English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

SmokeDetector

17:11

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected: Can "f***ed up" be used as a synonym for "f***ed"? by xxxxxx on english.stackexchange.com

NVZ

@SmokeDetector why now? the answer was posted in July.

Helmar

Cause tchrist edited it

Our new mod triggered the smoke detector :)

NVZ

17:26

Check out my ELU.

Got bored with the red-ish page. I tried tinkering with some CSS, which I am completely new to.

Helmar

red?

Standard ELU isn't red

NVZ

That is why I said red-ish. It's some shade of red/pink or something?

Helmar

Idk, I got a color weakness :D

NVZ

Or brown.

I don't know the real color of ELU. On different browsers, I see different, but close, colors.

Why would anyone edit to expand "OED"? english.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/200459

Helmar

Makes kinda sense for everyone unfamiliar with the abbreviation. On ELU however I don't see it as a valuable edit. I rejected it.

NVZ

17:35

Well, a simple Google search would tell us what OED most probably is.. google.co.in/search?q=%22OED%22

Helmar

That's not relevant, you can google every abbreviation and everyone is ambiguous. The important issue is, that in the confines of ELU certain abbreviations - like the usual dictionaries - are considered common knowledge.

tchrist

There, 134 done and only 4,379 to go.

Pity about the front page, though.

1

A: This is too vague a term

Just as the construction vague enough means 'so vague that S' The term was vague enough to describe any book. ==> The term was so vague that it described any book. the construction too vague is its negative, meaning 'so vague that Not S' The term was too vague to describe the book well. ...

But the professor is exempt.

And needs votes.

Helmar

18:02

@tchrist and you triggered the smoke detector :D

Should this be migrated to meta?

2

Q: Reference material for change in English usage over time

How words have changed in meaning and usage over time is frequently a hot topic both on here and the wider community, and I find it fascinating. Are there any good reference works which document this kind of thing? I'd like to be able to look up a word, and see lists of historical meaning, with...

tchrist

@Helmar Too old.

Helmar

Even for mods?

tchrist

Right.

Shog or a dev probably could, but I don't see it worth bugging them.

Oh, and:

> calibrate [v.]
ˈcalibrated [ppl. adj.] ← calibrate
calibration [n.]
calibrator [n.]
† calibre [v.]
calibre [n.]
calibre-compasses ← calibre
ˈcalibred [adj.]
calibre-rule ← calibre

Helmar

Yeah, it's not in anything official

I did a calibr* search on onelook.com

It's in nothing they aggregate

tchrist

I agree that calibratable is the word.

Because -able is a productive English suffix, so by definition calibratable is a word by virtue of productive derivational morphology.

Unfortunately, I cannot upvote your answer.

Helmar

18:12

Are you out of votes?

tchrist

Right.

I guess I could go delete things I downvoted. :)

Helmar

Interesting way to get the votes back :)

In my German poised browser a lot of google results are just "what's the translation of kalibrierbar?"

tchrist

Another way is to run the SEDE query looking for Roomba fodder and zap them right before it runs. You can get like double votes that way.

Helmar

I thought the SEDE runs on dated data

tchrist

Spanish doesn’t have "calibrable" either.

@Helmar Not very.

I can't find the query that tells you how old it is.

Helmar

18:18

The funny thing about the German browser results is, that the Duden doesn't list kalibrierbar either, but it's such an obvious way that no one cares that officially hasn't been inducted into the canon yet.

tchrist

Yep.

Helmar

How often is the Stack Exchange Data Explorer updated?
The data is updated early every Sunday morning around 3:00 UTC. The last update was 11 hours ago.

oh my, I just found out that we have a christmas tag

english.stackexchange.com/tags/christmas

And there are 35 questions associated with it :D

50 questions with homework

6 cloze-test

tchrist

@Helmar data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/541216/…

Helmar

18:33

@tchrist Thx

It's a little bit more precise than the FAQ :)

tchrist

Rather.

Helmar

damn, do we have 188k deleted questions on ELU?

data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/541210/684579

tchrist

Seems about right.

Helmar

71% deleted questions

tchrist

That seems unlikely. Our overall close-or-delete rate is like 42%.

Or was.

We have 20,080 deleted questions plus 40,005 deleted answers as of right now.

Helmar

18:42

Oh my mistake

That was the post table

answers are in there too

those don't have tags

tchrist

And we have 186,923 not deleted answers and 75,240 not-deleted answers right now.

Note that the posts table does have other things in it.

Helmar

That explains the weird results when I did a where on the deletedate column :)

tchrist

There are other possible values than 1 or 2.

Helmar

Just idly scrolling over the list makes me realize we have a lot more weird tags than I thought.

identification

3

Q: What word or phrase describes this musical instrument?

The last time I saw one in the streets was back in the early 1960s, and it drew the attention of all passers-by as most people had never seen one. Let me describe it: It consists of a box with a drawer and a hand crank. Turning the crank in a circular motion produces music. The drawer contains ...

identification

tchrist

Just edit the posts that have it.

Helmar

18:49

Created by a 20k+ user

tchrist

I know.

Helmar

I just did, I even got another instance of backticks in there ;)

tchrist

I’d rather we fix the mapping of backticks to <i> instead of to <code>, but if we cannot or will not, I fully intend to edit all 4,000 spurious posts.

Helmar

That's quite the task

I am honestly not sure if a retroactive change in mapping is a good idea.

tchrist

Then I shall have to edit them all.

Helmar

18:57

Just don't do it on meta with my copy paste blueprint ;)

tchrist

Haha

Helmar

Maybe it should be mandatory to provide a tag excerpt suggestion before creating a tag. That would be too strenuous for the creators of ridiculous who just type stuff into the tag field.

How else comes a tag like did into being?

tchrist

@Tonepoet Well that was certainly rude, wasn't it?

@Helmar I only wish. It won't happen.

NVZ

19:12

@Helmar I'd say no to making it mandatory

Helmar

@NVZ Why?

NVZ

@Helmar First, why mandatory? We already have a rep requirement for creating new tags, right?

Helmar

@NVZ Sure, but that identification tag was created by a 20k user. If he had to write even one sentence about that tag, he might have used swr instead.

I am not against creating tags, I am just against creating useless ones.

Right now you can just type in the tag field, everything between spaces will be created as a tag.

If there were a pop-up demanding at least one sentence we wouldn't have useless drive-by tags that catch on.

We have 3300 users whose edits we have to approve who can create shitty tags

data.stackexchange.com/english/revision/541231/684616

tchrist

19:55

@Tonepoet Two more published references now provided, one from OUP. @terdon

NVZ

@Helmar you, sir, are very persuasive. So I will now side with you. :)

Helmar

@NVZ Now I just have to convince the rest of the world :)

NVZ

@Helmar or some top-level mods handling feature-requests. Go ahead.

Go and feature-request the crap out of this..

Helmar

Yeah, I already opened the question page

Just thinking about the wording so I don't get down voted into oblivion.

NVZ

20:14

@Helmar Oblivion, great movie. And don't worry about it. No rush.

Tata

Tonepoet

@tchrist Don't put words in my mouth please.

tchrist

@Tonepoet Pardon me??

Funny Bengal Cats in the tub - Kuma and Elton take a bath and shower

►

I certainly don't recall doing so, and if I did it was not intentional. Please enjoy these kittens as some measure of compensation for any transgression.

Helmar

Tiny Hamsters Eating Tiny Burritos - Episode 1

►

tchrist

20:33

Oh fiddlesticks!

Tonepoet

I'm not even aware of what I should've found offensive @tchrist Did you delete something that could've been interpreted as rude?

Helmar

@tchrist and @RegDwigнt are doing one third of all tag edits. You two should get a honorary platinum badge.

tchrist

20:53

@Tonepoet Not in the way you're thinking. Earlier incarnations of others’ posts were perhaps ruder than their current versions, but I neither deleted nor edited any of those.

Helmar

Hm, just typing my feature request, but maybe putting tag creation in the review queue would better

Of course there is no tag review queue....

Tonepoet

I wonder what Merriam-Webster's and O.U.P's. primary source material for the claim is.

tchrist

Doubtless some corn husk one of those fiddlestickers pulled out of their hat.

I'm sorry, but I cannot help myself: I have to laugh at the corn husks.

Cornhole

Cornhole (also known as dummy boards, bean bag toss, dadhole, doghouse, Baggo or Bags) is an American lawn game in which players take turns throwing bags of corn (or bean bags) at a raised platform with a hole in the far end. A bag in the hole scores 3 points, while one on the platform scores 1 point. Play continues until a team or player reaches the score of 21. == Rules & Regulations == === Equipment and court layout === Cornhole matches are played with two sets of bags and two platforms and two to four people. There are four bags to a set. Each set should be identifiable from the oth...

But please, please, please do not look at Urban Dictionary.

More seriously, there's something people aren't mentioning.

Probably because it's unmentionable.

Tonepoet

21:10

Well I have relatively little doubt with the corn husk etymology. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that somebody might think "Oh shoot, that's too strong a word. What's the closest thing to it? Oh hey! Corn husks aren't worth much more than dung and shucks sounds similar enough." However without a primary resource I can't say anything for certain.

tchrist

You realize, I hope, what the most common form of "outhouse toilet paper" always was?

Corn husks.

And now.

You know.

The rest.

Of the story.

Tonepoet

Ah, that's something I wouldn't have considered.

tchrist

The association between shit and corn husks was made in the outhouse.

scotduke.com/2010/10/14/what-was-used-before-toilet-paper

> He immediately drew everyone’s attention to which husk to use from an ear of corn “for your personal hygiene needs”. If I remember correctly it was one of the middle husks. He just kept telling us that “of course, if you don’t want to pay attention here you can use trial an error. Then you will come to the husk that I am talking about”. Naturally, we had no idea what he was talking about because none of us were thinking we would every need to use a corn husk.

@Helmar Only a third?

Tonepoet

It seems to make perfect sense, although that's almost certainly not something that would be recorded in the annals of history.

tchrist

Oh my, what an indelicate choice of words! :)

Helmar

21:21

@tchrist Pretty much, some over 10k out of about 30k

tchrist

The anals of history, no less.

straightdope.com/columns/read/572/…

Helmar

0

Q: Tackling the drive-by tag problem

The problem We have a lot of one word tags that make nearly no sense. Among them are what, do, did, like, they, winterfest, motto & it. They are pure gems of uselessness and I urge you to prove me wrong and provide any value these tags might add. My suspicion is that some of those tags came i...

feature-request tags

Not so sure about the alternatives section...

tchrist

> Sitting next to the lime was a bag of corncobs. The corn had been shelled from the cobs to be used as feed for our chickens and the clean cobs were re-bagged and used in the place of toilet paper.

> Talk about being ergonomically designed; those cobs were neatly rounded to fit any contour, although I always preferred the white cobs to the red ones because they had a softer exterior. The white cobs were just as efficient as the red ones without leaving the wire-brushed effect.

farmcollector.com/farm-life/the-outhouse-zmrz14mayzbea.aspx

Helmar

Did you talk about shit and its euphemisms all the time? :D

tchrist

Shucks no.

Tonepoet

21:25

You know, I've mentioned that 1843 is the year Noah Webster died. I can't get the image out of my mind that he may have died from a heart attack while trying to devise a definition for this word. Shuck is conspicuously missing from the searchable online sources for his dictionary.

tchrist

Did he have an outhouse?

Helmar

Did he have a house? Wasn't he broke?

Tonepoet

I can't be certain but I don't see one in the photos outside of his home, so perhaps surprisingly, I would guess not.

Then again it probably would've been removed by the time those photos were taken.

Helmar

If I improve an edit, does the original editor get a message about that?

Tonepoet

I vaguely being aware of some improvements being made to my edits, but I forget how I found out about that.

Helmar

21:41

Hm, searching provides no results. I now know that the original editor gets his reputation, but that's just side-effect knowledge.

Well I am off, good night guys - or day or morning, depending on your timezone ;)

Lawrence

23:51

There will never be a translation that is completely free of interpreter bias because the semantic range of any nontrivial word is rarely going to be identical for two different languages spoken in cultures as varied as ancient Israel (or even 30AD to 100AD, broadly the period the New Testament was written) and almost any modern English-speaking nation. However, it helps when there is a team of translators because they can serve as checks and balances to each other's biases.
ESV (English Standard Version) has such a [team](http://www.bible-researcher.com/esv-translators.html). NIV is anothe…

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