> 1. Tampa is expecting an 8- to 12-foot storm surge. 2. Tampa is expecting an eight- to 12-foot storm surge. 3. Tampa is expecting an 8- to twelve-foot storm surge. 4. Tampa is expecting an eight- to twelve-foot storm surge.
Which of those is the worst?
> A. #1 is the worst because it should have been an 8-12′ storm surge. B. #2 is the worst because it makes you switch from words to numbers for a narrow range. C. #3 is the worst because it makes you switch from numbers to words for a narrow range. D. #4 is the worst because it’s the longest to type and read. E. They’re all equally bad.
I want a word or word phrase like 'Sales and Customer Service', but it applies only to the sale or transfer of stock between branches or divisions of the same company.
It's for internal transactions only, but it's still more than a simple stock transfer.
I'm thinking I could simply use the p...
Is there a term or phrase for when someone does exactly what he or she is talking about while he or she talks about it? Such as in the poem "Poetry of Departures" by Phillip Larkin, wherein his speaker mentions a common scenario where people hear about others shifting the paths of their lives, an...
@tchrist People have a lot of latin-derived names, more than anyone actually has tenses. Like perfect and preterit and conditional and continuous and anterier and posterier, half of which I don't even know how to spell in English. They just don't always use them consistently.
And yes, it's best not to go there or you'll have to figure out how all the English auxiliaries are used.
I am looking for a word that describes something that is so ridiculous that you cannot make fun of it anymore.
For example: A man is so fat that even superlatives do not work on him.
Let's say you want to make fun of his weeding day.
"He ate his weeding cake all by himself." "They had to mak...
Is there some word/term/phrase for a person who takes risks or just tries (something) without worrying about the failures just because he/she doesn't want to give up without trying?
Risk-taker might be a potential candidate for such a word but I don't think it is apt enough.
The role of mass media in our world in comprehensive. But, due to the increasing development of media technologies, the role is getting more and more comprehensive. Is there a word/phrase to mean such feature. I want a word/phrase to mean that the feature of comprehensiveness is ever increasing a...
I'm writing a small mythology in which I have two separate types of divine entities combine to give birth to the first gods. I strongly suspect one of these divine entities will be named Titans. However, I need a separate and distinct term for the second type of divine being, ideally pulling fr...
@KitZ.Fox For the most part, I think that the mixed notations in 2 and 3 both bug me pretty much equally. It seems silly to use a mixed notation for such similar things; it's confusing.
Or at least, unbalanced to my internal aesthetic sense.
@Jasper I think the mindless application of style-guide “rules” produces abominations like 2 that no thinking person would put up with. They just do what they’re told even when the result is senseless and uncouth.
@skullpatrol Wow, I just saw that comic in one of my google searches recently...
@tchrist I agree with Kit that 1 and 4 are better than 2 and 3, because you do not transition from numerals to words or visa versa, but honestly, I think if you are not going to write out eight-to-twelve in full, then hyphens have no business being in this sentence.
I mean, placing spaces after a hyphen is like placing a period after an exclamation mark. It's redundant and defeats the point.
And if those hyphens are supposed to be dashes, well then it's even worse to be using dashes alongside the word To, although I still can't honestly claim that they're all "equally" bad.
@KitZ.Fox When I become ruler of the world, and I'm discussing things with my Minister of Cultural Hegemony, I'll make the offhand suggestion that it seems dumb to do anything other than 1.
So the problem with this multiple choice question is that I can't honestly answer E, even though I know they are all wrong, because I think some are worse than others, but I can not honestly pick any of the other answers either because I do not think there is a single "worst". I agree with the rationale in A. the most though.
@Mitch Well, honestly I believe Arabic is a beautiful language. English has lots of shortcomings too you know. For instance this "you" and "generic you" (it confuses people sometimes) etc.
@Jasper Uh...no, I go it from myself. Everybody else gets their ideas from me. It's unfortunate when bad people twist my ideas into their perverted evil, but frankly I designed the system that way just to keep thing interesting.
I can spew out a list of things I don't like in English, but that would be kind of mean. I love the language though (English), that's why I am good at it.
@Ahmed Arabic is fine. It does have the 'sore throat' problem (it'd sound so much better if it weren't for all those consonants that sound like you're clearing your throat, like in Dutch.
@Jasper It also has the 'ch' like in German and Scottish, and the 'q' like in the strep-throat language of New Guinea, and the 'kqx' sound of the dying tubercular martyr.
@Jasper Apparently, it is a common misspelling, and perhaps a disproportionately high amount of my vocabulary is television derived too, so I probably heard it that way more than I ever read it.
I like to look at language learning books, and I am kind of surprised that other than the usual French, German, Italian, and Spanish, many publishers now also have books for learning Chinese.
@Ahmed 4chan is an imageboard: A special type of forum software and layout for posting hivh volumes of images on a temporary basis. It used to be primarily geared towards the hosting of anime imagery, but they have always had this "random" board which is more or less the cesspool of the public internet, and they have since expanded into many other subjects.
The random board, with the /b/ directory (I don't know why /b/, since the rest of the boards have an abbreviation based directory name), basically has no rules whatsoever. People can and do post almost anything there, including especially rude things...
@Jasper I've heard that there are lots of small business entrepreneurs From China that are spreading across the world (outside of East and South-East Asia), mostly commercial shops (like convenience stores), but they're not really into integrating or populating those places like with traditional immigration.
@Ahmed It also happens to be close to the source of some internet lingo, but because it is meant to host images, and images are comparatively large and bandwidth intensive, the posts are frequently deleted, so there's no way to really prove it frustratingly enough.
@Jasper If they'd just drop the characters and use an alphabet (like pinyin) people would really flock to using Chinese because it is so easy, grammar and vocabulary-wise.
@Jasper Sure, but I'm also talking about places like Egypt or Argentina, where there's no prior idea of any kind of influence.
@Jasper Those people are <strike>dumb</strike> misguided. It's totally Eurocentric and the vocab is opaque. With Chinese you can always guess and be close.
Politically, I'm not particularly inclined towards or against the Chinese manner (one way or the other), but I'm just being honest about the language and learnability.
@Jasper I was just going to say that. Running through foreign speech in my mind, that one sounds the nicest.
every language has it's own weird way of pronouncing things. It might be manageable for people from a nearby language to pick up having something similar already, but will be 'impossible' for most people in the world to imitate (or hear).
Like the English 'th' or difference between short and long 'i'
Chinese tones might be strange to most people, but really, it could be worse, like the French nasals or the Arabic multiple velar, uvular and laryngeal fricatives and stops. Or Indian 'prevoicing' (not unvoiced, not voiced, but-pre- voiced). I mean WTH. Who designed these things? A committee?
so as to learning pronunciation of a new language, I feel like most every other foreign language is on an equal footing. That's my point.
'r' and 'l' is hard in every language. vowels are hard in every language. Every language has that one weird consonant (or more sure).
I'm looking for a word that describes the green bulb of a pepper, banana or other mass a plant produces.
I feel there is a better more plant related term.
I cannot articulate my question enough for Google.
I thought of "appendage".
Let's say that event X was a bad thing for most people. But in the case of person A, event X ended up profiting them.
Many people then start suspecting A of causing X, or outright blaming them for it because they profited.
How do you call this phenomenon? I'd imagine it's guilt by something, lik...
I am looking for a concise word which means "that which is mimicked". For context, we have a synthetic device which mimics the behavior of a biological structure. I want to say something like:
...as the performance of [synthetic device] approaches that of its [word referring to the biological c...
@Færd Fascia might be a particularly architectural term, but is not really what any normal person would say. I would call it the 'sign' or 'store sign' or maybe a little fancy 'marquee' (the latter is exactly whatnormla people would call the sign above the entrance of a theater
That is, only an architect or someone who paints such signs might call it a 'fascia'.
Frankly I'd never heard of that use of 'fascia' ever. I had heard of it as the medical term for the connective tissue between and around internal organs and muscles.
Nameplate is only for small plates that might be placed on a (nice) wooden box or on or next to a door or an a desk.
FOr every day, if you're taling about a sign above an entrance that advertises a performance or performers, it is a marquee, otherwise I would call it a 'sign' or 'the store's sign. I would never have thought of 'fascia'.