English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

user19161

12:33 AM

@aediaλ If A calls B better half and B calls A better half, I wonder who is better. In this case, better has to be interpreted to allow equality and not strict inequality, so that A and B are then equally good. QED.

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

12:54 AM

@WillHunting Nah, A or B could be lying or wrong.

@aedia He's not allowed to grow out of needing a nap at that time. I need a nap at that time.

Cerberus

1:52 AM

@Vitaly That must be hard for you to swallow. Then again, perhaps a religious man can be a good president.

Vitaly

@Cerberus What's the Dutch word for a лощило or battledore?

Cerberus

I don't even know what it is. It seems to be a kind of badminton?

Vitaly

@Cerberus No!

Cerberus

> Battledore and Shuttlecock or Jeu de Volantis is an early game similar to that of modern Badminton.

Vitaly

@Cerberus That's a later sense of the word.

Cerberus

1:58 AM

This is all I know. And I knew nothing before I looked this up.

Vitaly

A лощило is a grooved implement for beating clothes while washing them. Battledores have a similar function, although they are not necessarily grooved.

The woman in the picture holds a modern reconstruction of a battledore in her right hand.

Cerberus

So I gathered from the dictionary. But I had never even heard of this utensil in any language. I didn't know it existed. I knew women used some kind of stick or whatever to beat clothes, but not that it was a special kind.

Vitaly

@Cerberus You are probably thinking of the dolly which was used to stir the clothes.

The dolly would be more stick-shaped.

Cerberus

I know clothes were sometimes beaten. But I have no recollection of the shape of the beating bat or whatever, so I did not think of anything in particular.

Vitaly

Also, is there a crowdsourced thesaurus that makes native speakers choose options in a multidimensional pairwise comparison between words that are considered synonymous, as in you get two words and then you have to choose which one is more rude/polite, formal/informal, vague/precise, etc?

So that, ideally, one could sort or arrange the synonyms in some particular semantically motivated order.

Cerberus

2:09 AM

Eh I know of no such thesaurus.

But you don't really need that, do you?

Vitaly

@Cerberus Yes, you do.

Cerberus

Surely you know the formality precision of the words you read and write.

Excuse me?

Vitaly

@Cerberus You are excused.

Cerberus

You make even less sense than normally.

Vitaly

@Cerberus I took the you to mean one.

Cerberus

2:14 AM

I did not mean it like that, since it was a question.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Such a thesaurus would be more computationally useful than, say, WordNet (to be fair, WordNet was meant to be an ontology, not a dictionary of synonyms).

And don't forget English learners.

Cerberus

An ontology? What does that mean?

> The Pirate Bay today unveiled their new mission. They’re working on ‘hosting’ parts of their site in GPS-controlled drones, instead of old-fashioned data centers.

> Although the line between reality and fantasy can be rather thin at The Pirate Bay, we were assured that the plan to launch a drone is real.

torrentfreak.com/…

This sounds hilarious.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Click

Cerberus

"In the computer-science sense" — I'm not going to look that up, but it doesn't sound like the real meaning of ontology at all. But never mind, that's fine.

The video is pretty cool btw.