English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@Robusto And not there alone, perhaps, with morning sun well past saffron in color. The hideously luteous moon shone upon my face all night long, and my world here smells and looks like a disaster zone here this morning, with AQIs over 150 here now. They say the doom cloud has already crept your way overnight to menace Colorado Springs with this strange and strangled sunrise.

@marcellothearcane Because I'm unwillingly cohabitating with a skunk?

@tchrist It looks from the map that there is an ugly patch that's localized to your area. We appear to be free of any of the dark lobes.

@tchrist Depending on how you are discussing this cohabitation, the air may be blue too

I'm all sneezy and snotty here.

Actually, we're at 76 PM10 and 67 PM2.5

2:07 PM

@Robusto I'm at AQI 157.

@marcellothearcane It's a superuser thing.

@marcellothearcane What's your point?

CowperKettle

@CowperKettle Precious!

@CowperKettle I would have called it the face you make when you realize you've mated with an orangutan.

Speak English? YOU FIRST!

2:12 PM

@Robusto tchrist is blue and I am confused

@Robusto You'd think she'd do something about that

@tchrist What does this mean?

he is a mod

And I'm a rocker.

and i'm a punk

2:30 PM

@Robusto One that annoys me is "safe haven"

Wait wait Robusto is italic

How are you doing this?

This HTML is messing with my brain

@marcellothearcane Room owners are italic; moderators blue.

How fancy

Can I have a <marquee>?

Never mind

Was that where an element would flash certain colours?

it was an element that would scroll across the screen

scroll text

2:47 PM

@Cerberus developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/…

Actually why is it called that?

I expect it's relating to signs over buildings that had scrolling text.

but I don't know

@marcellothearcane Wow, I thought it had already been phased out.

I don't expect Edwin would be happy if I asked

@Cerberus It has, but compatability

Seems like a legit etymology question

although it might not be classed as English, per se

Technical jargon!

2:55 PM

I'd almost suggest asking on softwareengineering.se but I don't think they like that sort of question anymore

Maybe in the History of Science and Mathematics? Programming is maths, right?

retrocomputing

ah, yeah.

good call

But the internet might be a bit modern for them

:D

Q: How is it "opinion-based" to ask about the fact that all current emulators "suck" when it actually is true?

-6

I tried asking this yesterday: How is it possible that video game console emulators perpetually suck? Actually, I asked it earlier in the day, but it was mysteriously "memoryholed", as if this had been the "Arqade" or "History" category of Stack Exchange. 404 Not Found. Baffling. That's why I re-...

discussion

3:01 PM

"How is my opinion opinion based?"

classic

Should've asked on main meta for a storm of downvotes

This has an insignificant six

Q: How much carbonic acid is in one can of soda?

3:23 PM

0

I need to find out how much grams or liters (preferably grams) of carbonic acid are in one can of soda. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

science

How would you go to politics.SE and think that is an appropriate question?

@marcellothearcane Naw nobody uses modems on the internet anymore.

Faheem Mitha

4:18 PM

I tried watching bits of the debate. It was a bit surreal. Does anyone else get the feeling they accidentally wandered into the early chapters of a bad dystopian novel?

I also watched Stephen Colbert's take on it. He actually looks frazzled, which in its own way was a bit unnerving too. Somehow one doesn't think of late night comedy talk show hosts as having feelings.

CowperKettle

5:21 PM

@tchrist Thank you for the explanation! I see both versions online but the queen has only used one. The guardian got it wrong: theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/29/…

I suspected it would be a case or gender thing

Q: A better alternative for the word 'urine'

5:50 PM

One more close vote and we don't have to take the piss anymore:

-5

I am writing a religious article that's related to urine. Since it will be on a religious website, I don't want this word 'URINE' to be in its heading. Please suggest a good word.

single-word-requests synonyms

CowperKettle

@Robusto Done

Trevor Reacts to the First Biden-Trump Debate | The Daily Social Distancing Show

Good man.

Q: Looking "at" or "into" objects in space

6:47 PM

2

In a recent conversation it was unclear if you can "look into the sun" or if it has to be "look at the sun", where looking into is supposed to mean the act of gazing upon it with your eyes, not researching it. This got me thinking about other objects in the sky. The english Wikipedia article for ...

grammar word-choice

Man, it absolutely never occurred to me that the sun is the only thing in the sky that you can "look into."

What are all the things that you can "look into," exactly?

The examples that I can think of are...

Bright lights; mirrors; eyes; and the insides of things.

7:11 PM

Perhaps bright lights count as things you can look inside of, to us, subconsciously?

But I don't know why.

It is the same in Dutch.

Or at least kind of.

7:30 PM

@TerranSwett Don't forget pools, especially limpid ones.

Also things people want you to be aware of: "OK, I'll look into it."

Q: Did Nietzsche ever state “The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man”?

8:00 PM

@Robusto organic water

10

There's this question on Philosophy SE. Nobody there has yet been able to come up with a "good" source/reference. (The thus-far apparently oldest reference, provided in a comment, is this.) This seems like something you are quite good at and might enjoy solving. So, despite numerous attributions...

quotes

Gee, Nietzsche was probably a huge party pooper

Jacob Collier - Fix You (Live for There With Care)

Question: How much truth is there to "my dog would make a better president" claims?

@M.A.R. I wouldn't want to argue against that.

Well, not a dog, but say, if I were to become the next POTUS, other than the social and political pressure, could I have just handled things fine listening to advisors and doing whatever's necessary preemptively?

What would I need besides some invisible karma idiot billionaires seem to get for free?

This sounds crazy as a serious question but these are crazy times to match

8:15 PM

@M.A.R. You could hardly done worse than Trump, unless your aim was to destroy this country, in which case you'd have to work hard at that to outdo him.

"Will you shut up, man?" making rounds on the interwebz

8/10 top notch entertainment

I know how Trump could cause a small amount of chaos.

There's still two more, right?

I won't watch any more of those.

Just call a press conference in the middle of the day and state, "I've got some bad news about the economy, some very bad news. This is going to have a tremendous impact on the stock market, it's going to crash tremendously, it's going to be very bad."

And then just keep on mumbling along those same lines and watch as the market immediately crashes to exactly 7% below the opening price.

8:19 PM

@Robusto It was predictable, and that it was going to be predictable was predictable

Yeah. And I watched anyway. Sort of. I turned it off for half an hour at one point, but went back hoping things were better. They weren't.

@TerranSwett Eh, you don't need a Trump for that. Any politicus liarus would do.

13 hours ago, by M.A.R.

Eh, Americans probably have no choice

Surely Trump is one of the very few people that traders would actually listen to and believe, if only for a few minutes.

It's downright humiliating having that pustule as the face of America.

Actually, Trump will only do that if it's not the US economy or when he's not POTUS anymore (whee, even the thought is fun)

Jan 4 '14 at 17:38, by tchrist

What we need here is not expostulation but expustulation: excising the pustule.

8:26 PM

You're saying that after Trump is no longer president, if he calls a press conference and says that then it will cause a market crash?

People will pay precisely the same amount of attention to him, at that point, that they do to the old drunk on the bus who is cursing the government.

8:53 PM

By the way, I've got a question.

What the heck is the vowel in the word "mutt"?

For a little while I thought it was [ə].

Then I learned that it's not [ə], it's actually [ʌ].

Then, much later, I learned that it isn't actually [ʌ] either.

Not for most Americans, anyway.

As far as I can tell, pretty much all Americans use pretty much the same vowel for the vowel phoneme in the word "mutt"... but what is it?

(Feel free to give me the Airplane! answer if you don't know the real answer.)

Airplane!

No wait, it's just superman

@TerranSwett I don't know how to write it, only to speak it. And it sounds a lot like the a in ability or afar or reapplied.

Feel free to give me the answer "Airplane!" if you know neither the Airplane! answer nor the real answer.

> Scientists can agree that a Newton, Lavoisier, Maxwell, or Einstein has produced an apparently permanent solution to a group of outstanding problems and still disagree, sometimes without being aware of it, about the particular abstract characteristics that make those solutions permanent.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop using IPA.

9:02 PM

Anyway, I want some more letters.

I've employed this sort of usage with indefinite article with a proper name myself, but the sentence sounds weird still

I want to write English (by hand, with a pen) using some more vowel letters. I want seven more, to be precise.

Go nuts.

Trap, dress, kit, lot and strut can keep their letters; those are fine.

But now I want to come up with additional letters for the vowels in foot, fleece, face, thought, goat, goose and price.

Anyone got any letters I can use? think emoji

Do not tempt me Frodo!

9:28 PM

It'd be cool if I had a "random Greek-like letter generator."

Something that generates letters that look like they could easily be part of the Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic alphabet, without actually looking like any particular letter from any of those alphabets.

Cajun Music: Savoy Family Band - Port Arthur Blues

@RegDwigнt: Maybe you can tell me what kind of accordion this is?

9:46 PM

@M.A.R. I think you wouldn't need much.

Generally, such leaders take on as much or as little work as they choose. The rest is handled by their staff and sub-staff. They could even handle all of the work.

RegDwigнt

10:03 PM

@Robusto I'd just call it a garmoshka, or garmon.

Garmon

The garmon (Russian: гармо́нь, IPA: [gɐˈrmonʲ], from garmonika (Russian: гармо́ника, IPA: [gɐˈrmonʲɪkə]), which means "harmonicа") is a kind of Russian button accordion, a free-reed wind instrument. A garmon has two rows of buttons on the right side, which play the notes of a diatonic scale, and at least two rows of buttons on the left side, which play the primary chords in the key of the instrument as well as its relative harmonic minor key. Many instruments have additional right-hand buttons with useful accidental notes, additional left-hand chords for playing in related keys, and a row of free...

This thing says you need two rows of buttons but bollocks to that.

I had a toy one as a kid that had like five or six buttons in one row.

Perfectly functional.

The way this one is labeled, it seems to produce two different pitches depending on the direction of the airflow.

I wouldn't know if mine did that, that's not a thing I would've grasped at the time.

@Robusto more to the point, if the speed of causality were infinite, nothing would happen at all, because all of it would have happened at once.