English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

I'm still not sure I understand.

But it looks nice.

12:26 AM

@Cerberus There is no hidden meaning. That was triggered by "naw just wondering whose thumb is in the cosmic ray generator". I just thought about God's thumb then César's.

> Study shows that how good or bad we are at perceiving the rhythm of language can predict the ability to acquire the language. This may also help understand individual differences in brain biology norwegianscitechnews.com/2024/03/…

12:42 AM

@CowperKettle This is something I've observed all my life. People who can't close their eyes and spout nonsense in the rhythm of a target language have a hard time learning it. They also make crummy actors.

@jlliagre Ahh OK.

1:12 AM

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791

@CowperKettle archive.li/Y35uu

> In 1975, around the time of Steve’s birth, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate.
[...]
The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is ju…

Your identical twin's child is also one of your first-degree relatives.

@tchrist I'm using Bypass Paywalls Clean :)

Ah.

1:42 AM

@CowperKettle I use the same!

Oh, I see I actually recommended it here in 2021 haha.

@Cerberus Yes, I followed your recommendation :)

2:20 AM

@jlliagre oh. Hm. I feel like I have misled this whole conversation. I made a typo. It should have been '...thumb on the ... generator ...' like it was some sort of scales. What could a thumb possibly do in a generator? That would be weird

3:58 AM

Word of the day: chukar. I never, ever heard of it before

8:08 AM

@Mitch I noticed the odd in but interpreted anyway the sentence to mean the thumb that was triggering the generator, like on a joystick.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. astralcodexten.com/p/…

@CowperKettle I thought slavery was more a thing in the South.

8:31 AM

LOL

I don't even know what they mean by that, by including humans there. Probably just for laughs :)

For some reason my i7-8550 CPU starts really dying when it tries to load that blog post about tooth decay. What did they include in the page's code, I wonder.

Etymology of the day: coda - a passage in music that brings a piece or a movement to an end. Borrowed from Italian coda (literally “tail”), from Latin cauda.

Dannyu NDos

8:48 AM

Not to be confused to "soda", "code", or "cola".

The opera is coding is not the same as the patient is coding or as the programmer is coding.

> c. 1588–1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623,→OCLC, [Act V, scene i]: "That codding spirit had they from their Mother"

Their mother was probably Grace Hopper

9:54 AM

@DannyuNDos Not to be confused with "cow dung" either.

11:26 AM

@CowperKettle Heh great.

1:21 PM

@CowperKettle Coding is not the progressive form of coda.

I don't think a progressive form of coda would be felicitous, but you could still use it, and it would include both syllables: coda-ing. Awkward.

1:39 PM

Wordle 1,004 4/6

⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩⬛⬛🟨🟨
🟩🟨🟩🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

1:52 PM

Daily Octordle #785
7️⃣4️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟5️⃣
🕚3️⃣
Score: 57

Daily Sequence Octordle #785
4️⃣6️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
🕐⓮
Score: 75

Q: Should it be "IS" or "ARE"? --- "The only thing we haven't seen ARE locusts."

2:43 PM

You folks want to weigh in (whichever way you think) on this one?

17

This is from an article published on CNBC: "The only thing we haven't seen are locusts, said CEO Jim McCann in an interview." CNBC-A rose is still a rose The subject of the sentence is "The only thing", which is clearly singular. So, the auxiliary verb must be singular, too. At least this is what...

@CowperKettle Same here. I still don't know what it is.

@jlliagre Yes, that's what was intended. I think the pattern 'putting one's thumb on the scale' is a thing.

Why the thumb? I hear you ask...

It seems a little awkward when you could be a little more surreptitious with your index finger.

These were the things that kept me up at night as a kid.

Also all the bike paths in the woods near my house I wanted to pave over.

In fact I wanted the trees themselves paved over.

It doesn't seem practible or even desirable to me now.

I have more important, adult things that keep me up at night.

Like how come those halogen light bulbs I installed a year ago and are supposed to last forever have already burned out?

@tchrist Is there any way to stop slanty bracketed phonetic transcriptions from breaking before/after one of the brackets?

@Araucaria-Him Yes, by finding a lookalike codepoint with the desired linebreak properties. Let me check.

2:59 PM

@tchrist Actually, I remember asking this when just back from a night out once. It didn't stick, plainly. Lemme see ...

mac(tchrist)% uniprops -1ga 002F 2044 2215 27CB 29F8  | egrep '^U[+]|Line_Break'
U+002F ‹/› \N{SOLIDUS}
Line_Break=Break_Symbols
Line_Break=SY
U+2044 ‹⁄› \N{FRACTION SLASH}
Line_Break=Infix_Numeric
Line_Break=IS
U+2215 ‹∕› \N{DIVISION SLASH}
Line_Break=AI
Line_Break=Ambiguous
U+27CB ‹⟋› \N{MATHEMATICAL RISING DIAGONAL}
Line_Break=AL
Line_Break=Alphabetic
U+29F8 ‹⧸› \N{BIG SOLIDUS}
Line_Break=AL
Line_Break=Alphabetic

Wow, those are all different.

Try 2044 ‹⁄› FRACTION SLASH.

See what ⁄ does instead of /.

If that doesn't help, try U+2215 ‹∕› DIVISION SLASH.

The last two both have Line_Break=Alphabetic which might have odd interactions with the prime used for marking stress, but you could try them.

@Araucaria-Him The comment threads there are getting spicy.

@Mitch Yes. I meant 'weigh in with a vote' btw!

@tchrist How do I actually use that in practice?

@tchrist I really wouldn't do this. It would probably be extremely confusing for anyone using a screen reader

@mitch As opposed to with pithy putdowns and so forth ...

3:08 PM

@Araucaria-Him You use your mouse to grab one of those in angle brackets and use it instead of a normal solidus/slash.

@tchrist Grand. Will do

@Laurel The default works ok with /joe/random/path/names but not so well for phonemic transcriptions. And we don't have access to custom <span> styling. Given the rapid dwindingly of SE, there's no chance we could get them to add any sort of customization for us, either.

@Laurel Wait, screen readers do IPA??

@tchrist I wish we could add custom JS like MathOverflow (see eg their rep is hidden)

@Laurel Yes, that's what it would take here.

@Mitch I was more wondering about the scale but now I understand that scale is a balance and not an échelle. That makes much more sense.

3:16 PM

But really, we would optimally have a way to specify an IPA span of some sort.

@tchrist I would probably have to set mine to use custom settings (probably to not ignore any characters) and then I'd probably have to read character by character, but that has to work. It's text, after all.

If I wasn't at work I'd go and test it

"read character by character" only works if you know what the character names are.

right [ɻ̝ajtʰ] / write [w˞ajtʰ]

[ˌfe.liθ̬ˈmẽn̪.t̪e]

How would it read those character by character?

right [ɻ̝ajtʰ] :: [ɻ̝ajtʰ]:
 ɻ̝	voiced retroflex approximant       	U+027B  LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED R WITH HOOK
	raised                             	U+031D  COMBINING UP TACK BELOW
 a	open front unrounded vowel         	U+0061  LATIN SMALL LETTER A
 j	voiced palatal approximant         	U+006A  LATIN SMALL LETTER J
 tʰ	voiceless alveolar plosive         	U+0074  LATIN SMALL LETTER T
	aspirated                          	U+02B0  MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H

write [w˞ajtʰ] :: [w˞ajtʰ]:
 w˞	                                   	U+0077  LATIN SMALL LETTER W
	rhoticity                          	U+02DE  MODIFIER LETTER RHOTIC HOOK
 a	open front unrounded vowel         	U+0061  LATIN SMALL LETTER A
 j	voiced palatal approximant         	U+006A  LATIN SMALL LETTER J
 tʰ	voiceless alveolar plosive         	U+0074  LATIN SMALL LETTER T
	aspirated                          	U+02B0  MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H

[ˌfe.liθ̬ˈmẽn̪.t̪e] :: [ˌfe.liθ̬ˈmẽn̪.t̪e]:
 ˌ	secondary stress                   	U+02CC  MODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE
 f	voiceless labiodental fricative    	U+0066  LATIN SMALL LETTER F
 e	close-mid front unrounded vowel    	U+0065  LATIN SMALL LETTER E
 .	syllable break                     	U+002E  FULL STOP
 l	voiced alveolar lateral approximant	U+006C  LATIN SMALL LETTER L
 i	close front unrounded vowel        	U+0069  LATIN SMALL LETTER I
 θ̬	voiceless dental fricative         	U+03B8  GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA

The last one is happily felizmente.

Which is awful in Verdanananana.

@Araucaria-Him Oh sure. Already done.

I try only to think of putdowns. Putting down a put down is no bueno.

@Mitch The spice must flow.

@tchrist I don't understand what you're saying. It just reads out the name of the character

I'll maybe do some experiments during lunch

3:26 PM

@Laurel What is the "name" of ẽ?

That's the grapheme LATIN SMALL LETTER E combined with COMBINING TILDE.

I'll have to tweak my settings, unless it's in code (backticks or whatever) where iirc I have it reading out all the characters

Just like t̪ is the grapheme comprising LATIN SMALL LETTER T along with a following COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW.

@jlliagre wait what? What do fish have over their skin? What do musicians practice endlessly? Cipes now I have even more things to keep me up at night.

If you read code point by code point, you get the names in the last column of my displays.

That might suffice.

@tchrist OK that's another thing... how did the navigators do it -before- they got to Arrakis?

3:30 PM

@Mitch Astrolabes.

@tchrist Squinting at astrolabes will certainly make your eyes feel funny.

@jlliagre No, quite right. You can scale a ladder, in English, but you can't scale a scale.

Or, for that fact ladder a scale either.

@Mitch That should be 'cripes' not 'cipes'.

@Araucaria-Him Not without a lot of scratches on your shins.

@Mitch That's so racist!!

@tchrist Put that in my DEI report and smoke it.

3:34 PM

@Mitch Difficult for me to tell, as I have no sense of scale.

3:58 PM

@tchrist It says pretty much the names as you have them written, except there are some characters that aren't supported, such as turned R and bridge.

Well, it says like "Kay" for the letter K, not Latin whatever

I'm using mobile voiceover, which I don't think is the greatest screenreader

@Mitch What do fish have over their skin? Des écailles. What do musicians practice endlessly? Des gammes.

@Araucaria-Him An échelle is not necessarily a ladder in French. Our word overlap with several meanings of 'scale' but we can't name a wheighing device une échelle.

and even less escalier :-)

@Araucaria-Him Apparently you could scale a scale a while ago.

4:37 PM

Wordle 1,004 4/6

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛
⬛🟨🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself." ---Oscar Wilde

@jlliagre I learn something new every day round here!

5:16 PM

From my walk today, a total of 28 km

5:51 PM

tradlarp

Verb: tradlarp (third-person singular simple present tradlarps, present participle tradlarping, simple past and past participle tradlarped)

(Internet slang) To pretend that one is living a traditional or historical lifestyle; to LARP as trad.

Noun: tradlarp (countable and uncountable, plural tradlarps)

(Internet slang, uncountable) The act of tradlarping.
(Internet slang, countable) Synonym of tradlarper.

alphabet

6:13 PM

Word of the day: tradwife. "A married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional femininity and female gender roles, often associated with conservative or alt-right political values."

7:37 PM

@jlliagre un jeu d'esprit

8:33 PM

#WhenTaken #21

I scored 784/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 53.2 metres - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 195 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 2 km - 🗓️ 7 yrs - ⚡ 191 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 1178 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 145 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 1750 km - 🗓️ 13 yrs - ⚡ 122 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 5 km - 🗓️ 26 yrs - ⚡ 131 / 200

https://whentaken.com

2

user 85795

8:49 PM

Neat game.

9:00 PM

Not easy.

user 85795

9:18 PM

Agreed.

Besides being on the verge of graduating, he has been accepted into the University of Minnesota’s Physics PhD program.

@Mitch Bien vu !

9:43 PM

#WhenTaken #21

I scored 757/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 2 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 211 km - 🗓️ 3 yrs - ⚡ 182 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 1179 km - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 144 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 166 km - 🗓️ 7 yrs - ⚡ 178 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 910 km - 🗓️ 40 yrs - ⚡ 54 / 200

https://whentaken.com

9:57 PM

@jlliagre is this some kind of crowdsourcing

@MetaEd No, it's just last Teuteuf's game.

@jlliagre if I wanted random people in the world to add identifying information to photographs, I'd gamify it and this is what it would look like

also you can spell Teuteuf without Teufel but that's only because they beat the [h]ell out of it

@MetaEd At the moment, the locations and dates are well known at least by the author but that might evolve the way you imagine it, yes.

now I know the answer to "what if I post and then later edit to add an @name"

10:25 PM

@MetaEd C'est diabolique. I was surprised when I learned Teuteuf is his real name. In French a teufteuf is a train in onomatopoeiaic child's language, maybe like chuff-chuff in English while teuf is slang for fête (party).