English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:00

It has also been user for other countries, by analogy, I believe.

Like England around 1980.

Robusto

@Cerberus You're just jealous that the British East India Company outshone the Dutch East India Company.

Cerberus

Lost its empire and its economy.

Robusto

Umm, where's the Dutch empire these days?

Cerberus

@Robusto Well, in its days of glory, the VOC dwarfed the British aequivalent, I believe!

@Robusto We had gas.

Robusto

BTW, IIRC, England successfully resisted invasion by Spain ... sound familiar?

Cerberus

00:01

Didn't we all.

Robusto

@Cerberus I'm sure the English can fart just as well as the Dutch.

Cerberus

Ours was worth a lot of pecunia.

And still is, although we are extracting less and less because of the (minor) earthquakes it causes.

Mitch

Was that what the tulip bubble was about?

Robusto

@Cerberus Well, in point of fact you guys were ruled by Spain during the time of the Armada.

Cerberus

@Mitch That was a few hundred years earlier.

@Robusto No!

We were fighting them.

Robusto

00:03

Not altogether successfully.

Cerberus

Quite successfully.

We lost a few provinces.

Then again, before the war, we had hardly been a unity.

A state.

Robusto

@Cerberus Well, you say you were fighting, but it must have been a dilettantish effort to have taken eighty years!

Cerberus

So, yes, their loss was unfortunate, but tons of rich and educated people fled Brussels and Antwerp and Bruges to Holland.

Mitch

as distances go, not particularly far

Robusto

@tchrist Is there no end to their effrontery?

Cerberus

00:05

@Robusto Still, a few tiny, disunited provinces against the greatest empire the world had ever known!

Mitch

The Mongols?!!!

Robusto

@Cerberus And yet the Brits remained inviolate.

Cerberus

I think the Spanish Empire spanned a larger uhh angle of the earth. What do you call that? Not quadrant.

Mitch

swath

Cerberus

@Robusto It's easy when you have just one island to defend.

And we bore the brunt of the Spanish attacks.

We defeated their armies.

And I think we helped the British kill the armadas?

Robusto

00:07

Also cf. Germany vs. the Netherlands. Germany 1, Netherlands 0. Britain 1, Germany 0.

Cerberus

@Mitch I don't know, would a swath include oceans?

Mitch

tranche then?

Robusto

How about area? Safest bet.

Cerberus

@Robusto Well, Germany had like twenty times our population. And Britain is a single island with lots of sea around it.

@Robusto I believe the Mongol Empire had a larger area.

I mean, if you have to draw a line from one end of the empire to the other, the Spanish would have won.

Mitch

lots of horses

Robusto

00:09

Oct 25 '12 at 13:19, by Robusto

That's loser talk.

Literally.

Cerberus

We, too, shared in the conquest of Germany in 1945, like many other armies from occupied countries.

Robusto

@Cerberus Yes. In the "we were present when others beat the Germans" sense.

Cerberus

Quite a large part of our army escaped, I believe.

It returned after the occupation, of course.

Mitch

@Cerberus everybody shared

Cerberus

Oh.

Not everybody!

But, yes, even France had a free army that fought together with the Allies, I think.

Robusto

00:12

@Cerberus De Gaulle made more trouble for the Allies than Germany ever did.

Cerberus

Hah.

Mitch

@Cerberus in the last year

Cerberus

Probably after the war...

@Mitch I think earlier?

As soon as the government fled Paris.

Mitch

summer '44?

Cerberus

1940?

Mitch

00:14

and they didn't have a free army before '40?

Cerberus

It was just the French army before the occupation.

They didn't need the word 'free'.

Mitch

oh

Cerberus

Damn you, now you've tied me up in a Wiki chain again...

Jasper

I mix up Cerberus and Centaurus on ELU sometimes.

Robusto

@Cerberus Kinky.

Mitch

00:20

27 mins ago, by Mitch

@Robusto my work is done here

KannE

There is an OP named Andrei Kovalev who has a simple question (re: who/whom/whose), but I can't understand the second part of his sentence, not really. Maybe someone could help him. The language barrier is too much for me. I would probably just confuse him further.

0

Q: I am confused of using 'who' or 'whom' or 'whose' in the sentence

Is it right to say? He can recognize brands of cars that are whose certain country has a manufacturer of. I am certainly confused to compose such complicated sentences.

Robusto

@KannE I have no idea what is being asked here.

I voted to close for that reason.

Mitch

00:35

Yeah. That sentence is a mess

KannE

@Mitch Omg, that song is awful. I've never heard it before. I guess "Love Shack" is the only one of theirs I remember; I hear it on the radio every week or so. I still like it a lot, but that other song...I jamming stuff in my ears now to try to stop the ringing and compress the swelling.

@Mitch He seems nice to me for some reason; I wish I knew what he was trying to say. I have about 3 ideas on that, so it would make matters worse.

Mitch

'Dance Dance Revolution' is a video game that encourages the most limber of proletariat.

@KannE Everybody is nice. But that guy is in the wrong place. It's not even good for ELU

KannE

01:00

@Mitch Nah, a few of the really aren't, but he seems extra nice. He may be trying to say that...he knows the make/model of cars made in his own country...but I dunno.

*a few of them...I'm jamming stuff in my ears...I'm getting sleepy and making a lot of mistakes. GN.

Mitch

@KannE Buenas noches

Dobry vecher

Shab be kheyr

Wan an

Oiche mhaith

pronounced nothing like it is spelled

/i:he wa/

Irish is worse than English

spelling or food

tchrist

01:28

Oh great, now they're doing the whole dumb mobile viewport thing to books, too:

> The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.

Gotta love them Dutch UX designers!

I was a little worried at the word dwarsliggers at first, in case it might involve dwarf-tossing.

Or lying dwarves.

Dwarsligger (boek)

Een dwarsligger is een boekvorm, waarbij de bladspiegel van één pagina uit een conventioneel boek overdwars op twee pagina's van elk acht bij twaalf centimeter wordt afgedrukt. De dwarsligger wordt uitgegeven door Uitgeverij dwarsligger, onderdeel van Veen Bosch & Keuning Uitgeversgroep (VBK). == Geschiedenis == De dwarsligger werd bedacht door Hugo van Woerden, destijds directeur van de Nederlandse drukkerij Jongbloed BV, gespecialiseerd in het drukken op zeer dun papier, een specialisme dat onder meer ingezet wordt voor het drukken van bijbels en gezangenbundels. De gedachte was om een nieuw...

nytimes.com/2018/10/29/business/…

Cerberus

@tchrist Never heard of this. Sounds like nonsense...

A dwarf is a dwerg.

tchrist

01:45

OE had dweorg. Tolkien thought its modern plural would have been dwarrow, and so it was the Dwarrowdelf in the Common Tongue that place which the elves call Moria.

Language Log: itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000293.html

> It may be observed that in this book as in The Hobbit the form dwarves is used, although the dictionaries tell us that the plural of dwarf is dwarfs. It should be dwarrows (or dwerrows), if singular and plural had each gone its own way down the years, as have man and men, or goose and geese.

I agree with Bill Poser in that I voice the end of roofs as if it were roovez.

> Anyhow, my original point stands. The standard relationship between singular and plural pronunciations of English nouns ending in /f/ is inconsistent and indeed variable. Eliminating all the [-vz] plurals would make the system more consistent and easier to learn, but it would be a distinctly non-standard way of talking.

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2959

> With concern at an all time high, an economic burden that dwarves other diseases, and numbers with dementia spiralling towards a million, there really isn’t an argument against action now.

> The DNA contained within Paris japonica dwarves all other plant and animal genomes that have been analysed so far.

> The package dwarves the £36.8m that he earned last year from the Clearasil manufacturer, which made him the blue-chip index's best-paid chief executive in 2008.

> Google Ngram Viewer shows "dwarves" being negligible with respect to "dwarfs" until 1960, then a clear trend of "dwarves" increasing at "dwarfs"'s expense to reach a current rate of 1 in 6.

(Never before have I felt the need for the genitive of a quoted string. And one ending in "s," too. Never again will be soon enough for me.)

Actually, it ended in "s" not in "s,", doncha know.

Cerberus

06:33

@tchrist Now, those verbs look odd.

SmokeDetector

10:19

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Url in title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title (490): amazonhealthstore.com/praltrix-ireland/ by DonaldWatkins on english.SE

SmokeDetector

11:25

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Url in title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, blacklisted website in title, +2 more (559): amazonhealthstore.com/praltrix-ireland/ by DonaldWatkins on english.SE

Robusto

14:35

@Mitch Maybe that's why all the great Irish writers write in English?

@tchrist: I viewed one of your font sallies on my phone the other day, one containing an example CSS rule, and seem to remember that you might have made a mismatch typo something like the following: font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; (Obviously, Georgia is a serif font. I couldn't respond at the time and I don't recall which question/answer this was on; it might have been in a comment.)

Mitch

@Jasper You were right. Apple just announced a new MacBook Air. It's still October

@Robusto also the food is better. instead of eating raw spoiled fish you get to eat deep fried spoiled fish

Robusto

@Mitch I was off in the Irish hinterland once, and stopped at a restaurant that had salmon on the menu. I asked if they poached the salmon and the proprietress gave me a shocked look, saying, "Oh, no, we buy them at the market!"

Mitch

14:51

haha...that means they totally poach them

but mostly irrelevantly, how was the trip? I have a running argument with someone that touristing to Ireland is boring because really what is there? The Blarney Stone? That's as exciting as Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts (which doesn't even register as underwhelming because you don't even think it's an actual rock).

I mean what else is there in Ireland? Grass?

Robusto

@Mitch Ireland is all about drinking and talking. You don't even need to leave the pub to have a good time there.

The only problems arise when someone turns out to be a surly drunk. But that sort of problem is not unique to Ireland.

Mitch

Ugh. Talking. Do you have to come up with something to say? Or can you let it ride and the other person will fill the conversation?

Robusto

@Mitch It's better if you hold up your end. Raconteurs are highly prized. But you'd better bring your A game.

Mitch

flips through stories

flips through made up stories

makes up more stories to flip through

Jasper

@Mitch Terrible price, starting at 1199 USD. No way I will ever get it this lifetime.

Everyone expected it to be at most 999 USD.

Robusto

14:58

@Mitch Making up stories is not against the law there. And some embellishment is actually expected.

Mitch

So there was this time when I had to hit my ol' da in the head with a shovel. We were burying someone (don't worry, it's was no one we knew)...

Robusto

Good opener.

Færd

@Mitch I'm glossing it with findings from corpora, checking its examples, etc.

Jasper

@Mitch With that price, one might as well pay a bit more and just get the Macbook Pro.

Færd

Trying to have a good time with it.

Mitch

15:00

@Jasper Oh, yeah, that's revolting. I think Mac is, well they've always been, becoming an 'aspirational' good. people buy the more expensive thing because it must be better because it is so expensive.

Robusto

Apple is more about fashion than utility.

Mitch

@Robusto Well put because there was blood gushing all over and all I had were the corpses own soiled clothes to staunch the blood...

Jasper

I think this new Macbook Air you are basically paying more for the Retina display. The current one isn't even FHD.

Mitch

@Jasper I have an old macbook air, it is sooooo light. Really nice.

Jasper

And who will get the 12 inch Macbook now? It doesn't even come with HD camera!

Mitch

15:02

@Jasper Is 'FHD' SFW?

Jasper

@Mitch Yes, LOL. I think TV and computer screen resolutions use different terminology.

Mitch

I think the retina display is bogus...the resolution in screens was already better than my own personal eye resolusibility years ago. and eyesight doesn't get better with age.

Jasper

Retina is strictly an Apple term.

Mitch

@Jasper what is 'FHD'?

Færd

I've always shunned anything Apple.

Mitch

15:03

Federal High Density?

Jasper

@Mitch 1920 by 1080.

Full High Definition

I think this new Macbook Air price will be good for Apple in one way. All those trying to get a cheap Apple laptop will rush to get the current Macbook Air which is also the only one I ever considered getting.

The only one under 1000 USD.

Mitch

@Robusto so I was stuffing the hole in his head with old leaves...

Jasper

I am going to do some thinking and sleeping, kthxbai

Mitch

...and that's why I had to sell the state in Mallorca. Another round?

Robusto

@Mitch I hope you've been downing a pint in the pauses. Can't really tell a good Irish story without that.

Jinx, I thinx?

Jinx, methinx?

Jasper

15:07

It seems the whole word is switching to USB C ports now.

Mitch

@Robusto I was doing shots because bee is so filling, dontcha think?

Jasper

First USB 2, then USB 3, then USB C.

Mitch

@Jasper C? already? I'm just getting used to plain old USB.

Robusto

Then USB losin' its democracy.

Jasper

@Mitch My Acer Swift 3 has one 2, two 3, and one C port.

Mitch

15:08

I liked it when it was just US...B

Robusto

Let's all hop on the universal serial bus! It's a good time for all!

Mitch

@Jasper Gah. I just want to stop with all the plugs and just have all data 'out there'.

Jasper

This new Macbook Air only has two C ports and a headphone jack.

Mitch

@Robusto People try to put me down

Just cause I try to get around

Robusto

Talkin' 'bout your veneration?

Mitch

15:09

oh.

shoot

I was going for the bus song

Robusto

The wheels on the USB go round and round, round and round, round and round ...

See, USB is an anagram of BUS.

That's why it's funny.

Mitch

Which reminds me of that time with Lambchop and we were singing 'The song that never ends' and we were just having such a good time, and Lambchop accidentally spilled her limoncello all over my pants and I had to go in the back and change and ...

OMG I just realized it was no accident.

@Robusto I don't get it..

Færd

@Cerberus They wouldn't all at once succumb to an idiot's wishful thinking, I don't suppose. But the lure of money and power can change mindsets.

Whatevs. I'm giving it a rest for a while.

.

There's this Iranian girl on Instagram who posts educational videos for English learners.

She has a couple hundred thousand followers. Most of them Iranian, I think.

Mitch

call me uneducated but Instagram has videos? I thought it was just photos

Færd

Her videos don't look particularly hard to make, but her perseverance is commendable.

Yeah you can post a video up to 1 min in a post

I'm mulling over the idea. Seems like an easy way to promote your business as a teacher.

Robusto

15:26

@Mitch Perhaps this will refresh your memory:

Shari Lewis

Phyllis Naomi Hurwitz (January 17, 1933 – August 2, 1998), better known as Shari Lewis, was an American ventriloquist, puppeteer, children's entertainer and television show host. She was best known as the original puppeteer of the sock puppet Lamb Chop, first appearing on Hi Mom, a local morning television show that aired on WRCA-TV (now WNBC-TV) in New York City. == Early life == Lewis was born Phyllis Naomi Hurwitz (some sources cite Sonia Phyllis Hurwitz) to Jewish parents, Ann Ritz and Abraham Hurwitz, an education professor at Yeshiva University. She had one sister. Her parents encouraged...

Now it all makes sense. Lamb Chop is your sock puppet.

Færd

Sounds too cruel for children's programming.

Robusto

Crueler than the Muppets? I think not.

And then there's all that pop music kids listen to.

> What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Færd

It's the egg-or-chicken story.

Robusto

Nah, the egg wins: "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."—Samuel Butler

Færd

I don't know about the Muppets. I used to watch this as a kid:

Happy Tree Friends

Happy Tree Friends is an American-Canadian adult animated video series created by Aubrey Ankrum, Rhode Montijo, and Kenn Navarro and developed by Montijo, Navarro, and Warren Graff for Mondo Media. The show has been cited as an example of achieving a cult following.The series mixes cute cartoon anthropomorphic forest animals and extreme, graphic violence. Each episode revolves around the characters enduring accidental or deliberately inflicted events of bloodshed, pain, mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation, evisceration and/or death. At one point, there was a warning given to the site "Cartoon...

Mitch

15:41

@Robusto some of the songs coming out now are too realistic

> Who's waking up to drive you home when you're drunk and all alone?
Who's gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?
It ain't me

I mean, thanks for the honesty and all

but

what about 'stand by your man'?

Robusto

@Færd Happy Tree Friends is lame. Also Canada. Why haven't the Canadians rushed the border and deposed Der Trumpf by now?

Færd

Because some of them triumph over Trumpfs?

Robusto

@Mitch I guess it had to lie down for a while, right after D-I-V-O-R-C-E (which I'm pretty sure a lot of C&W fans render as D-I-V-O-R-S-E.

@Færd I get the non part. I'm just missing the sequitur.

Mitch

hold on...

> Sometimes it's hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man.
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times,

Robusto

You still haven't addressed the Shari Lewis issue.

Mitch

15:45

that sounds like she's totally accepting that the dude is running around with other women and she should just accept it.

@Robusto Oh Phyllis? We used to call her Filly. Filly Cheese Steak. Because she was... mmm mmm.

Robusto

@Mitch Filly Cheese Steak? That sounds like it's made of horse meat.

Mitch

@Robusto Aw man and she was a thoroughbred, if you know what I mean.

Robusto

I dread finding out what Hush Puppy was made out of.

Færd

@Robusto Sorry. Made a mistake there. I meant to say "thrive on Trumpfs".

Mitch

The song that never ends? More like the ride that last all night.

Paula Revere we used to call her

Færd

15:49

My connection is really poor. See you in better connections.

Mitch

@Robusto That reminds me of a story of a dog I once had.

Robusto

Hungry - Paul Revere and the Raiders

►

That kind of hunger?

Cerberus

@Færd A fateful dot.

Mitch

We were running through the alleys, trying to distance ourselves from the Imperial Guard.

Robusto

Looks like @Cerb is making another non-appearance appearance.

Mitch

15:51

I was carrying the baby, well toddler really. And my wife, at the time, was eight months with twins expected

and goddammit if we didnt go down an alley with a dead end.

not even a sewer grating to go down or fire escape to climb up.

and there was this mangy dog just lying there like he was dead

my son, at the time (that's another story), the rug rat that he was, wriggled out of my grasp to go ... I shudder to think of it now ... pet the dog.

now I and my wife, that bitch (that's quite another story) were out of breath but trying to make no noise, so we couldn't breath loud or even shush anyone out of fear of attracting attention.

and goddamit if that dog didn't perk up right away and start barking like a maniac

jesus effing christ and we could hear the clap of the running feet of the guards down the street

Cerberus

16:08

@Robusto Hey, I posted something. Happy now?

Robusto

20:46

@Cerberus Somewhat. I hope your future endeavors in this regard will be more meritorious.

Cerberus

23:10

@Robusto And more loquacious?

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…