English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:02 AM

@RegDwigнt That's not what I meant. Probably I stated it poorly, and perhaps mastered wasn't the right word. What I meant was that Stravinsky extracted the essence of the genres he explored and filtered them through his own vision. He didn't out-Joplin Joplin nor did he out-Ellington Ellington. That wasn't the point. But he found something in jazz that he could use, and he did so eloquently.

For that matter, he didn't out-classical anybody, but his Apollon musagète is a masterpiece of neo-classicism.

BTW, I totally forgot to mention Prokofiev in my desultory listing of 20th century composers. What was I thinking?

Feb 10 '11 at 13:21, by Robusto

Tchaikovsky called him "a giftless bastard" but I rather like his symphonies.

Although I'll take Tchaikovsky's violin concerto over Brahms's any day.

And there's another one I forgot to list for the 19th century.

My random-access memory is a bit too random.

@RegDwigнt Well, at least Kubrick knew a good piece of music when he stole one.

Still, all most people know of Strauss is the World Riddle at the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra. They oughta listen to the rest of it, because it's great.

So is Ein Heldenleben. So is Don Quixote. And Till Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche. I could go on.

1:21 AM

@RegDwigнt BTW, I have a pie plate, now all I need is the pie. Can you help? Mit Schlagobers, bitte.

The fuck are you doing mucking around on that site? I thought you were better than that.

Heh, speaking of Richard Strauss:

Schlagobers

Schlagobers (Whipped Cream), Op. 70, is a ballet in two acts with a libretto and score by Richard Strauss. Composed in 1921–22, it was given its première at the Vienna State Opera on 9 May 1924. == Background == While serving as co-director of the Vienna State Opera with Franz Schalk from 1919 until 1924, Strauss sought to revive the fortunes of the resident ballet company, struggling after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He recruited choreographer Heinrich Kröller (1880–1930) from the Berlin State Opera and collaborated with him on a series of productions, restaging his earlier...

Well I'll be damned.

My fantasia seems to be repeating itself.

Cerberus

4:09 AM

@RegDwigнt That's a nice site.

It's cool, being able to follow the music on the sheets as it's played.

The new, fifth Walz is good, too.

Some parts look-sound pretty hard?

And watching your fingers play is somewhat ASMR.

My windmill is currently out of commission.

But I'll think about it...

11:35 AM

@Robusto well yes, that's why people still like checking out his jazz stuff. Precisely because he had no idea wtf he was doing, as is indeed documented in his own handwriting. He just took some random ideas and ran with them. So it's interesting to listen to because he takes them in directions nobody in his right mind would take them to.

Alas, that's not true of his ragtime. That one's just rubbish all around. A shame.

@Robusto I am promoting the hell out of myself. To people who don't know what a third is. That's what the Internet is all about, sadly. I wish it were about something else. But it is not.

@Cerberus the fifth waltz is the easiest one I wrote, maybe with the exception of the very first one, that one was very basic. But yeah yours is much harder to play. I couldn't just sit down and play it right now. The fifth one anyone can sight-read no problem.

It still sounds brilliant, of course, but that's sort of the point. If I can achieve an effect with two notes instead of ten, or with three easy notes instead of two hard ones, I take the easy path. Always.

11:51 AM

@Mitch thanks I'll use that. Public domain with no attribution, right?

12:57 PM

@Rob Last time in Frankfurt I listened to a spectacular pianist from Austria. She would play fucking Liszt as a warm-up exercise, you know. That sort of thing. I've been following her on Instagram since. Here's the latest comment thread from her latest post:

> Q: "Hi Sophie! Where can I find your videos playing the piano?"

> A: there are some on YouTube :-D

And we're complaining about MuseScore. Or ELU, for that matter. Lol.

This is what people actually ask professional musicians on fucking Instagram.

And this is what professional musicians have to answer.

It's a disgrace.

BTW, in a couple months there's a piano concert here at the uni, like two hundred feet away from where I'm sitting now. Guess who's the pianist. Valentina Lisitsa, that's who.

I want to go but nobody seems to have the tickets up yet.

1:15 PM

@RegDwigнt Possibly, but let me check with my music copyright lawyer. The last time I checked, they said I own all rights in perpetuity to D, D sharp, and E, so if you can score it without those then go wild. Or which is better, use them and then direct deposit.

Prashin Jeevaganth

1:32 PM

Hi, can I ask if anyone knows of a "writing review" stackexchange platform or chat where I can go to? I have posted a question here but I'm not sure if it's welcomed in the community. english.stackexchange.com/questions/482641/…

SmokeDetector

2:42 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer, no whitespace in answer, repeating characters in answer (263): A word to describe a place which is "very cozy" by KAKA on english.SE

3:00 PM

@RegDwigнt Well, at least the question was related to music. It might have been a question about her hair, or if she likes bunnies. Or maybe a single-word-request for the opposite of piano.

3:10 PM

@PrashinJeevaganth Hi Prashim. ELU is not a editing/proofreading/review site (It doesn't work well on SE; only CodeReview.SE allows such a thing). Your ELU question should be closed as proof-reading or primarily opinion based.

As to where on the web to do that sort of thing, I'm sure there are places, and I'm sure there have been questions here about the same, and I'm sure there are some pointers...

...but I can't remember any of them or how to search for them here.

@Robusto Forte, duh.

@Mitch Nope. That's simply the other half of the full name of the instrument: pianoforte.

Q: Where can I ask for free proofreading?

@PrashinJeevaganth ah...

12

I know that proofreading is prohibited in this site. However, I'd like to ask if there are free online websites to do that. I remember once there was a website where I can help people in Spanish/Portuguese and they help me in English. I attempted searching on Google, but I didn't find anything....

And in case you were wondering, the opposite of pp is poo poo.

I wasn't wondering that

at all

Then call it a lagniappe.

3:14 PM

but now I'm wondering about ppp

That is peeing in three dimensions.

@Robusto or a cockaigne

@Robusto good spread. also showing off

@Robusto Isn't that what you make a meringue out of?

It could be.

Could be many things.

fufu

@Robusto You could be riding your bike

I could if I didn't have a cold.

I rode yesterday and it wrecked my throat.

BTW, note BrE spelling: could.

"I have a could."

"I could catch a could."

"Fould your clouthes neatly instead of roulling them up."

"Ouh! That's an ould trick and a bould one!"

@RegDwigнt To successfully promote yourself on the Interwebs, you need to find something that appeals to the worst of the dumbest.

I'm afraid obscure Russian poets set to music only appeal to smart people. So you start with two strikes against you.

3:47 PM

@Robusto well I don't read comments, just occasionally catch a glimpse of one, so for all I know the entire rest of the comments she gets totally is "do you like bunnies" or "pls like me on Tinder" or whatever.

@Robusto Well for one, that sounds like a challenge and I like challenges if only because they give you something to do for a while.

For two, it's not like obscure Russian poets is the only thing I do.

@RegDwigнt But that's what you're best known for, innit?

To you maybe. To the rest of the world I'm known for whatever string of spaghetti that I tossed stuck to them.

Some think I only do LEGO videos.

Some think I will teach them languages.

Most don't think at all.

Maybe we should do an NGram search for your name and settle this matter definitively once and for all.

You could do that. I've not googled myself for two years maybe.

It's kinda pointless anyway since my name can be spelled twenty different ways, and that's just the official spellings in my fucking passport.

For a while I thought about collecting all the snailmail that I was getting with my name misspelled. There were some real gems in there.

@RegDwigнt I wasn't aware you needed a passport to fuck. That must be a hardship.

3:53 PM

But I'm fucking lazy so I never did.

@Robusto In Soviet Russia, you fuck bureaucracy.

It's difficult to understand for a TSA citizen.

Or whatever your country's called.

Anyway I actually gotta run in about three minutes.

The e in my name fucks up everybody. When asked to spell my name for some bureaucrat or clerk or something, I have taken to spelling it in letter pairs so that it's clear and simple, and still they fuck it up.

@RegDwigнt TSA is a good guess. For "Trump States of Amurrica" ...

Yeah but you know how some misspellings kinda make sense, like someone thought it's Robnsto.

And then there's some misspellings that make no fucking sense at all, like someone thinking it's Robgeanj.

I got a fucking lot of the latter.

I really have no idea how they arrived at some of them.

It cannot be a visual thing, and it cannot be an aural miscomprehension.

I'm talking about the Americanization of the umlaut. Like in the name of the special counsel investigating Trump: Mueller. Everyone pronounces it Muller, when in fact Miller would be closer to the truth, which would be Müller.

Basically it's a complete reimagining of my name from scratch.

@Robusto All that matters is how he says it.

3:57 PM

@Robusto well Mitch right there thinks that there's a writer named Nabakov.

And I've never asked him.

Most people mispronounce him like that, but not many actually think that's his name.

Mitch does.

I blame his cats.

The Spanish normally map /y/ to /i/, whereas Americans normally map /y/ to /u/.

Anyway guys I got that bus to catch. Lators.

That shows which features each considers central.

3:58 PM

@RegDwigнt Bai

@tchrist What? /y/ to /u/? Example, please.

@Robusto Americans mispronounce the French question Tu sais? as /tu 'sei/, while Spaniards mispronounce it /ti 'se/.

Ah, okay.

But the Spanish at least say the /t/ correctly. Americans do not.

It's dental.

But that's phonology not phonemes.

The lack of an /y/ phoneme in their own tongues is why neither of the foreign groups says it right.

This is why Trump wants to ban foreigners? Now it makes sense.

terdon

4:18 PM

@tchrist Thanks! I only got round to watching that now. I had always known of this, but it was very interesting to see the breakdown of why it happens. Although I disagree with the point the video makes about the /s/ sound. While the Spanish and Greek ones may be more similar to each other than either is to English, the /s/ is one of the few ways you can spot a Greek speaker speaking Spanish. I think the Greek /s/ is more retracted than the Spanish.

4:38 PM

I don't think I would ever confuse the two.

@Robusto I thought the usual pronunciation in AmE would have been /mju: lr/ (or at the least the one person I know with thta last name (before the laywer guy) was pronounced 'Myooler')

@Mitch It depends. A few years ago a Boston Red Sox player named Mueller was pronounced "Miller" ...

They're really all over the map.

Bill Mueller

William Richard "Bill" Mueller (; born March 17, 1971) is an American retired professional baseball third baseman who played in Major League Baseball (MLB). Mueller's MLB playing career was spent with the San Francisco Giants (1996–2000, 2002), Chicago Cubs (2001–2002), Boston Red Sox (2003–2005), and Los Angeles Dodgers (2006). A number of Mueller's accomplishments came during the 2003 season, when he won the American League batting title and a Silver Slugger Award. A switch hitter, he became the only player in major league history to hit one grand slam from both sides of the plate in the same...

mɪlər

@Robusto Sports don't exist for me, so I am unable to read that.

I mean I see markings on the page...

but when I try to make sense of it, it just floats away.

Nevertheless, you do understand that there is such a thing as sports and that these sports have players, right?

only abstractly. I think sports is some kind of game maybe?

and maybe you .. do things... something like that.

sure a team.

but what exactly they're attempting to do...

like... why?

and then people watch it?

I understand you can eat things while watching, which makes sense, but then why bother watching.

Is it like watching TV?

4:47 PM

Forget sports. Athlete is a subclass of person. Bill Mueller is a person.

Oh. Ok. Got it.

I feel like someone doing a sport thing is using a... are they... twisting?

Is it like a dance? Like a dance troupe and they dance together with colorful costumes? And people enjoy watching it? That makes sense.

Explain to me the principle of 'offsides'.

Also the rules about overtime in football.

THE PATS ONLY WON BECAUSE OF THE COIN TOSS

terdon

5:26 PM

@Robusto I bet you would. Hell, I do and I speak both fluently. And I still mix them up when heard at a distance.

Tonepoet

5:41 PM

@Mitch <_< >_> Yes.

6:53 PM

Hey cool, they've killed the main site.

Now we can chat in peace.

@terdon "At a distance"? Maybe. English sounds like Russian if you get far enough away. Up close? I still doubt it.

7:49 PM

0

Q: Is it right to write?

Are these sentences is grammatically right: I should start to play guitar someday. Is it ok if I update before I play in the old version? Or this update should be updated now ? If it is ok, I will follow the instructions you gave to me. Afterwards, I make sure that the update has succeeded.

grammar

Great title. Propose migration to Philosophy.