Hey gang, I was trying to express an idea in a comment dialogue on this question:

I got into a back-and-forth with Jason Bassford and I moved the conversation to chat after a couple sallies. I'd like anyone who wants to to look at the chat and the point I'm making and see if it makes sense to you.

chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/88770/…

@RegDwigнt, @tchrist, @Mitch, @MattE.Эллен ^^^

I'm not saying I'm right, but I do feel that to parse the adjective as an adverb is insufficient in such cases. The easy out.

@Robusto You're sitting pretty there.

FWIW, this is not a "who's right" battle. I don't really care. I just want to be sure there aren't big flaws in my reasoning that I am not seeing. I'm kinda feeling my way in the dark on this.

@tchrist What's your take on my attempt to define this concept?

My previous response should have enclued you to my concurrence.

Ah, thanks.

Sitting pretty is not sitting prettily. That's a predicate complement, if you would, for the subject.

Just like painting the town drunk.

The town isn't drunk: the subject is. :)

Heh.

Or standing tall. Again, that is NOT a "flat adverb".

No more so than "good" is when you're looking good.

@Robusto I bet you can read that.

Where ficar is quedar, mostly.

quedar they have, but don't use much.

@tchrist Let's see ... Translate "Control food publicity to minors" (?) This is a title that precisely translates into English, [fiquei] in doubt about the minors, I saw that it's sometimes translated as "children" sometimes as "child audiences". Can you help me translate completely? Many thanks!

Unsure about fiquei ...

Read: me quedé

Oh, like "I remained in doubt"?

Yes.

Whee!

Is minors accurate?

And control is the noun, food publicity the modifiers.

Ah.

Well no, I think it's about little kids.

So ... just children.

Yes, maybe even babies. Like baby food.

Ah.

Control in "European" means something a little different than it usually does in English.

My literal translation in mind was "the infantile public" ...

Like when the surprise inspectors jump on the tram to check people's tickets.

So it's about surprise?

That's ticket control.

Well, oversight.

They're making sure things are right.

Ah, like appellation controlée on the French wine bottles.

Yes. Pretty sure this sense exists in German as well.

Prädikatswein, perhaps.

Regulations and such.

That's their "name control" thingy.

Oh maybe only the Scandinavian tongues have kontrollen.

I can only find a loanword in German, and as a noun.

The literal translation of appellation controlée would be "kontrollierte Appellation" I think.

Inspection hits closer to the mark here, I think.

We called them controllers, but yeah, inspectors works better. I never thought of that. You stop translating eventually.

Exactly.

Because things in another language are things in another language.

It's why you get loanwords. Spend a few months in a Spanish-speaking country, then come back to an English-speaking one and try to describe things, and your nouns especially will be weird.

Because they're names.

And you know the names as you knew them.

I've said that exact thing before.

And even the experiences you have can be hard to translate because you experienced them in another language. Not hard, exactly, but cumbersome.

You want to go right to the language the experiences happened in.

You might even ask people whether their soup appestesces them. :)

Hehe.

German also has Qualitätswein, btw. Forgot that one. And then Qualitätswein mit Prädikat.

Even when you speak English, or mostly English, with other English speakers there, you'll constantly code-switch to pull in nouns.

Yes. And you hear that all the time with foreign speakers here.

I was talking to a lad this morning who offered to shovel out my driveway. I know he speaks English pretty well, but his dad doesn't speak a word of it so I always use only Spanish with them. But the kid pokes in random English nouns.

Yep. The second generation picks up the language faster and better, of course.

He's certainly more relaxed speaking Spanish, which is important.

It's kind of like you're on the inside then.

Please tell me why the American educational system refuses to teach children a foreign language until they lose their innate aptitude for it?

He still mostly usteds me, but I'm an old man.

Heh, of course.

Respect.

Even if you didn't earn it, your years did.

It's no different in England or Australia, you know.

I still don't understand it.

It's literally like burning in all the gates on a CPU and then trying to open other ones.

Most folks can't imagine ever speaking anything but English. Like, who would they talk to?

Where "most" means the 4:1 English:Spanish majority here, or whatever the right figures are these days.

For the MAGA crowd the ratio is expressed as notenough:toomany.

The other day a guy I work with who lives in DC let me know a couple things and I was in a hurry so just said "kk". Then he told me a third thing and I said I'd add another "k" but then he'd expect me to wear a white hat. He answered, or a red one.

Haha, nice.

Not bad for a twenty-something.

Yep. To be precise, though, you should have said a white hood.

Funny how nearly extinct the Republicans are in DC proper.

It's minority rule.

Naw, impossible in a democracy. It's always majority rule. Or cheaters.

That's why Republicans hate democracy and want to destroy it.

If you can and do rig the system, it's not a functional democracy.

I blame Faux News. There are people who get their "information" nowhere else. Not even from their senses.

Did you notice that the Golden State Warriors visited the President in Washington today to get their picture taken and all? Turns out Trump wouldn't let them come to White House so they went and visited the other guy.

I'm sure everybody was a lot happier that way.

And now we know why they weren't allowed into the White House.

@tchrist Which other guy?

@Robusto The President.

I can't see them trying to get in to see Trump anyway.

They didn't.

They came to see the President. :)

You mean Obama?

Aye.

thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/…

Ah. Cool

Surely a burn.

Yep.

Pinocchio knows he isn't a real boy.

But why not visit the president who actually won an election, right?

Who wants to be seen with a criminal anyway?

A criminal and a traitor.

Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn't define treason as betraying one's country for another.

The patriots were too sensitive to the long history of the Crown trumping up treason charges over just anything, so they wrote a very tight definition into the Constitution.

I'm sure it fits, regardless.

Of course.

Not even the guys who give away our top secret stuff to Russia or China or Saudi get charged with treason. They can't be, because we haven't declared war on those powers.

Or Israel.

Doesn't mean that isn't a crime and all. Just means it's hard to execute them for it.

To quote the Wicked Witch of the West: "What a world! What a world!"

Well, I have to hit the hay. Gotta lead a ride tomorrow and it's going to be near freezing. Buenas noches, amigo.

Night.

It's cold here.

What temp?

checks

18

And falling.

Yeah, ours ain't that bad.

But it's January. What do you expect?

Anyways, seeya.

Yeah, had worse.

This is pussy winter.

> A letter to a match factory: "I've been buying your matches for 10 years, and counting the number of matches in each matchbox. Sometimes there are 59 matches there, sometimes 60, and sometimes 61 or even 62! Are you all crazy there?!"

(Russian Joke of the Day)

hi

Can you boycott a place?

like say, we should boycott "New York".

is that okay?

My friend said we only boycott actions

@Breathing I'm boycotting Texas right now...and they're probably boycotting Target...and all 49 other states.

@Breathing People don't really boycott actions or places; they boycott entities. Boycotting New York is acceptable since it can refer to the government or people of New York, but you wouldn't boycott a forest because forests have no business dealings. You might boycott a national park though, if that's possible.

With that having been said, boycotts are typically motivated by actions.

Israel is frequently boycotted.

Hi

Who are the red guys wearing KKK hoods. I'm not following.

And I'm not even twenty anymore.

Song of the day:

I love the ingenious rhymes here

@Tonepoet I don't understand.

@CowperKettle I guess you had to be there.

@RegDwigнt You understand "kk" meaning "ok", right?

Well, the joke comes from there.

Add a k to kk and you get what? What does that have to do with hoods?

OIC U せ.

@Robusto I don't understand

@RegDwigнt It was a reference to the racists who wear Trump's MAGA hats.

Hello.

@Cerberus Sez you.

@CowperKettle Meaning I don't get the joke.

That is, I don't see why it's funny. Or supposed to be.

@Robusto It's a crazy behaviour to count the number of matches in each matchbox for years.

Maybe I mistranslated the joke

And yet the guy accuses factory workers of being crazy for not keeping the number of matches constant.

This number is always approximate.

The matches are just being thrown into matchboxes by a machine until each box is full.

And a matchbox costs a trifle, nobody cares if it's a match less or a match more.

I know what a matchbox is and what matches are.

It just doesn't strike me as particularly funny. Maybe because it's morning here and I'm not completely awake, I dunno.

Probably!

I got it.

@Mitch Quite so!

@Robusto Now you'e just showing off.

@CowperKettle If that letter is all there is and there's no missing words or little 'untranslatable' particles, then I suspect it's not a translation problem, but more of context of the joke. Your explanation around the context makes it clear that it is funny, that it is absurd for this guy to complain about them being crazy when it is he that is being crazy doing all that counting.

@Mitch Umm you didn't get the joke without the explanation?

It was evident to me.

But (as an American) when I read that I'm not thinking at all about the process of counting the matches, I'm expecting something else about the numbers to lead to something funny, like he's contradicting something he said before, or showing that the match makers are intentionally putting in less matches (but that wouldn't be a joke just that the match makers are cheap).

@Cerberus No, I didn't understand what was supposed to be funny. Read it a number of times trying to see wear the humor was. Why did the guy keep raising the #? 60 as a round # is probably what was expected so getting 61 or 62 would have been a good thing. Why would somebody complain about that, the guy just seems like a complainer, and by itself doesn't seem funny.

Also, even if machines are putting the matches in, there's always statistical variability in machine processes so it is normal to see a difference of 1 or 2 (like in pill bottles and such).

Ummm.

Funny you didn't get it!

@Cerberus That's not funny.

@Robusto Sigh, I don't expect many people would get the relation, since it requires knowledge of two somewhat obscure factoids from two distinctly separate fields of knowledge, so if you know one you're unlikely to know the other. I wonder if Gracenote would get it. The character depicted is the avatar she has on the established user privilege page, and it has been that way for as long as I can remember.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Repeating characters in title (64): meme time! HEEEEEEEEEEETYYYYYY by user333567 on english.SE

@Robusto thank you for explaining the one part of the joke that absolutely everyone got.

@tchrist thank you for explaining the specific part of the joke that I was actually asking about.

Now I'm on to google MAGA, whatever the fuck that is.

@RegDwigнt They are all adept combatants in Krav Maga (israeli martial arts).

The hats double as eye shade from the sun, protection of the scalp, and fashion statements. I realize that that is a triple threat, but that's how clever the whole thing is.

@RegDwigнt I was just messing with you. Lighten the fuck up.

@Mitch I work very hard at learning the names of things. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it. If you can find a match, that is.

@Robusto 1) I don't smoke, and 2) some other second reason.

@Robusto I am always lit AF.

Also NOU. I never take anything seriously, least of all myself. But you people always listen to me like I have something of value to say. Pffft.

Also I figured out what MAGA must stand for even before my Vista agreed to open Google. I am so smart, I am actually quite proud of how smart I am.

I actually recall writing a song about that. Now where was it. Ah here:

@RegDwigнt ¡Qué Vista buena!