> Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said Kyiv hopes to arm a million people as the country prepares for a “new, long phase of war”.

@Cerberus On small roads in towns. They do so when they don't have license or other documents.

@CowperKettle sounds Dodgy

Yeah

I liked his last advice about not intimidating with dictionaries for learning. Read more books.

@CowperKettle Writing them is easy for me. But re-reading makes me tired.

I'm surprised about presently. Isn't Tharoor is too prescriptive when he rejects its alternate (and more logical) currently meaning?

Can't say. I understood only 50% of what he said. And normally, I understand 20-30% of what he says in any speech.

@CowperKettle A wise policy.

@jlliagre Did you mean "current meaning"?

Also, presently does mean soon, not now. I don't know where anyone gets the latter notion.

"I'll be there presently" is good English. You have to use it with a future construction. You can't say "I am there presently."

BTW, Shashi Tharoor says "important is already an adverb" ... No, no, no! It is an adjective. The problem with using the adverbial form, importantly, is that in that case it describes something about the action involved: "And, more importantly, I feel ..." So you are feeling in an important manner? How vain of you! You said the quiet part out loud!

@M.A.R. Only because he went a-Carrolling.

‘American Babies First!’: Fox News Rages Over ‘Illegal’ Infants Getting Fed

The nationalist right is now making war on babies.

I guess because they can't fight back.

Good news!

That'll teach Putin. Fuck with the bull, you get the horns.

But a military coup against Putin sounds like the military would take the war further, with 100% mobilization against Ukraine (and NATO).

So Putin is just not horrible enough for them, eh?

On the other hand, if they wait they risk their leadership being purged, no?

Possibly.

But just because there may be no plans at all for a coup doesn't mean the leadership won't be purged anyway.

A routine prophylaxis.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer (77): Is it correct to say "The reason is because ..."? ✏️‭ by NNOX Apps‭ on english.SE

@CowperKettle What? Someone was removed when his only problem was incompetence?

@CowperKettle Do you have any background in programming?

@CowperKettle Well, C# in and of itself isn't hard. What is hard is the .Net environment, and it's not hard, really, but it's an enormous environment that you have to use a lot to understand all the things you can do and how best to do them.

Yeah. I don't like C# because of the relentless class hierarchies you have to be familiar with.

It's Microsoft's answer to Java, really.

@CowperKettle Well, yes and no. I just don't like the rigidity. I prefer a language that is more plastic, like Python.

@CowperKettle It's the eternal war between enterprise standards and creativity. When a system gets too big, it stifles the latter.

Ken Olsen, of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, Digital) wondered why anyone would want to create their own software, considering that DEC had "a five-foot shelf of routines and system calls" they could use. And eventually DEC couldn't compete because their solutions had become ossified.

@Robusto No, I meant when "presently" means "currently/now". That's the logical and etymological meaning I was referring to because present doesn't mean the near future but the time of now (see fr: présentement and it/sp/pt: presentemente). A few questions around it have been asked like english.stackexchange.com/questions/74825

@jlliagre Yeah, but it doesn't mean that. I've actually never heard it used that way.

I see what you're saying now, though.

Yeah, but people want to do their own thing. It's the difference between automobiles and trains. Much good can be said about trains, but people want to get in their cars and go wherever they want whenever they want to go there.

That politician (whose video I shared) has most fluent and better English than all other politicians in India. And he is intelligent too!

@Vikas So why did you miss half of what he said?

@jlliagre I didn't miss it. I watched full btw. The way he speaks looks like uses some advanced words. So not easy for me to understand it one go.

And we still have Unix, but no more VMS.

@CowperKettle Yeah, but that is for legacy systems.

@Vikas You wrote you only understood half of what he said, and I was wondering why. I have usually some trouble to understand Indian speakers because of their accents, but his accent is moderate. The fact I read the subtitle while watching helped too. It's funny he talks about the V W confusion at the end of the talk but at the beginning, he mispronounces adverb as adwerb.

@jlliagre People in Pakistan with same name as mine write it as: Waqas XD

Vikas == Waqas

I feel they mean same

Development

Their pronunciation is slightly different.

@jlliagre Of course he's not as good as native. But like I said, he speaks better than all other politicians here.

@Vikas Yes, Tharoor accent sounds like a mixture of Indian and British accents to my ears.

@jlliagre He lived his first two years in London :D

Maybe that affected his accent.

After that his parents shifted back to India.

@CowperKettle I used to pronounce it C hash 😆

@CowperKettle Each language has its specific uses. You wouldn't use JavaScript to write C#-style programs either, but that doesn't mean either is "better" than the other.

Kotlin is used for creating Android software, for example.

And VMS is used for ancient legacy systems that nobody wants to write all-new code for.

And as ugly as PHP may be, it is still used in many, many Web back ends.

I'm not sure, but I think Facebook may still use PHP.

Facebook still uses PHP, but it has built a compiler for it so it can be turned into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance.

It uses what they call "C syntax" ... meaning curly braces, parens for functions, etc.

if-then conditionals, for loops, all that stuff.

@CowperKettle Both of those are good languages to learn, especially if you're not going to be in a huge company. And even if you are, I suppose.

Nowadays people acquire computer languages as readily as they acquire computers. I don't know anybody who I consider a programmer who doesn't know and use at least three languages.

> The Russians who support the Ukraine war are as dumb as the Republicans here. —A Friend, just now

@CowperKettle I was quoting a friend. I just thought it was funny what she said.

And by the way, you can be smart and be stupid at the same time, if you know what I mean.

That would be tantamount to surrender for either party.

Uh-oh, what did they do this time

@Robusto nice

@Robusto anything for the nation

@Vikas goodness, that brings back memories. I had this English teacher at school that was proud of having finished reading, or memorizing a dictionary

The man was not at all ashamed of dreaming.

He let his jaw loose and went on amazingly bizarre adventures involving English

@Vikas I have some pet peeves.

Peeves are adorable as pets

Does he get around to that "revert to me" abomination, I wonder. Also, using "mostly" when "probably" is meant.

@Vikas Indian elites sometimes sound like that. He probably did a lot of reading when he was younger.

Honestly, my pet peeve is "doubts". Everything else is too wrong or too right to be a pet peeve

I'm told I don't sound exactly Indian myself.

@M.A.R. If you meant "doubt" when "question" is meant, that's another Indianism.

As in "I have a doubt".

@FaheemMitha yeah that. It's been more than a decade now and I still flinch when I read it in an SE post or something

Though that's not actually incorrect English per se. Since one can indeed have a doubt.

As in "I doubt I can jump off this building and fly".

It's probably irrational. It doesn't seem that detestable. But that's maybe part of why it gets under my skin

@M.A.R. I don't seem to come across that one much. Is that also an "Iranianism"? :-)

Everything else I can just pompously declare wrong when I'm uncomfortable with it

Though I didn't think "importantly" was incorrect. Or even non-standard. Or specially Indian. Though I could be wrong, of course.

More importantly, it is often used by respectable authors all over the Anglo-Saxon world.

Yes, the interviewer mentioned "revert".

@Cerberus What is?

@FaheemMitha since the fluent English speaker population here tends to be where I'm standing, I consider myself an expert on Iranianisms. I tend to say "in" when I mean "on". I also, uh, haven't been paying attention. I sometimes eat words, I guess?

@FaheemMitha Try to guess.

@Cerberus Sadly, I'm a really bad guesser.

@M.A.R. Example usage?

Wait what

You guys lost me.

Is this about "importantly"?

@FaheemMitha I know you can do it!

@FaheemMitha in a street, on a street

Hint: you can use its position in the list of messages, and the content.

I don't think "intimate" is actually incorrect. Just somewhat archaic. I bet you could find it in somewhere in 19th century English usage. Whereas "revert" has never been standard English, AFAIK.

As with all chat messages.

@Cerberus I'm gladdened by your confidence in me!

@M.A.R. Yes, that would be "on" a street. Though there is no compelling reason to choose "on" vs "in", really.

Can anyone provide a justification for it?

Other than common usage, that is?

@FaheemMitha hey the asphalt there might get hot enough that people get stuck in it but it doesn't happen anywhere else!

@M.A.R. One could argue that a street is three-dimensional, so one is actually "in" it.

Not that I would pursue that line of argument very hard.

@Cerberus you could avoid all these mind games by replying you know

Though far be it from me to question your style

@M.A.R. To be honest, I was a bit annoyed.

It's plainly obvious.

So I do not understand why anyone would ask.

Supposedly, "revert" was British English legal usage a while back. But I've never heard it used in that sense. Then again, I wasn't an English lawyer in the 19th century or whenever.

Regardless, I try not to grind my teeth when people say things like "revert to you". Which in India, they do. A lot.

Apparently people confuse "imply" with "infer", though I can't imagine why. They don't mean the same thing at all, and they don't even look alike.

@Cerberus it's weirding me out because I never knew people questioned "importantly"

. . .

Hehe

That one is not an Indian thing though.

It's 0:15 and I'm acting like it

And I can't remember ever hearing an Indian use either word.

Indians have their pet words, and tend to use those almost exclusively, never straying from their accustomed paths.

They love "pathetic", for some reason.

That's a learner thing I suppose

@M.A.R. Yes, I thought "importantly" was a standard adverbial form. More so than "important". Though I'm not saying "important" is wrong.

@M.A.R. What is?

@FaheemMitha knowing a bunch of cool-sounding words and stretching their meaning thin

@M.A.R. Oh, I wasn't suggesting the words were used incorrectly. Just that they like certain words.

It's just that there are a lot of words one could use. And it gets boring to use the same ones all the time. All those other words will get bored, stuck between the pages of a dictionary. They need to be taken for an outing from time to time.

And because of English's mongrel/hybrid nature, there are an awful lot of words to choose from. That's possibly true of all languages, but I don't know any other languages.

@M.A.R. Yeah it's a perfectly normal word, to me.

@M.A.R. These are the first people who would step in to deny the "illegal" woman an abortion—because, you know, that's killing a baby—and then turn right around and starve the infant to death because, you know, it's "illegal."

I hate these sanctimonious hypocrites so much.

> With particularly dystopian flair, the formula shortage came to a head around the same time that a draft opinion leaked from the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. On one hand, women would be forced to birth children. But on the other hand, once those children arrive, there might not be food to feed them.

washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/13/…

@FaheemMitha Another Indianism is to refer to a graph or a picture in a text as "the below graph" or "the below picture."

It's funny because at least here in the US nobody says that. We will refer to "the above graph" but not the "below" one. Not that the construction it is ungrammatical or any of that, but it just sounds strange to the Western ear.

@Robusto Ah. I hadn't really noticed that one.

I mostly notice the more egregious ones. And there are plenty of those.

And there are lots of turns of phrase in "Indian" English which aren't exactly wrong so much as things no standard English speaker would ever write or say.

I remember some years ago the Indian Debian user group posted a letter draft asking for comments. Apparently I had nothing better to do that day, so myself and another person in the U&L Chat room (Anthony) spent some time rewriting to standard English.

And the authors of that draft were presumably educated persons.

Actually, that should probably be "I and another person". Forgive me, I'm grammar-impaired.

My problem with trying to understand Indian English was that the accents were sometimes very weird, and it was salted with odd words.

But the Chinese and even the Iranians I worked with were worse.

My recent Finnish guest probably plumbed the barrel as far as comprehensibility goes.

And I thought Finns spoke English fluently.

Hmm, apparently "plumbed the barrel" isn't a thing. Though "plumbed the depths" is.

@FaheemMitha maybe your barrel is really deep?

I think you could plumb a barrel.

One doesn't always have to speak in certified idioms.