@aedia — Grats. I actually saw the mobile stylesheet for the first time this evening on the way home. So I thought what I had before was the mobile, but it was actually the screen CSS.
So, have we applied the choke to EL&U.SE so that only four approved questions may be asked and answered within any 24-hour period? And those asking and answering must be doctoral candidates (at least — post-doc researchers preferred) in English?
Jim: (reading) ... the egregious Jim Hacker. (to Humphrey) What does egregious mean? Sir Humphrey: Um, I think it means outstanding, in one way or another. --- Yes Minister
— +1 for Yes Minister reference. But here: **egregious** |iˈgrējəs| *adjective* 1 outstandingly bad; shocking : egregious abuses of copyright. 2 archaic remarkably good.
I do all right, unless I'm playing people who have memorized the Scrabble™ dictionary. There are sooo many words that are just freakin' made up, and if you don't know them you can't win.
Seriously, I started a game and I couldn't lose. So I looked up on the Web what was the high score at the time, and it was like 12 million, so I ran my score up to 12.1 million and never played again.
@RegDwight, @Kosmonaut, @nohat, @Dori, @Rebecca: So ... are we answering Yoichi Oishi's questions anymore or not? Which side of the line are those on?
I mean, seriously, are we going to tell him "Sorry, but your questions are rubbish because you are not a native speaker and you don't understand the subtleties of English that we all take for granted"?
Frequently, before going on stage, someone will say "break a leg" to an actor, which is a peculiar acting saying meaning "good luck!" How did this expression come about?
In the past days, a question has been deleted by a diamond user (not one of our moderators), and some questions have been closed as off-topic because of something that was added to the FAQ (again, not by our moderators).
Does that mean we are not doing a good job in closing questions that do not...
@RebeccaChernoff — That is the user I'm talking about. I do not wish to see him go. He's a 78-year-old Japanese man learning English. He lived through the firebombing of Tokyo when he was 13 and he pops in to ask us smart people what this or that odd expression means from time to time.
@RebeccaChernoff his questions are basic but don't otherwise violate our standards regarding form, objectivity, and indicating a little bit of effort on his part before asking. he gets uniformly good answers
@RebeccaChernoff it's unlikely that very many people will land on a yoichi question by googling. however, any beginner to intermediat non-native speaker running across one of them is likely to learn something
What do “socially imposed judgments” and “Keyboard, face, keyboard, face.” mean?
The differing opinion here seems to revolve around the idea that the two questions are coming from the same source. The asker didn't know what two phrases meant and decided to ask us.
Should EL&U enforce a one ...
When you get old, it becomes tough to move your body. We Japanese, particularly old people and the middle-aged use to utter a signal word or interjection, “Dokkoisho” when we sit down on the chair, bench or stone on the roadside and when holding up a bulky and heavy thing like heavy luggage. It s...
I found the phrase ““She was young and blithe, 22 going on 16” in the article of the Time magazine (July 6 issue) dealing with the Casey Anthony Verdict, under the title, “The Casey Anthony Verdict The Jury Did the Right Thing.”
I know Casey Anthony was 22 when her 2-years old daughter was kille...
The surreal world in the New York Times article depicted by a seasoned editor at Harper’s Magazine who was laid off recently and experiencing bitter world, under the title, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Unemployment’ was entertaining as well as relevant to me.
However I can’t understand phrases, “The g...
Emmanuel Lewis (born March 9, 1971) is an American actor, best known for playing the title character in the 1980s television sitcom Webster. He is tall. Lewis graduated from Midwood High School in 1989 and then Clark Atlanta University in 1997. He is often compared to the late Gary Coleman, star of Diff'rent Strokes.
Early life
Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York. His mother, Margaret Lewis, was a computer programmer.
Career
When Diff'rent Strokes became a hit on NBC with Gary Coleman in the starring role, ABC tried, with some success, to duplicate that show's formula ...
@MrHen i don't think either of those describes our leniency, though. we ruthlessly close questions that actually are off-topic, gen ref, etc. but we're willing to take a more forgiving view of what counts as on-topic than some other sites
@Robusto Yeah, sure. "Welcoming" works in there. I don't have a problem with nice or welcoming. My point was that being leniency for those reasons is fine; being lenient because we don't want to define our own definitions of good/bad questions is not fine.
it only became an issue because Jeff decreed that the guidelines should be interpreted in a different way than the community had been applying them up until now
@RebeccaChernoff — Word. And if we get too doctrinaire about our definitions we will stop looking at the questions qua questions and start looking at them as fodder for our dogmatic checklist.
@RebeccaChernoff I interpreted it as, "If we start analyzing the questions to see if they fit we stop looking at the questions for the reasons we started the site in the first place."
@RebeccaChernoff No, it's brilliant - see, I'm not an expert, nor am I learning English, so I'm excluded from the site. You gotta either be really good, or really bad to play.
the problem with linguisticky questions is that if they get too advanced they also become off-topic, candidates for migration to the eventual linguistics.se
I am very bad at English Grammer! Because it is my second language and in School i was not a attentive student. Now, I want to improve my gramatical skill.
How and where i can get some instruction to improve my gramatical skill?
Mr.Moderator plz don't close this topic or close after some valua...
This something may be innately obvious to native speakers; however, to many outsiders, the difference is elusive. I only recently realized the difference and still have a hard time to distinguishing them. Please explain how to pronounce these two letters correctly, specifically lip/tongue movemen...
@JSBangs Honestly, though, ESL is completely irrelevant. A question about English may arise due to an ESL perspective but the question itself is still about English, not English as a second language
And here's another thing. We have been talking about questions exclusively. But how about people who come in here and give craptastic answers time after time?
@Dori the key as i see it is specificity. if you ask "i'm a native speaker and I don't understand when I should say X as opposed to Y", that's very much on-topic. we get a lot of those kinds of questions and i don't want them to go away
@Dori In other words, it is easy to say, "Delete bad stuffs." But... it isn't fun trying to get bad stuff deleted and having the community respond by saying, "Be nice to people!"
I would like to know some adjectives to refer to a person, possibly a partner. Some of them are well known, such as
my love
sweetheart
honey
etc..
Beside the classic ones, I wondered if anyone knows some that are less often used, or that are particularly funny/cute. I heard, for example,
b...
regarding bad questions and bad answers both: downvote. flag if appropriate. there are mechanisms in the site that if someone is consistently getting downvoted, flagged, posts closed or deleted, the site will block them from asking. or answering, if it is on answers.
a thought: we have have grown to the point where we need to be "meaner", just like SO got a lot more strict about its policies after its first few months. even though i was one of the ones who called for leniency, i'm willing to accept that the time for leniency has passed if that's really the case