English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

12:28 AM

@alphabet Well, he moving back to Portugal tomorrow.

@M.A.R. Considered by whom?

@tchrist Yes, exactly this.

Luckily, I never trust people to know that nobody uses X just because they don't recall hearing it.

2

@Mitch By what definition of achievement?

Robusto

12:55 AM

@tchrist Yes. Francis and Roger, I believe.

alphabet

1:08 AM

@Cerberus This strikes me as a fairly nonstandard usage. This ELL question gives the usual meaning:

3

Q: Is it correct to refer to an apartment block as a "house"?

Is it correct to refer to an apartment block as a "house"? What is the semantic relationship between the words 'building', 'house', and 'apartment block'? House and apartment block are two types of buildings, right? A house hosts only one family in contrast to an apartment block that accommodates...

> A home is the general term meaning "place where you live," regardless of the form of the building. You can point to an apartment building and say, "That's my home," or do the same with a single-family house.

> The word house, for most native speakers, would suggest what is more precisely called a single-family detached home, which is a residential building intended for a single family to live in. Other terms for the same thing include "stand-alone house," "detached house," or "single-family home."

> You would never refer to a multi-story apartment building originally built as an apartment building as a "house."

Likewise, you can find tons of attestations for the phrase "a house or an apartment," which pretty clearly establishes that most speakers understand the contrast between them.

alphabet

1:21 AM

@Cerberus Unfortunate.

Xanne

2:23 AM

@alphabet Did you miss this?

Cerberus Yes of course, When on the playground you hear Jimmy say he's going over to Billy's house to play, it simply means he's going to wherever Billy lives, irrespective of whether that should be a cottage or a castle, a shack or a chalet, a flat or an apartment, a yurt or a tent, a lean-to cabin or a glitzy penthouse suite, the state orphanage or tenement hall, boarding school dormitory or refugee camp enclosure. He might not even go inside whatever this place is–just be near it.

From tchrist

CowperKettle

alphabet

@Xanne I saw that. I'm pretty sure tchrist's usage isn't the more standard one; I'd consider it incorrect and it isn't what typical dictionaries list.

Xanne

@alphabet In the major cities in which I’ve lived in the US, “home” is stuffy when referring to “my place,” wheras “house” is far more common. Spoken, that is.

alphabet

@Xanne I can genuinely say that I've never heard people use the word *house" to refer to anything other than a freestanding building.

I don't doubt that some people use it that way, but the dictionaries are absolutely right about the typical meaning for most speakers.

Xanne

2:41 AM

You suffer from the belief that what you haven’t experienced doesn’t exist.

alphabet

@Xanne No, I suffer from the belief that dictionaries usually give the standard meanings of words.

2

There's an ELU question about this, and while unfortunately the top two answers don't address this issue, the third one does:

> A person's home is the place where they normally live in. (Again, several related meanings also exist.) As it happens, a lot of people live in houses, so often a person's home will be their house. It could be something else, though, such as an apartment, a trailer, a boat, a tent or even a cardboard box under a bridge. None of those would normally be called a house in English.

Ryder is not Rude.

Only love will turn a house into a home.

alphabet

In fact there was another ELL question about the same issue, where the most upvoted answer was:

> A house is generally used to mean a single-family dwelling, or at least a building used exclusively for a small number of people, perhaps to include a duplex house.

Ryder is not Rude.

Home sweet home.

alphabet

Likewise, in the answers to Is there a word that means both "house" and "apartment"?, while there is one commenter who agrees with that usage, by far the most popular answer accepts the basic premise.

Ryder is not Rude.

2:53 AM

"Many of the world's refugees have beautiful homes, but no houses to put them in."

alphabet

Wait @Xanne -- we had this exact same argument many months ago in the comments on your answer. here.

Curiously, I can find one exception to the dictionaries and ELU/ELL questions: a Reddit post on /r/AskNYC where everyone agrees with your usage. Maybe it's a regional thing--some of the commenters there seem to think so.

Robusto

Anyone who's looking for an all-purpose word for "the place where I live" can try the slang term crib, which is used to describe houses, apartments, duplexes, whatever serves as your abode. It's not fussy.

Excuse me, it ain't fussy.

I'm in my crib now, so I may as well go to bed. Big Sunday ride tomorrow. Ciao.

alphabet

Why do we call it home remodeling when we could call it crib-pimping?

Ryder is not Rude.

3:09 AM

Cya pal.

alphabet

In informal contexts I think place is the most common choice.

Word of the day: cut-and-shut. "A car that has been welded together from vehicles previously involved in accidents.'

Robusto

@alphabet Good one. It avoids over-specificity while nailing "the place where I/you/he/she lives." And now that I think of it, that's probably just the word I use most often in such circumstances.

And so to bed.

Ryder is not Rude.

Later homie homeboy.

alphabet

There's also the freestanding genitive used in e.g. "I'm over at Max's." You'd never guess, but H&P has a section about this since it is--in their wonderfully simple and straightforward terminology--a fused determiner-head.

tchrist

3:28 AM

@Xanne Alas that such parish pumpery arrogantly wrapped in unwavering self-certainty, although especially common in the underaged, the underread, and the undertravelled, should by no means be limited only to such uncultured ingénus alone! Would that it were otherwise.

alphabet

Isn't it funny how tchrist still tries to win arguments against me when he can't read my messages?

CowperKettle

ChatGPT o1 - First Reaction and In-Depth Analysis

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Ryder is not Rude.

3:52 AM

Chat.SE

Ryder is not Rude.

5:22 AM

Why MIT and Harvard Students Often Make Bad Employees

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Ryder is not Rude.

5:34 AM

🌄 🗻 🧗‍♂️

Cerberus

@alphabet Nobody would call a buildings with several apartments a house: a house is where one household lives, whence the name household. (Not homehold.)

alphabet

@Cerberus As stated earlier that answer, you also wouldn't call a single apartment within such a building a house.

Cerberus

@alphabet I would consider this infelicitous.

@alphabet But you would.

alphabet

@Cerberus You would consider what infelicitous?

@Cerberus See the ELL/ELU answers or look it up in any major dictionary.

Cerberus

@alphabet We have said our goodbyes.

alphabet

5:43 AM

Anyway, let's drop this argument. I've cited my sources.

Cerberus

@alphabet Gosh, do you remember this type of discussion and how it went earlier?

alphabet

@Cerberus C'mon, don't you find these debates incredibly productive and useful? /s

Cerberus

@alphabet Housework.

@alphabet Yes, enormously so.

I have just dropped my fling off at his...I want to say house, but he actually lives in an hotel!

He sat on the back of my bike.

Very romantic.

alphabet

@Cerberus I'm looking for dates (mostly online) and it's testing my patience for tedious small talk.

Cerberus

Hmm can't you break the smalltalk and introduce fun topics?

Like fun facts of the day.

@Xanne I actually feel that "stuffy" matches my feelings about "my home".

@alphabet It is funny indeed. Though I the word trying may be omitted.

alphabet

5:52 AM

@Cerberus I fear my fun facts would make me seem like I have a very unusual set of interests. Which, granted, would not be an entirely inaccurate.

@Cerberus Have you ever disagreed with him about anything?

Cerberus

@alphabet Give me one.

@alphabet All the time, why?

Don't bring up the p word or the g word, or we both go crazy. Every season in the same way.

alphabet

@Cerberus Well, my current interests include reading a textbook on English grammar and closely following a British statutory inquiry into someone who was probably a serial killer but possibly just the victim of extremely bad luck.

@Cerberus Sorry, but which words? (You could post them and immediately delete them if you want to avoid accidentally triggering the problem in question.)

Cerberus

6:07 AM

@alphabet Dangerous!

Let's say they are not exactly p-spot and g-spot.

It is ᵖᵃʳᵗᶦᶜᶦᵖˡᵉ and ᵍᵉʳᵘⁿᵈ.

alphabet

Oh.

I thought it was going to be, like, politics or something.

But I don't think I've seen you two debate that topic.

Cerberus

@alphabet Perhaps other fun facts.

Something about biology or history always works well, they like that.

Like the male anglerfish.

Or Germany originating in a crusader state.

Dinosaurs also always hit the right spot.

I once had a streak where a G contact and I would exchange fun facts every day for many weeks.

alphabet

@Cerberus Did you know that biologists now classify birds as "feathered theropod dinosaurs"?

Cerberus

Voilà!

That is fun. Though quite well known.

But that is OK: then you will make him feel good about himself.

Or you could post a picture of a dimetrodon and ask whether he is more closely related genetically to humans or dinosaurs.

alphabet

Isn't the male anglerfish thing even more well-known?

Cerberus

6:21 AM

If you say so!

Perhaps in your circles.

Something else, then.

You can do this.

Otherwise, you can post one of your theories about something, and ask his opinion.

Or random questions: what animal do we think is smarter, a dolphin or a pig?

alphabet

Did you know that about the parasite that destroys a fish's tongue and replaces it with its own body?

Cerberus

Or do a guessing game.

alphabet

Ok, definitely not that one.

Cerberus

I know it! And it is fun!

But, yeah, maybe ask, do you like disgusting/gruesome fun facts from biology.

Many people will!

Though maybe from an anonymous person on an application it may seem a bit sketchy.

alphabet

Yes.

Aug 29 at 1:21, by alphabet

Fun fact of the day: when the USS West Virginia sank during Pearl Harbor, three sailors got trapped in an airtight compartment inside the ship. Instead of rescuing them, the military let them starve to death.

Probably not that one either.

Cerberus

6:30 AM

Maybe differ that one until you know he likes the lugubrious.

alphabet

Most of my "fun" facts are actually just sad and dispiriting, if you haven't noticed.

Cerberus

Sure, I like those too.

But you can also think of things that are simply weird and not especially horrifying.

alphabet

Wait it's like 2:30am.

Ciao.

jlliagre

@alphabet No, it's 8:40am !

Cerberus

Correct.

But sleep if you must.

jlliagre

6:42 AM

Waking up :-)

Cerberus

So early!

CowperKettle

warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/…

jlliagre

@Cerberus Not my thing, especially on Sunday's but I have to drop my daughter somewhere this morning.

Cerberus

@jlliagre Ah, that sucks.

Sport match?

jlliagre

@Cerberus I will survive.

@Cerberus Gathering with friends.

Cerberus

6:57 AM

@jlliagre Wow and you didn't tell her to meet later in the day!

Ryder is not Rude.

7:48 AM

Can ChatGPT o1-preview Solve PhD-level Physics Textbook Problems? (Part 2)

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Cerberus

Can it?

Ryder is not Rude.

Yes.

CowperKettle

8:10 AM

> “You know horses are smarter than people. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.” -- Will Rogers

M.A.R.

@Cerberus the semi-official terminology from people that occasionally call other people undergrads. The US and part of Europe, I guess?

Xanne

8:26 AM

@M.A.R. Undergrads are people in college who have not yet received a BA degree—what we used to call freshmen, also sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I don’t know what the terminology is outside the US when programs are longer than the four-year college program.

Xanne

8:45 AM

Undergrad is short for undergraduate.

Vikas

Now I know what Stalingrad means.

M.A.R.

9:08 AM

@Vikas if you sport a thick, manly mustache you become a Stalingrad

@Xanne I only know it because of academia.SE. Not many medical doctors or pharmacists there

Vikas

@M.A.R. I trimmed it today.

M.A.R.

The best you can do is Lenin

Ryder is not Rude.

@Cerberus this explains the HUGE decrease in demand for answers on StackOverflow since GPT came out.

The Transformers are taking over.

The proof is in the pudding.

M.A.R.

@RyderisnotRude. the vast majority of questions asked from chatGPT are probably of the sort SO wouldn't want. If only the investors valued views more than content generation

Ryder is not Rude.

Watch the last minute of the vid.

M.A.R.

9:22 AM

You're my preferred presenter. What's it say?

2

Ryder is not Rude.

It scrored 90%

M.A.R.

On what? Getting the answers right?

Ryder is not Rude.

Yes on PhD level questions.

M.A.R.

Well if you give a machine a database and questions from that database, it will always outperform humans.

But

1) As SO will prevent LLM training on its data in the future, it's accuracy will go down. It won't be as reliable for, say, Python 4. And 2) As it's ripping off SO it will never be superior to SO.

SO needed to fix their half-baked search and question staging ground projects. Instead it introduced another half baked feature based on AI. So now it has two half baked features.

Ryder is not Rude.

:-D

M.A.R.

9:33 AM

It still holds the monopoly on programming answers, but that's only because the people angry at the company haven't come up with a scaleable alternative yet

In short, the clock is ticking, both for SO and for AI ripping off SO

We should, in the meanwhile, probably just stop worrying and love the bomb

4

Ryder is not Rude.

Agreed.

tchrist

1:04 PM

SIGH We're now going to have people arguing about morning and afternoon all the livelong day.

0

Q: How do you greet someone at noon hours?

Noon hours refer to the hours between 12PM and 4PM. It's very common to say "Good morning" for a greeting during the hours of 6AM until 12PM or "Good afternoon" for a greeting during the hours of 4PM until 6PM, but not "Good noon". Then how do you greet someone during noon hours?

single-word-requests greetings

What in tarnation are "noon hours"??? The asker's profile says he's from Israel. Are "noon hours" a thing there? Is this calquing something from Hebrew? It seems weird to only say good afternoon between 4ᴘᴍ and 6ᴘᴍ alone. People's greetings have never been governed by an atomic clock.

Laurel

@tchrist Maybe we should popularize "good noon" as a greeting

tchrist

@Laurel I was taught that it was impolite to talk while I'm chewing. :)

@Laurel Maybe at the monastery: merriam-webster.com/wordplay/…

I wonder whether Israel has a four-hour meal break.

> Because the time of sunset varies throughout the year, the time that Shabbat begins and ends changes every week. There are a number of websites etc. where one can check the times each week. In the winter, businesses close around lunchtime, with some restaurants not opening at all for lunch. In the summer, businesses close later. Each place has its own rules regarding this.

jlliagre

1:21 PM

Just say bonjour or g'day, whatever the hour. Problem solved.

tchrist

Even before cockcrow? :)

jlliagre

As a greeting, bonjour works anytime. You might say bonsoir in the evening but that's not mandatory. Bonsoir is more used when you leave someone.

tchrist

Yes, exactly. You can't say good night as a greeting in English.

jlliagre

Unless you want to cut the conversation short :-)

tchrist

> “To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”

> “Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here,
thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he
meant that the conversation was at an end.
“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf.
“Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good
till I move off.”

Robusto

1:31 PM

Interestingly, all those greetings, if said forcefully, can be used as a dismissal. And "Good night!" can be an emphatic rejection or disapproval of whatever has been said. "You say they're building flying cars now? Good night!"

tchrist

@jlliagre Interesting how French doesn't really have a buenas tardes, either to greet someone or to leave them.

Robusto

@tchrist They're all taking a nap in the afternoon.

tchrist

@Robusto Which is why you can't say good noon: either you're chewing your comida or you're sleeping your siesta. ;)

jlliagre

@tchrist No buenas tardes to greet someone but we might say Bonne après-midi (or Bon après-midi, this is an open point) at the end of a middæg conversation.

tchrist

Nobody even agrees where "evening" falls.

jlliagre

1:36 PM

@tchrist Not in Spain!

#WhenTaken #201 (15.09.2024)

I scored 866/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 1060 km - 🗓️ 14 yrs - ⚡ 142 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 997.8 metres - 🗓️ 10 yrs - ⚡ 185 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 1763 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 154 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 817.2 metres - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 196 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 271 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 189 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Robusto

Wordle 1,184 5/6

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jlliagre

Wordle 1,184 5/6

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tchrist

@jlliagre Only because they aren't so silly as to equate mediodía with twelve noon there. Much too early for dinner.

It's more of a duration than a point in time anyway.

And nobody in the world thinks that a second after midnight counts as the morning there. It's still night. It's not even the madrugada yet.

I blame the factory workers' time clock whistle for screwing up our language. :)

jlliagre

I remember some restaurants in the Spanish Mediterranean coast were serving cena between 6pm and 8pm for the British, Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians, between 8pm and 10pm for the French and Italians and between 10pm and 12pm for Spanish people. Hard work but efficient use of spacetime.

Robusto

#travle #641 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

Easy-peasy.

tchrist

1:48 PM

@jlliagre That's great!!

> The noon hours came and the shop closed for the afternoon siesta. Don Rafael did not leave but ordered a soup and fish to be sent in. He waited and he thought.

Apparently the noon hours used to be used for 11am to 1pm in English??

@Xanne Apparently we used to use the noon hours in English, but most of its uses either antedate our births or are calquing something in translation.

Well there you have it. You learn something new every day. And doubtless forget three somethings old everyday as well.

Good morning and good day.

SmokeDetector

2:06 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer (38): What’s a word for deliberately slow and sexy? ✏️‭ by Edward Nelson‭ on english.SE

tchrist

fp

Yosef fixed it. It's not spam.

jlliagre

3:06 PM

#travle #641 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

jlliagre

3:21 PM

Oh fsck, that was 10pm to 12am. Supper isn't that long :)

Mitch

3:54 PM

@Cerberus 1) I agree that a claim of lack of evidence is not -immediately- evidence of lack.

2) but someone who has shown knowledge of the domain (ie we have experience that they have experience in the field, is that they have some authority there), then they might be trustworthy as to some of their claims.

3) also there are a lot of different contexts where'home' and 'house' seem the same, but I have a hard time switching them one for the other.

4) we should come up with wxamples (when I say 'we' I mean me)

MetaEd

4:26 PM

Wordle 1,184 4/6

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Vikas

4:39 PM

@Mitch [ SmokeDetector | MS ] "me should" is not recognized as a correct grammar.

Cerberus

4:53 PM

@Mitch In the domain of language usage, I can almost never agree with this.

@Xanne That much is clear, but it is just that there are many diplomata so one always wonders, under what degree? High school? Bachelor's? Master's? Doctorate?

Mitch

5:19 PM

@Cerberus then how do you process any language teacher? Do you not trust them at all?

@Vikas touché!

Cerberus

@Mitch A good language teacher will not say "nobody says X" (unless it is something extreme).

But, yes, teachers of language will absolutely occasionally teach you something that isn't quite true. That is fine if you don't take their word for an oracle.

jlliagre

5:54 PM

Jul 16 at 1:12, by Cerberus

@DannyuNDos Nobody says North Asia!

;-)

M.A.R.

6:40 PM

@jlliagre nobody says nobody says nobody says, all right?

Cerberus

6:50 PM

@jlliagre But that was obviously not meant as a categorical and academic statement!

The "nobody" was not meant in a Grave and Serious Manner.

tchrist

7:18 PM

@Mitch “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. But when he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” ―Arthur C. Clarke, a distinguished but elderly scientist, stating the first of his three laws.

There have been more gunshots in Trump's vicinity. The SS have detained, alive, a suspect in the new shooting.

Apparently he had just blasted Taylor Swift on his fake social media platform a few hours previous.

Happy Sunday, everyone.

> Donald Trump was golfing at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Sunday afternoon when Secret Service agents heard gunshots.

Criggie

@tchrist you lagged - its Moanday here already, damnit

tchrist

7:43 PM

@Criggie And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

Phrase of the Day: Mindful Underparenting.

> An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.

This is yet another stupid bourgeois “problem”—and one of the rich fat burgers’ own making, no less. Even if pearl-clutching Lisa Douglas wouldn't know how to remedy it, I guarantee you that Oliver Wendell Douglas would banish it in a trice, probably with a pitchfork.

Exeunt omnes

M.A.R.

8:16 PM

@tchrist what's the exchange rate for gunshots? 100 votes? 1000? Reagan would know

Cerberus

8:37 PM

@tchrist Is this the elusive American upper class, portrait of the King And Queen?

Rather stylish.

tchrist

9:15 PM

Green Acres

Green Acres is an American television absurdist sitcom starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple who move from New York City to a country farm. Produced by Filmways as a sister show to Petticoat Junction, the series was first broadcast on CBS, from September 15, 1965, to April 27, 1971. Receiving solid ratings during its six-year run, Green Acres was cancelled in 1971 as part of the "rural purge" by CBS. The sitcom has been in syndication and is available on DVD and VHS releases. A reunion movie aired in 1990. In 1997, the two-part episode "A Star Named Arnold Is Born" was ranked No. 59 on...

Upper class on the left, professional class on the right.

Our left and right, respectively, not theirs.

> There was an AK-47-style rifle with a scope, two backpacks filled with ceramic tile and a GoPro camera in the bushes where the suspect was spotted, law enforcement officials said during a briefing.

tchrist

9:30 PM

@M.A.R. Do they get to count for vote conversion each live round discovered unexploded in the magazine of the almost-machine gun?

> The armed man spotted at former president Donald Trump’s golf course was between 300 and 500 yards away from the Republican nominee when he was stopped by authorities, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said in Sunday’s news conference.

“With a rifle and a scope like that, that’s not a long distance,” Bradshaw said.

Robusto

@tchrist ... the way to dusty death.

Daily Octordle #965
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tchrist

@Robusto Another near miss, or thither it would have gone and yesterday's tidings tomorrow would have been grimmer by far.

Robusto

No doubt.

tchrist

> In response to a reporter’s question, officials acknowledged that because Donald Trump is not in office, the full golf course wasn’t cordoned off.

Robusto

@tchrist May it remain ever thus.

tchrist

9:40 PM

A year of living dangerously.

Robusto

Daily Sequence Octordle #965
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jlliagre

10:02 PM

Daily Octordle #965
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Daily Sequence Octordle #965
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Score: 75

Robusto

11:58 PM

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Sep. 15, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 💔 🎉

My Score: 2150

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…