English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

08:41

Faheem Mitha

08:59

@tchrist That sounds famillar. Yes, Minister?

Probably a bit dated now, though.

Faheem Mitha

09:32

@Cerberus I really hope that isn't true.

M.A.R.

10:29

@skullpatrol Isn't it possible they've used a pretty loose definition of the term?

CowperKettle

11:58

Haha, they are just shocked so much

Word of the day: Macropus

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle What did he reveal?

Can't watch the YouTube video you linked

@CowperKettle I thought this was going to a medical term for too much pus and I expected something pretty gross

M.A.R.

12:26

@tchrist Wait, if this Taos hum is the ringing I'm thinking of when everything gets quiet, I've definitely heard it myself

It's been puzzling me since I was a kid

One other thing was how my finger seemed to bend the light around things when I held it close to my eyes

It's answered on Physics.SE IIRC

I'm almost sure the hum has a biological nature

But I don't have tinnitus or anything

CowperKettle

12:45

@M.A.R. BellingCat together with some journalists and the Navalny Team investigated his poisoning by bying phone call tracking data and airline passenger data on the black market. They discovered the eight FSB operatives who tracked Navalny since 2017 and made calls to FSB's chemical research facility, to experts who previously worked with chemical weapons.

They have their names, their addresses, etc.

CNN journalists even visited one of the killers, he shut the door on them.

Three FSB goons flew on the same planes that Navalny took, since 2017.

After the poisoning, they quickly travelled to the nearest city with a chemical research institute.

M.A.R.

13:02

0

Q: Is the following statement grammatically correct and does it transport the intended meaning?

Is the sentence Most of us know at least one person, who is generally labeled as weird. Few of us ever think about how it feels to be that person, until they are. grammatically correct and does it correctly transport the intended meaning, which is Being weird, sucks ?

Transporter 5, now with more kicks

Mitch

13:36

@tchrist Hm.. yes, there's that.

@tchrist We know -exactly- who to blame.

M.A.R.

13:48

@Mitch Sarkozy

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch the sunshine?

Mitch

14:18

Entangling alliances?

Mother Theresa?

It's a lot more complicated than I thought

Matt E. Эллен

The moonlight?

Mitch

Now you're just guessing

Matt E. Эллен

The good times?

Mitch

A couple more and we got ourselves a hit song

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch what is a correct answer but a guess backed up by experience :þ

Mitch

14:27

da doot doot doot doot, da dum-dum-dum-dum. boop boop boop - da boopity loobity boop

catchy!

it's the base line to ...

Chic - Good Times (Atlantic Records 1979)

►

> Don't be a drag, participate
Clams on the half shell, and roller skates

CowperKettle

15:29

> Effectiveness and safety of Moderna COVID vaccine confirmed, path cleared for expected authorization this week

Yay!

Cerberus

@FaheemMitha To some people. Not your kind. I believe many even have a mobile Internet subscription where Facebook access is free (costs no data), so they only use Facebook for everything, and are sometimes unaware there is more on the Internet?

CowperKettle

15:55

Word of the day: cattle murrain

Faheem Mitha

@Cerberus I've not heard of that. A mobile internet subscription where Facebook access is free. Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course.

CowperKettle

social media use is associated with depression, but the direction of the influence is unclear.

tchrist

16:11

Latin is not my strong suit, so if anyone would like to offer constructive criticism go ahead...or even edit. — Cascabel yesterday

@Cerberus ^^^^^^ ♬ “This one’s for you, wherever you are....” ♬

Jingle-Bell has written a rather nice answer. I don’t see anything off the top of my head to edit there, but maybe you do.

@FaheemMitha Oh aye.

@FaheemMitha If only!

@M.A.R. No, that’s merely the blood rushing through your brain. :)

@CowperKettle Bigfoot the cryptid? :)

Mitch

16:26

@MattE.Эллен I only just understood this. A tautology of nothing which says so much.

@CowperKettle Party all summer!

well, maybe late summer

Robusto

16:37

@CowperKettle Meanwhile Oliver Stone takes a chance on the Sputnik V vaccine.

The Moscow Times bills itself as "independent journalism" ... somehow I wonder about that.

Conrado

@CowperKettle You already sent a word today, didn't you?

Your WOTD tokens will run out before Dec. 31st.

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch the depth of my shallowness knows no bounds

Conrado

> early 14c., morein, "disease or plague among people or animals or both," from Anglo-French moryn, Old French moraine "pestilence" (12c.), probably from mourir "to die," from Latin mori "to die," from PIE root *mer- "to rub away, harm" (also "to die"...

Robusto

16:53

@MattE.Эллен But your beauty is more than skin deep, right? It's good to have thick beauty.

Conrado

Often used as an admittedly nasty curse by folks in Robin Hood stories and such-like: "Now a murrain seize thee and thy news, thou scurvy dog, etc."

Nastiness comes in degrees, you know.

Matt E. Эллен

@Robusto I'm thicc

Robusto

@MattE.Эллен Rhymes with "itch"?

RUDOLPH THE LEAKY LAWYER - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

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Matt E. Эллен

@Robusto urban dictionary at your own risk

Robusto

OIC

Matt E. Эллен

17:09

sadly, it's not true. my body is somewhat reminiscent of a pencil

Robusto

You should get the lead out.

skullpatrol

17:21

6 hours until WintersBash 2020 starts

Robusto

Don't start.

Seriously, what is this, junior high?

skullpatrol

Think of it as a countdown-to-jan-20 , pal

Good riddance day.

Robusto

@skullpatrol Well, since you put it like that ...

But really, I've been counting down to January 20, 2021 for four years already.

skullpatrol

17:45

Yeah, too bad the pandemic slowed down my count.

amongst other things...

Robusto

This is how that feels:

Dave Edmunds - Crawling From The Wreckage

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skullpatrol

niiice

CowperKettle

@Robusto They published a large piece on the Navalny investigation right away yesterday, which means that they are not under strict control, at least -- themoscowtimes.com/2020/12/14/…

Robusto

Interesting.

CowperKettle

> Tell me, why is it that wherever I travel in Russia, you three are always there?

It cracked me up

> Amphetamin, Heroin, Cocaine, Alcohol, Opiates, Desomorphine, Ketamine, Novichok

The faces are of the thugs that participated in the poisoning, btw

skullpatrol

18:30

Thugs will be thugs.

Robusto

19:32

@CowperKettle There's enough there for a proper thug-of-war.

user 6232128

20:34

6

Q: Why isn't the word "Which" one of the 5 Wh-question words?

Wikipedia has a nice history article on the 5 question words beginning with "Wh" namely, Who, What, Where, When, and Why But nothing on the word "Which." Could this be just tradition?

wh-questions

Thanks @Mitch, @tchrist, et al. It has been reopened. 😀

☠🏈

Robusto

20:48

I wonder if anyone has appended "Monica can go to hell" to their name. How long has it been now?

@user6232128 Who are you and what have you done with skullpatrol?

user 6232128

:D

she's very active on Twitter

CowperKettle

21:45

Monica is active on Twitter?

> Nanoparticles that attach to photoreceptors allowed mice to see infrared and near-infrared light for up to two months.

scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/…

Three IR-vision mice,
Three IR-vision mice,
See how they run,
See how they run

tchrist

22:02

5

A: What is the origin of the phrase “guts for garters”?

With regard to the eighteenth-century origins that Eric Partridge claimed for "guts for garters," as noted in user66974's answer, the antecedents of the phrase appear to be considerably older than that. A search of the Early English Books Online database turns up ten approximate matches involving...

Robusto

22:14

300,000+ dead now.

It seems like just yesterday it was 200K.

And 100K the day before that.

Mitch

@user6232128 It's good to ask, because otherwise people may not notice that it is good to reopen.

@Robusto I don't know if you've seen the show 'PEN 15'. It's pretty good. It's a comedy about 2 7th grade girls and junior high stuff.

Robusto

@Mitch I haven't seen it.

Mitch

It's mostly cringe comedy, the second season is funny too but turns a little more serious.

Robusto

Cringe comedy?

I don't know that term.

Cringe comedy

Cringe comedy is a specific genre of comedy that derives humor from social awkwardness. Often a cringe comedy will have an air of a mockumentary and revolve around a serious setting, such as a workplace, to lend the comedy a sense of reality.The protagonists are typically egotists who overstep the boundaries of political correctness and break social norms. Then the comedy will attack the protagonist by not letting them become aware of their self-centered view, or by making them oblivious to the ego-deflation that the comedy deals them. Sometimes, however, an unlikable protagonist may not suffer...

Hmm, OK.

Mitch

One of the best parts of it is that the two 12-13 year old girls are played by the two 30 year old actresses/creators of the story. But everybody else is playing their age (the other school kids, the parents). So part of it is hilarious because well the two 'girls' actual do play their parts well and look right, but you know they are ~30.

@Robusto yes. lots of social awkwardness. it's junior high

Robusto

22:23

@Mitch Yes, let's live through that again. By all means.

Mitch

like the kids yelling and crying at their parents because the parents looked at them.

CowperKettle

Mitch

@Robusto Some of it is embarassing yes.

Robusto

A lot of it is still embarrassing, lo these many years gone.

Mitch

like any tv show it is stuffed with non-stop drama that real life only has like one incident per person, but all the writers collect incidents and stuff all of them into each episode.

any normal person would explode with anxiety

@Robusto looks aside

oops not that way, the other way

Robusto

22:25

@Mitch Or commit suicide.

Mitch

covers eyes

@Robusto This is a comedy not real life.

most people survive

Robusto

Well, perhaps nobody has yet mined the rich veins of humor inherent in self-cancellation. At least not on TV.

Mitch

even though the virus and lockdowns have quantifiably increased anxiety -and- depression, the # of suicides hasn't really changed that much overall (dips and rises hear and there but surprisingly little significant change).

maybe like wartime when suicides go down.

it might pop up next summer when a lot of people are partying and some might get really depressed because they don't feel comfortable at the party.

Robusto

@Mitch Do they go down during wartime? And how can you tell when it's no longer wartime?

Mitch

@Robusto That might be too dark a comedy for most

@Robusto I've heard that it does go down.

I think you tell it's over when there's an announcement?

helicopters taking off from roof tops?

SmokeDetector

22:31

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in body (56): Obtain Registered database approved IELTS/TOEFL/PTE/NCLEX certificates Without taking the test by marrieclaire on english.SE

Robusto

We've been at war now for 20 fucking years. And I can remember when we thought Russia was stupid for staying in Afghanistan for less time than that. Yet we bought a used war from them.

Smokey has a point this time. It's Grade A spam for sure.

@SmokeDetector Attaboy, Smokey!

Or should we call him The Smokester?

Someone is trying to convince me to watch The Mandalorian. I can only conclude that they don't know me very well.

So, is George R. R. Martin the George Lucas of sword-and-sorcery fantasy? Or is there not a meaningful distinction between those genres?

Mitch

23:15

Does that mean he had a slew of good ideas for one episode and all the ones after are poor retreads?

CowperKettle

It is such a pleasure to proofread a translation in which you clearly see that the translator made some consciencious effort.

There are errors and typos, but you can see that the girl really tried.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…