Beautiful.

Is it reasonable to assume that, colloquially, the word “conflate” may imply mistakenly or erroneously combining two things (words, concepts, etc.)?

Or am I just overloading the word with additional semantics?

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@LucasTizma No: I, too, usually see it written with a negative connotation.

Technically, it could be positive, neutral, or negative.

But nowadays it's usually used in a negative sense.

Sure, blend or fuse together.

@Cerberus wow. I just did the necessary and checked all the (online) dictionaries. MW/ODO/Cambridge/dictionary.com (but I didn't check for borrowing/independence of those). WHat's surprising is that 'conflate' has only negative connotations for me, but that connotation is not mentioned/alluded to in any of the definitions.

That is, if someone (or myself) were to use conflate it would only be in the negative sense, and if someone else didn't use it in a negative sense I would be all confused.

All the quotes in OED are neutral, none negative or positive.

No wonder it's hard to learn another language.

from books.

and dictionaries

well...just dictionaries

Agreed, conflate has definite negative connotations for me too.

That said, I can't really think of many situations where confusing one thing for another would be good.

@terdon my thoughts exactly but the definitions and the quotes all just point to plain old boring 'mixing'. not confusion, just mixing.

Which still has negative connotations usually.

But yes, it is odd that no dictionary explicitly mentions it.

Then again, maybe the negative connotations are implicit in the action described. Just like I doubt you'd find any dictionary to explicitly mention the negative connotations of the verb to die.

It could be positive?

@terdon Dictionaries are at pains (well, depends on the dictionary) to create separate entries for the slightest of nuance or metaphorical usage. So I'm surprised that a strong direction of negativity is not mentioned with conflate

Agreed

Hi guys,

according to my reference it is

but I'm struggling because it doesn't seems to be mentioned anywhere as a preposition

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Hi guys

Hi @Sayros

@tchrist Were there surprises there?

@MetaEd For me, yes.

Like that example question that he expected people to lie about: "Have you ever cheated on an exam?"

I don't place that in the same category as asking a teenage boy whether he masturbates.

There is presumption there that everyone cheats on exams.

That surprised me.

Common though it may be, I don't believe it is common to all human experience.

Depends on the country, probably. There is a far greater stigma associated with cheating on exams in US culture than I am used to from what I can tell.

Especially in school, cheating every now and then was pretty normal.

I happened to be a bit hung up about it and did so less than my peers but I would also write down ancient greek conjugations on my desk to pass tests.

The stigma associated with telling the teacher that someone cheated is very strong. Far less so with the cheating itself.

And having now spent some time teaching as well as many years as a student, I feel very strongly that any exam where you can cheat is a bad exam to begin with.

Especially in the age of the internet. You should always ask questions whose answers can't be found by searching and can only be derived if the student has understood the course material.

So cheating is not even relevant.

Cheating is also really common here

I heard it's even more common in university exams

you're only really cheating yourself out of an opportunity to learn

I admit I haven't cheated since high school and did so rarely even then (ancient Greek only, pretty much). Well, and math where I'd write the formulas down but that's not cheating. The trick is applying them, not remembering them and we were allowed to write them down.

@TROLLSLAYER Depends. Most exams, sadly, don't measure learning. They measure your ability to regurgitate data. Learning involves actually comprehending information, not simply being able to repeat it.

Which is why I firmly believe that any exam you can cheat on is almost by definition pointless and not actually testing your learning. Only your ability to remember ingormation.

sure, learning builds upon itself

@tro I stayed the cleanest kid till now

that means you have a strong foundation

Not because I believe in what you said, or that I valued those exams

But because I figured not paying attention to anything other than my paper helps better

@tchrist Was there a presumption that cheating is common? I thought the article was more about how much more we lie than is supposed.

Successful cheating will end up making an 85 a 90

Not worth it

but what about the next test?

@M.A.R. Maybe we should make that the exam in a statistics class.

learning is cumulative

Or a class on Machiavelli.

@Meta I'm pretty sure results will agree with me, because they want to

if you want to cheat yourself out of an opportunity to lay the foundations for a deeper understanding at the next level, that's your choice

@M.A.R. So we're post-singularity, then.

@TROLLSLAYER Many people are in it for the money.

the "payoff" doesn't come easy

sometimes it doesn't come at all

@Tro now I'm getting the impression that you either had a very great and ideal education, or you think of it way too high

It's been a long time since I last learned something in school

I'm not talking about a school education here. I'm talking about learning something because you really want to understand it at its deepest level...

@TROLLSLAYER You seem to be having a parallel conversation. Nobody here is saying that cheating is a good thing or defending it. We were discussing how common it is and I went off on a tangent about how good exams are those where cheating is impossible because of the questions asked.

@M.A.R. The you are very unlucky and went to a crappy school. :(

@ter more like stuck in a craopy system

...cheating can only rob you of that kind of understanding.

And I'm getting the impression it's so broken no one knows how to fix it

the system is what it is

@tro but how can I cheat in a study that didn't originate in school? o.o

I mean, that's how this conversation started

Did it?

shrug

If everyone is cheating then no one is cheating

Fifth book, Tao Te Ching

I think there should be a class on how to cheat well. And then on the final exam, if you were caught not cheating, you'd be in big trouble. Or would you?

All the time and effort trying to figure out how to cheat is so much more than just remember the regular stuff for the test.

There's no royal road to cheating.

No sense as in gibberish or kinda understood the general idea but on particular problems didn't know exactly what was wanted?

Tests are not life. But they are a good proxy for it. Better than nothing

I suppose you could cheat at life

but if you're not a good cheater there you go to jail

@Mitch Not really. They're a crappy proxy for pretty much anything.

@terdon so what would you do instead?

that is also practical

@Mitch Write exams that test comprehension, not memory. Things you can't find the answer to and need to get it yourself. And show your reasoning.

I might come up with more criteria in case I start losing this argument

You can't cheat at those and those actually measure comprehension and not memory.

@terdon memory is a good skill to have.

cheating success relies on good memory

how will you pass the test if you can't remember the answers stolen from the teacher?

Precisely. If all you need to pass is memory, the test is useless as a measure of whether you have learned the material.

@terdon How can you have good comprehension without remember the meaning of rote things?

Easily. The two are barely even connected.

If you can't remember 1492 or the third person plural passive hortative subjunctive 3rd declension then comprehension is far beyond attainable

When I was in university, I had this idiotic question ask me "What does myosin 14 do". There are >20 different myosins and I actually knew what each of them did. I couldn't remember which one of them had the arbitrary label 14 so I got no points for that question.

A good version of that question would have been something like "Myosin 14 is the one that does this. Explain how it works, what its importance is and how it ties in with other processes of the cell".

In other words, test my global understanding, not the minutiae of what something is called.

@terdon Myosin 6 is afraid of myosin 7

because 7 8 9

We were even asked "What year was The Origin of Species published in?" Can you believe that? In a Biology course. Nothing about what the book said, why it was important, whether it is still relevant. No, all they asked was a datum any moron could get by looking at the first page of the book!

@Mitch Agh. Un deux trois cats sailing on the river. What happened? They cinq.

@Mitch Also, that sounds like some sort of weird Borg-fetish porn movie.

@terdon sure, some minutiae is irrelevant... eg who and when was myosin invented (God, 700M BC, it's precambrian but not too long before the Cambrian)

@terdon I will not judge your number fantasy

The year above mine in highschool (I did the International Baccalaureate) had this brilliant question for a physics exam: is it true that sucking on ice cubes can make you lose weight?

@terdon It's extremely important for a philosophy of science curriculum. Not really for mechanisms of evolution.

@terdon Ahhh... highschool. good times

That is brilliant. You won't find the answer in your books and the question gave you the data necessary to work it out. If you'd understood the material, you could answer it. That is a decent exam and one you can't cheat on (short of copying).

If that turns you on, you got more serious issues.

@Ghalib terdon mentioned some movie in reference to my # joke, so it's like a fantasy about #'s.

That's your quota for joke explanations today. From now on you're on your fasdkjgasu

@Ghalib There's a Beatles lyric for that some where.

@Ghalib Seven of nine is a character from Star Trek. She is a Borg. So 7, 8, 9 which Mitch meant to be thought of as seven ate nine sounds like a deviant Borg-themed porn movie.

I realize I may be lte to the game here, but isn't 'Beatles' spelled wrong?

Is that a 70 year delay in 'getting it'?

will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite, will not bite

@terdon You just ruined all my jokes for 6 year olds

@terdon also ruined jokes for 70 year olds

70 years olds are a tough crowd. They've heard all the good jokes already, and raunchy stuff bores them.

@Ghalib tries to make a pun with patients and patience

fails

You're gonna have to patent those.

rimshot!

ba dum tish!

christ

groan

What's brown and sticky?

6 year olds love this one.

a stick

it's a stinker

Why is the news so down on the biggest ice berg ever breaking off from Antarctica? They should be cheering it's freedom.

So it could hide in cherry trees?

@Mitch Oh damn. I actually laughed. Shows you the sophistication of my sense of humor.

Come on, the suspense is killing me!

Kids aren't sophisticated about dirty jokes but really appreciate them.

Here's another dirty one

A white horse fell in the mud

Classic

@Ghalib Argh!

@Ghalib Nice

because cats are dumb

(dogs love that joke)

@Mitch It's the cobbler who said shoe, not the cat!

What was the joke that the dog said about cats in the movie 'Up'?

found it. sorry it's not about cats.

> Hey, I know a joke! A squirrel walks up to a tree and says, "I forgot to store acorns for the winter and now I am dead." Ha! It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.

I'm still laughing

because the squirrel is dumb

You worry me sometimes.

@Ghalib A fillet.

@Ghalib A fsh.

@Ghalib Chum.

@Ghalib Half blind.

@Ghalib He Who Swims In Circles.

@Ghalib A small-scale tragedy.

@Ghalib A ghot.

@MetaEd We have a winner!

@Mitch Gone with the Wind is literally is the best book ever, or at least it is in the American Library Association's opinion. [It was awarded it earned that title in 1988, and it won an actual majority of the votes against "all other books ever published". Take that Shakespeare! However, I can't help but imagine it lost its place in the following year, after the O.E.D. Second Edition was published. >_>

I first read about it recently in an old copy of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" but here's a source for effectively the same data on google books.

It seems to me that the point of mentioning this in both sources is to illustrate how provocative of a subject slavery is.

@Tonepoet How dare you bring up slavery.

@MetaEd You better ban me now, because it's only a matter of time before I start mentioning genocide and inevitably invoke Godwin's Law! ;-)

@Tonepoet There's probably a corollary about invoking Godwin's Law on one's self as a debate tactic.

Ah, yes. Quirk's Exception.

@Tonepoet You got me man! I could not find any such list and all the ones I did find were filled with Bronte and Tolstoy, except the ones that were voted on by 'normal' people and that was filled with Tolkien and Ayn Rand.

@Mitch I'm surprised you didn't find Rowling in the normies' list.

Just so you know that by copies sold it's Bible/Quran/Mao's little book

@Tonepoet Potterheads may be nerds but they're not jerks enough to stuff ballot boxes with bots

I didn't see GWTW on any of those lists. Prose-wise I'm not sure Margaret Mitchell would welcome herself alongside Rand (or Tolkien).

@Mitch I've read that the bible is "the best selling book of the year, every year," in the U.S.A. but I forgot in which article. I probably have it in an unfinished answer, because I was trying to use it as a baseline comparison.

The Bible and the Quran have been the leading vectors of literacy and knowledge for over a thousand years.

Thank you, God. Literally. Literally literally.

I'm honestly rather surprised, you'd think Samuel Clemmens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Lewis Carol would get recognition in these lists. I mean, Shakespeare too but he didn't really write books.

@Mitch So not really? =P

@Tonepoet I'm not sure where you're getting these suppositions. I didn't think any of those things. I did see Doyle on one of those lists. But seeing is not expecting.

Oh. I didn't see the comma. I'm surprised Mark Twain wasn't mentioned because I had always heard that Huck Finn was supposed to be the Great American Novel (after Moby Dick) that Hemingway aspired to surpass. But most of those lists seem to have been done by British newspapers (the Telegraph, the Guardian). Lewis Carroll is, as entertaining as it is, 'niche' literature.

Which is also what GWTW is, excepting that it is aspiring to the Brontean Gothic Romance that all other Harlequin romances do.

I have recently read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was said by Earnest Hemmingway to be the first great american novel from which all others are derived. It's worth noting that while Moby Dick predates it, Herman Melville only ever had postmortem recognition, long after his death.

I think one of the things that might be holding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn back is the fact that it uses the N word extensively, which leads to it being censored off of the required reading lists and out of libraries. It's somewhat strange, since Twain seemed to satirize racism, whereas Gone with the Wind is actually racist according to the sources I've read. I suppose it never was a fair world, eh?

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