English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2021-05-20

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12:00 AM

washes hands

There's a third one. but every time I put it into words it comes out tasteless and vulgar.

not that there's anything wrong with that.

@tchrist what is the source of this? OED?

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Q: 'Fomites'? From 'fomes'? What up with that?

Of the many candidates for 'word of the year', 'fomites' is a semifinalist for sure (with the added flavor of multiple pronunciations). But why the '-t-' in the plural? What is the pattern? Is there a rule in Latin in this obscure declension that I missed? From OED (English): Origin: A borrowing ...

12:45 AM

@Mitch Excellent!!

This will have them Latinists something to chew on.

3 hours later…

3:35 AM

@Cerberus Two answers already. Nice that they both seem to know linguistics in addition to Latin.

But...

really, Latin does -not- allow word final '-ts'. It allows all sorts of other clusters.

I mean to say: Really? Latin does -not- allow word final '-ts'? It allows all sorts of other clusters. and '-ts' id hard? Isn't '-ps' allowed at the end? x = /ks/.

Am I crazy or are all Romance languages anayzable like french with only open syllables (all syllables end in a vowel (or s,l,r,n,m)?

That seems a bold claim but feels right but I can't think of any words right now.

4:11 AM

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2 hours later…

6:40 AM

When learners don't understand something they keep telling me "Excuse me?" instead of "pardon" and it's the most passive-aggressive thing ever

2 hours later…

8:54 AM

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> You were right. People do not land on their feet.

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9:38 AM

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2 hours later…

12:07 PM

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Is there an ambiguity in that sentence? She is being trolled on Twitter for saying "One of my husband". I think "husband" should have been in pluran if she meant one of many husbands.

12:32 PM

@Yashas That's because they're idiots who don't understand educated English.

@Yashas It sounds weird but is logically/grammatically correct. If one were to change it, it would become worse.

There's nothing wrong with that sentence.

@Mitch And it doesn't sound weird, either.

It just presumes an ability to parse complicated syntax.

It's going 'Rajiv Gandhi' -> 'my husband Rajiv Gandhi' -> "my husband Rajiv Gandhi's" -> "one of my husband Rajiv Gandhi's"

One of his most significant legacies.

@Robusto putting the Saxon genitive on a phrase is allowed but sometimes sounds a little weird.

12:35 PM

It's how educated people talk and write.

Fuck Twitter and the numbskulls who inhabit it.

@Robusto Is that just a general observation, or motivated by one particular response?

Even with judicious following curation, little toxicities can creep in. Also idiots in the news.

@Mitch It's my experience. One of the reasons I only tried that venue for a few months.

Oh. the numbskulls who are trolling the grammar

of

'one of my husband'

Yes, that Twitter.

That was the post I was responding to. Not Gandhi's utterance.

I find that it is a good source of info that I don't get any other way. With it comes a lot of crap.

12:41 PM

The S/N ratio is pretty dismal.

Curation is key

Using exclusion words

Not my problem.

eg excluding posts that mention particular leaders' names got rid of a lot of things

though some seep in.

If none of it is important, then it's not worth the sporadic entertainment.

I put it in the same bin as Facebook, and it's a refuse bin.

Which I refuse.

but 'cats that don't belong here' and space exploration videos are pretty good

12:46 PM

If you want to pan for gold in the East River, go ahead.

@Robusto I don't think I've ever seen anything on FB that made it worth scanning. If someone posts a family picture that's great and I'll look at it but the rest is, well, I don't know because I just don't understand it.

@Robusto nah I'm cool

BTW, I've been re-reading some Elmore Leonard. You could do a dissertation on how he captures the way Americans really talk.

But if you were to use that as evidence on ELU people would discount it.

@Robusto I've only ever seen the movies

1:12 PM

@Mitch Some of that gets preserved in the films, but not a whole lot.

As Leonard said, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

> Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

> If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

> “I didn’t scare him enough,” Vincent said. He told this to his closest friend on the Miami Beach Police, Buck Torres.
> Torres said, “Scare him? That what you suppose to do?”
> Vincent said, “You know what I mean. I didn’t handle it right, I let it go too far.”
> Torres said, “What are you, a doctor? You want to talk to the asshole? You know how long the line would be, all the assholes out there? You didn’t kill him somebody else would have to, sooner or later.”

Take that last sentence of dialogue: "You didn't kill him somebody else would have to, sooner or later."

A lesser writer with a poorer ear would have had Torres say, "If you didn't kill him then somebody else would have to, sooner or later."

That passage is from the beginning to Glitz, btw.

Here's one from Killshot:

> “I was below. I saw him and Wayne moving positions. I think Wayne had just put another fifty feet of hose on his yo-yo. What must’ve happened, he throws it out to get some slack, not looking what he’s doing, and the rubber trips Kenny coming along behind him. I heard Kenny yell—that’s when I looked up, I see him grab hold of the beam, he’s okay, but he lets go of the beater he’s carrying. I’m looking up, shit, I see this ten-pound sledge coming at me. It hits the deck plate, bang, missed me by only about a foot. I see Kenny, he’s down flat on the beam now, the rubber hanging over it right…

Note the fluid tenses, the disjoints, the omission of syntax ... ""And here's Wayne looking at him like, the hell are you doing hugging that beam?" Not "what the hell," just "the hell" ...

Leonard had a damn near perfect ear.

1:55 PM

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A mural in Yekaterinburg

Racoon with a spoon

And a fork.

Yes

2:43 PM

@Mitch I'd prefer something like, one of the most significant achievements of my husband, Rajov Gandhi, is...

Although I still don't really like that.

I'd use full clauses rather than a mess of noun groups.

Clauses were invented to convey information with a complex structure—nominal groups, less so.

They are very limited and get awkward.

3:21 PM

Word of the day: past-master

3:48 PM

@Cerberus Hi :)

Can you help me with this now?

yesterday, by ConGovDeIn

Someone please suggest me the most beautiful poem (or a part of any other long work) that you think is, by Lord Byron or PB Shelley. Beautiful, aesthetic.

@Robusto The dropping of 'what' in 'what the hell' has always sounded very unnatural to me in writing. In speech if someone says 'The hell' with that emphasis it is also unnatural sounding. Even though the 'what' is swallowed almost entirely, there has to be some vestige of it, and that sort of requires writing it out as 'what the hell' for me even if I don't spit out all of that first word.

@Cerberus Yes, the Latin genitive is less a torture of piled-on optimized noun modifiers, like a headline. Can sound stilted though.

@ConGovDeIn The absolute most beautiful?

@Robusto The TV show 'Justified' was based on one of his books/stories and he was some kind of producer on it, but I can't remember if he was ever a series writer. But anyway, they tried to capture the multiple accents on there ok.

@Mitch No, relative :)

@ConGovDeIn Donna Julia's Letter, by Byron

> So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,
As vibrates my fond heart to my fix’d soul.

Thanks @CowperKettle, that’s really a good recommendation. The weather is so nice for reading it.

@ConGovDeIn Also the beginning of Canto the Fourteenth

4:02 PM

Okay.

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I love this:

> Nothing more true than not to trust your senses;
And yet what are your other evidences?

That’s awesome!

What is the correct way to add an "and" after a list?
Like: "This matches structs, tuple structs, flags and enums and produces..."
Above structs, flags and enums are all possible things and we follow it up by "and produces"

@Mihir You could end the sentence and begin a new one: It produces...

@Cerberus Makes sense. Aside of that, just for English knowledge, would it be invalid to use "and" there?

2 hours later…

5:53 PM

hi all, I have written a piece for a novel. Plz comment on it and tell if it is engaging and grammatically correct ?

Content : You may have watched the movie: Anabelle, in which the doll used to move on its own under the influence of soul. The paranormal forces are peculiar to move objects. With the word object, it means, any object, either small or big. Amit was a student who was doing his graduation. All the things were going well until an incident that gave him to suspect that something is wrong. One evening, he was working on his laptop and received a call from his friend.

No safe level of alcohol consumption for brain health: observational cohort study of 25,378 UK Biobank participants

@CowperKettle The first line, can you please comment on that? I mean a little bit of paraphrase.

6:46 PM

@ConGovDeIn Oh. "Not to trust your senses" is a true statement; nothing is more true than this statement.

But despite the trueness of this statement, you have no other evidences. You can only use your sight, hearing etc. to gain information about the world.

7:02 PM

@Mitch Yeah, my wife and I watched the series. It was good, but not as good as the novels. Shaped for TV it was.

In Hollywood, executive producer can simply mean you're cut in for a bigger piece of the pie. You don't actually have to do anything except collect your cut.

Besides, I think he was dead for most of that series anyway.

@Mitch Well, I don't think you listen to enough dialects then. Or else you're too fussy about it when you do.

@Cerberus What she should have done is eliminated the name and just gone with the possessive "my husband's" ... I mean, who needs the name? If they need it they can ask.

But it reads fine as is. Certainly nothing to attract the Twitter gadflies.

7:24 PM

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@Robusto Yes.

But he is probably famous.

@Robusto one of my wife

2

So she wants to associate herself with his name.

@Robusto That is pretty American, wow

You really really really don't want to know what's going on in Indian Twitter.

@M.A.R. Indeed.

7:28 PM

White savior rich spoiled brats are one thing, Indian Twitter is a whole different level

I mean, white kids learn to behave a certain way to seem cool somehow, on Twitter. Asians don't have such inhibitions, they don't separate much how they are in real life compared to how they behave online.

Now if that happens on a platform where people talk before they think . . .

Absolutely, horrifyingly cringy. Makes Rick and Morty fans seem like Plato.

@M.A.R. On social media, thinking before you talk is the exception.

I guess so

7:47 PM

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A new building on Khokhryakova St.

@M.A.R. IKR those guys (it's always guys) are so aristotelian

@Robusto As to the language, it was hard to tell if they were trying real hard or that's what the actors were reproducing faithfully (I think few of the actors were native speakers).

As to the plot, WTH the main guy would kill at least one person an episode and I'd yell at the screen that guy should be put on leave after the first guy is dead and my wife would just say "What's the title of the show?" sigh fiction.

8:05 PM

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8:18 PM

@Mitch The thing is, Leonard's plots and characters are way more believable than that. The characters are odd, and they do surprisingly human things. Raylan Givens in the first book is kind of a corny doofus, not at all a Timothy Olyphant can't-miss hero, but he somehow muddles through and gets the job done.

8:54 PM

I hear Twitter being trashed. It depends a lot on who you follow and how you use it.

Sep 16 '20 at 10:38, by Færd

I dunno. Twitter has been a real nice experience for me for the past couple years (mostly). On it, I've met good friends (whom I later met in person), had informative conversations, learnt from other people's conversations (and altercations), participated in political activism, put together a book club, and met a girlfriend.

@Færd I suppose. But as I said above, the S/N ratio is pretty dismal.

I think you could adjust it for yourself. At least some people do.

Yeah. I just never got the habit.

Too much like work.

It's not an inviting space for everybody, to say the least.

@Cerberus Congrats on the 100k mark! I just noticed.

Eat your heart out @Mitch.

9:44 PM

@Færd For what?

@Robusto Oh yeah, Olyphant's role, it was all about him being.a good guy no matter what. But there were a number of screw-ups that you still rooted for even if they had multiple nazi tattoos like maybe their heart really wasn't into the nazi stuff?

@Færd holy crap. that's quite a bit.

but I have seen a couple altercations (way fewer than I'd expect from people talking about it), and it is really easy to see how empty a back and forth can be and easy to stop reading that.

@Mitch That's the right response. Nothing. Was just joking about you falling behind Cerb in reps.

@Mitch Yeah when it gets heated it's mostly like that. But some people have careful conversations there. The medium doesn't lend itself completely to that sort of communication, I agree.

1 hour later…

11:16 PM

@CowperKettle Yikes. Were there many protests?

@Færd Oh, merci.

@Mihir If you strictly look at syntax, it would be possible. But I would say, don't ever do that because of other reasons (which you understand).

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