there's a Mitbewohner here who is a garbage American redneck
just tonight, in the span of about 4 hours, he has managed to proclaim, loudly "I'm American!" at least 6 times, ask everyone to speak English at least 10 times, and make awkward world war 2 references which everyone felt really crappy hearing at least 20 times.
he thinks humanity started with literally two people in a magical garden with an applesnake, and he thinks businesses should have the right to refuse business to gay people
I just have no capacity to deal with such idiocy in person. I can't do it, it makes my blood pressure too high.
he could just be playing up to stereotype, because he doesn't have anything else in him (that is, he isn't actually a stereotype, but all he's ever seen in media about Americans is the stereotype and he's not imaginative enough to be himself.
I think he's just an idiot. he comes from an idiot family. he's uncultured and has never traveled, he believes the bible literally, he thinks the United States is categorically superior to any other place in the world
he always goes around like to supermarkets and stuff and exclaims that he is looking for AMERICAN things
like he wants AMERICAN cookies and AMERICAN soda
but wait, that's not my problem with him. I can deal with the fact that there are people this shockingly dumb in the world, especially in America; I'm used to it.
the issue is that I'm here trying to learn German, a bit about Germany, I'm trying to make this my future home.
and when he's in the room, somehow he gets everyone to go into English only mode, and he talks so much about the US that people become intrigued and go "oh tell me more about so and so place in rural iowa"
@GeorgePompidou Isn't there an ethnic section now in most german supermarkets where you can get peanut butter and marshmallow fluff and real chocolate (like Hershey's not that weird commie Lindt or Toblerone)?
and honestly, actually, no I'm not. I couldn't give two shits about the US. I was raised by Romanians mostly in Switzerland, and I find Western Europe of much higher quality than anywhere in the US.
I appreciate the US for its scientific achievements, ventures to space, technological advancement… but not when it comes to everyday life.
I wouldn't call it native. I spent many years in Zürich, unfortunately going to an American school. besides, in my experience, most people I knew in Zürich speak English most of the time, wherever they're from.
@GeorgePompidou hmmm...ok. Maybe I'm intimidated by the american supermarket with 3 huge football field long aisles of snacks. and then 3 more for soda.
WHOA! do you guys realize that if the stack exchange guys ever wanted to start a Q&A site about cats targeted at French people, the domain of choice is already long gone
how can someone have let this happen?
Cerb, it's cause he gets in the way of my learning and integrating with the people of this country, inside my own residence.
@AndrewLeach Yes, you're right about the question. I was looking for some mod to ask about the migration but didn't see anybody, so I thought I'd just migrate.
But while I think that "Lang X -> English" is better on this site, maybe that one requires more Chinese knowledge than usual.
@Jez can you explain the weird distribution of popular vote vs seats won? Because winner-takes-all (FPTP), does it mean that in lots of districts where conservative and labour won, it was a close vote (lots of votes) for UKIP and Greens, and that for the the fringe groups, they won in smaller districts where few of the other parties got votes?
@Mitch The UK has the most unfair electoral system in the world. First-past-the-post means every constituency (let's say "region") has just one representative (MP). The candidate who gets the most votes in that region becomes that region's MP. It's a very simple system, but also a very bad one for properly representing the pattern of voting on the national scale.
To take the most extreme example, there could be two parties, where one party gets 49% of votes in each region and one party gets 51% in each region. The latter party would win 100% of the seats.
Many sensible proposals have been made to make this fairer, probably my favourite being from the Lib Dems, where you just increase region sizes to maybe 5 MPs, allowing a good degree of proportionality when MPs are elected via the D'Hondt method.
@AndrewLeach Snow, Andrew. I got rather heavily snowily snow on. Quite extraordinary.
I awoke to hummers trying to get inside my house. I went out and poured a pitcher of very hot water over the hummingbird feeder that was buried in snow and therefore inaccessible. I am again the most popular person in Colorado as far as hummers go. I fear to look beneath the tarps at the garden. It is still well below freezing anyway.
I told my neighbor he shouldn't put his tomatoes in before Mother's Day.
A combination of entrenched interests wanting the unfair current system, and moronic voters who believe their lies that it's "good" in some way, prevent this reform from happening and will (IMHO) cause the break-up of the Untied Kingdom and a huge level of voter disenfranchisement. I'm already thinking I won't ever bother voting again unless we get electoral reform.
@Mitch In the specific case of this election, UKIP and the Green party got lots of votes but only in two regions did their candidate actually get the most votes. This could easily have been zero regions, had those two regions gone a few thousand votes the other way, meaning their ~5 million votes would have resulted in zero MPs.
Alternatively, they could have had regional concentrations of their votes. In that case, they would've won an unfairly high number of seats. Heck, with UKIP's 4 million votes being in just the right places, they probably could have won 300 seats.
His philosophy is that if they live, he’ll have a head start on everybody. And usually, they do. He has to put them in twice ever couple years, but three times is a lot. Still, it's a great deal of effort lost to the snow goblins.
Our frost-to-frost growing season is so ridiculously short it is hard to get real tomatoes for long here.
He doesn't want a head start on others, just on himself.
Why to we put vegetables in and up?
I mean, Englishwise.
One puts one’s tomatoes in (the garden) during the spring, and one puts them up (in the cupboard) as summer fails.
In linguistics, morphological derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happiness and unhappy from the root word happy, or determination from determine. It often involves the addition of a morpheme in the form of an affix, such as -ness, un-, and -ation in the preceding examples.
Derivation stands in contrast to the process of inflection, which means the formation of grammatical variants of the same word, as with determine/determines/determining/determined.
== Derivational patterns ==
Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational...
> Derivation can also occur without any change of form, for example telephone (noun) and to telephone. This is known as conversion, or zero derivation.
In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation; specifically, it is the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green.
Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (e.g., the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean).
== Verbification... ==
The process of changing a word with one grammatical function into a word with a similar meaning but a different function is called Derivation.
Derivation one of the two varieties of Morphology (the other is Inflection). English has almost no inflection left, so its morphology is almost all deri...
No, the -(t)ion derivational suffix can't be applied to update. Derivations are almost all irregular, and restricted in the words they can appear on.
Since update is a modern word, it follows the modern English trend of Zero-Derivation, like what Calvin calls "Verbing". Hence, as Shyam points ou...
More or less any word can be verbed in English—that is, turned into a verb by zero-derivation. That includes patient.
The trouble with patient, though, is that it is both an adjective and a noun, and the two mean quite different things (“able to accept or tolerate waiting, delays, etc.” vs. “a p...
An important means of creating new words in English is zero-derivation (aka conversion). This is the process of converting a word from one part of speech to another without any overt morphological process. The use of the noun 'medal' as a verb is an example of this. There are many other examples—...
Well, to start with, flaw is not really a verb; it's a noun, and nouns don't have past participles.
Like practically any noun, however, it can be "Verbed" (as Calvin calls it; linguists call it Zero-Derivation, or Conversion), resulting in a causative verb to flaw, meaning 'cause to have a flaw'...
Zero derivation is a term of art in the linguistics realm. It is not really one in general circulation.
Another kind of derivation occurs when converting mass nouns to count nouns: simply render them into the plural instead of using a partitive premodifier of some sort. This also jars people.
@mikeeustace If God has texted you, who are we to complain? :)
I have a BSc Linguistics (but a primary teacher). The English lang teacher in secondary asked me to make a "very slightly risque" presentation on why I chose my subject etc.
I'm going to talk about censorship in news. Use of * to represent a letter. Moving on to a 'joke' about zero derivation and the noun finger
Oh, you said secondary, not second-grade. Ok then. Still could be potentially risky to present a risqué presentation; one never knows who will complain, and believe, someone always complains. So annoying.
@Jez 1) thanks for the explanation 2) I think the American electoral college system for presidential voting is worse (America wins again!!) 3) I agree with you that the FPTP (or winner take all) is dumb (that's how the US electoral college works, see how much we're alike?).
drowning in conformity sounds just as appealing as drowning in isolation. Perhaps it is the use of the word drowning that is awful, and should be eliminated from vocabulary, Then, for example, indulging in conformity and indulging in isolation sound just as great.
@crl sewer: sows all pipelines together.
something that performs the action of sewing.
user116848
9:07 PM
Ahh, so my wall clock has stopped working.
user116848
That’s what all the mystery is.
user116848
I better go and change its battery.
user116848
Although I was staring at my computer screen this whole time, I still didn’t notice the correct time in the task bar.
@snailboat you're going to have to trust me that he's just really dumb and has never been outside the United States or bothered to learn about the world.