English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

3:30 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive body detected, toxic body detected (103): what's the origin of this expression recorded in Louisiana 1867 by Rusty Brooklyn on english.SE

SmokeDetector

3:51 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in link text in body, potentially bad ip for hostname in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body, potentially bad keyword in body, blacklisted user (143): Should you miss the goal too far to the right or left, your shot will overlook in that way by Dingbest on english.SE

Wes

5:07 AM

I bought shiny, ripe apples; small, sweet, juicy grapes; firm pears; et-cetera.

I was taught that multiple semicolon in the same sentence are bad; looks like they are not. That was another language, however.

Does that sentence read fine for you?, including the final "; et-cetera."

KannE

5:43 AM

@Mitch No, it is. I'm tired of learning simple things in my old age. When will all this end? Someone overcomplicated my youth on purpose, I think.

KannE

5:55 AM

@Mitch - The context is the origin part of Oxford Languages. I looked up caterwaul to see if waul was onomatopoeic (a word I must google for spelling every time), and lo and behold, it is imitative. So I looked up imitative, and you could've knocked me over with a feather (#2 means just that; well, fizz or blob, sound or sight). And echoic? That's another story altogether.

KannE

6:23 AM

@M.A.R. - I mean why not comment first at least? But some things just get on your nerves. Why talk about independent/dependant if you can't identify a subject? It's like me discussing climate change even though it's always 90 degrees here... Just annoying gets a downvote from me, evidently. Sorry, some of us are broken people.

*dependant ^ dependent

I prefer dependant. I don't know why.

@M.A.R. - I help care for my 91 y/o FIL. His hobby is gardening, a terraced garden... It's terrifying. And he has an aversion to electolytes and hats, or skin cancer prevention in general. Tea would be nice. I'd pay for that. Grandmas are the best.

M.A.R.

6:41 AM

@KannE I wouldn't be so quick to judge. On places like SO (ELU might be just big enough for that to happen here too) commenters that have tried to help the OP rather than voting and moving on have often been met with hostility. People get conditioned into not commenting on their votes anymore, because absolutely everything pisses off absolutely everyone these days. Maybe that's called "broken" shrug

Faheem Mitha

@M.A.R. I think people have a tendency to think things were better back then.

Of course, the internet didn't exist "back then".

KannE

I meant electrolytes. And I was actually paid to test urine... Nothing prevents my typos.

KannE

7:09 AM

@M.A.R. - What does SO stand for? Well, months ago, this lady was standing right behind me, instead of on her spot, so I said, "No offense, but I care for an elderly person..." And during that exchange the lady in front of me moved up a spot, so the lady behind me said that I was on the wrong spot... Some people have BPD; they were traumatized, presumably, so it's our fault. Everything is, somehow.

M.A.R.

@FaheemMitha Back when? The current polarized climate did not exist at some point, and will not in a short or long while. I understand and try to steer clear of golden age fallacy. But many things are much better today than they have ever been and many things are much worse or in a cycle.

My impression is it's much easier than ever to find things to be pissed off at with all the networking that has existed for merely a couple of decades and the vocal minorities taking a turn at the mic.

It's easier to find kindness too for sure, but negative experiences trump positive ones.

KannE

I told my kids that life is hard, sucks a lot, but it's worthwhile b/c they'll be able to squeeze some good from it, really good, but not much. So they're actually content most of the time b/c they weren't really expecting anything, and sometimes it's pretty amazing.

M.A.R.

In the years to come, obviously someone's gonna start a movement and put a leash on (social) technology and AI. We're not there yet, so we're suffering the unhinged-ness of the internet.

@KannE I think there is a lot of hidden good that we take for granted. Many people's lives contain much more good if squeezed than you'd expect

But yeah, not expecting anything is an important life lesson

One of THE life lessons I guess.

Faheem Mitha

7:32 AM

@M.A.R. I guess I was speaking generally. I didn't have anything particular in mind.

@M.A.R. I wouldn't count on it. Not if it serves the needs of the elite.

KannE

@M.A.R. - We were really grateful for Sesame Street (and shows that followed) b/c our parents were deaf. Deaf people were really grateful for CC and texting. We were really grateful for Walmart b/c we could afford things that we couldn't before (e.g., my daughter's Easy-Bake Oven was $25; 25 years later, my granddaughter's was only $9). You could buy 4 giant hula hoops and 4 candy bars for $5, really; so that was that.

Faheem Mitha

I personally think the Internet on balance is a pretty major plus. I remember the world before it, and wouldn't want to go back. But it's much abused and misused.

The fact that Net Neutrality is under constant attack is already a pretty good indicator of the way the wind is blowing

But it's an enormous plus to be able to find information so easily. Before it used to be much, much harder. If not impossible.

@KannE Stack Overflow.

Færd

How many words originating from Arabic here? :)

So the admiral left the arsenal and lay down on a mattress beside the sofa under an alcove made of adobe while reading a book on chemistry. He covered himself with a cotton blanket, but when he got tired, he tried to decipher another book on algebra while eating an apricot—or was it a tangerine? It certainly was not an artichoke or spinach. Silly man, he had too much alcohol. But drinking coffee from the carafe helped clear his head. Just then a passing child asked for some candy; so he put his hand in the jar but all he found was loose sugar…

The text is nonsense, I know.

It's from Crusade and Jihad, by William R. Polk.

Captain Bohemian

hunger is so difficult to solve

Faheem Mitha

@Færd Algebra, for one.

Captain Bohemian

7:47 AM

it haunts so frequently that there is so sufficient time to get food

Faheem Mitha

@Færd This is an actual novel?

Færd

@FaheemMitha Oh no, it's a history book. This passage is devised to exemplify English words of Arabic origin.

@FaheemMitha One down, X to go.

Hint: X>10

Xanne

8:13 AM

@Færd I’d guess all the nouns are Arabic in origin, or they wouldn’t be there.

Plus a few verbs.

Admiral, arsenal, mattress, sofa, adobe, chemistry, cotton, blanket,tired, decipher, apricot, artichoke, spinach, candy, jar, sugar.

Also alcohol, coffee, carafe.

Tangerine (lemon).

Most of them seem to have come via Spanish or Latin.

Not Arabic: chemistry, tired.

Færd

8:39 AM

@Xanne Nice!

Chemistry has passed through Arabic as well.

But it's originally from Greek, I think.

Xanne

@Færd When do you figure the Arabic-origin words mixed with the Indo-European?

Færd

There were some translations from Greek at the dawn of the Islamic era, and later some translations from Arabic to European languages.

I'd need to look up the details in order to be accurate.

And there were Crusades and Jihads that lead to more lending and borrowing.

BTW I think blanket is not from Arabic.

Gigili

@Robusto At your service! I love being helpful.

Færd

Influence of Arabic on other languages

Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries visited by Islam or Islamic power. Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for languages as diverse as Amharic, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chaldean, Chechen, Croatian, Dagestani, Dari, English, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Malaysian, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romanian, Saraiki...

Xanne

So as of 700 A.D. (or C.E.) there is mixing . . .

But even earlier . . . Silk Road etc.

It makes me doubt the whole P.I.E. stuff.

Someone on ELU wanted examples of texts in P.I.E. . .

Færd

8:54 AM

lol

Indo-Semitic languages

The Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship exists between Indo-European and Semitic and that the Indo-European and the Semitic language families descend from a prehistoric language ancestral to them both. The theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times, but historically it has had a number of supporting advocates and arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. == History of the term and of the idea == The term "Indo-Semitic" was first used by Graziadio Ascoli (Cuny 1943:1), a leading advocate of this relationship. Although this...

Xanne

And how it was pronounced, of course.

Færd

> The theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times

Xanne

Interesting; I didn’t know that, or that there were alternatives.

M.A.R.

CowperKettle

9:11 AM

How I'm Handling Online Teaching (Original Video)

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Xanne

9:25 AM

There seems to be an effort to discover a language commonly spoken that later diverged, instead of an assumption that language was developed independently by many peoples.

Presumably the Asians or Polynesians who went to the Western hemisphere had language.

Mayan, Aztec, Inca, Navaho, other indigenous American . . .Of course there was some book burning along the way . . . and some similarities in indigenous N. American, or Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have been able to depend on their female translator, who seemed to communicate quite widely.

The language of isolated groups seems to diverge rather quickly (a few generations).

Different writing systems obscure similarities and tend, perhaps, to lock in differences among languages or exacerbate them.

CowperKettle

9:50 AM

I wonder if there are dashcams with automatic license plate capture. Meaning, cameras that automatically zoom in and capture each passing license plate.

I was reading a news report on a local site about a car accident, and the dashcam footage there was not clear enough to read the license plate of a passing truck that caused the accident.

So I wondered that maybe there are specialized dashcams with a couple of separate cameras, one for the general capture, one solely for tracking each license plate and capturing it in high resolution.

After all, these days we have smartphones with three cameras, why not dashcams.

Xanne

@CowperKettle I think these all exist, but not everyone has them.

Mitch

12:57 PM

@KannE I remember it via: O-O-A...O-O-A

plus some weird e and i mixed in at the end like oesophagus.

@Færd contemporary -and- modern times? Who writes these things?

Oh.

Right.

Nevermind.

Luyw

1:15 PM

Hello!

by "What is the probability that a week (7 days) passes till the event that exactly 3 computers failing the same day occurs?", do you understand that the event happens on the 8th or 7th day?

Robusto

@Luyw Think of a week as a zero-based array of days. One week later is the day after the seventh element of the array of days passes, so it would be the eighth day.

Luyw

thank you, @Robusto :)

Robusto

Actually, I misspoke. A week is a one-based array of days. The first element is the first day, the seventh element is the seventh day, and then you need another 7-element array.

But the outcome is the same. The first element of the second array is the eighth element overall.

RegDwigнt

1:34 PM

Some stunning photos from Germany ca. 1945-1949:
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/deutschland-nach-dem-zweiten-weltkrieg-bildband-wolfszeit-a-d467fc48-2d4b-42a5-bdbd-bd663950e5e0

The caption to this one reads, a German officer captured by GIs on March 2nd, 1945, in the ruins of the city I'm in right now. And I indeed very much recognize that church top.

Færd

@Mitch people, I guess!

Mitch

1:53 PM

@RegDwigнt Weren't the allies much further east by March 2nd? Oh... they were. the photo was taken some time -after- the 2nd.

But the allies really bombed the crap out of that town.

Robusto

2:09 PM

My uncle might have been involved in that. He flew 35 missions in a B-24 as a bombardier.

He said the famous Norden bombsight, which was a fiercely protected secret, was actually not as accurate as everyone was led to believe.

RegDwigнt

@Mitch shrug. What do I know. But if you're not liking that photo, I will be happy to provide an alternative.

Robusto

There was a lot of collateral damage.

RegDwigнt

Robusto

@CowperKettle: What does "Putin khynlo" mean (graffiti from your Strava pix)?

CowperKettle

2:36 PM

@Robusto "Putin is a dickhead" (Путин хуйло), it was a soccer chant invented by Ukrainians in 2014, and it has spread quite widely.

@Robusto There is a tongue-in-cheek Russian song "Putin, hello!" (which sounds a lot like Putin khuilo). The song tells how all peoples of the world admire Putin and give a "Hello" shout out to him.

Although you can guess from the song's lyrics, with all the exaggerations and innuendos, what the author intended.

Here's the song.

Михаил Новицкий - Путин Hello

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I like this singer a lot.

The song is very funny.

Another great song by him is Путин, лыжи, Магадан (Putin, skis, Magadan) - meaning that we should equip Putin with skis and send him skiing to Magadan, a far-off northern region where penal colonies are located.

Михаил Новицкий. Путин, лыжи, Магадан. Прогулка 20 мая.

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I just love it.

Magadan

Magadan (Russian: Магадан, IPA: [məɡɐˈdan]) is a port town and the administrative center of Magadan Oblast, Russia, located on the Sea of Okhotsk in Nagayev Bay (within Taui Bay) and serving as a gateway to the Kolyma region. Population: 95,982 (2010 Census); 99,399 (2002 Census); 151,652 (1989 Census). == History == Magadan was founded in 1930 in the Magadanka River valley, near the settlement of Nagayevo. During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit center for prisoners sent to labor camps. From 1932 to 1953, it was the administrative center of the Dalstroy organization—a vast and brutal...

During the Stalin era, Magadan was a major transit center for prisoners sent to labor camps.

M.A.R.

2:52 PM

@RegDwigнt What, what does Chaldea have to do with Trump?

CowperKettle

3:25 PM

@Robusto My grandfather flew bombing missions over Germany, likely over Berlin, in the summer of 1941, although these missions were a drop in the bucket and did not achieve much. It was possible to fly them because for some time the airbases in the Baltic remained uncaptured by the Nazis.

After the Germans captured the Baltic, he was in an encirclement for some time, I'm not sure though.

After that, he was hauling American Lend-Lease planes from the Far East.

And then he became Head of the fuels-and-oils service in some military division that advanced West.

When taking part in some shipment over Lake Balaton in the spring of 1945, about a month before victory in Europe, he got under a bombing raid by Germans, or maybe under shelling, and lost one eye. Thus he spent the Victory Day in hospital.

Mitch

4:00 PM

@Robusto I think 'collateral' is ...not the most accurate word for it. As the allies pushed west through Germany towards Berlin, the allies heavily bombed civilian parts of cities in advance. I don't know how common it was but I've heard stories of intentional strafing of row houses to get people into the streets, and then on a second pass the streets were strafed.

I don't know the timing of that, if it was only during the rush to Berlin, or if it happened during bombing of German cities before D-Day.

CowperKettle

Strafing? I thought that Allies only bombed from high altitude, because losses were very high due to flak.

> The findings were more disturbing in New York where an astounding 19 percent of respondents felt Jews caused the Holocaust; followed by 16 percent in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Montana and 15 percent in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico.

claimscon.org/millennial-study

I'm not a statistician though and haven't read in-depth.

Mitch

@CowperKettle That's what the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and other big city bombings were like. The strafing part was stories I heard about as 'preparing' German cities for occupation just ahead of the infantry as the Allies came from the west into Germany.

CowperKettle

4:22 PM

I'm sure that Allies committed war crimes. I hope there were not many instances of deliberate strafing of civilians.

War always involves war crimes. The Soviets did their share too.

Cerberus

They did deliberately target civilian neighbourhoods.

The idea was to kill as much of the population as possible, in order to break German morale, and reduce the labour pool.

Neither of which worked.

Luckily, current military doctrine is completely different now, among the great powers (or so I believe).

CowperKettle

Yes, they did during the so called area bombing.

Because bombing was so imprecise that they thought it better to just bomb the densest accumulations of people than try bombing any standalone targets.

Mitch

@CowperKettle In my superficial googling, I couldn't find any confirmation of this. Lots of film of strafing of airfields and trains. Nothing about civilians in the streets.

But I'm fairly certain that the someone who told me this had it from some documentary.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle It was also a purposeful strategy, as I said above.

CowperKettle

In the midst of a war it was hard to oppose this. "Let's not bomb German cities" would have evoked some strong reaction towards you.

Or maybe there were proposals not to bomb cities in the press? I wonder.

Cerberus

4:42 PM

At first, the Americans opposed it.

Only late in the war was it done en masse.

Churchill found it was necessary.

CowperKettle

Operation Tidal Wave

Operation Tidal Wave was an air attack by bombers of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) based in Libya and Southern Italy on nine oil refineries around Ploiești, Romania on 1 August 1943, during World War II. It was a strategic bombing mission and part of the "oil campaign" to deny petroleum-based fuel to the Axis powers. The mission resulted in "no curtailment of overall product output."This mission was one of the costliest for the USAAF in the European Theater, with 53 aircraft and 660 air crewmen lost. It was proportionally the most costly major Allied air raid of the war, and its date...

I found this. 50 planes lost in a single day in an attempt at targeted bombing.

> The efficiency of the bombing was lacking. Working from German records for certain sites, the USSBS determined that on average 87% of Allied bombs fell outside the factory perimeter and that only a few percent struck plant or equipment inside the boundary.

Cerberus

5:15 PM

I know.

But they bombed civilian cities on purpose, as above.

CowperKettle

5:39 PM

Yes, I agree.

Cerberus

6:36 PM

OK.

CowperKettle

6:55 PM

But I feel there's a difference between bombing from a great height and strafing civilans in plain sight on purpose. Both are crimes, but the second is harder to commit personally, as a pilot/fighter.

Cerberus

Quite possibly.

I believe the bombing of Tokyo took 100,000 lives in a single night.

CowperKettle

7:34 PM

Common people easily condone such actions. In 1999, Chechen terrorists blew up several buildings in Russia, and Russians condoned the invasion of Chechnya and total destruction of the capital Grozny.

Grozny ballistic missile attack

The Grozny ballistic missile attack was a wave of Russian ballistic missile strikes on the Chechen capital Grozny on October 21, 1999, early in the Second Chechen War. The attack killed at least 118 people according to initial reports, mostly civilians, or at least 137 immediate dead according to the HALO Trust count. Hundreds of people were also injured, many of whom later died. == The attack == The first reports from the region suspected the use of Scud missiles (SS-1). The hypersonic missiles, ten in number according to Chechen officials (other sources reported less), fell without warning, as...

> According to official Chechen sources, about 30–35 people died at the hospital; a correspondent for the AFP counted 27 bodies, most of them women and newborn babies.[6] Most of the casualties from the post office strike seemed to have been people waiting for public transport outside the building, as several buses were at the stop at the moment of the explosion.

Grozny was later called the most thoroughly destroyed city since Stalingrad.

It was all in ruins.

I argued then with my university teacher. During a lesson he said something in support of punishing Chechnya. I said that we invaded and occupied Chechnya and in 1944 we deported the whole Chechen people, so no wonder they are not very friendly.

He said that Stalin was right in deporting Chechens. And one guy from our class said, "we have a lot of nuclear bombs, we should cordon off Chechnya and drop a nuclear bomb on them". And the teacher did not react. As if that was just a normal statement.

So after the Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor and after all they did, it's no wonder that Americans were willing to bomb them. Even a lesser conflict is enough to polarize people.

Basically that's how Putin came to power. He used the conflict with Chechnya.

Prior to him, there was another presidential candidate who wanted to avoid invadign Chechnya. Putin managed to get that candidate removed.

People condone violence, after that politicians use this as a way to gain positions, after that the millitary and special services uses that as a way to gain power.

Robusto

8:08 PM

@Mitch B-24 crews didn't do any strafing. They dropped bombs, period, and tried to keep from getting shot down.

My uncle wasn't involved in Dresden. His tour was up in late '44, and he got to go home.

He didn't really talk much about his experience.

Xanne

8:43 PM

You want to do atrocities, there’s always Katyn Forest.

Robusto

8:56 PM

I don't really want to talk atrocities. Ever. There's way more than enough of that shit to go around.

But really, what is a war crime? War is the fucking crime, period.

Worship of the military is another crime, because it propagates the idea that there can be such a thing as a "good" war.

“There never was a good war or bad peace.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1773

tchrist

9:21 PM

> WASHINGTON (AP). Tue., Oct. 20, 2020. This morning by a vote of 94 to
4 the U.S. Senate approved a year’s delay — 53 weeks, to be precise
— before the country next moves its clocks back an hour when it stops
observing Daylight Saving Time. We had been previously scheduled to
switch to Standard Time only 12 days from today, on Sunday Nov. 1, but
this bill delays that change until November 7, 2021. As the U.S. House of
Representatives already passed an identical version of the bill last week
on Tue., Oct. 13, it goes now to the White House, where the President

Robusto

@tchrist This is a joke, right?

The dateline of the article is more than a month in the future.

KannE

10:51 PM

@FaheemMitha - Thanks

@Mitch - Thanks, but I just figured out separate a few years ago. I'm not sure I can take on that many vowels yet.

Robusto

11:56 PM

Plan

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…