English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mitch

2:00 PM

@RegDwigнt his remains are still French

RegDwigнt

This is on there, too:

Mitch

his dead uncle is still french

Cerberus

RegDwigнt

@Cerberus exactly. That's Eva Green.

Mitch

@RegDwigнt That's known as a French hug

les bisous

et pas les Bizets

Færd

2:01 PM

@Cerberus To return to earlier examples of Iranians, I find non-White-passing Iranians underrepresented as fashion icons and on the Net and elsewhere.

Mitch

Eva Green got some smoky eye

Cerberus

@Færd Umm it's too hard to cut through the euphemism jungle here.

Mitch

@Færd how about the passing ones? which ones are they?

Catherine Bell?

RegDwigнt

Eva Green is half Swedish, BTW.

Mitch

Christiane Amanpour?

Reza Aslan?

Færd

2:02 PM

@Cerberus I didn't ehphemize anything?

Mitch

@RegDwigнt What's her face is total Swedish and yet has a permanent tan

Færd

@Mitch Hmm. He's an Iranian?

Cerberus

Mitch

Alicia... Tank girl or is it the new Lara Croft?

@Færd Probably not.

Færd

@Mitch What are giving examples of?

Mitch

2:04 PM

Our doubts are wrong

Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan (Persian: رضا اصلان‎, IPA: [ˈɾezɒː æsˈlɒːn]; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American author, public intellectual, religious studies scholar, producer, and television host. He has written three books on religion: No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization, and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the International Qur'anic Studies Association. He is also a professor of creative writing...

tchrist

Mitch

But Iran is pretty multiethnic.

tchrist

Indian or Iranian?

Mitch

Aslan could be Azeri

@tchrist THat's Shohreh

tchrist

It is.

Mitch

2:05 PM

Aghdashloo

Bless you

tchrist

Gesundheit.

Mitch

Dia linn

Færd

Iranian. And White-passing.

Mitch

A tes souhaits

Færd

Not Aslan, tho.

Mitch

2:05 PM

or whatever the French say

Cerberus

@tchrist Could be French or Iranian or Dutch.

tchrist

I guess I don't get the "white-passing" bit.

Mitch

probably in France everybody else sniffs

tchrist

Does that mean "not Asian"?

Færd

Those with lighter coloring who could pass as white Westerners.

Cerberus

2:06 PM

Doesn't look particularly Indian to me, but I believe there are some with lighter skin, so who knows.

Mitch

@Færd Alicia Vikander is white (Nordic) passing for ... danged if I know, something else

Færd

White, I find, is predominantly used to mean white Westerner.

Mitch

@Færd Any examples?

Færd

But that would depend on the centext more than anything else.

Cerberus

Mitch

2:08 PM

Who is the new CEO of Uber?

Dara long-last-name?

Cerberus

Færd

@Mitch Most Iranians on Instagram who are famous because of looks.

tchrist

@Cerberus Yeah, I was wondering what all these brown-eyed photos were about. Seems unnatural the mix.

Mitch

@Færd For example? wait...how do you get famous on instagram? Is that a thing?

Kim Kardashian doesn't count. Armenian. (but that is a very Iranian look)

Cher.

also armenian

Steve Jobs

Cerberus

Mitch

2:10 PM

Lebanese

Færd

@Mitch I guess followed is the correct word in social media cant.

Cerberus

@tchrist What mix?

Mitch

@Cerberus >55% in Norway? I find that hard to believe

tchrist

@Cerberus The photos people have posted here this morning. Everybody has dark hair and dark eyes. Where I'm from, most people have light hair and light eyes.

Mitch

what is blond? Not yellow. maybe they're thinking light brown.

@Færd examples? I need names

Færd

2:12 PM

Most Followed Iranian on Instagram

►

Cerberus

@Mitch Why?

It's 65%+, by the way.

Mitch

@Færd just type two names!

Cerberus

@tchrist Umm I don't understand. Why was it relevant what people near you look like?

Mitch

@Cerberus I'm always shocked by Norwegian shows how everybody is not blond (yellow) haired.

Færd

@Mitch You demand too much! Taraneh Alidoosti, Sadaf Taherian, etc.

Cerberus

2:13 PM

The question I believed we were investigating was, how distinguishable do Iranians look compared to Europeans and Near/Middle-Easterners.

Mitch

most everybody is light brown at lightest and one or two token blonds

Cerberus

@Mitch Well, I don't know about that, but since when are you addicted to Norwegian soap operas?

Mitch

just like British or German or French TV/movies

tchrist

Because it's one way to immediately notice that all those people are exotic/foreign-looking.

Færd

Do we have certain American looks yet?

Mitch

2:14 PM

@Færd OK. Those I've never heard of.

@Cerberus I'd say not particularly.

As distinguishable as Greeks or southern Italians

Færd

@Mitch The former is one of the most famous actresses alive.

tchrist

@Færd Every picture I posted but the last is Indian; the last was Iranian.

Mitch

@Cerberus shuts mouth

tchrist

Where "Indian" means the ones near me, not the ones near thee.

Cerberus

@Mitch I would tend to agree.

Mitch

2:16 PM

@Færd I don't doubt that... in Iran

tchrist

So those were all American.

Færd

@tchrist So native American. What about other Americans? Do we have regional physiognomies there?

tchrist

@Færd Cerb's maps strongly suggest so.

Færd

Hmm. looks

I like Cerb's fixation with maps and statistical data.

Mitch

@Færd somebody spent time creating a youtube video out of scrolling down different pages on instagram. I don't think that's how the internet is supposed to work.

Cerberus

2:19 PM

@Færd I read history and classics and philosophy at uni, so d'oh I'm fixated.

Mitch

@Færd Data is useless. Don't let facts get in the way of your opinions

Cerberus

Data is not useless!!

Mitch

Is too!

Cerberus

He's super handy on away missions.

Mitch

I just proved it by saying so!

Cerberus

2:20 PM

Or did you mean Data are useless?

tchrist

Lore is not to be trusted.

Cerberus

Indeed not.

Mitch

But Loren is as cute as a button

Cerberus

Unless it's Folk Lore.

Loren?

tchrist

thefederalist.com/2018/06/22/…

Cerberus

2:20 PM

I only know Lauren from the Catherine Tate Show.

tchrist

They were all nekkid because the computers weren't fast enough to draw their feathers.

Færd

@Mitch I told you about my impression, and you asked for a couple examples.

tchrist

Same with those Navajo Girls calendars.

Cerberus

@tchrist I'm not reading an article about a film, but I presume feathers are more difficult to render and to create on physical models?

Right.

tchrist

@Cerberus right

Færd

2:21 PM

@Cerberus More power to your fixation.

tchrist

People bought it.

Cerberus

That's also the reason for the transporter in Star Trek.

tchrist

Because most people then didn't know that they had feathers. This awareness has been growing.

Cerberus

I remember the feathers came when I was a child.

In primary school, before dinosaurs had become popular and before Jurassic Park, they had very few books on dinosaurs in the book shop.

I did get this huge encyclopaedia with all known dinosaurs in it.

Mitch

@Færd Nasim Pedrad was on SNL for a couple years. Does not 'look Iranian' whatever that means.

Cerberus

2:23 PM

It was one of my favourite books.

But archaeopterix was already known, and the line of descent.

Mitch

Maz Jobrani is pretty well known. But bills himself as 'brown' so hard to choose otherwise.

The Iron Sheik... is one of a kind

tchrist

@Cerberus That surprises me: dinosaur books for kids were popular 50 years ago here.

Mitch

Cerberus

@tchrist Well, they had some, but it was nothing compared to the late nineties.

When everything and everybody had to be a dinosaur.

Færd

@Mitch She does to me.

Mitch

2:26 PM

@tchrist people tend to forget over the years since they died

tchrist

Avifilopluma

Avifilopluma ("bird filoplumes") is a clade containing all animals with feathers. Unlike most clades, which are defined based on relative relationships, Avifilopluma is defined based on an apomorphy, that is, a unique physical characteristic shared by one group and not found outside that group (in this case, feathers). == Definition == The clade Avifilopluma was created along with several other apomorphy-based clades relating to birds by Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in a 2001 paper. Their specific definition for the group was "the clade stemming from the first pan-avian with feat...

Mitch

@Cerberus wait... because they didn't want to draw feathers?

Cerberus

@Mitch Because they didn't want to draw shuttle landings.

Too expensive.

I had this one!

tchrist

Which non-dinosaur prehistoric beasts did they cover?

Cerberus

2:43 PM

@tchrist A lot, though I don't know what criteria they used.

Probably size?

And representing as many subgroups as possible?

tchrist

2:58 PM

They used to think that Archaeopteryx was by definition a bird, because the rule then was that if it had a feather it had to have been a bird.

Saying that if it has a feather it must by definition be a member of Avifilopluma isn't quite the same as saying it must by definition be a dinosaur, but even that would be truer than the bird bit.

Cerberus

@tchrist When I was young, it was considered an intermediate stage.

And there were questions about some feathers on dinosaurs, but I think nobody really knew.

tchrist

The revolution occurred during the 1990s.

> Nearly all palaeontologists regard birds as coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs.[

Cerberus

Yeah.

The terminology probably wasn't fixed yet then.

Mitch

3:37 PM

Oh snap there's a dinosaur that just flew into my window and is lying stunned below it

I'm having a dinosaur salad sandwich for lunch

There's a dinosaur on the American dollar holding an olive branch and some arrows

Mitch

3:50 PM

Omg a dinosaur just crapped on my shoulder

Færd

@Mitch Oops. Sorry.

Cerberus

4:46 PM

@Mitch I hope it wasn't a diplodocus, then.

skull

5:07 PM

36

Q: Why is SE giving so much attention to the "be nice"-policy?

Recently we have been treated to featured meta posts and blog posts about the importance of the "be nice"-policy, and how/why it should also apply to comments. This is all fine. Educating each other about how we see their actions is surely the best way forward. But, it seems to me the efforts o...

does the hyphen in the title look right?

i mean the quotation marks makes it look awkward, no?

tchrist

5:22 PM

@Mitch The root trouble working against our naming here is an English one, not a taxonomic let alone a palaeological one. The key is that we want, or would like to say, short little Germanic words for all our things, not ponderously sententious polysyllabic terminologies deriving from classical lexicons. Like its brethren fish and beast, bird is a nice short Germanic word sitting easily in the mouth of native speakers, but dinosaur is exotically Graeco-Latin.

So we should start calling dinosaurs birds, not birds dinosaurs.

Mitch

@tchrist I'm gonna call an ostrich a longneck

tchrist

If only we were allowed to continue to use (metric) yard and (metric) pound and (metric) inch and (metric) mile and (metric) foot and (metric) acre for the newfangled French system, it would be far more readily adopted by us anglophones. As it stands now, these are all resisted as foreign invaders.

Mitch

what do uneducated kids call a tyrannosaur or velociraptor?

tchrist

Just like dinosaurs.

@Mitch They don't.

Mitch

@tchrist but they call the brontoapatosaur a long neck

tchrist

5:28 PM

What's the common name for the Helicobacter pylori bacterium?

There isn't one. Things we cannot see because they are too small or too long gone have no common names.

@Mitch Do they now?

skull

common to who?

Biologists probably have different common names for them :-)

Mitch

@tchrist h pylori

@tchrist yes

c difficile

becuse the first word is hard to pronounce

skull

@tchrist sounds like using "training wheels"

just learn them like riding a two-wheel bike

imo

their advantage is the prefix system

milli, centi, etc

Mitch

@tchrist longneck, domehead, fastrunner, sharpteeth, fastbiter

it's what kids call em

Educ

أه

Hi

Mitch

5:43 PM

salaam

Hi

dia duit

How are you ?

aloha

nil dona agam

conas ata tu?

Educ

Is this spanish ?

Mitch

5:46 PM

hm...no. the 'tu' is definitely Indo-European, but not Romance here.

Educ

ah Okay

Mitch

google translate should guess the right language.

or maybe not

It ain't top ten

aloha is hawaiian and has nothing to do with the other two lines

skull

~~ain't~~

tsk, tsk you're a room

:-)

Educ

rom= something related to the computer science

but about room owner is like you say admin of this room

Am I right ?

skull

yup

I forgot to type "owner" :-/

Mitch

5:52 PM

There's so much more I've forgotten to

Educ

:)

tchrist

@skull No, it is the nature of the English to re-use the same words on different continents instead of choosing new words that might be foreign. Witness American robins, kestrels, buffalo, antelope, blackbirds, buzzards, cedars, blackbirds versus the unrelated Eurasian or even Australasian or South African versions of the same.

skull

you have a valid point there

tchrist

There are many, many more like those I've just listed, things that you couldn't imagine. Vultures.

skull

yup

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…