English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:40 AM

@RegDwigнt Seriously? Perhaps that is just a parking spot that was wrongly/weirdly entered into some navigation database?

I can't think of a reasonable explanation for that Russia traffic light.

@tchrist That's cute, you have your very own blond bedmate.

1:57 AM

> I say "I feel stressful" but my native English American teacher say that I should say "I feel stressed"

That’s an unusual collocation.

urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dickage+factor

Of course I'm only posting results when they are good; don't expect unbiased statistics from me.

2:16 AM

I’m pretty sure dickage is a recognizable word, howsoever polysemic it may be.

I know what a caravel is; I wasn't sure whether carvel was legitimate, so I pressed no.

@tchrist Thank you.

I only know caravel.

Same here.

But of course in context we would have known the word.

OED unimpressed.

> Etymology: a. OFr. caruelle, kirvelle (16th c. in Littré): see caravel. Carvel was the vernacular Eng. form from 15th to 17th c., and still continues to be so, so far as the word is truly at home, as in the comb. carvel-built, etc.

> The ordinary name from the 15th to the 17th c., of a somewhat small, light, and fast ship, chiefly of Spain and Portugal, but also mentioned as French and English. (Rarely mentioned after 1650 exc. as a thing of history, and then usually written caravel, after mod.F. caravelle, Pg. caravela.)

Hmm.

"Usually".

2:21 AM

> The Santa María was a nao, was a bit of a tub, and was not able to go near the coastline. But was able to carry a lot of cargo, and it was able to stand up well in bad weather. The Niña, the Pinta were caravels, with a shallower draft than a nao, did not have much cargo space, but were able to explore shallow bays and the mouths of rivers.

> A carvel was square-rigged on its foremasts and mainmasts, but used a lateen sail on the mizzen to help in tacking. A caravel had about twenty crew members, who slept on the deck and would go below only if the weather was bad.

Rather inconsistent.

I’d always read that the nãos were the Portuguese contribution. :)

christopher-columbus.eu/columbus-ships.htm

Reminds me of an old rhyme.

Los hermanos
Pinzones
eran unos
mari—

neros.

Your brain completes mari- the wrong way. :)

A nao is a funny word. It’s from Catalan nau, which of course is just a nave.

I read about nãos on Wikipedia a while about, on the page about the Portuguese expeditions to India.

I was making a joke: he asked Portugal first, and they said não. :)

Having better navigators and a less easily persuaded monarch.

There is/was a Cape Nao.

> 1422—Cape Nao, the limit of Moorish navigation is passed as the African Coast is mapped.

I have to admit I thought of the Greek first, naus.

Ah, that não.

> Aeol. sg. gen. νᾶος

Apparently, naos exists.

I think that the Portuguese use the Catalan without changing it.

It would make perfect sense as a form. But naus is very irregular.

2:34 AM

> 1648-1651—António Raposo Tavares with 200 whites from São Paulo and over a thousand Indians travelled for over 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi), in the biggest expedition ever made in the Americas, following the courses of the rivers, most notably the Paraguay River, to the Andes, the Grande River, the Mamoré River, the Madeira River and the Amazon River. Only Tavares, 59 whites and some Indians reached Belém at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Belém means Bethlehem in case you didn’t know.

> 1559— The Nau São Paulo commanded by Rui Melo da Câmara (was part of the Portuguese India Armada commanded by Jorge de Sousa) discovered Île Saint-Paul in the South Indian Ocean.

So yes: nau in Portuguese for the vessel.

Ah, that makes sense.

> The only practical method for determining longitude in the fifteenth century was a well-known method of timing lunar eclipses. The eclipse timing method is simple: first, you determine the local time that the lunar eclipse starts or ends by direct observation. Then you compare your local time for that event against the local time at some distant place.

> The difference in the two times is the difference in longitude. For example, if the eclipse starts at 8:00 p.m. where you are (say, in Cuba), and the same eclipse starts at 1:00 a.m. in Cadiz, you find that there is five hours difference between Cuba and Cadiz. This works out to 75 degrees of longitude.

I can make a word out of most anything.

And make out a word out of most anything, too.

I would say clumpedly is at least a possible word.

Yeah.

Since clumped is a word.

2:42 AM

> Columbus made two attempts to measure his longitude using eclipses. His results were pretty bad, even by the standards of his day.

That is a nice new word, olumbus. Beautiful.

> Using these clues and a sandglass, Columbus should have been able to determine the correct local time of an eclipse to within about ten minutes. However Columbus's eclipse timing longitudes are off by much greater amounts than this. His 1494 longitude had an error of an hour and 20 minutes. Columbus's error in 1504 is even worse from Jamaica, his error was two and a half hours.

> The best way to explain the errors is to assume that Columbus didn't really use the lunar eclipses at all. He worked out his longitude by dead reckoning and fiddled the figures for the eclipses to agree with the distance he had sailed, converted to longitude on the basis of what size he thought he world was. He used his dead-reckoning distances, and claimed that they were celestially determined. This was probably done to make his results look respectable.

christopher-columbus.eu/navigation-longitude.htm

I am surprised to learn how important lunar eclipses were.

> Midnight could be determined by using a nocturnal, a nifty little tool which tells the time of the night by the rotation of stars around the celestial pole.

columbuslandfall.com/ccnav/cn.shtml

He really wasn’t very good at navigating. :)

Your Dutch is as bad as your English.

@oerkelens Have you taken the Dutch test yet? woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest/test (The English one is on the star wall.)

@tchrist Apparently.

There was one word I know very well but misparsed: tourrit.

Tour = Tour de France; rit = ride.

French + Dutch → confusing.

2:55 AM

Turrets.

Tourette’s. :)

My golden lad has come home. He really is a good kitty.

I was thinking of a geminated r, yes.

The black shadow stalks the night.

Now I'll feed Lorin and he will go up to my bed to wait for me.

That's a good kitty.

And words like ijs-dansen "ice-dancing" and stok-pop "stick-puppet" I just didn't know were used but are immediately transparent when you look up their meaning.

He brought me a mouse, a vole, two dragonflies, and a grasshopper today.

Impressive.

2:57 AM

His all-time high was 5 rodents in a day: 3 prairie voles and 2 mice.

My parents' cat once brought in 6 young rabbits in a single week, all alive and well, or so they appeared. Lively and unbleeding.

Or possibly the same little rabbit 6 times...

Randy brought in a young rabbit some time ago. I was unaware of it, and therefore it was not in that condition.

Oh, well.

It took me some time to discern what creature it had even been.

I am not proficient as a haruspex.

They have brought in 3 snakes so far this summer.

He is as proud of a little june-bug as he is of a great magpie.

One word I got wrong was laparoscopie, "laparoscopy".

I have to admit I didn't know the word, nor did I know the Greek root.

(Speaking of haruspection.)

Now I must to bed.

Adeus!

3:02 AM

Night!

Surprised you haven't heard of laparoscopic surgery.

Although I for some reason hear it said "laproscopic".

Oxinabox

4:23 AM

I feel like we can authoritatively answer basically all antonym, synonym, and hypernym questions with WordNet. english.stackexchange.com/a/261978/14218

6:14 AM

Hey!

Would anyone be so kind to clarify if I can "fill up" a form/exam/resume? I've found that some people only use fill in/fill out, but others also say that you can use "fill up"?

6:42 AM

Hey?

Personally, "fill up a form" sounds a bit strange. Why use "up"? I would use "fill up a gas tank" because it starts at the bottom and fills up.

"Fill in a form" sounds better to me because you are "filling in the blanks."

7:00 AM

Well, the only dictionary that offers "fill up a form" is the Collins dictionary

So that's why I am a bit confused.

Also, someone on SE said this "...but if you have more than 1 year of experience and you can't fill up a resume without this information, I am not interested in hiring you anyway."

From British English A to Zed by Norman W. Schul, Eugene H. Ehrlich, and Richard Ehrlich:

fill in
The British fill in or fill up a form; the Americans fill in or fill out a form.... Fill out is creeping into Britain.

It sounds strange to me, too. I don't recalling hearing "fill up a form" and I'm British.

collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/fill-up#fill-up_1

apparently it's a thing

So it's not wrong?

7:11 AM

looks like it

it is not wrong.

Alright. Interesting.

Do you use Zed or Zee for the letter "z" @MattE.Эллен?

zed

Did you know that "&" used to come after "z"?

7:15 AM

in what sense?

In the alphabet

I didn't. when did that start?

x y z & was the old alphabet

And how did you pronounce &?

1500's I think

7:17 AM

but & hasn't been around as long as the alphabet, so it must have started at some point

I see

Pronounced "and"

Shocking.

There's a link somewhere on EL&U

well. TIL, even Romans did it

"TIL" in what sense?

7:21 AM

Today I learned

Cool :-)

oerkelens

7:53 AM

@Cerberus Should have had some coffee first. My English is better than my Dutch, it seems. I supposedly know 84% of all Dutch words, and 93% of English words.

9:06 AM

@terdon dafuq I have to use J and F? It's not "jes" and "fo". Idiots.

@Mitch Because they change. And tweak the format. And are relatively cumbersome to work with.

I think this test simply always returns a figure around 88% @Cerberus.

@RegDwigнt No, corny got ninetysomething. I got 80 something but I don't remember what. Less than 88 though.

Also, "locater" is not a word. The word is "locator". Idiots.

I specifically figured it would be a test for just that, agent-noun suffixes. But noooo. Turns out it was a demonstration of the authors' facebookedness.

@RegDwigнt It's locate 'er.

It's actually listed by MW as an alternative spelling. The world is going down the drayn.

9:21 AM

I entered it into Google and it told me "go fuck yourself, here are the search results for locator".

Google said that?

Anyway.

It's a fun game of course, but far too many people will think it has some scientific value.