English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-08-02

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Captain Bohemian

04:57

I think women are more flexible than men.

2

women can be seen in a variety of profession.

but men are absent in some kinds of professions.

men are only better in physical force.

but now machines have replaced human force in works requiring strong physical force.

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

07:19

> record, reproduce on any medium (including paper, electronic and other media), store, edit (including with the use of photo/video editing programs) the original materials, create derivative materials, adapt the original and derivative materials to the selected media.

I think that there should be no the here. It's a clause from an agreement.

Because the actual media are not mentioned in the document. The meaning is, "the media that the company might select on its own choosing in the future"

Xanne

@CowperKettle I’m inclined to agree with you, especially if this is what’s forbidden rather than allowed. I am wondering why there’s no and or or before the last part.

CowperKettle

07:43

@Xanne Because in Russian it is common usage to omit conjunctions before the last phrase in a list.

Translators often carry this usage over into English

Xanne

08:00

@CowperKettle Okay, thanks.

KannE

08:18

@CaptainBohemian Wet nurse...birth-control pill tester... I dunno.

M.A.R.

08:36

@CowperKettle I think both versions have some subtle differences in nuance, but are correct

But if the translator firm requires you to rule lawyer sentences, the no-article version is perhaps seen in better light

CowperKettle

09:00

user image

M.A.R.

09:21

@CaptainBohemian Eh, I think rightfully or not, it's the opposite. Count how many professions are "male-dominated", and how many are female-dominated.

So if that's the definition you use for flexibility, I don't have the numbers but the conclusion seems very wrong

I think if we agree that there is a difference, it'd most likely be what the society dictates each gender to be like that determines most of it.

4 hours later…

CowperKettle

13:06

You know what's really odd? Numbers not divisible by two.

@CaptainBohemian I think women are more feminine than men.

Mitch

Calm down everyone or I'll have to freeze the room.

Robusto

@Mitch Cowperkettle was making dad jokes without a license. Why should the rest of us have to suffer for his infractions?

CowperKettle

13:25

user image

A joke about the Belarusian president.

Belarus is considered the Land of Potato

The potato is very popular there.

Hence a lot of jokes about Belarusians and potatoes

tchrist

@CowperKettle "Idaho – Famous Potatoes"

> Q: How can you tell if someone in Idaho is married?
A: The tobacco spit stains are on both sides of his pickup truck.

> Q: Did you hear that the governor's mansion in Idaho burned down?
A: Almost took out the whole trailer park.

> Q: Why did Idaho raise the minimum drinking age to 25?
A: They wanted to keep alcohol out of the high schools!

Jokes such as these, mutatis mutandis, are forever repeated about every community demographic that another group, or sometimes that group itself, wishes to "make fun" of.

However, no other place has a joke whose one-word punchline is Idaho.

2 hours later…

Captain Bohemian

15:38

@M.A.R. I think it's only fair to determine flexibility of women and men when there is no marriage because marriage is a great burden to women.

when more and more people don't get married, the flexibility of men and women get clearer and clearer.

tchrist

16:05

@CaptainBohemian In what regard is marriage a great burden to women?

Captain Bohemian

@tchrist women need to give birth to children and take rest after birth and take care of children; that's the reason married women don't usually take too time-consuming professions.

tchrist

It's rather easier to do all that within marriage than without.

So what you mean is that childbirth and childcare are a great burden to women, no?

Captain Bohemian

but men can't do those.

so men can find professions they are really more interested in whether those professions take more time or not.

if a woman spends too much time in child care, the professions she can choose is limited.

tchrist

@CaptainBohemian Men can't do childcare?

Captain Bohemian

@tchrist men can't be pregnant.

tchrist

16:15

Though they too seldom do so, men are surely physically capable of taking care of children.

@CaptainBohemian That’s my view and I’m sticking to it.

Captain Bohemian

being pregnant limits women from doing too time-consuming professions.

tchrist

Like?

What sort of professions?

Captain Bohemian

that depends on women.

but I think being pregnant makes a woman subject to fatigue and discomfort so that they can't spend as much time as they are not pregnant.

but how much that affects a woman depends on individuals.

I don't know much about childcare, but I find it's mostly women who take care of very young children.

I don't know if men can take care of very young children.

also, all nurses in baby's rooms in hospitals are female. I have never seen a male nurses.

probably men are not good at care.

tchrist

They can, yes sure. But it's not especially common. In days of old they'd have a wet nurse.

Captain Bohemian

16:31

I have only seen male nursing students in my undergraduate school.

but have never seen even one single male nurse.

tchrist

Oh I see them all the time.

It's perfectly common here.

But I don't know how many work OP-GYN though; that's rather focused.

Captain Bohemian

I have seen more and more female doctors but still haven't seen a male nurse.

tchrist

And another thing. Just as there are women who are more COMFORTABLE with female nurses assisting the physician during delivery, so too are there men who are more comfortable have a male nurse assisting the physician conducting a colonoscopy.

There are things that a 6'4 hospital nurse can do more easily by himself than a 5'1 nurse can do by herself.

> Historically, the majority of the nursing workforce has always been female. However, the number of men choosing nursing as a career has been increasing in recent years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau: While 3.2 million (91 percent) nurses are female, only 330,000 (9 percent) are male.

Here's the thing: this is a completely cultural matter. You can see this by comparing the sex ratio in nursing from one American state to the next.

Putting them all in one big all-fifty-state statistic hides great differences.

M.A.R.

So what's the point here? Banish marriage and doom humankind so accurate flexibility values are known?

tchrist

The point is that I don't believe you should be conflating marriage with childbirth.

Let alone with childcare.

M.A.R.

16:42

How about we stop treating taking care of children as an 'inferior' job? As a Middle Eastern, it always baffled me

tchrist

That's a very different thing, and of great importance.

M.A.R.

@tchrist I do think more children are being taken care of by women than by men, but this doesn't say much of men's capability just as not taking many diverse jobs says much of women's.

tchrist

Who do you think gets paid more, the auto mechanic who works on your imported brand car, or the guy who teaches your children second grade?

M.A.R.

And it's rather cultural I guess.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Yes, they certainly are.

Women can get married and not have children. Women can have children and not get married.

M.A.R.

16:45

Yeah, no argument there

tchrist

Historically neither has been well regarded.

Raising a family takes a crazy amount of work.

Captain Bohemian

our country has fewer and fewer children.

M.A.R.

No argument there

tchrist

You don't get the same kind of family when both parents are always away at some 40–60 hour job or career.

M.A.R.

@CaptainBohemian That's evidently a bad thing objectively.

Captain Bohemian

16:47

then more and and women in our country appear in a variety of professions.

M.A.R.

Yes, and families also have fewer mouths to feed. It has its own positive side effects. But it's a bad thing in general.

tchrist

Young guy I work with was raised by an at-home art-critic dad, while his mother had the high-paying dayjob.

He's ok. :)

Captain Bohemian

in the long past the typical job for a woman was homemakers, which is not a real employment, but nowadays very few women are homemakers.

M.A.R.

Both my parents have a full-time job

I consider myself mostly OK

👼

This emoji looks weird.

tchrist

The Hurricane That Dares Not Speak Its Name is causing no end of conniption in radio and TV news and weather reports right now.

> 1 [aɪ̯ˈzaɪ̯.əz]
2 [ɪˈzʌɪ̯s]
3 [ˌi.zɐ.ˈi.ɐʃ]
4 [i.s̺äˈi.äs̺]
5 [aɪ̯ˈze̞.jəs]
6 [iˈzeɪ̯.əz]
7 [ʌɪ̯ˈs̠eɪ̯.əz]
8 [aɪ̯ˈzeɪ̯.əz]
9 [ʌɪ̯ˈs̠aɪ̯.əz]
10 [ˌi.za.ˈi.ɐs]

It's all because they retired Ivan last time around, and this time picked a name that isn't English.

So nobody can guess how to say it. The poor spelling habits don't help.

Captain Bohemian

16:54

I used to see my professors pregnant going to give lecture for us when in undergraduate school.

tchrist

Sure.

Captain Bohemian

I don't understand how they can do that. I feel that's very difficult for me.

M.A.R.

@tchrist Isays

tchrist

@M.A.R. That would have been easier. Or Isaac.

Esaw.

It’s Isaías but nobody writes the accent mark in English, which leaves you with something you can't figure out how to say.

ee sah EEEEEEEEE ahs

First two syllables almost rhyme with see-saw.

@M.A.R. I says, you says, he says would be so much easier. :)

I don't know why they even had Ivan in the mix of hurricane names to begin with. Anybody could have told you that one would prove to be Terrible.

M.A.R.

Jun 27 '17 at 14:55, by user288256

@MetaEd You were right yesterday, your practice with making dad jokes is showing.

tchrist

17:09

You know it's a bad sign when a sexual predator names his baby girl I wanna.

Let alone when she’s I wanna junior.

Like our current First Daughter.

M.A.R.

You and Robusto should have a standoff

Captain Bohemian

@tchrist I don't know if I would be scared if I encounter a male nurse to take care of me one day.

tchrist

@CaptainBohemian Scared of what?

Captain Bohemian

17:25

@tchrist I feel male doctors are indifferent, not genial, so I am afraid male nurse may be that way, too.

tchrist

Nurses have to be nurses.

Not surgeons.

They have to be caring.

Captain Bohemian

being caring takes patience, I think.

CowperKettle

@CaptainBohemian Yes, pregnancy has a major effect on the whole organism, and on the brain. And women also have their periods, with the associated hormonal changes. It's tough.

Women have a lot more years lost due to depression than men.

Captain Bohemian

I feel some medical administrator pretends to be genial though I am not sure if my feeling is correct.

CowperKettle

user image

> GBD 2010, a major set of studies

I'm translating these images into Russian right now, I mean the related bits of the text

MDD stands for "major depressive disorder"

@tchrist It took me a while to understand. Ivanna ))

tchrist

17:38

@CowperKettle Terriblette.

@CowperKettle And dysthemia stands for minor depressive disorder. :)

If only the First Daughter added the nickname "Will" to the front of her name, she could be Willy Wonka.

CowperKettle

> Dysthymia, also known as persistent depressive disorder (PDD), is a mood disorder consisting of the same cognitive and physical problems as depression, but with longer-lasting symptoms.

I haven't read a lot about dysthymia.

I'm afraid there are too many diagnoses heaped in the DSM. I'm not sure that in real-life practice doctors really distinguish between dysthymia and MDD

Gigili

17:54

@CowperKettle You're lucky to have other people here answering your questions all the time.

CowperKettle

18:12

@Gigili That's why I joined StackExchange in the first place, to ask questions.

I've also asked on lang-8, on two Russian communities, on Proz.com, in a Facebook community, and in several translation chats in VK and Telegram.

Captain Bohemian

I wonder if surgery has other meaning than medical operation.

I read These unique outcomes reveal which corrective surgery, if any, needs to be performed — an operation that flips back the first, second or third physical qubit without collapsing the logical qubit.

CowperKettle

The main thing you learn when you are a translator is that you will always stumble upon things that you don't understand, and that no matter how hard you try, you will make mistakes all the time.

All the stuff written on translation companies' websites about impeccant proofreading and expert translators is bullshit if ever bullshit there was.

Crew Demo-2 Splashdown

Crew Dragon will be entering the atmosphere in several minutes.

tchrist

18:45

Palestrina: Osculetur me - Sixteen

That's quite nice, no? But this is almost haunting in its clarity.

CHANTICLEER: Nigra Sum Sed Formosa - Tomás Luis de Victoria

Lots more canticles to go from that book.

Spicy.

That "Nigra sum sed formosa filiae Ierusalem" always struck me as strange with the "sed" there. "Black am I BUT beautiful".

Sure I'm black but hey I'm pretty.

Of course it really just mean "dark" there, not what we think of as well whatever we do these days.

Palestrina: Adjuro vos - Sixteen

CowperKettle

I don't understand - in the Crew Dragon broadcast, the commentators said something like "spacedads are back". I'm not sure I heard it right. Spacedads? Spaceduds?

tchrist

@CowperKettle I hope it's dads not duds.

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle Yeah, Spacedads

tchrist

thewalkingicon - Dead Heart (official video)

Lavi pedes meos, quomodo inquinabo illos?

Mitch

19:10

@CaptainBohemian That sounds like a very metaphorical usage. 99.999% of uses are for medical interventions.

Captain Bohemian

@Mitch oh, great. then next time I can also create my metaphors even if I have never seen others using the ways as I do.

Gigili

19:33

@CowperKettle Not in the chat room, you wouldn't expect native speakers answering your questions everyday, in details.

tchrist

Most of us aren't just native speakers.

Gigili

Yeah.

Some are even heritage speakers.

tchrist

Most of us are polyglots to one or another degree. Many of are also translators, whether full or part time, at our job now or in a previous life. And almost all of us know all kinds of funky things about English.

Gigili

Precisely my point.

M.A.R.

OK, I'm not liking where this is going.

tchrist

19:38

You could also go hang out with a bunch of teenaged video gamers from South Dakota, too, and those would nearly all of them be native speakers of English, or at least fluent ones.

M.A.R.

@tchrist lul wat u mean flew int

tchrist

But nuanced questions about putting the context needed for translation of subtle shades of meaning and connotation in English prose may be less well received there than here, or at least less fully answered.

M.A.R.

Makes me wonder, have the square-shaped state borders caused any problems?

tchrist

Do you mean those with ninety-degree angles?

It's hard to stand in more than two states at a time at the Four Corners.

M.A.R.

Uh, rectangular? Hard to say with Earth being round and stuff

tchrist

19:41

You have to go down on all fours and plant one paw in each.

M.A.R.

Well, as far as I know, there are state-specific laws, some very polarizing ones too, so I'd guess people have used funny looking borders to their advantage if they could at one time or another

tchrist

Q: Do Colorado and Arizona share a border between them?
A: Yes.

Q: How long is that border?
A: Illegal division by zero, segmentation violation, core dumped.

M.A.R.

Yeah that's just weird

tchrist

Why might right angles prove problematic in some fashion peculiar to that angle?

M.A.R.

How accurate are these things? I have no idea. Like if part of a tree is from one state and the other part in another

Gigili

19:44

On a side note, there was a protest here and not a single one of them wore mask.

Yet they report the infection ratio is nearly zero.

M.A.R.

@tchrist Not the right angle per se, just that, as opposed to states with irregular looking borders, which I assume are so because the properties of the land are taken into account, specific shapes would entail that stuff wasn't taken into account

tchrist

@M.A.R. How accurate are they? When the law or treaty spells out particular meridians and parallels, they are theoretically as accurate as hyperbolic trigonometry on a oblate spheroid of imprecise squishening allows.

And yes, it's perfectly possible for one building to lie in two states, and not altogether uncommon.

You have no straight lines?

What poor geometers your people then!

Sometimes there are curious jigs and jogs carved out by the law.

M.A.R.

@tchrist Only one or two I think, but they're in the middle of them big deserts

tchrist

Oh I've heard about all those Nascar lines in the desert.

M.A.R.

We trained Lightning McQueen, you got all the big bucks from the movie

Gigili

19:50

I hate it when this blue thing is present here.

M.A.R.

Thank you, anything for my fans.

tchrist

It's one thing to say that Iowa is separated from Wisconsin and Illinois by the Mississippi River.

M.A.R.

Part of our border with Iraq is the river Arvand, that also makes sense and I think is too common

tchrist

It's quite another to say that Iowa is separated from Minnesota by an exact "straight line" at the parallel running along this or that degrees of latitude.

It's much easier to move the first one. :)

M.A.R.

So which one do they say, or are all of the straight lines through rivers and stuff?

So if a farmer has this big land in two or three states, which state's law must they abide by?

tchrist

19:54

The straight borders are defined by degree/minute/second of latitude or longitude.

M.A.R.

Ah

tchrist

> In 1787 the US Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which created the northwest territory of the US, known today as the "Midwest".

At that time, territories that wanted to request statehood from Congress were required to have a population of at least 60,000. In the original plans of the Northwest Ordinance, the northern border for the Illinois territory was a continuation of the Indiana-Michigan border (see map below).

In order to get to a population of 60,000, the Illinois representative Nathaniel Pope convinced Congress to move the border north by 31 miles, which would include a l…

The line dividing Michigan and Indiana was supposed to continue west to separate Wisconsin and Illinois, but then Illinois would lose Chicago and not qualify for statehood as early.

user image

And there was the matter of Michigan stealing most our northern coastline, jerks.

After all, it's *our Upper Peninsula, not theirs.

It's attached to Wisconsin not to Michigan. Hence it should be called the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin. Thieves.

Mitch

@CaptainBohemian Of course, fluency and nuance and esthetic skill play a large part in how well received any metaphorical usage might be.

Anything does not actually go.

ha ha

see what I did there?

tchrist

The Toledo War (1835–36), also known as the Great Toledo War, the Michigan-Ohio War or the Ohio-Michigan War, was an almost bloodless boundary dispute between the U.S. state of Ohio and the adjoining territory of Michigan. Poor geographical understanding of the Great Lakes helped produce conflicting state and federal legislation between 1787 and 1805, and varying interpretations of the laws led the governments of Ohio and Michigan to both claim jurisdiction over a 468-square-mile (1,210 km2) region along the border, now known as the Toledo Strip. The situation came to a head when Michigan...

Somehow Michigan and Ohio went to war, and the resolution was to steal part of Wisconsin. Never understood any of that.

> In exchange for ceding the Toledo Strip, all of what is now known as the Upper Peninsula was included within Michigan's bounds when it was admitted into the Union in 1837 (only the easternmost portion of the peninsula had been claimed in Michigan's 1835 statehood petition).

Mitch

@tchrist funky is when you use a feather; funkAY is when you use the whole chicken.

tchrist

20:07

The thievin' bastards.

Mitch

@tchrist But you can surely sit in all four at once

...wait for em...I'm still gong through the feed...

tchrist

user image

^^^^ Now that's some nation-sized thievin' for ya.

Captain Bohemian

@Mitch where?

tchrist

user image

Just look at how little Baja California used to be compared with Alta!

Mitch

@M.A.R. The Mississippi, a large sinusoidal river, changes local course often. Its course is in a wide flat flood plain, maybe 50- 100 miles from source to way up north past Illinois. The little loops sometimes get cut off in big floods, or the loop sort of slowly shifts downstream.

So since the borders of some states were made in the 1800's, pieces of one state are now on the other side of the river and only accessible from another state.

YAY TRIVIA!!

Ask me another!

Go on!!

@CaptainBohemian In the sentence just previous to where I said 'ha ha'.

It was clever.

Trust me.

tchrist

20:17

@Mitch O Canada!

Mitch

When somebody says 'trust me', you should trust them.

tchrist

Point Roberts, Washington

Point Roberts is a pene-exclave of the United States on the southernmost tip of the Tsawwassen peninsula, south of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The area, which had a population of 1,314 at the 2010 census, is reached by land by traveling 25 mi (40 km) through Canada. It is a census-designated place in Whatcom County, Washington with a post office, and a ZIP Code of 98281. Direct sea and air connections with the U.S. are available across Boundary Bay. Point Roberts was created when the United Kingdom and the United States settled the Pacific Northwest American-Canadian border dispute in...

Mitch

@tchrist Or province? I thought Lake in the Woods or whatever that weird little ...

oh

tchrist

I'll let you figure out pene-exclave on your own.

Mind the zipper.

Mitch

Oh so its sort of an American Gibraltar.

Sort of.

tchrist

20:20

Since the longest unguarded border in the world is now impermeable, those people are spared the mobs of Americaner trafficking they're used to having in the summer.

> The acceptance of the 49th parallel as the international boundary was concluded without precise knowledge of its effects. Later, as the Boundary Commission surveyed the line, the British government realized the peninsula of Point Roberts would be an isolated part of the United States.

> The British Foreign Office instructed Captain James Prevost, the British Boundary Commissioner, to inform his U.S. counterpart of the situation and request Point Roberts be left to Britain, because of the great inconvenience it would be to the United States.

Mitch

@tchrist Unguarded? I'm sure there's at least one poor guy walking along, just to make sure.

tchrist

@M.A.R. So that's the answer to your question. We wind up with circumcised penes exclave.

Er circumscribed.

> If the American Boundary Commission was reluctant, Prevost was instructed to offer "some equivalent compensation by a slight alteration of the Line of Boundary on the Mainland". It is not known how the U.S. commissioner responded, but Point Roberts became part of the United States.

So it got cut off anyway.

Mitch

@M.A.R. Be circumspect about @tchrist's circumlocutionary circumfulgence..

tchrist

Pure circumstition, I tell you!

Mitch

@tchrist But kudos on that tidbit. Now placed in my trivia hidey-hole to impress the chicks at partAY's

haha I came here to say something totally different

Data science shenanigans with NYT word frequencies

That's my title. The gist is that all the weird problems with Google NGrams that we (ELUites) have with their word frequency #'s apply to Lexus/Nexis and any word frequency thing. @Robusto

tchrist

20:32

@M.A.R. Weren't there "countries" made up of random straight lines of zero meaning when the various colonial mandates and protectorates that followed the fall of the Ottoman Turks and the divvying up of the spoils of war?

Robusto

@Mitch Why are you k'plunking me? I was trying to have a nap.

Færd

21:06

user image

(a version of the "strong dog vs weak dog" meme)

Robusto

21:37

user image

Captain Bohemian

21:50

@Mitch then I will metaphorize my original home city as Syria.

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Aug '202

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