English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Conrado

12:06 AM

@Robusto Good!

Bohemian relativist

12:28 AM

eyestrain

the poster examples for English class are so small

Xanne

1:38 AM

@Mitch Okay. Simon and Garfunkel did their best work in the ‘60s. The ‘70s were down hill from there.

Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth was stunning, but that’s film.

Robusto

@Xanne His music was pretty cool as well.

Xanne

Well, I have already given in. Also I am deferring to the judgment of those who have paid more attention to these matters and are better judges.

Bohemian relativist

1:57 AM

Facebook friends are all fake. Only fake people on Facebook would get contact with you.

even those who apparently contact you for scientific exchange.

Navdeep Singh

3:07 AM

Sentence: He felt a pain in his shoulder and fell to the ground.

Why not "on" the ground?

Xanne

See this, @Navddep english.stackexchange.com/questions/78210/….

Mitch

3:25 AM

@Xanne that was a defense I didn't expect. But it works.

Xanne

7:51 AM

@Mitch What did you expect?

Anyway, you’re up too late.

Unless, of course, you want to be at your computer for the European market open.

CowperKettle

10:05 AM

11

Q: Would anything bad happen to humanity if quantum tunneling stopped working overnight?

First let's discuss what the heck is quantum tunneling? We know the story of Einstein the Great, his award winning paper on light as particle had received universal acclaims and was plagiarized too many times over the centuries. But it is the wave like nature that allows matter particle to overco...

In a long while, an interesting question on that SE

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya.

She had a thyroid disease though, and by 1919 she looked ill and bad.

This is her photo in youth, much earlier than 1919.

Sadly, there was no proper treatment for thyroid disorders then.

It was hell for women, since it happens more often in women.

CowperKettle

10:40 AM

> Return of the Shipping Container

To maintain the blind, the unblinded pharmacist or unblinded monitor will be responsible to prepare and return the shipping container to the Sponsor.

I don't understand this section. Is the main point of the sentence that the person must be unblinded?

"To maintain the blind, use only unblinded persons for this action".

Or is the main point that the pharmacist/monitor must send the container back?

"To maintain the blind, .. send the container back to the Sponsor".

It's really hard and I cannot understand.

I don't understand the main logic of the sentence.

And on this logic depends the translation.

In Russian, you must drastically change the word order based on option 1 or option 2.

Matt E. Эллен

@CowperKettle I think this one. stating that the pharmacist or monitor are unblinded must be significant

CowperKettle

@MattE.Эллен I also think it's the one. Thank you!

Matt E. Эллен

no probs :)

CowperKettle

But then I start to doubt. Why? Because there's the definite article used before "the unblinded pharmacist or unblinded monitor". Shouldn't it be an? If I imagine that they are known (the), the logial meaning of the sentence seems to flip in my mind.

Matt E. Эллен

I think the means "the one that was specified in the method section"

or wherever they were specified

CowperKettle

12:00 PM

Gigili

12:26 PM

@CowperKettle She looks good.

@CowperKettle It still is.

Now it's hell for both men and women.

Mitch

@Xanne I expected something lame like 'but the grunge era' or 'mumble rap really cuts directly to the problems of humanity'

M.A.R.

1:30 PM

@CowperKettle Oh that usage is pretty valid, if I understood correctly what you were saying. "People wouldn't bat an eye at this proof while the venerated mathematician would expose the author for the charlatan he is."

Robusto

1:56 PM

@CowperKettle The picture on the right is Scarlett Johansson, and it's not from 2019, unless the actress is still in her underwear from at least 10 years ago. I recognize it because I used it years ago on EL&U as an answer to a question.

18

A: Can you still call a woman "handsome"?

Well, the use of handsome in that film may well be archaic or it may not. According to NOAD it currently means handsome (of a woman) striking and imposing in good looks rather than conventionally pretty. What I think it doesn't mean is hot in the sense we would use it today. The emphasis is...

Obviously that is the same photo shoot as the picture you used.

M.A.R.

The other day I noticed a clever use of B.C. to refer to the times before the pandemic

Robusto

@M.A.R. There's a song for that:

Those Were The Days (Remastered)

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Which is a redo of an old Russian song, or so I'm told.

CowperKettle

"Дорогой длинною" - А.Малинин ("Влюбленный в романс", 2003) / A.Malinin, «Those Were The Days»

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Дорогой длинною

«Доро́гой дли́нною» — русский романс, написанный Борисом Фоминым (музыка) и Константином Подревским (слова). Существует также вариант текста Павла Германа. Самые ранние записи этой песни были сделаны Александром Вертинским (1926) и Тамарой Церетели (1929). == Текст == В оригинале романс имеет следующий текст: Однако А. Вертинский сильно переделал текст, и сейчас в России чаще всего исполняется некий «гибрид» из оригинала и варианта Вертинского. == История == Романс был написан в 1924 году и очень скоро получил необыкновенную любовь и стал весьма популярен среди русских эмигрантов. Прич...

A Russian romance song of 1920

A good romance song.

From my childhood I remember this romance, and another one penned by famous writer Turgenev (1840s)

"Утро туманное" - Александр Малинин ("Влюбленный в романс", 2003) / Alexandr Malinin

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Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (English: ; Russian: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев, IPA: [ɪˈvan sʲɪrˈɡʲeɪvʲɪtɕ tʊrˈɡʲenʲɪf]; November 9 [O.S. October 28] , 1818 – September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian realism. His novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. == Life == Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Oryol (modern-day Oryol Oblast...

Turgenev also wrote Fathers and Sons, the English translation of this book is superb, I have it on my shelf.

It has the unknown words marked by pencil.

Matt E. Эллен

2:28 PM

check is a pattern, i.e. chequered.

CowperKettle

Yes, I know that now ))

Matt E. Эллен

oh :D

CowperKettle

I read it many years ago ))

Matt E. Эллен

I was beginning to wonder

Robusto

Anyway, a very tuneful song.

Dorogoi Dlinnoyo?

CowperKettle

2:38 PM

Yes

Robusto

English never puts "DL" at the beginning of a word. Or anywhere else, for that matter. It makes my tongue want to go back to bed.

I guess it's not too hard to pronounce, though.

CowperKettle

2:57 PM

You can split Kindle into Kin and Dle

Dorogoi means "along the way", along the road

"Dlinnoyu" means "long".

"Along the long way"

(Traveling) "along a long road".

Dlinny is "long", and the yu ending is to fit the case in which the noun (doroga) stands.

Robusto

Heh, lotta work.

Yeah, I read the yu as yo, which is incorrect.

Curious similarity between Japanese ゆ and Russian ю.

Same sound, though.

Sometimes my brain gets in this fugue state where I start getting thoughts in a weird mixture of English, German, Japanese and Spanish, sometimes with French (which I never studied) thrown in. Not necessarily all at the same time, but slipping in and out of each. Kind of a flow.

Maybe I'm just channeling James Joyce. I dunno.

CowperKettle

3:23 PM

Dunno

Dunno, or Know-Nothing or Ignoramus (Russian: Незнайка, Neznayka that is Don'tknowka (ka - the Russian suffix here for drawing up the whole name in a cheerful form); from the Russian phrase "не знаю" ("ne znayu"), don't know) is a character created by Soviet children's writer Nikolay Nosov. The idea of the character comes from the books of Palmer Cox.Dunno, recognized by his bright blue hat, canary-yellow trousers, orange shirt, and green tie, is the title character of Nosov's trilogy, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends (1954), Dunno in Sun City (1958), and Dunno on the Moon (1966). There...

Dunno on the Moon

Dunno on the Moon (Russian: Незнайка на Луне) is a fairytale novel by Nikolay Nosov from the series about the adventures of Dunno with elements of science fiction. This is the final part of a trilogy of Nosov's novels, consisting of the works The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends (1953-1954), Dunno in the Sun City (1958), and Dunno on the Moon (1964-1965). For the first time novel, Dunno on the Moon was published in the magazine Family and School (rus. Семья и школа) in the years 1964–1965. A separate edition of the book was published by Detskaya Literatura in 1965. In 1969 Nosov was awarded...

> The novel was written as a satire on Western capitalism of that time.

Back in 2017 a blogger posted an excerpt from this book, which told that the police is serving the rich and not protecting people's rights, but suppressing the people. And the blogger was called for questioning by the Russian Prosecutor's Office.

lenta.ru/news/2017/10/10/luna

There's the running joke in Russia that Putin has built his regime using old Soviet satire on capitalism.

Recreated the stuff that was in Soviet cartoons and caricatures.

The policemen's batons have insribed on them the main Constitutional tenets: freedom of speech, freedom of public protest, etc.

And the officer says: "use these to beat the chapters of our Constitution into the protester's heads"

This has been posted often recently in Russia. An old caricature on the West.

Mitch

3:41 PM

Robusto

3:55 PM

@CowperKettle That's funny.

CowperKettle

@Robusto You mean the title is funny? The book is great, especially the book about his travel to the Moon

Незнайка на Луне все серии подряд FullHD без рекламы

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There's a full-length cartoon version

> Bags should only be filled to ¾ full.

I think that to should be removed.

> Bags should only be filled ¾ full.

CowperKettle

4:18 PM

Cerberus

Convergence and growth.

CowperKettle

> Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill is daily spun

M.A.R.

4:35 PM

@CowperKettle I love all these stats, but I wonder if we've come close to the cap

Gigili

@CowperKettle That's what I love about books, took the author a whole paragraph to describe the personage, and doesn't deaden your creativity to imagine them as you wish.

Never happens in the movies.

CowperKettle

> When the device is switched off, the memory will store the mode that last appeared on the screen. This (It?) will be displayed when the device is next switched on.

I wonder if It should be used instead of This

For some reason It feels better.

But why?

@Gigili "There is no frigate like a book to take you lands away"

Cerberus

5:05 PM

@CowperKettle I think either is fine in this example.

It is often a matter of variation: you may not want to use this twice in a row, for example.

Robusto

6:16 PM

@CowperKettle the coincidence is what I found funny

Cerberus

7:29 PM

Wow, Chrome is even worse than I thought.

It seems to be completely impossible, by design, to prevent Chrome from showing pages from your browsing history when typing something in the address bar.

So, if you are showing something to a client, and you click the address bar to type something, pages from your political party or medical issues may very well show up right there in plain view.

Google is horrible. Don't use Chrome.

3

In Firefox, you can easily disable this.

Luckily, I always use Firefox.

The issue above happens even when you type a single letter into the address bar.

But Google have said they will definitively never allow you to choose what kinds of things appear when you type something in the address bar.

Gigili

8:02 PM

I dislike Chrome, but its devTools is quite useful and more user-friendly than others.

@Cerberus I guess there must be an option to disable that.

Couldn't find it. Keep using Firefox.

Cerberus

@Gigili There isn't!

I couldn't find one, and people on the Internet write that Google have said they will definitively not allow you to do this, as I have mentioned above.

Gigili

That sucks.

I once realized it has access to my location without even asking for my permission.

It's baffling to ponder what might be going on behind the scenes.

Robusto

8:31 PM

@Gigili That's how they sucked me in. Around 2007-8 they offered the best tools around for web development, and I began to rely on them. Mozilla's are OK, though there are some differences that can be annoying.

Cerberus

You could use Chrome only when you need it for specific tasks.

Robusto

Yeah. Actually I'm kind of addicted to Brave, which is based on Chrome. I like its ad and snoop blocking. No muss, no fuss.

Cerberus

I'm sure Firefox's ad and snoop blocking will be better.

Robusto

I have the search set to Duck Duck Go, but I always use Firefox, which is always open as well, and I do a Google search there if I really want to find something.

Cerberus

Brave has various conflicts of interest.

Robusto

8:38 PM

@Cerberus That's a bold statement.

Cerberus

@Robusto Good.

Robusto

I'd settle for "as good" ... I'm not convinced it would be better.

That's since I got the new PC at the end of November.

Costco just emailed me their latest "deals": including "Puma Ladies' Sports Bra, 3-Pack" ... I wonder if that is distinct from a Men's Sports Bra ...

Mitch

9:15 PM

@Robusto Yes, they're very di... I've said too much already.

Robusto

Haha.

But really, if they're that obsessed with over-classifying, why not say "Puma Ladies' Sports Bra for Women"?

Mitch

9:35 PM

@Robusto -Lady- Puma Ladies Sports Bra for Women in pink or mauve.

sure, if a man needed support around his chest, I'm sure the design should be clearly distinct, as opposed to deodorant.

"-Ladies- Sports Bra?? Wait, -I'm- a lady, that must be for me!"

But to be honest, sometimes if you don't have those labels for dudes, they feel kinda weird when you put them on. Like the no pockets, buttons on the other side, 'is this on backwards?'

But more importantly...I have a question about English.

NYTimes article about racial disparities in vaccination

Here's a graph with the label "Black share of the general population and the vaccinated population"

I don't doubt that minority sub groups are getting less of the vaccine than the majority.

But that label just doesn't make sense to me.

it looks like it means the gold dot is the percentage of blacks to the whole population. And the green dot is the percentage vaccinated.

And it checks out that you can't have a percentage -more- than the whole.

But so what? The vaccine has only been out a couple months, the percentage of the population vaccinated -shouldn't be even close to 100%. With my reading of the label it looks like blacks are mostly more than 1/2 vaccinated, which is -much- more than the general population.

So I must be reading this wrong...but I also can't figure out what the labels really mean and what the label should be.

I'm reading it as "Black share of the general population and black share of the vaccinated population"

Does it really mean "Vaccinated share of the black population vs vaccinated share of the general population"?

Is that what it should say? Or are my eyes (and or brain) crossed?

Robusto

9:50 PM

I dunno. I'm more alarmed that church groups are saying the vaccine is immoral because we got it from stem cell research.

Mitch

@Robusto any excuse for an idiot

Robusto

Showing that it's never too late for stupidity to come riding in.

Jinx, I guess.

Mitch

@Robusto What's worse, lyin or dyin

wait that's not what they're saying.

that's just one church or one guy preaching. Not all churches.

bt before we go on... what do you think of my grammar misunderstanding? Have I misunderstood how to distribute what modifies what in the graphic label?

OK rereading it as "Black share of the general population and black share of the vaccinated population" makes sense to me now.

fraction of general pop vaccinated vs fraction of black pop vaccinated. and blacks always less than general (mostly white).

got it.

Thanks for all your help!

You really talked me through it!

Robusto

@Mitch I took a look and decided the game wasn't worth the candle. Too much thinking when I'm feeling nappish.

Mitch

10:11 PM

maybe that's my problem

not enough naps

Robusto

The world would be a better place if everyone took more naps.

The Hudsucker Proxy you know for kids

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SmokeDetector

11:38 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, toxic answer detected (159): Non-vulgar way to express an "Oh shucks!" moment? by Dave Coleman on english.SE

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…