English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Q: What word is used to replace a redacted name?

3:23 AM

If a name of an military officer is redacted for security reasons, how can I replace his name with an adjective and the word 'officer' without too much hubbub? Say the original sentence is "The meeting was led by Lieutenant Smith and his men." Can I say, "The meeting was led by an unnamed/redac...

8 hours later…

Keep these mind

11:03 AM

If I had previously described 100,000,000 as 'whopping', what would be a good word for 10,000,000,000,000?

BAYMAX

12:03 PM

@KannE Nice!!

Robusto

12:35 PM

@tchrist Perhaps they were harbingers of the plague? When you're dying the Black Death, even cheerful chirping might be construed as painfully annoying.

3 hours later…

Anonymous

3:12 PM

@tchrist I wonder if you're familiar with this story: dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

tchrist

@snailboat Haha, no.

user1732

yeah, 1978 is a long time ago

omg, 40 years

:-)

@Keepthesemind 1,000 million times more 'whopping'

actually, 100,000 times more whopping

3 hours later…

Q: Is there a name for words rhyming from two different stanzas?

5:59 PM

Im analyzing this poem, and I noticed that none of the words rhyme with each other in a stanza, but words rhyme with another word from tge next stanza. I understand rhyme scheme is supposed to be within each stanza. Is there a word when rhyming occurs outside the stanzas??? “I heard the screams ...

single-word-requests terminology poetry rhymes

1 hour later…

7:07 PM

The difference between a plain and a prairie appears to be more about the vegetation and climate, rather than topography.

More specifically, I guess all prairies are technically also plains, but not vice versa.

@Færd The precipitation in Portugal plummets primarily on the prairie

Anonymous

@Færd I think that most prairies are on flat land, but not all. I grew up in Illinois, where we have (or had) some hill prairies.

@Færd That would be up to the geographers, geo- and bio-logists for their technical terms, but informally, I'd say you're right.

@snailboat Yeah. I suppose the grasslands=prairies could go over rolling hills, which are not exactly plains.

@Mitch I heard that's the place where they pluck the plumage off the plantation poultry.

Doesn't 'la prairie' en français refer to what would normally be called just a meadow, a grassy area between woods, in English?

Prairie (Amérique du Nord)

7:19 PM

@snailboat Nice! The picture of a prairie has a smooth wavy terrain in my mind.

Which is prolly just one kind of prairie.

@Mitch Interesting. I don't know.

La Prairie (anglais : Tallgrass Prairie) occupe les Grandes Plaines entre les Appalaches et les Montagnes Rocheuses. Cette écorégion à prairie de zone tempérée est constituée d'une flore herbeuse de graminées, de composées et de légumineuses. Son nom lui vient des explorateurs français et n'a pas été anglicisé. Elle est l'équivalent de la steppe en Eurasie et de la pampa en Amérique du Sud. Aux États-Unis et au Canada, on fait parfois la distinction entre la végétation de taille basse des Hautes Plaines à l'ouest du 104e méridien terrestre et la végétation de taille moyenne et haute de l'est (depuis...

@Færd Please, planting a plague of playthings is implausible.

@Færd OK. Well, that is what they call the American Midwest's 'Great Plains'

not the Great Prairie.

Wait...they also say 'Les Grandes Plaines' in capitals as though that's a thing too.

prairie

Noun: prairie (plural prairies)

An extensive area of relatively flat grassland with few, if any, trees, especially in North America.
It was not far from the house; but the ground sank into a depression there, and the ridge of it behind shut out everything except just the roof of the tallest hayrick. As one sat on the sward behind the elm, with the back turned on the rick and nothing in front but the tall elms and the oaks in the other hedge, it was quite easy to fancy it the verge of the prairie with the backwoods close by.
prairie f (plural prairies)
meadow, grassland, pasture, prairie

> French
meadow, grassland, pasture, prairie

now, what is the definiition of 'plain'? Probably entirely geological

The Wikipedia article is on the North American prairie.

Plain

In geography, a plain is a flat, sweeping landmass that generally does not change much in elevation. Plains occur as lowlands along the bottoms of valleys or on the doorsteps of mountains, as coastal plains, and as plateaus or uplands.In a valley, a plain is enclosed on two sides, but in other cases a plain may be delineated by a complete or partial ring of hills, by mountains, or by cliffs. Where a geological region contains more than one plain, they may be connected by a pass (sometimes termed a gap). Coastal plains would mostly rise from sea level until they run into elevated features such as...

@Mitch I'd say topographical? But yeah.

Even though wiktionary/wikipedia are works in progress and not necessarily dependable authorities...

7:27 PM

Right.

I think that makes my point. Plain is a geological term, prairies biological

which highly correlate

Plains are plain planes.

that is you're unlikely to have prairies in mountainous areas.

@Færd Plainly

Terrain terminology is widely and (for me) confusingly varied.

Uplands, highlands, heaths, moors, ...

Taiga is usually on a plain, but is probably not considered prairie at all

7:30 PM

Right!

But isn't that covered with trees?

I've heard that by study of place names in England, one must assume that the anglo-saxons had a very detailed sense of geomorphology of hill.

which is pretty ethnocentric. I'd expect that of any language.

But I've only heard about it for Engiand.

Hmm.

And just haven't sought out similar for other languages.

OK, now let's do 'stream' and 'brook'.

I'm kidding. I don't think I have the patience to do another one.

even though it would be fun.

as far as fun things go

I suppose a rollercoaster would be more fun

but also for that I'm not particularly in the mood

@Færd is (was) today a working day for you?

ie whatever you call Monday. Is Sunday the first day of the working week?

@Mitch Let's babble along.

Or not.

I'm sure we've been through this numerous times, but I keep forgetting.

@Færd haha

7:35 PM

@Mitch It was.

Saturday is the first weekday.

ie the fist working day.

Our days of the week are
ʃambe = Sat
1ʃambe
2ʃambe
3ʃambe
4ʃambe
5ʃambe
dʒome = Fri

A: A word for decorations added to letters

shifting I can deal with (but my usual weekend (of days off from work) is Sat/Sun, so that's concerning in case business calls need to be made on my days off).

but the point is that I think in France they take off Thursday instead of Saturday. So there aren't two days in a row that are off.

Or maybe that's just for school.

2 hours later…

tchrist

9:19 PM

Font porn, anyone?

The word you are looking for is swash, which is a term of art in typesetting. The OED’s 1989 definition for this is: Printing Applied to old-style capital letters having flourished strokes designed to fill up unsightly gaps between adjacent letters. Most italic faces, for example, use...

Q: A word for decorations added to letters

9:41 PM

Is there a word for the artistic decorations that are often added to letters in some type-faces / fonts (e.g. caligraphy, etc.) I'm thinking like a serif, but as far as I know, (I'm open to correction) a serif is a specific tail that's added to some letters, whereas I'm looking for a word that ...

single-word-requests terminology typography

1 hour later…