I call the extra menu silly because I find silly that one is trusted to vote to close a question but it's not trusted to see the list of the questions that have been voted to be closed.
To make a comparison with drupal.org, if I am trusted to deal with content, I am also trusted to deal with taxonomy terms.
There is also meyer, as pro-tempore administrator.
It'd be nice for questions that have close or reopen votes to show that on the home or questions page, maybe like this pic:
EDIT: This would only show for the 3k+ users who could vote to open or close.
I am logging in in SO from a Mac, and the font used for the question textarea is difficult to read.
Could not be possible to have two buttons that allow to change the font, if somebody is having problems with the browser he is actually using? As alternative, if that is not possible, could not be ...
It's also the proof that what they wrote in the FAQ is the first thing they don't follow.
> Treat others with the same respect you’d want them to treat you. We’re all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor.
That is also reported on m.s.o, but I guess it doesn't matter.
Anyway, I wonder why I don't have anymore the problem with the font without to change any settings on my Mac.
Possible Duplicate:
Is staff plural?
It always sounds wrong to me when people refer to a a proper team/group/band/etc in plural form, e.g.:
Nirvana are the creators of grunge.
The Avalanche are on the road to the Stanley Cup this year.
To me, this sounds correct:
Nirvana is...
What is correct to say?
Korn* is a great band
OR
Korn* are a great band.
(* You can replace your favourite band's name here)
Of course everybody there is no doubt about the following sentences:
The Beatles are a great band
Led Zeppelin is a great band
But with certain kin...
Right now, the maximum privilege "unlock" is at 10k reputation:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/privileges
We're considering adding a new 20k reputation privilege, but having a hard time figuring out exactly what it should be.
Two guidelines:
I would like it to be more than cosmetic -- I'd pre...
The fact users who can vote for closing a question must do a hard work to close the questions that are duplicates is already a signal that something needs to be changed.
To make an example, on drupal.org I can remove spam from a specific user without to delete the single posts.
Hello. I am curious what the Gates of Dawn part in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (the name of the 7th chapter of The Wind in the Willows) means. I am not sure, however, that it would be a suitable question for E.SE. :-/
If drupal.org would be like stackexchange.com, I should delete each single post. So, I am trusted to delete posts, or comments, but I have to work hard to do something that give benefits to the site.
Exactly, if you are talking about the gates of dawn here.
That's the mental picture I invariably get.
Wow, the OED appears to have nailed the phrase:
3. Phrases. a. at the gate: fig., close at hand. 1340 Hampole Pr. Consc. 2000 For when þe dede es at þe yhate, Þan es he warned over late —— Also the gate(s of death, used to denote a near approach to death.
@Vitaly: Hm. I think if you include all of this research in your question, it would certainly be on-topic for this site. As in, you're not sure what the phrase means, you've checked the OED, the most recent citation is rather old, so that leaves you wondering whether that phrase is ever used in a non-poetical context.
I have seen a lot of backlash in internet media against people using the word literally to mean something not literal.
Something like "he was literally as big as a house" to mean someone was very big
I think this comic sums up the anti literal movement well
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally
...
Hello @nohat, mind if I ask you a question about linguistics in general? Is there an area of linguistics that studies mental pictures and associations people get when presented with lexical stimuli? More importantly, if there is such a branch of linguistics, are there recognized monographs and textbooks addressing it?
@Vitaly There is the field of psycholinguistics, but I don’t know much about recent research. Much of psycholinguistics research has to do with acoustic perception, but there is certainly some research into other areas of the relationship between the brain and language
@RegDwight looking...
and ... closed
although I do suppose it is a shame that the The Oatmeal reference remains as the accepted answer there despite having fewer votes than mine
also, my answer probably should be updated to address the issue of style vs. grammaticality
maybe if i merge the older question with the newer one, I think that resets the acceptedness, but I'm not sure
No, wait, perhaps it was a different one, this doesn't seem to have had actual answers that were merged in.
Just went through the list of all questions that have ever been merged, there's no indication that the acceptedness is resetted. In one case, it's just pure coincidence: english.stackexchange.com/posts/8/timeline
The answer got unaccepted 3 minutes before the merge.
I thought at one time that "usage" was distinct from some other cases that fall under the more general rubric of "English" ... but with the "English" bin gone, it's all usage, innit?
@Robusto nah, some questions are about English and not usage but they have more specific tags. There's no need for tags as general as English and usage. I think it would be like having "coding" and "programming" tags on SO
I'm not sure what "usage" is supposed to mean, either. Even etymology has to do with usage. Pronunciation, too. Word-order, nouns, dialects, you name it. All usage.
for example, I tagged this question of mine with the usage tag, looking forward to actual accounts from non-native speakers whether that phrase is really used, even though it's not reported on the Web very well
Consider this example:
I'm sorry if you got the impression that I meant to insult you. That was not my intention.
Would it be correct to say that the above person apologized?
All the dictionaries I have checked defined "to apologize" as admitting one's fault. However, in the above example...
Seems like pretty much every question is a usage question, so keeping around a "usage" tag seems about as pointless as having a "programming" tag at Stack Overflow would be. Does anyone object to my re-tagging questions to not have the pointless tag "usage"?
Meanwhile, I'll just remark that once I found English.SE I haven't posted much at all on SO itself. I got tired of answering the same kind of questions, and so few seemed new ... I wonder if there is an expiration date for new-seeming questions on an SE site.
Speech act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Many scholars identify 'speech acts' with illocutionary acts, rather than locutionary or perlocutionary acts. As with the notion of illocutionary acts, there are different opinions on the nature of speech acts. The extension of speech acts is commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting someone and congratulating.
Locutionary, illocutionary and ...
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was thinking that maybe I could replace the usage tag in my question with that new one, but apparently, the answer is no. I didn't know that technical term.
I wrote a quick little Perl script to scan through the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my @size;
while (<>) {
my ($word) = split / /, $_;
next unless $word =~ m/^[A-Z]+$/;
my @letters = split //, $word;
my %coun...
You can probably type faster than you can clean up images and install OCR engines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
(my$d=q[AA GTCAGTTCCT
CGCTATGTA ACACACACCA
TTTGTGAGT ATGTAACATA
CTCGCTGGC TATGTCAGAC
AGATTGATC GATCGATAGA
...
It isn't a grammar issue at all.
The backlash stems from the fact that they are using the word incorrectly. "Literally" should not be used for emphasis. Just because a lot of people make the same mistake doesn't make it correct.
I ran a regular expression script on an entire deploy directory, looking for all CSS colors that were used, concatenating and sorting the references along with their file paths and all that good stuff, and dumping it into a log file which I then used to create an HTML display so we could see which colors were being used over and over again with slight (too slight to notice) variations. It took about 3 minutes to run.
@nohat I just realized that poor JohnFx is now getting all these comments delivered straight to his inbox. That's kind of sad and funny at the same time.
lame... I guess I will have to use the data explorer. I want to find questions that ask about correctness by searching for questions that contain the words "correct", "incorrect", "wrong", etc.
I think the grammar tag is supposed to denote that the question is not about pronunciation or etymology, say. But, we actually have much finer granularity with "word-order" and whatnot. "Grammar" is too all-encompassing in that regard,
though I would still like to check if it can be replaced with something more meaningful in most cases. I don't want it to be just thrown away, leaving lots of questions simply tagged "adverbs".
That makes me really sad, I actually read Alice as a child, in Russian, with excellent footnotes by the translator that filled half of each page, so I kind of read it in two languages for the most part, it was my favouritestest book ever, and then those pictures by Tenniel!
I am yet to read Finnegans Wake, At Swim-Two-Birds, or Ulysses, for that matter. I am told that after page 200 Joyce just gave up and copied a phone book, but nobody has ever read that far.
LOL. I couldn't make it past the first 20 pages with Finnegans Wake. Ulysses, on the other hand, proved rather enjoyable for me, but I read an annotated version of it.
I also happen to think that the Russian translation of Ulysses is one of the best translations into Russian out there
I sometimes cross-check the English and the Russian versions of Ulysses to see how an expression might be translated
As to At-Swim-Two-Birds, it appears that I'll be getting the German translation by Harry Rowohlt. He seems to be one of the best En/De translators of all times, certainly up to the task.
Byel esli perebrala, to mozhno ogyats poradovatsya v dushe tomu, kakoi ya ymni obrazovannii, i kak xorosho angliskii znayu. Correct transliteration? I could only catch a bit of the tail end, something about "... and how well I know English"?
First of all, there are issues that are much more urgent, such as the site search being rather useless, but even those feature requests are currently being rejected on the meta Meta.
My impression is that the powers that be are somewhat hesitant about tweaking the StackExchange engine for beta ...
See, I can kind of even read what you wrote there, @Robusto. But not quite. In fact, I've forgotten about Japanese for about a year only to find out that I no longer can read katakana! I only recognize a few kana it has in common with hiragana. I am shocked.
Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 125 root words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its ...