English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

The present tense of wit is wot.

Not *wits.

Cerberus

What if you have a post with a net score of -60?: with 100 down, 40 up, you still rep cap for the day.

So you could build a huge rep score posting -60 questions.

Or minus any number, really.

and so the quest for world domination begins

> 1865 A. C. Swinburne Chastelard i. ii. 200 And that, God wot, I wist not.

"And that, God knows, I knew not."

What what!

12:06 AM

> 1867 P. J. Bailey Universal Hymn 8 Witting nought.

> 1753 S. Richardson Hist. Sir Charles Grandison IV. xvii. 133 Wot ye not the indelicacy of an early present, which you are not obliged to make?

> 1899 Cent. Mag. Dec. 300/2 They..witting little that the tide has long since turned.

> 1844 E. B. Browning Brown Rosary i. iv, The grey border-stone that is wist To dilate and assume a wild shape in the mist.

> 1830 Tennyson 2nd Song to Owl Thy tuwhits are lull'd, I wot.

Lucky guy, our Alfred, what with all the tuwhits.

> 1876 A. D. Whitney Sights & Insights II. iii. 363 We wit well of many things that we would never prove.

> 1793 R. Burns Poems & Songs (1968) II. 766 O Lassie, art thou sleeping yet, Or art thou wakin, I would wit.

KannE

12:25 AM

@Mitch Ha-ha, I was just wondering too hard. Well, I like extra points; it gives me more leeway to delete dumb stuff. It happens. I'm not a genius all the time; I've been misled.

@KannE Misling is hard on a person.

Make sure to get vaccinated next time.

KannE

So whatdaya say we do away with all these "tense" questions? My son was born with Spidey verb-tense sense. Doesn't know Rule One. Let's just tell everybody you're born with it or you're not. That seems accurate enough.

@tchrist - I belive every really bad or really good thing said about me. I refuse to be mediocre. There is no cure for that.

Robusto

2:37 AM

@RegDwigнt What an amazing trick. I'm surprised he shared it with the world.

M.A.R.

7:11 AM

@Robusto Musicians don't want you to know it.

9:46 AM

@Cerberus oh, wonderful. At last I have found a use for my Twitter account.

I will tweet back "Well I'm a racist and I'm not leaving the network".

Though I didn't know that different genders were different races.

I learn so many things on SE.

@Cerberus Anyway. Can't really blame Chipps for that, that's her whole job.

It's a nice sociological study if nothing else.

People should read more Asimov.

Or read Asimov, period.

@Malavika bonjour.

Same old, same old.

A whole bunch of things. Even my business card doesn't know what to say.

Software development. Quality assurance. Web and graphic design. Translation and proofreading. Marketing.

Writing music and playing instruments.

Teaching. Instruments and everything else.

Heads-up: I'll be off the grid momentarily. Planned outage scheduled for in about twenty minutes.

10:08 AM

CU. come back soon

Well it's not up to me. They said twenty minutes, but you know how it goes.

You know how the saying goes. You gotta turn the power back on, you gotta do it yourself.

@Malavika Y a-t-il quelqu'un qui ne l'aime pas ?

@RegDwigнt sadly, yes

@MattE.Эллен it's like Thatcher's Britain all over again.

She didn't even make the coal mines run on time

@MattE.Эллен that, and she ran the UK as part of the EU. The horror.

Anyway I'm off.

10:56 AM

@Malavika Le piano, la guitare, le bayan, le violon, la grande flûte, le mbira.

2:47 PM

> I had a fight with a man on some moving stairs today... It started at the bottom and just escalated from there.

they started fighting each other's bottoms?

Gigili

@Cerberus You apologized for ignoring me, and you keep doing it afterwards.

3:25 PM

> Apparently this kind of thing is on the rise

> They took it up a level

@Mitch started from the bottom now we're here

@MattE.Эллен We should step away from it.

So moving I nearly cried

It elevates the spirit.

Cerberus

4:17 PM

@Gigili Then I must apologize again: if I failed to respond to a message of yours, I must have missed it.

In this room?

6:19 PM

@Malavika ah, mais c'est formidable, ça !

Je ne la connais bien du tout, moi. Bien fait.

@Robusto that sus chord you recommended really is quite a dream. Wear your gravatar with pride. And prost.

You know I'm wary of drawing comparisons. Because any comparison always tells you exactly nothing about the things being compared, and exactly everything about the person doing the comparing.

But with that caveat I do find it quite beethovian in spirit.

Like those speaking pauses in the Pathétique, mvt. 1.

And it is with the bar set just that high and not a bit lower that I'm off to drink vodka and write more music. Not necessarily in this order. But probably in this order.

Eddie

8:50 PM

Hey friends... looking for a quick once over on this sentence, I'm unsure whether I should use the word "mean" or "means" -- plural or singular:

> These four terms all refer to somewhat overlapping concepts. *As a result, some confusion has surfaced about what each of these terms actually **mean**,* and how they differ from each other

I feel "mean" sounds cleaner, but a friend claims it should be "means". Any thoughts?

9:01 PM

@Eddie in this case, notional concord is common and idiomatic. Still, the regular concord is preferable when in doubt.

In brief, ask yourself if you'd say "each one of these dogs are brown" or if you'd say what a load rubbish, that's clearly not English, it should be "each one of these dogs is brown" instead.

In the latter case, definitely use singular in your sentence. In the former case, use whatever you feel like using.

Eddie

@RegDwigнt That was most helpful. Thank you.

I had to look up "notional concord" and "regular concord" =)

@Eddie sure thing.

Regular concord is that you just look at the words. So a lot has to be singular. Always. Because it's a lot. One lot. So it must be a lot of people is. Never a lot of people are.

Notional concord is when you look at the meaning of the phrase as a whole, rather than that of the individual words it's comprised of. So a lot of people is clearly plural, even though it's just a lot. And so we say "a lot of people are" and not "a lot of people is".

Similarly for each.

Traditionally, each is clearly singular. Each person is. Not each person are.

@RegDwigнt rethinks entire existence

Joe Cocker - High Time We Went

However, notional concord has been creeping into this in the recent decades (or maybe centuries), so sometimes each is singular and other times it can be plural.

In your case, the singular is still preferable, and by quite a margin.

But plural is perfectly acceptable already, and will likely only become moreso in the future.

@Mitch high time you did.

Indeed I actually wrote a song about that.

Well. maybe Joe did. But in this day and age I can just claim authorship for whatever. Plus Joe is dead anyway.

9:51 PM

I've decided to write commas and periods inside the quotation marks, "the American way," instead of "the British way."

But now I have a doubt (a particular topic about which I feel uncertain).

What if I'm quoting something with a question mark, but I also want to use a comma?

Suppose I want to write what, in "the British way," would be written like so:

In the question "Who did it?", the "it" comes at the end.

I can think of several possible ways to write that "the American way," none of which I like.

I could leave out the comma:

In the question "Who did it?" the "it" comes at the end.

Or leave out the question mark:

In the question "Who did it," the "it" comes at the end.

@Malavika Mais alors, où est-ce que tu habites dans la Francophonie, toi ? Ça m'intéresse. Il n'y a pas que quelgues français dans cette salle de discussion la.

Use both a question mark and a comma??

In the question "Who did it?," the "it" comes at the end.

Use an en dash instead of a comma:

In the question "Who did it?" – the "it" comas at the end.

@TerranSwett as weird and rubbish as that looks to me, it looks to me just fine.

@TerranSwett nah, now you're pushing it.

Or revert to "the British way" in this particular case while sticking with "the American way" everywhere else.

The golden rule of dashes is, if you're not 101% sure you must use a dash, do not use it.

9:56 PM

@RegDwigнt To clarify, you're saying that the "Who did it?," solution looks weird and rubbish but also just fine?

Unless your wont is to come off as silly.

@TerranSwett yes that's what I'm saying yes.

With the comma after the closing quotation mark, mind.

I like dashes a lot—they're really versatile—they can be used anywhere—more or less.

I love dashes. My native language uses them a ton. Which is how I've become quite proficient in using them over the decades.

My personal favorite is an em dash immediately followed by a comma. You don't see a lot of those these days. I try to sneak them in everywhere I can.

Now, what I really want to do is put the comma under the quotation mark, or perhaps combine the comma with the question mark. Both of those would be easy if only I were writing my answer on a typewriter.

Well yes that's entering the realm of typography.

That's what you'd try and do in them Olden Days™.

10:01 PM

My favorite,—(which I admit I'm taking to an extreme here),—is when people use commas together with parentheses.

Well yes, that's overkill.

Speaking of which, I tried out an electric typewriter today.

I would typeset that as "My favourite — which I admit I'm taking to an extreme here —, is when..."

Though the comma is really quite unnecessary there to begin with.

@TerranSwett electric or eclectic?

Instructions unclear.

I used a lot of electric typewriters when I was working at a "copy shop", as they're called in Denglish.

It was really cool. It had an "auto return" feature, where, once you get close to the right margin, it automatically moves to the next line. You can just keep typing without worrying about hitting return whenever you hear the bell!

Yes yes yes. I am following.

10:04 PM

Such luxury!

inorite

Best thing ever.

It was definitely electric. It was not very eclectic.

This typewriter can make em dashes, although it's a bit of a pain.

One day in that copy shop I was typing on that non-eclectic typewriter and suddenly it got freaking dark outside and "arse-cold" as they say in German.

You just press [-] [bksp] [half sp] [-] [bksp] [half sp] [-].

klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse

It was a total eclipse of the Sun.

10:06 PM

Interesante.

I have to go run some errands right now so you go watch that video in the mean time. Worth it.

\o

By the way, I found that the typewriter can type readable—although reasonably ugly—Polish.

Klaus Nomi - Total Eclipse 1981 Live Video HD

No wait, that's a rubbish link. Use this one instead.

Ah. The marvels of HD.

1981, no less.

You can type ą and ę by overstriking with a comma, and ć, ń, ó, ś, and ź by overstriking with an apostrophe.

I didn't try to type ż or ł.

Александр Градский - Как молоды мы были

@TerranSwett I hear you. These days it's just a nodeadkeys=yes.

@TerranSwett True story time: that was my very first job on the side as a translator.

I would be working in that copy shop, photocopying shit for people — and we're not talking "shit" as in "stuff", we're talking "shit" as in "shit" —, and that one elderly gentleman would come in and ask me to translate into German a book of Armenian jokes that he had in Russian.

And he'd give me like a week's worth time.

And I would just translate them on-the-fly, using that non-eclectic typewriter — and even if I had made a mistake or had thought of a better wording, I'd just press backspace a couple times and type it anew, and only once I'd pressed Enter it would actually type it. And he'd pay me 50 Deutschmarks a-page.

So much money for so little effort.

No effort whatsoever, indeed.

Good times.

Alas.

How young we used to be.

musescore.com/user/27897310/scores/5625083