English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

kiamlaluno

3:18 PM

This seems a duplicate.

0

Q: "Yeah Right" expression

Where does "Yeah right" come from? Can it be used in a formal writing? If not, what is a good alternative?

expressions

RegDwight

I'm not so sure, actually. I think the whole irony thing makes it stand apart.

But it's kind of a poor question in other ways.

kiamlaluno

I guess vgv8 didn't understand how to use EL&U.

RegDwight

It's okay, I've made my fair share of mistakes, too.

kiamlaluno

He updated his question to reply to my comment.

RegDwight

Yes, I have seen that.

kiamlaluno

3:24 PM

I think that with 200 points he can already add comments to his own questions.

RegDwight

I'm not sure how to edit it into shape, and whether to bother at all.

Now that it's closed.

kiamlaluno

I have already done it.

Even if it's closed, the question is still accessible.

RegDwight

Yeah, my point is that it is perfectly acceptable to update one's questions/answers in response to comments. It's just the "at" syntax that he used that was jarring.

Theoretically, it is even possible to edit this question into shape such that it could get reopened. By kicking out Russian, and turning it into an all-about-English "single-proverb-request", you know? (^_^)

kiamlaluno

:-)

I was referring to the fact he replied to a comment inside the question. The reply to a comment has nothing to do with the question.

RegDwight

Then again, he did reply to my comment in a comment. Go figure.

Without at-mentioning me.

kiamlaluno

3:34 PM

I guess I didn't like he posted something about me in comment. :-)

kiamlaluno

3:49 PM

1

Q: Is this usage of "aren't" proper English?

Aren't you going to go outside? My wife insists this is improper English, Hillbilly speak, she calls it. The proper way to ask, she says, is Are you going to go outside? I say it's the same as asking Won't you play with me?, which I do not find offensive. So: is there anything wrong with u...

usage

I think there is a little nuance between "aren't you going inside?" and "are you going inside?".

Robusto

5:16 PM

Anybody home?

kiamlaluno

It seems not. :-)

Robusto

Nobody in here but us chickens, boss ...

kiamlaluno

I guess so. :-)

Robusto

Speaking of translations ...

Americans of Italian ancestry have a phrase: "Stugotts"

Or something like that

I wondered what it means.

kiamlaluno

Stugotts?

Robusto

5:27 PM

Something like that.

kiamlaluno

I can ask to a friend of mine, who has Italian roots.

I mean, she is American, but her grandmother was Italian.

Anyway, she doesn't use gravy to mean tomato sauce.

I know the term has been attributed to Americans with Italian roots.

Robusto

It may be spelled stugots ... and sorry, but it's associated with the TV show The Sopranos

The name of Tony Soprano's boat. I don't know as I'd go and ask someone's grandmother, because I think it's obscene.

kiamlaluno

If it's obscene, I have a guess.

Robusto

I think the Italian spoken on that show must be not very genuine, because the pronunciations sound very odd. Cappicola, for example, is pronounced like "gobbigool"

kiamlaluno

In some Italian dialects stu means this.

Robusto

5:32 PM

Oh, like for questo?

kiamlaluno

Yes.

Robusto

What about gots then? Another contraction?

Manicotti is "managott" and so forth.

kiamlaluno

Cappicola seems closer to capocollo. My friend knows Calabrian.

Looking to how cappicola is pronounced, I would think the word is stu caz.

In Calabrian, the word would be cazzu, and has a sexual meaning.

Vitaly

Hello.

Robusto

Hi Vitaly

Did you get through that poem yet? :)

I gave Vitaly homework last night.

Vitaly

5:41 PM

@Robusto I have just read the poem, before signing into this chatroom. It beautifully and powerfully captures the spirit of some sort of reverie, which is almost akin to Buddhism, I think.

kiamlaluno

I mean, the word you are asking seems stu cazzu.

Vitaly

@Robusto Was it the Piper that made you share the poem?

Robusto

Thanks Kiamlalu

kiamlaluno

@Robusto: YVW.

Robusto

@Vitaly: No, not the Piper. You said you liked "odd-sounding" writing, which I thought might mean exotic or some other similar concept.

Vitaly

5:43 PM

And according to *Partridge Slang Dictionary*, “_stugots; stugats
noun the penis. From southern Italian dialect, adapted/corrupted by Italian-American immigrants US, 1962_”

Robusto

Ha, molto bene

Vitaly

@Robusto Well, the poem is not as odd-sounding as Joycean writing. It's almost transparent, though I had to backtrack some phrases to understand them.

:D

Robusto

Not Joycean ... but I would imagine hard for a non-native speaker to parse.

Actually, hard for most native speakers to parse as well.

Vitaly

Actually, it would be easy to parse for a native Russian speaker given the native speaker has a sufficiently large vocabulary

It may be hard to native English speakers to parse it because it bends the grammar around, to which Anglophones are not used, I would believe

Robusto

Meaning, not words. The words are fairly easy to parse, although one can get lost in the hypotaxis.

Vitaly

5:48 PM

And which is natural in the Russian language

Robusto

Here's a simpler poem of his:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

~Wallace Stevens, 1954~

Anyway, Stevens is one of my favorite poets.

Vitaly

Now that one's odd. Help!

Robusto

It's very simple, yet profound.

I don't think this is harder to comprehend than The Idea of Order at Key West, though.

Suffice to say that they are both talking about the same thing.

To put it simply, one way to look at this is to suppose that reality is always a construct of the imagination.

Vitaly

Ah, yes, the human reality is always in the human's mind

Robusto

And my reality at this moment is that I have a 1:00 meeting to attend. Ciao! for now.

Vitaly

5:59 PM

lol

Bye @Robusto

RegDwight

Lots of poetry in here.

Kosmonaut

What is this — writers.SE?

kiamlaluno

(I guess I am in the wrong room, then.)

:-)

RegDwight

No, more like readers.SE

We're not writing poetry here. Yet. ))

@Kosmonaut: please have a look at the close tab as time permits, there are a few questions that are dangling at 3 or 4 close votes.

I don't feel like flagging everything, that would be overkill.

Many thanks.

kiamlaluno

6:53 PM

I cannot believe nobody gets the meaning of "I will go up the stores". :-)

RegDwight

Now I'm intrigued.

kiamlaluno

0

Q: I will go up to the stores

What is the common meaning that is understood from the sentence I wrote as title?

usage prepositions prepositional-phrase

I heard that from my friend, who lives on LI.

RegDwight

Yeah, I have seen that question and the answer. I' intrigued what your proposed alternative would be.

kiamlaluno

I know what she means because I know where the stores are. I actually went to those stores.

RegDwight

Okay. Let's wait for another answer, then.

kiamlaluno

6:56 PM

I will tell you tomorrow. I don't want to influence you.

I can just say that is quite easy to catch.

RegDwight

Sure, I'm not asking that you disclose it here. Just saying that I am looking forward to read it on the site.

kiamlaluno

We have that expression in Italian too, actually.

RegDwight

Now you are influencing me.))

kiamlaluno

Vado su in paese.

That doesn't mean I go to the town following a vertical path.

Vice versa, I would say I go down to Calabria.

RegDwight

Stop it, already)) Now every Italian who reads this thread is able to answer the question))))

kiamlaluno

7:01 PM

Are there any Italians, here? :-)

RegDwight

Precisely.

kiamlaluno

Really?

RegDwight

I'm joking, kiamlaluno.

kiamlaluno

Wheeeew. I was counting on the fact there aren't Italians, on this room. :-)

RegDwight

Yeah, those Italians, they're just everywhere! (^_^)

You never know.

kiamlaluno

7:03 PM

Don't tell me!

RegDwight

Hahahahaha.

kiamlaluno

I go to New York, and what language do I hear? Italian!

Vitaly

shomal/junub?

kiamlaluno

If you can believe it, when I hear that, I speak American (or my version of it).

RegDwight

Then again, you're biased. If I went to New York, the first language I would hear would be Russian.

Vitaly

7:04 PM

@RegDwight And the second? ;)

RegDwight

@Vitaly: is that toki pona once again?

Vitaly

No, that's Persian for North/South

kiamlaluno

I escape from Italy, and Italian is not the language I want to hear when I am on USA.

Excluding from the Calabrian I speak together my friend, of course.

RegDwight

What's Persian for zenith/nadir?

kiamlaluno

Zenith/Nadir? :-)

RegDwight

7:07 PM

Not sure, actually.

Vitaly

So, am I right, @kiamlaluno?

RegDwight

I think you quite obviously are.

Vitaly

Well in that case, it's not “commonly understood”, because it's British English.

RegDwight

I was in the middle of writing just that.

Vitaly

:P

RegDwight

7:09 PM

No matter what Persians, Italians, and Russians agree upon, if there's an answer by a native speaker saying something different, well, tough luck.

kiamlaluno

I have to disagree on that. My friend is American, and she doesn't understand a word of British English. :-)

RegDwight

Perhaps she's not a common American...))

kiamlaluno

I asked her what she means, and she confirmed I was right.

She is surely not common. :-)

I guess I have to remove "commonly".

Robusto

Just because something or someone is not common doesn't mean that it or they are uncommon ... :)

RegDwight

It might be too late.

Yeah, just because something is flammable...

Robusto

7:19 PM

mm

kiamlaluno

Common doesn't start with in. ;-)

Robusto

OK, we have that in common, at least.

RegDwight

Better?

The M on my keyboard is actually broken.

I have to hit it real hard.

Just a few minutes ago I misspelled "I'm".

What's worse, it's a Ь in Russian. Can't live without that one. People keep thinking I' a oron.

Vitaly

:D

kiamlaluno

Is that word "moron"? :-)

RegDwight

7:26 PM

You tell e.

kiamlaluno

It could be oron, an inhabitant of Orion.

RegDwight

Or this:

Oron (Bezirk)

Der District d'Oron (dt. Bezirk Oron) war bis zum 31. Dezember 2007 eine Verwaltungseinheit des Kantons Waadt in der Schweiz. Hauptort war Oron-la-Ville. Der District wurde in die Cercles (dt. Kreise) Oron und Mézières aufgeteilt. 2002 wurde die Gemeinde La Rogivue mit der Gemeinde Maracon fusioniert. Der District bestand aus 22 Gemeinden, war 76.03 km² groß und zählte 10'924 Einwohner (Ende 2006). {| border="1" cellpading="5" cellspacing="0" style="border: gray solid 1px; border-collapse: collapse;" !colspan="5" align=center bgcolor="#EFEFEF" | Cercle de Mézières |- !colspan="1" bgco...

kiamlaluno

@RegDwight: I guess you are not using a Mac.

RegDwight

That would be my guess, too.

kiamlaluno

Looking at the little map, it seems Switzerland.

RegDwight

7:28 PM

Or Nigeria:

Oron people

The Oron Nation comprises five Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, where it is the third largest ethnic group in the state, and Bakassi LGA in Cross River State. The five Local Councils in Akwa Ibom are Oron, Udung-Uko, Mbo, Urue-Offong/Oruko, and Okobo. The Oron nation, popularly called 'Oro Ukpabang' or 'Akpakip Oro' by its indigenes, is made up up of several clans. Oron town is the third largest city in Akwa Ibom State after Uyo and Eket. It has a population of around 250,000 people living within the city. Lying on the Cross River, it has a seaport and a Maritim...

kiamlaluno

As you said I'm oron, it should be the second one.

:-)

RegDwight

No, I'm actually this one:

Haim Oron

Haim "Jumas" Oron (, born 26 March 1940) is an Israeli politician and former Minister of Agriculture. He is currently head of the political party New Movement-Meretz, for whom he serves as a member of the Knesset. Biography Oron was born in Giv'atayim and grew up in Ramat Gan. His parents emigrated from Poland before World War II. His father was a textile worker and his mother a housewife. His nickname as a boy was "Jamus" (water buffalo) and later, "Jumas". Oron served in the airborne Nahal. After the army, he and his wife Nili joined kibbutz Lahav, where he taught in the high school a...

Now you know my second native tongue, @Robusto!

And there's a rather nice picture, too.

Robusto

Or you could have been missing a space in a sentence: Am I on the 6:00 train of on the 5:00?

RegDwight

That would be Ofon. I'm not Ofon.

Vitaly

Today I learned that Samoron is a Cloath between Linnen and Hempen, not altogether so course as the one, nor fine as the other.

RegDwight

7:35 PM

Congratulations!

Vitaly

Thanks.

RegDwight

BTW do they have an F in Hebraic? See, I don't even know that...

@Vitaly: where did you learn that, actually? Wikipedia only points me to samovar.

Vitaly

I was searching for words that end with ‘oron’ in the wordlist I posted here earlier.

RegDwight

I figured as much.

Ah

Vitaly

And that one word is in the OED.

Robusto

7:40 PM

I was rushing

RegDwight

THE LIST.

Robusto

I meant "or on the 5:00"

RegDwight

I figured that, too)))

No access to the OED here, sniff.

Vitaly

sameron
† ˈsameron dial. (Yorks.) Obs.
Also 6 samoron, 6–7 samron, 7 sameran, 7 sammaron.
See quot. 1684.
1556 Knaresb. Wills (Surtees) I. 73 Thre yerdes of sameron. 1564 Ibid. 96, xj paire of samoron and hardin sheetes, xiij s. iiij d. 1583 in Ripon Charter Acts (Surtees) 380, xl yeredes of sameron, 20 s. 1598 Knaresb. Wills (Surtees) I. 211 My best blankett, samron and a harden shete. 1617–18 Ibid. II. 50 One paire of sameran sheetes. 1638 Ibid. 162 One little paire of samron shetes. 1684 G. Meriton Yorksh. Dial. 45 Thy Sammaron web..Is stown. Ibid. 107 (Alphabetical Clavis), Sammaron, is…

RegDwight

Hard to make this word one's own.

Where'd you use it?

I don't even use silk that much.

Vitaly

7:48 PM

@RegDwight yeah, it's not like it's easy-peasy to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

RegDwight

That's a good one.

Robusto

So your first native tongue is Russian?

RegDwight

I guess making a sameron purse must be even harder.

I think it's pretty obvious by now.

Robusto

You're a master of the indirect response.

RegDwight

Well, I gave you a rather direct one just yesterday:

1

A: Stack sites must support primary and secondary language when defining user profile

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 ...

Robusto

7:53 PM

I used to work with this guy who would say, in response to any question, "Well ... [oblique reference], so ..."

Just out of curiosity, I have to ask. When I asked the question about Yiddish a couple months ago, did it get flagged? Is that why Joel Spolsky showed up?

RegDwight

I don't remember seeing any flags but Joel is actually a regular.

Robusto

13

Q: Is Yiddish a creole language? And if not, what is it?

A "creole" language is formed by the merging of two parent languages, usually through an earlier rudimentary mixture of the two. Does this make Yiddish a creole language? Was English itself a creole language in the century or so after the Norman Conquest? My question is really about what consti...

creole language-formation

RegDwight

And he's obviously interested in such questions.

Robusto

It felt like there was some kind of back-room palaver going on, like I was disrespecting some ethnic group or something.

He gave a great answer, btw.

RegDwight

At no point did I have that impression.

Robusto

7:56 PM

I was a regular on Joel on Software before he quit for SO.

RegDwight

249

Jewish life and learning

Proposed Q&A site for people who base their lives on Jewish law and tradition and anyone interested in learning more. (If created, this will be the new home of mi.yodeya.com.)

Currently in commitment.

Yeah that's where I come from, too. I used to hang out on the JoS forums, actually.

Robusto

I sometimes posted replies, but not that often.

I got bored when he started to talk about nothing but SO.

But I have links to some of his best columns. Hard to look at the dates on some of those being 2002, 2003, whatever. Doesn't seem like that long ago, but, well ... tempus fugit.

RegDwight

Heh. Well, I can't even begin to imagine how busy he must have been promoting it across the country.

Robusto

Yeah, doesn't it suck when other people do what they want to do, not what you want them to do? I run into that all the time ... :)

RegDwight

Okay, so let me do what you want me to do, and give you a direct link:

2

A: First recorded appearance of the mistranslation "Red Square"

Using Google Books, I was able to antedate usage of “Red Square” to refer to the square in Moscow to 1844. It is from an 1844 translation of The Heretic by Ivan Ivanovich Lazhechnikov, the first use being on page 30: Look out of the window towards the Kreml, you will see the cannon-yard, ...

Read the comments. It's been there all the time ever since August 21st.

Robusto

8:02 PM

Yeah, but at least I got you to do the leg work for me.

I mean, it's not like a search for RegDwight would turn up more than a few dozen hits at most, right?

RegDwight

No, but the meta post links to that very place.

Robusto

Don't toy with me. :P

RegDwight

Yeah, I tried and failed.

Robusto

13 mins ago, by Robusto

You're a master of the indirect response.

RegDwight

But that would make me the worst possible candidate ever for answering questions on a Q&A site!

Robusto

8:06 PM

Q.E.D.

See, that's why we go over this stuff.

Just kidding, of course.

RegDwight

Sure. It's just that my thoughts are already elsewhere, with JoS.

That "How MS lost the API war" post was awesome.

joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Robusto

Yes. And the recently-mentioned-on-English.SE classic, "The Law of Leaky Abstractions"

RegDwight

Absolutely.

I am irritated that JoS links don't get inlined.

They should be!

Robusto

Well, he didn't have the API for that in those days, I guess.

RegDwight

Even Amazon gets inlining.

Robusto

8:10 PM

Tell him he should retrofit the old columns.

RegDwight

I think I will actually raise the issue on MSO.

But not today, I guess. Have to log off in a few minutes.

Robusto

His columns, when they were new, used to take up a big chunk of my compile time.

Well, dos vdanya, shalom, w/e.

RegDwight

They used to take up a big chunk of my time, period.

I would print them out and read them on the bus.

I would read them in bed.

Robusto

Now that's obsessive.

The john, yeah. In bed? Hmm...

Does he still put out FogBugz?

RegDwight

Nah, it's just when I first came across it, there were tons of posts already, and I couldn't read that much on a screen.

Robusto

8:13 PM

I got our company to switch to that way back in 2006. Then I switched companies.

RegDwight

I tried to get ours to switch to FogBugz, to no avail. We've been tinkering with PHP ourselves ever since.

Robusto

Yeah.

RegDwight

Imagine my frustration.

Robusto

I know the feeling.

It's amazing how much productivity companies are willing to flush down the toilet for this or that rason.

reason

RegDwight

or raison

Robusto

8:16 PM

or Grund

I used to want to open a little pub and call it Maison d'Etre

RegDwight

Or причина, and now in Japanese

I demand.

Robusto

Probably just 事.

こと

RegDwight

That looks awfully familiar.

Robusto

Yeah, you just attach it to any statement and it becomes an "explanative" ... and i just coined a word.

RegDwight

That's elegant.

Robusto

8:19 PM

Sore wa [noun] koto desu ... It was a matter of [noun] or It was because of [noun].

It was a [noun] thing.

RegDwight

That makes even more sense, I've heard that construction in Zelda or something.

Robusto

Japanese is very, very simple when you get down to the basics of structure and syntax.

The hardest part of the language, for me? Gairaigo ... foreign loan words.

RegDwight

I don't have that many problems with structure and syntax, or even with the kanji. My problem is Katakana. I just keep forgetting. Over and over again.

Robusto

It's really mostly used like display type. You see it on signs a lot.

RegDwight

Hiragana is so much easier.

To me.

Robusto

8:22 PM

It really is hard to read because they also use it for gairaigo.

And when I see a bunch of it, I slow way down in my reading, because I never know what they are going to throw at me.

Everything is suddenly a phonetic struggle.

RegDwight

I actually thought that was its main purpose.

Robusto

That's one of its purposes.

But if you walk through Tokyo, or read Japanese magazines, you see it a lot just for ordinary signage.

RegDwight

Kurisumasu.

Robusto

Or ad headlines and the like.

Yeah, Christmas.

And waapuro is word processor.

Don't get me started.

RegDwight

Don't they actually have taberu as well?

Robusto

8:24 PM

That's a Japanese word meaning to eat.

Oh, do you mean something that sounds like table?

RegDwight

I thought that was derived from the English table.

Yeah.

Robusto

Probably they have that, I don't recall atm.

But there is chizu (map) and chiizu (cheese)

RegDwight

Mmmmhhh. Cheese.

Mmmmmap.

Robusto

The worst part is, when they find out you're an English speaker, they start throwing all the gairaigo at you, because OF COURSE you understand them ... hell, they're you're language, right?

RegDwight

The Swedes do that, too.

You just can't stop a Swede from talking at you in English.

Robusto

8:27 PM

Same with Japanese. Here's a funny story ....

My wife is Japanese-American, but speaks little or no Japanese. I studied Japanese and speak it fairly well. When we would go into sushi restaurants, they would speak to her in Japanese, she would look at me, I would translate, then she would respond in English and I would tell the waiter what she said in Japanese.

Then the waiter would laugh and tell my wife in Japanese that I spoke very good Japanese, and how remarkable was that, yeah?

RegDwight

That's the very definition of OMG.

Robusto

And then he would reply to me in English.

/rim shot

RegDwight

Hahaha. Of course!!

Robusto

The hardest part about Japanese is getting people to talk to you in Japanese, which is necessary for fluency.

RegDwight

I'm rereading the story for the fifth time now, it's pure gold.

You can't invent that type of thing.

Life writes the greatest stories.

Robusto

8:33 PM

Real life, yep. Who could have dreamed that?

RegDwight

Not even Joyce.

Robusto

Although maybe Molly Bloom ...

RegDwight

That's meta.

Robusto

Very.

Once you imagine a character, it has a life of its own.

RegDwight

Don't let us get into where we're all just dreams of an intergalactic computer or something.

Robusto

8:35 PM

Nah.

RegDwight

I actually read that poem the other day.

Robusto

But everything that has ever existed, even in someone's mind, has had a kind of existence, and still exists somewhere in the space-time continuum.

Which poem?

RegDwight

The one you posted for Vitaly.

Robusto

Of Mere Being?

RegDwight

Yeah.

Robusto

8:37 PM

Nothing propinqs like propinquity.

RegDwight

I didn't quite understand who that Spanish-named character was supposed to be. He popped out of nowhere.

Robusto

Oh, you're talking about The Idea of Order at Key West now.

Ramon Fernandez.

RegDwight

Darn, I had that feeling that I was mixing them up.

But I went with a "yeah" nonetheless.

I was pretty sure it contained the words mere and being, too...

Robusto

Read also writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html

RegDwight

Anyway, I didn't get the reference.

Robusto

8:40 PM

Some people speculate that it refers to a literary critic.

Me, I don't need to know that to come to an understanding of the poem.

RegDwight

I like this one a lot. And I liked the one with the bird, too...

Robusto

Wallace Stevens. He kicks ass, so to speak.

He is considered one of the imagist school of poets, but he's really not totally about that.

RegDwight

I was going to say that the wintery imagery got closer to my heart, but on a second thought, that wouldn't be true.

Robusto

And look at it again. The whole poem is one single sentence.

RegDwight

Yep.

Robusto

8:44 PM

The references and antecedents pile up on one another. Suddenly you realize that "One must have a mind of winter ... not to hear any misery in the sound of the wind"

Which isn't apparent on first reading.

And the more you return, the more you see.

That poem still gives me chills, if you'll pardon the pun.

RegDwight

I must admit I totally missed that.

Whooosh.

kiamlaluno

I still don't understand this question.

0

Q: Are there any cases of a word that originated in English replacing another word in English in common usage?

I'm curious if there's any cases of a word that originated in English (didn't come from a foreign source) replacing another word in every day usage?

etymology history

Vitaly

The sound of leaves, he means psithurism?

RegDwight

That's a strange question indeed @kiamlaluno.

Not sure what the OP is getting at.

Robusto

Or susurrus, @Vitaly.

Vitaly

8:49 PM

:)

RegDwight

There must be like a zillion answers, not sure if the OP realizes that.

Robusto

But what an erudite term! Thanks for teaching me a new word. I can't wait to use it and claim it for my own.

RegDwight

Now I miss playing Эрудит against my father.

Vitaly

@Robusto news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7654511.stm

Robusto

Erudit?

Is it like 20 questions?

RegDwight

8:51 PM

Nope, it's like the Russian name for Scrabble.

@Vitaly: one of my hobbies is actually reading etymological dictionaries.

kiamlaluno

I guess he means a word that was originated from Old English, and that replaced a word originated from another language.

RegDwight

It's fascinating.

Robusto

I just like finding out there are words for things that I didn't even know.

Vitaly

speaking about Scrabble, @RegDwight slovolom.ru

Robusto

Another funny story, and then I have to go ...

RegDwight

8:52 PM

@kiamlaluno: I'm afraid that either way, the question is too broad.

And kind of pointless.

IMHO.

kiamlaluno

It's what I think too.

RegDwight

@Vitaly: try this one some time: kongregate.com/games/gabob/clockwords-prelude

Robusto

When my elder son was five, he would ask me approximately 55,321 questions per day. So we were driving home one day and asking me questions, and at one point he asked me a question I didn't have a ready answer to. It was a conceptual question, and I didn't really understand it. I replied, "I don't even know if there's a word for that." He thought for a minute, then said. "If we don't have a word for something, does that mean we can't think about it?"

I nearly drove off the road.

Vitaly

Nice.

Robusto

I felt I should have majored in epistemology ...

Thanks, you've been great. I'll be here all week. Try the veal!

RegDwight

8:56 PM

Hehe, But did you answer, "that theory has actually been proposed and dismissed"?

Robusto

Seriously, gotta run. Talk at you later.

RegDwight

Thanks for chatting. See you later

Vitaly

Bye @Robusto

kiamlaluno

Are there any "authoritative" source, for English language?

RegDwight

17

Q: What are your favorite English language tools?

To prevent myself from asking an obvious, silly question again, I would like to know which tools you find most useful, besides dictionaries. I found Corpus Concordance English is extremely useful to lookup collocations. Edit: Please, one tool per answer.

learning beginner esl tools

Some of these are pretty authoritative, I'd say.

Vitaly

8:59 PM

Yo, I've been thinking, why is there no books tag just now, and you posted that link

Thanks!

RegDwight

We kind of settled on this site not being a book discussion club @Vitaly, hence the absence of the tag.

Vitaly

A couple CW questions about dictionaries could have been allowed, though

RegDwight

Every now and then, such questions keep popping up, actually.

But I can't remember the last time.

Vitaly

I like the way mfg went about it on Atheism.SE

kiamlaluno

Do you think that up in I will go up to the stores is fairly useless?

RegDwight

9:04 PM

Linky, please?

Vitaly

3

Q: How should we manage books on atheism as questions?

Books are a great resource and reference for atheists. Atheists also have many interests and reasons for looking for resources. Just as Christianity books have many, many sub-categories, so can atheism. However, in trying to keep in line with the suggestions over at the stackexchange blog, we ar...