seen it.
Shouldn't you bring that up on meta so that everybody can judge if that is a good strategy?
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
Meta-meta that is.
 
Mitch
Mitch
Oh...little eva's advice was to quote the original (in addition to the original link), not wayback. You're very good at moving all the goal posts around.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Mitch I wasn't trying to suggest she endorsed my strategy. I was only trying to suggest that she cared about the problem.
 
Mitch
Mitch
One counter argument is the concept of single point of failure.
@Tonepoet right. 'caring bout the problem' is not just a moved goal post but an almost entirely new playing field.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
1:01 AM
Anyway, regarding this point, I personally believe that while this isn't an ideal solution, it's better than none, at least insofar as my own posts go.
 
Mitch
Mitch
now to point 1, so MW is fallible? AHD is too and so is OED. But I think there is a sense of progress (I may well be wrong but you'd have to provide a lot of evidence), so it seems incoherent to suggest a very outdated reference as respected currently (but it may at a stretch be relevant for the history of dictionaries and definitions)
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Mitch The question asks if Merriam Webster's definition is wrong. I'm not even going so far as to suggest it is, so much as it might be or if it is even right, that some other dictionary may have been used. So far I've seen a few definitions for afterclap and Merriam Webster's is the only one that implies the word is bad by necessity. You can see on The Free Dictionary and O.D.O. that this isn't requisite
The question even asks if Merriam-Webster's dictionary is wrong: "So, what is the definition and use of the word 'afterclap'? Does it have a positive or a negative connotation? Was Merriam-Webster wrong? Did the writer of the article use the word correctly?" I have no reason to believe that Merriam-Webster captured the nuances of the word properly.
They overprojected the word's progress according to the cross-references, if the word even really has changed in meaning.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
1:36 AM
That is unless every other commonly available dictionary that defines the word is wrong. That's also a possibility, but a far less likely one.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
2:01 AM
@Mitch Also no, not quite. If I had no reason to believe that specific edition was the edition preferred by bible scholars, as I would expect the lead pastor who wrote the article would be, this would be correct. However these are old fashioned people with old fashioned values who may actually have the beliefs you characterized me as personally having. Those are not the only two that extol Webster's.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Scottish Gaelic.
Singular, dual, and plural.
Plural is also known as dogecoin around the Internet (Google it).
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Cerberus Dave would be proud. Not that you know who that is...
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
The one from Hello Dave?
Together one scene of ca. 4 minutes.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Cerberus No, not quite. This fellow was the op of #music on the sorcery I.R.C. server. He loved his dogecoins, and their inspirational mascot.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Oh, aha.
You've made me rewatch scenes from the League of Gentlemen, best comedy ever.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
2:22 AM
@Cerberus I doubt that this is any great cause of grief, thankfully. Anyway, I think the sorcery I.R.C. server has a Dogecoin chatroom, if that'd be of any interest to you. I'm not completely sure since I never visited it myself. I just saw Dave discuss it in #music sometimes.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Indeed, it is not!
I have to admit I know little about Dogecoin except that it exists.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Cerberus Same here. Anyway, mealtime!
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
2:51 AM
Adios!
 
 
4 hours later…
SmokeDetector
SmokeDetector
6:49 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, pattern-matching website in answer: Should one use "of" when abbreviating "number of..." using "no."? by fifa17bella on english.stackexchange.com
 
 
1 hour later…
Matt E. Эллен
Matt E. Эллен
8:05 AM
Blog Overflow is actually going to be shutting down completely soon, so it doesn't make sense for us to invest time in fixing any bugs for it. We'll be reaching out to all the individual communities who currently have a blog on their site's Meta over the coming weeks to discuss whether they want to let their blog die or transfer it to an alternate blogging platform and maintaining it on their own, as Worldbuilding does now. Those Meta posts will contain more detailed information than I've provided here. — animuson ♦ Oct 7 at 22:24
what do we want to do with our blog content?
 
Lawrence
Lawrence
8:31 AM
@KitZ.Fox For deleting a couple of obsolete comments.
 
 
3 hours later…
user36188
user36188
11:44 AM
when to use will and would in setence, both are represent the future sentence
 
Matt E. Эллен
Matt E. Эллен
11:56 AM
@user36188 have you heard of English Language Learners? They also have a chat room where people might be more apt to help you.
 
user36188
user36188
ok
 
 
2 hours later…
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
2:15 PM
@MattE.Эллен Well I don't suppose we want to let it just disappear after so many people put effort into creating it. Does this mean the Stack Overflow blog is going to disappear?
 
Matt E. Эллен
Matt E. Эллен
2:34 PM
@Tonepoet I don't think their blog will go. just the ones that the communities maintain.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@MattE.Эллен Thanks for the info.
 
Matt E. Эллен
Matt E. Эллен
If we are to continue to have a blog then we will need people to look after it. I opt out, as I spent a good couple of years trying to get people to write for it to little success and I'm done with it.
however there will be a meta topic on the subject, so willing volunteers can sort something out.
 
 
2 hours later…
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
4:15 PM
@MattE.Эллен You might want to consider just having a read only version of the blog, just for archival's sake, if nobody's willing to update it. I think a number of us might've had reason to reference it in the past, assuming it would be around forever.
 
Andrew Leach
Andrew Leach
4:29 PM
@Tonepoet It is at least theoretically possible that existing blog content will be migrated. But as we don't know what will be provided/recommended and on what basis, it's not really worth speculating.
 
Lawrence
Lawrence
@MattE.Эллен We've got some good stuff there. I like Tonepoet's idea of a read-only version - maybe keep that as a no-maintenance fall-back measure.
 
Andrew Leach
Andrew Leach
It is worth considering whether existing content should be kept. A Meta post might be worthwhile, once the proposals from TPTB are known so there is some basis for any proposals.
 
Matt E. Эллен
Matt E. Эллен
Yes. I like the read-only idea.
 
Mitch
Mitch
5:06 PM
Keeping read-only is probably little less than keeping the whole thing
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Mitch The initial investment of effort and resources wouldn't be much different but we also need to consider the ongoing cost. The problem is that if we have a writable blog, somebody is going to have to maintain it because an unsupervised blog may be more of a liability than an asset.
 
Mitch
Mitch
5:27 PM
@Tonepoet @Tonepoet Who do you mean 'we'? You should make your suggestion on the meta.SE site and see if it sticks with the SE community or the SE development team (two very different things).
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Mitch I don't think a simple preliminary suggestion is outside of chat's scope, given I'm just going with the flow of the conversation we have here Mitch. By "we" I mean the English Language & Usage community. Animusion's comment suggests that each community needs to figure out what to do with their own blog posts, now that the blog service is being discontinued. The devs. are washing their hands of it.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
6:00 PM
Which Roald Dahl character are you?
I am Matilda.
 
tchrist
tchrist
 
Mitch
Mitch
6:35 PM
@Tonepoet the dev's washing their hands means that the blog software goes for all sites. There's no single site software.
 
 
4 hours later…
SmokeDetector
SmokeDetector
10:50 PM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer: "Boyfriend" and "girlfriend" usage by Jessica on english.stackexchange.com
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Mitch That's right: However I have no reason to believe that Anime, Sci-Fi, User Experience, Ask Ubuntu or any of the other Stack Exchange websites would care about the independent fate of the English Language & Usage blog's content.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
Random question: is "contingently" really a word? Is there a less-awkward synonym I could use?
 
tchrist
tchrist
On a contingent basis?
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@Marthaª It sounds strange to me but it seems to be listed as the adverbial form under contingent for a few dictionaries. Adding the -ly suffix to an adjective to make an adverb doesn't seem that strange either. It seems to have usage in books dating back since 1631...
... and with relatively stable usage since about 1828, I'd be willing to count it as a word.
 
tchrist
tchrist
It's not a pretty word. I suggest a phrase.
Potentially.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
11:06 PM
"Your field experience application for 1234 Practicum has been [contingently] approved for the Spring 2017 quarter." I'm not sure how to insert "on a contingent basis" in there without the sentence suffering from excessive clause-itis.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
Hmm, even Noah Webster listed it in his dictionary so it should be common enough by the dictionary standard, since that more or less means its been in the dictionary since forever.
 
tchrist
tchrist
There's a standard word that goes there.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
If there is, it's not coming to mind.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
Already.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Starts with pr-.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
11:09 PM
Ah! Provisionally! Thank you!
 
tchrist
tchrist
Yep. :)
I knew you'd get it. :)
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
Hmm, yeah, that works much better.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
(I kept getting bogged down with "preliminarily", but 1. that's hardly any better, and 2. we're already using it with a different meaning.)
 
tchrist
tchrist
The OED has 389 adverbs that start with pr-.
 
Marthaª
Marthaª
Thanks again! Back to the grind...
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
11:11 PM
@tchrist That's interesting as Onelook only has about 100, although provisionally is there.
 
tchrist
tchrist
> [adv.] ← practicable
practically [adv.]
practically minded ← practically [adv.]
† ˈpractively [adv.] ← ˈpractive
pragˈmatically [adv.]
pragmaˈtistically [adv.] ← pragmatist
ˈpraisably [adv.] ← praisable
ˈpraisefully [adv.] ← praiseful
praise-way [adv.] ← praise
ˈpraiseˌworthily [adv.]
† ˈpraiseworthly [adv.]
ˈpraisingly [adv.] ← ˈpraising
ˈprandially [adv.] ← prandial
† ˈprankingly [adv.]
ˈprankishly [adv.] ← ˈprankish
p’raps [adv.]
ˈpratingly [adv.] ← ˈprating
† ˈpravely [adv.] ← prave
prayerfully [adv.]
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
I mention onelook because obviously it is not everybody who has access to the O.E.D. to perform that kind of search.
 
tchrist
tchrist
They probably forgot prunȝeandlie.
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@tchrist Seeing Pre-Raphaelly as an O.E.D. word makes me question whether we're too harsh on S.W.Rs. for having inconceivable concepts. =P Then again, seeing the hyphen after the prefix suggests it's considered nonstandard even to the people who use it.
 
tchrist
tchrist
Untrue.
That is not what that means.
It means that there is a capital letter.
In this instance.
 
Mitch
Mitch
11:29 PM
@Marthaª wait-listingly?
 
Tonepoet
Tonepoet
@tchrist Hmm, you know what tchrist, that didn't make sense to me at first because when I read "Pre-Raphaeˈlitically" in your list, my mind basically discarded everything after the apostrophe. I figured it was an adverb for a pluralized synonym for grove. Now the word makes more sense because it's based on the name Raphael, which I did suspect for a moment before considering that the -ly suffix would add an L.
 

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