English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2022-09-27 (page 2 of 2)

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8:07 AM

Russia is moving military vehicles towards the border checkpoint with Georgia, reportedly to set up a mobilization station right there. Twitter users write that some people have ditched their cars and are moving by foot along the car queue, trying to pass into Georgia as quick as possible.

Dmitry Medvedev made a new Telegram post, again mentioning a nuclear strike and saying that the NATO would do nothing in reply.

8:20 AM

> Kazakhstan announces that 98,000 Russians have entered the country since Putin’s mobilization order

8:32 AM

Why does Medvedev think he knows what NATO would do? Or Ukraine?

Iran’s having some problems of its own. They killed a woman over a scarf. Are these men unable to control themselves?

8:51 AM

@Xanne it's the immunity he believes the language barrier gives him

@tchrist no we're special

Because we're we and we're not you or anyone else so it makes we special.

Weee

9:22 AM

Wordle 465 5/6

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

#Worldle #249 4/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜⬇️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨↗️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨⬇️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 27, 2022 🌍
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 7.26
🟧🟥🟥🟥🟥🟩 = 6

#globle

2 hours later…

11:15 AM

@Xanne They killed a woman over a scarf?

Oh, I see. Mahsa Amini.

2 hours later…

1:05 PM

Dreadnought hoax

The Dreadnought hoax was a prank pulled by Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Cole tricked the Royal Navy into showing their flagship, the battleship HMS Dreadnought, to a fake delegation of Abyssinian royals. The hoax drew attention in Britain to the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group, among whom some of Cole's collaborators numbered. The hoax was a repeat of a similar impersonation which Cole and Adrian Stephen had organised while they were students at Cambridge in 1905. == Background == === Hoaxers === Horace de Vere Cole was born in Ireland in 1881 to a well-to-do family. He was commissioned into...

1:31 PM

user image

1:41 PM

#Worldle #249 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 27, 2022 🌍
🔥 27 | Avg. Guesses: 6.16
🟨🟩 = 2

#globle

Wow, that one was lucky.

I always start globle with the worldle answer, and my first guess out of the box after the seed country totally lucked out.

Russians Are Terrified and Have Nowhere to Turn

Wordle 465 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

2:05 PM

> “Hello, I have a pregnant wife and a mortgage. My wife is panicking, and I have no money to go abroad. How can I escape the draft?”

This is a message we received at Helpdesk.media, a website I and other journalists set up in June to help people — with information, legal advice and psychological support — affected by the actions of the Russian government. The writer, after completing his mandatory military service seven years ago, was being drafted into the war in Ukraine. The Russian government was not interested in who will pay the mortgage or take care of his pregnant wife. It simply w…

> We have a saying in Russia, “to bomb Voronezh.” Voronezh is a Russian city not too far from the Ukrainian border, but the phrase does not refer to bombings by Ukraine. It refers to the Russian authorities’ perverse habit of retaliating against their own citizens in response to the actions of other governments. On Sept. 21, Mr. Putin added perhaps the most egregious example to the list. Thwarted by Ukraine’s resistance, he chose to punish Russian citizens for his failure.

On 4 October, the Federation Council session will admit the new regions as parts of Russia.

Yes, бомбить Воронеж

Бомбить Воронеж

«Бомбить Воронеж» — первоначально интернет-мем, ставший затем распространённым фразеологизмом в связи с соответствующими политическими событиями в России 2010-х годов. Означает такой ответ российских властей на санкции или иные неугодные им действия иностранных государств, который наносит ущерб гражданам самой России, ущемляет их интересы. == История == В августе 2008 года, сразу после вооруженного конфликта в Южной Осетии, в ЖЖ появилась запись: Вспомнилась шутка про жителей Воронежа, которые попросили Путина разбомбить Воронеж, когда узнали, что правительство решило заново отстроить Цхинвал...

It's like "shooting yourself in the foot"

2:27 PM

@CowperKettle Do you know the saying "to bomb Voronezh"?

@Robusto Yes, it's widespread

Do you notice any flagging of support for the "SMO"?

Like "to steamroll over geese" (давить гусей), after some contraband geese were rolled over by a tractor to destroy them, when Putin prohibited the imports of some European foodstuffs to "punish" the European economy

@Robusto I do not communicate much. And, most importantly, people avoid talking.

"Fly you fools!"

People may talk about how to evade a draft, but fall silent if you try discussing whether the SMO is right.

2:32 PM

I see.

It sounds like there may be a certain emboldening under way.

The Stasi cognates are always listening.

> Давка гусей одобрена Госдумою,
"Гусь-Русь-горжусь"
Совпадение? Не думаю.

(from a song)

> The steamrolling of geese has been approved by the State Duma
"Goose - Russia - I'm proud" (rhyming)
Is it a coincidence? I don't think so.

For most people, there is no greater motivator than self-preservation.

Hence draft avoidance.

And silence.

In the early '70s, Nixon sought to stifle war protest over Vietnam by eliminating the draft. That, and his winding down of the war, worked. Putin seems determined to go in the opposite direction.

> A successful nephrologist who owned 11 dialysis centers before entering Chestnut Lodge, Dr Osheroff reportedly paced relentlessly, slept little, and lost 40 pounds. His psychoanalyst pressured him to regress, to peel away his presumed narcissistic personality disorder. Eventually, his mother arranged his transfer to Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, where his symptoms remitted after a mere 3 weeks of treatment with medications.

It's amazing that such atrocious pseudoscience as psychoanalysis flourished in the USA well into the 1980s

2:38 PM

Pseudoscience will always be with us. Look at the anti-vaxxer movement.

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The Russian Clocks Are All Ticking

> The Kremlin boss assuming command is, of course, easy fodder for Hitler-in-the-bunker memes, but even Russian imperial history should be a warning to Putin: When Tsar Nicholas II decided to assume command of the Russian empire’s forces in World War I, his own advisers warned him that personal association with failure could destroy his reign.
“Consider, Sire,” one wrote to him, “what You are laying hands on—on Your own self, Sire!” (Another warned him bluntly: “The army under Your command must be victorious.”)

The mobilization order is so pointless that I am left wondering who in Moscow thought it might be a good idea. It was a decision guaranteed to generate massive protests for no apparent military benefit. There is no way for the poorly supplied and corrupt Russian military to train, house, clothe, and arm 300,000 men anytime soon, and certainly not before winter arrives.
In reality, Putin doesn’t even have 300,000 men; he has roughly 300,000 names of male Russian citizens, many of whom will never set foot on a military base. As a strategic matter, this measure is pure idiocy.

> The Russian president is facing multiple countdowns that could end in disaster, all of them set in motion by a series of his own stupid and reckless decisions that has cost thousands of lives and put world peace at risk. There is one last mistake he has not yet made—the use of a nuclear weapon—and we can only hope that all the other clocks run out before he even considers the most dire misstep of all.

2:55 PM

A video has surfaced in which a young guy intentionally breaks the leg of another guy, to help him avoid the draft.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

The subject placed his foot on a step of a staircase, and himself lied down on the landing of a typical Russian building. The helper jumped on his leg, the part between the foot and the knee.

It's hard to watch.

I just skipped it, and without the sound. I just turned on the sound for a moment, heard him groaning, and turned it off.

Yeah, I would skip it too.

BTW, the past tense of lie (as in lying down) is lay, not lied. The past tense of lie (to tell an untruth) is lied.

Ah, yes.

I knowed it but forgot.

An easy mistake to make.

As I understand it, there are more hard-liners waiting in the wings, and that would be sufficient provocation for them to seize power.

The thing is, that is an escalation, and the unknowns involved in that scenario are too daunting.

There are enough unknowns to go around already.

3:04 PM

By the way, I only learned the origin of "wait in the wings" this year.

I never knew it was a theater expression.

I thought it was actual wings, maybe of an airplane.

Like "air missiles waiting in the wings, to be launched"

@Mitch Gopher it, Gaufrette!

3:41 PM

Russia started forming Territorial Defense units, although under the current legislation, such units are formed only when Martial Law has been declared. e1.ru/text/gorod/2022/09/27/71690057

3:58 PM

@CowperKettle So they've begun forming up this particular type of unit but the units aren't allowed to be active until martial law is declared? Or they aren't even supposed to be created until then?

@tchrist Yes, they have begun assigning newly drafted people to such units

Looks like Martial Law might be soon declared

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It's hard to believe. They say it was written by an AI.

twitter.com/sundellviz/status/1574492250620542980

@CowperKettle I think that should be "lay down". It's possible "lied down" is correct, but it sounds wrong to me.

@FaheemMitha I knowed it, but forgot. Robusto reminded me

Oh, never mind. I see @Robusto covered that already. I should learn to read.

@CowperKettle "knew it", not "knowed it". I'm fairly confident that one is wrong.

Huh. Online it says "nonstandard". So maybe it's OK.

Knowed is acceptable

> I've been having some hard traveling, I thought you knowed
I've been having some hard traveling, way down the road,
I've been having some hard traveling, hard rambling, hard gambling,
I've been hitting some hard traveling, Lord.

Hard Travelin' - Woody Guthrie

4:10 PM

I don't understand the implications of declaring martial law. Will the Govt. (i.e. Putin) declare it? I suppose they would have to, I don't see who else would.

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@FaheemMitha Yes, he will

4:29 PM

@CowperKettle in case you're being serious, it is very nonstandard

4:42 PM

@Mitch How does one quantify "very" in this case? A graph of usage (I forget what the name of that is)?

So what happens once martial law is declared? More chaos?

I now have a Fiber Optic line here. How many of you folks out there do?

5:05 PM

@FaheemMitha we tried but it had such crappy implementation and bureaucracy that we quit halfway through

Call this guy call that guy this guy'll visit for the electronics that guy'll charge for sightseeing

And we didn't have internet for a week, so we just abandoned the thought for the time being

@M.A.R. Oh. Well, happily that's not the case here. For once.

Though "crappy implementation and bureaucracy" is practically an Indian trademark.

@M.A.R. Sightseeing?

@FaheemMitha just saying. They had us run in loops for a while and I gave up

@M.A.R. OK.

The local internet service I've been using here is (mostly) Airtel. And it's been surprisingly professional during the time I've been using it.

Not really what one expects in India.

The Fiber Optic line seems very stable so far. Touch wood.

5:22 PM

@FaheemMitha a freuency graph over time like Google NGramss?

@Mitch Yes, maybe NGrams.

Is that a standard thing?

'knowed' is definitely used but only in the context of 1) very old and very 'hill Billy's speech or 2) child language errors when theyre learning past tense and overgeneralize treating a strong verb as the more regular weak verb. @CowperKettle

@FaheemMitha dependes on what you mean by standard. If you mean 'is it accepted as a authority on judgements of correctness' then no, but is it a reasonable research tool then sure but you have to know how to interpret the results and look at the data rather than trusting just some plain frequency numbers.

@Mitch Well, "reasonable research tool", though I don't think I've ever done that kind of research.

5:44 PM

@CowperKettle I thought you were making a joke. ;)

@Robusto About that being incorrect? No.

@FaheemMitha Oops, wrong attribution.

Fixed.

I thought Cowper was making a joke by saying "knowed" right after I'd just corrected him on "lied" ...

@Robusto Ah. Apparently not.

As it is, "knowed" is nonstandard and pretty much the province of dialect.

It's like something you can imagine a character in "Huckleberry Finn" or "The Yearling" saying.

5:48 PM

Yes.

It's not something you hear from the highly literate, let's put it that way.

Well, there are many problems with living in India, but at least having to worry about a military draft isn't one of them.

Apparently the rural areas are quite beautiful.

@Robusto In India? And if so, is that relevant?

Just by the way.

I mean there are areas that aren't horrible crawling cityscapes.

The relevance is my general ignorance of India coupled with you being here to agree or disagree, since you live there.

Otherwise known as a conversational gambit.

@Robusto Sure, parts of India are still beautiful. I'm sure it was very beautiful before the British arrived and started the process of destruction that led to where we are now.

But much of it is now ravaged. Too much population pressure. Pollution, soil erosion, etc.

@Robusto I don't actually know much about India at all. I've hardly travelled in it. It's a big place.

6:01 PM

It sounds like most people live a hand-to-mouth existence, wherever they live in India.

@Robusto Yes, they do. Of course, that's not unique to India. I was reading that many (most?) Americans couldn't afford a USD 400 emergency payment.

Still, very few in America do not have a mobile phone.

I don't know what India looked like before the British arrived. I wonder if anyone bothered to draw pictures.

Probably, but they would likely not have been landscapes.

The paintings I've seen were mainly to glorify the Raj.

@Robusto I don't think Americans are terribly good money managers. On the other hand, they know how to enjoy themselves, which I suppose is also important.

@Robusto British painters used to draw landscapes. Maybe Indian painters did too.

@Robusto I was talking about the period before the British.

6:08 PM

I don't think landscapes made it into the Kama Sutra. ;D

I detect an element of stereotyping here. :-)

India did have a life before the British, you know.

Though I must admit I know little about it. Nor does anyone else, probably.

6:55 PM

@FaheemMitha Yes, I know. Its history was similar to most of the rest of the world's: different peoples clashing, conquering and being conquered, prosperity some years, famine in others, etc., to the first syllable of recorded time.

4 hours later…

solastalgienitsyne

10:46 PM

@Cerberus "At least not in this way". Good to know loll. Thanks.

@Robusto Perhaps Russia is planning for after winter. Then the Russian army can rest and possibly acquire more matériel, train soldiers, await the supposed European collapse, etc.

I think they can probably still not make much progress in spring, though.

@CowperKettle As to what would happen if the plane were shot down: I don't think that would improve the situation.

Worse replacements.

0

A: Why can't you say "A doll was made me by my sister"?

Syntactic restrictions on distransitive passivization: Why you can be baked a cake yet a cake can never be baked you Under passive inversion of verbs with two objects, only the indirect object can ever be promoted to the subject if you leave the object left behind “unmarked” the way it had been i...

11:43 PM

@Cerberus So Putin's going to pay the conscripts to do nothing all winter? Because it sure doesn't sound like he's going to be spending money on training or equipping them.

@Robusto Hmm why don't you think he is spending money on those things?

@Cerberus Because I don't think he has it to spend.

I think he lacks sufficient capacity to train and equip them any time soon.

I think he has enough money, for the time being?

But he needs time.

Maybe, but he doesn't have enough money to repair all the damage corruption has done to the entire military, from the top down.

He probably won't have that.

And I doubt whether money would be enough.

He has spent a lot of money on the army, over the past 15 years or so.

It probably helped a bit, but not enough.

I don't think he can improve the quality of the army very much.

But he can try to increase its quantity and hope it will help to some degree.

Of course Ukraine will not let the same time pass unused.

Western weapons will continue to be delivered.

11:48 PM

Ill-prepared and ill-equipped is not the way to conduct a war. Or even a special military operation.

If he sends tens of thousands of Russians to the cannons, Putin will be no better off.

Ill equipped but larger is better than ill equipped and smaller.

Though better to what degree, I do not know.

It didn't help Saddam Hussein in either of the Gulf wars.

He may hope to use winter to procure more equipment.

The American army was overwhelmingly more powerful.

The Ukrainian army is not.

War penalizes stupidity, and modern warfare absolutely annihilates it.

Even so, Russia has conquered large parts of Ukraine.

11:52 PM

@Cerberus No, but they are trained and motivated. The Russians are not.

All is not lost for the Russian army.

@Robusto Indeed.

I agree, all is not lost for them. Not yet.

But I think it is praemature to suppose that the Ukrainian army is far stronger and will certainly win.

I doubt whether this mobilisation will have been worth it.

But I do not know on whose side time is.

I don't presuppose that. But I don't yet see the ace Putin thinks he has up his sleeve. Maybe time will tell, maybe it won't.

Kinda jinxish.

Perhaps it is just that he must be seen to do something?

One hopes that China and others have made it clear that a nuclear attack will be the end of their coöperation.

11:55 PM

It seems to be more about bluster now.

I hope so.

Me too.

Unless he should use a large number of atomics, it is said that they would have little military significance here.

I suspect that Ukraine will not even surrender if he should annihilate Kiev.

He may think he can use one as a warning shot to get the West to do what he wants. If so, he is wrong.

Holland surrendered before the bombing of Rotterdam, because it knew it could not win in the end, so the threat to bomb cities was enough of an argument to accelerate the inevitable.

11:57 PM

And if he does annihilate Kiev, that will only make the rest of Ukraine filled with a terrible resolve.

Yes, I doubt whether it would change the position of the West.

It took two bombs for Japan to surrender.

And Germany never surrendered, no matter how many cities were utterly destroyed, when it still thought it stood a chance.

I think Japan probably also knew it could not win any more.

@Cerberus Yeah, but at that point the political situation needed to be resolved before Japan could even put the surrender mechanism in gear.

After all the, Americans threw the bombs when they were at a point where they had to choose between a (huge) invasion or the atomics.

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