English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:00

I'm not asking.

I'm telling.

Tim

Forgive me that I am still in the aftermath of this morning

tchrist

00:23

@Robusto One of yours?

Not a real question.

Robusto

00:54

@tchrist Otero County contains Alamogordo, White Sands, Holloman AFB, and other relics of a violent past.

tchrist

@Robusto And apparently at least one relic of a violent present.

Robusto

I will grant you that.

Surgeons practicing with tools making origami. Can you do it?

I don't particularly like the ersatz bokeh framing, though. Why do people do that?

> INTERVIEWER: I see there's a four-year gap in your resume. Did you work in the Trump administration?
JOB APPLICANT: No, I was in prison. I swear!

4

Robusto

01:16

@tchrist: Am I crazy? Whenever I hear someone talk about a "stave" in music, my brain does a little seg_fault shudder. Why can't they call it a staff and the plural staves.

Cerberus

@Robusto Sounds good.

Mitch

@Robusto what is 'bokeh framing'? the fuzzy part on top and bottom? What is 'bokeh'?

Robusto

Bokeh

In photography, bokeh ( BOH-kə or BOH-kay; Japanese: [boke]) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image. Bokeh has also been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause very different bokeh effects. Some lens designs blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce distracting or unpleasant blurring ("good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively). Photographers may deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions,...

Cerberus

Something for silly kids.

Mitch

Oh

but the blur at the linked image is the usual (annoying) extra on the side to 'fill out' the square, so it is not blurring the original image but stretching out a blurring of the sides.

Robusto

01:32

@Mitch Hence the term ersatz.

Mitch

oh

it's annoying everywhere.

I feel like that I'd prefer the narrow original with black on the sides. Why did designers think it was a good idea to add the bokeh?

I need answers

Robusto

All I have is questions.

Answers cost more.

Mitch

What is something that costs less because you gave answers in the form of a question?

Robusto

Jan 12 at 0:45, by Robusto

@Færd What, are we auditioning for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?

Mitch

@Robusto is that like Waiting for Godot but more modern?

I should look all this up on wikipedia

Robusto

02:04

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) - Playing Questions Scene (2/11) | Movieclips

►

tchrist

02:36

@Robusto I can't say whether you're crazy or not, but there has been vacillation about this for going on four centuries now.

Robusto

We hates it, precious.

tchrist

> 1659 J. Caryll Peters Pattern 3 After they had sang the two first staves of the tenth hymn of Larners twelve Songs of Sion.
1786 T. Busby Compl. Dict. Music (at cited word) The five horizontal and parallel lines on and between which the notes are placed. Guido..is said by some to have first used the stave.
1823 Ld. Byron Island ii. v. 23 One long-cherished ballad's simple stave.
1841 C. Dickens Barnaby Rudge xxxix. 162 ‘Cheer up, captain!’ cried Hugh, when they had roared themselves out of breath. ‘Another stave!’

The 1842 citation is most salient.

> There is a schism among musicians, whether this should be staff or stave, pronounced by some staaf. Authorities are mostly in favour of ‘stave’ but custom may be pleaded for ‘staff’ and ‘staves’ in the plural.

> 1654 J. Playford Breefe Introd. Skill Musick i. 3 But for Lessons for the Organ, Virginalls, or Harp two staves of six lines together are required.
1688 R. Holme Acad. Armory iii. 157/1 [Follows Playford and adds:] They are called a Staff or Stansa.
1782 C. Burney Gen. Hist. Music II. 87 The regular staff of four lines.
1806 J. W. Callcott Musical Gram. 1 The lines and spaces of the Staff are counted upwards.
1842 Westm. Rev. Jan. 34 (note) There is a schism among musicians, whether this should be staff or stave, pronounced by some staaf. Authorities are mostly in fav…

Robusto

Wah.

My world is untidy.

Words are a mess, aren't they?

tchrist

I really don't know where it got confused.

Robusto

I also hate dwarf -> dwarfs.

tchrist

02:41

> Forms: Plural staves /steɪvz/, staffs /stɑːfs//-æ-/.

Forms: Old English stæb, ( stab-, steb-), Old English–Middle English stef, Old English–Middle English stæf, Old English–1500s staf, Middle English oblique stæve, steave, Middle English oblique stave, Middle English–1600s stafe, Middle English–1700s, (1800s archaic) staffe, Middle English–1500s Scottish staif, 1500s stayffe, Scottish stalf, ( stafte), Middle English–1600s genitive singular staves, Middle English– staff;

plural

Old English stafas, Middle English stafen, Middle English stafes, Middle English staven, Ormin stafess, Midd…

Robusto

Prolly because /f/ in OE would have the /v/ sound in certain cases.

tchrist

@Robusto I thought of that. But it seems more recent than that.

I think part of it is that OE had stæb, stef, stæf, staf.

Robusto

Well, yeah. OE was all over the map. At least all over the shire map.

tchrist

Notice also how we use clef to mean clave.

But that's from Latin.

The "key".

Robusto

Yeah, I thought clef was from French.

tchrist

02:45

It is.

Robusto

It is a whirligig of words.

tchrist

> < French clef < Latin clāv-em key. In spelling formerly confused with the various forms of cliff n., cleeve n.

Robusto

But it still means key, which was originally the meaning of having separate staves for different keys.

Now it actually means range.

Or, in singing, tessitura.

Historians having to tape together documents Trump tore up.

tchrist

fermer à clé, cerrar con llave

fechar com chave in Portugal.

@Robusto You and I shall not live to see them finally bring to light all the evils they’re eventually able to uncover that were secretly wrought by this administration.

And even if he were to plunge into a black hole, the gaping flaws in our broken politics will continue to grow wider and consume more.

Namely, that one of the two major parties is no longer interested in democracy, preferring to push a false narrative utterly divorced from reality.

I don't know how you can have a functioning democracy under a two party system where one of them is the reality party and the other the surreality party.

tchrist

03:08

The latter is something we see in personality cults, including those of civil autocrats and religious figureheads alike.

There is a well documented process by which the cultist breaks down his follower's acceptance of any external reality. He becomes the sole source of "objective" truth.

There very quickly comes a point from which there is no return for them, because to deny their cult leader's lies puts the lie to the life they have themselves been leading for so long. Now they're stuck.

I can't remember what all this called but that doesn't matter. The point is that it is a process that has been well studied and borne out again and again.

Jim Jones. Benito Mussolini.

SmokeDetector