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11:03 AM
 
11:20 AM
lol
What's that word when someone's body language shows they are proud. Like their chest puffs up with pride. I've written "He bristled with pride" but bristled is the wrong word.
 
@MattЭллен strutted?
 
maybe. he's not moving, though. I just found swelled, which might be it
 
BTW, I just read your "teaching English to fruits" piece. Am I alone in finding it borderline-offensive?
 
I think you are. why do you find it offensive?
 
They both have male names, so they're fruits?
 
11:25 AM
fruits are seed carriers, that's what makes them fruit (biologically speaking)
 
"Fruit" is an offensive term for homosexual man.
 
and here I though I covered all angles
oh well. no one else seems to be bothered
 
Neither TRiG, Joel nor Cerberus are offended
 
Cerberus is inoffendable. The other two, I have never met (I think).
 
Oh, THAT Joel!
I briefly debated with him the NZ pronunciation of fish and chips. He agreed with you, if I recall.
 
Vaguely, yes :D
 
And I think I may have actually encountered TRiG once or twice.
 
But I hadn't thought of that meaning of fruit, although it's not unfamiliar to me
 
Really?
 
11:29 AM
I was trying to not be racist more than I was trying to avoid homophobia
 
So, your giving both fruits male names was just an accident?
No, don't answer, I'm just giving you a hard time. As is my wont around here.
 
I'm imagining you giving a English class, where only gay men are welcome.
Then driving them all away by referring to them persistently as fruits.
 
my English classes are pansexual! I swear!
2
 
As in pansies?
Ba-da-boom!
Anyway, I had never noticed our blog before. What does one have to do to get onto it?
Hey, another question.
 
11:36 AM
You can become a contributor, come into my office
 
As you may be aware, I am quite opposed to the ELL proposal. I think it will destroy this site. So, as has been pointed out to me, I'm welcome to go and downvote the questions in the proposal. But to downvote a question, I need a rep of 150+ on Area 51. And it seems the only way to get rep on Area 51 is to support a proposal. Do you see my problem?
 
that is odd
@DavidWallace oh, wait! you should get 150 reps via association bonus
 
I get 101 by association.
So, I should go and support something completely ridiculous that I don't care about, just so I can get the remaining 49. Right?
 
have you joined area51? I'm fairly sure it gives 150 by association
 
Yes, I have joined Area 51. I have 101 rep there.
Meanwhile, RegDwight, (bless his little cotton wings) seems to advertise the ELL proposal any time an extreme pineapple asks an acolyte question. This kind of seems like cheating to me.
 
11:41 AM
well, we believe in its efficacy, so we recommend it.
 
Would my comment get flagged if I un-recommended it every time Reg (or anyone else) recommends it?
 
I don't think so. It depends on how you do it. It might be better to bring it up on meta, so that a proper discussion can be had
or do both
 
Yes, I might just do that.
Bring it up on meta, I mean.
 
Or I could go into stealth mode. Ask questions in the proposal itself, so that people think I'm in favour of it and give me upvotes. Once I reach 150, then I switch over to the dark side. Muhahaha
The first people to get downvoted would be the ones who had upvoted me!
 
11:44 AM
or you could find proposals you like, and propose questions there!
 
I could indeed. You are being surprisingly helpful!
If I went the "stealth" route, I'd have to be careful to avoid asking really good questions, in case they get to 10 upvotes.
 
I'd probably find that if that happened, and I deleted them, then my downvotes on the other questions would cease to count.
So my project for the next few days is to think of as many mediocre ELL questions as I can. You'll upvote them, right Matt?
I suppose we have a vs an, affect vs effect and that vs which already?
 
Well, that would be disingenuous. If they're good I'll up vote them :)
 
No, they will be specifically mediocre.
If they're good, I have failed.
 
11:49 AM
@DavidWallace not sure about that vs which.
@DavidWallace looks like "affect vs effect" and "that vs which" can both be asked
seem like good questions for ELL, too
 
"Good" questions! Damn, that's no use then.
How about how to pronounce tomato?
Or database.
 
that would be quite mediocre, yes
 
affluent vs effluent?
 
that would be poor, I would say, but possibly valid.
 
GR I guess. Hello @Reg.
 
11:53 AM
Ohai.
 
@DavidWallace well, I don't think we want to be a dictionary or thesaurus (at ELL) but GR might not exist there
 
@DavidWallace just search the transcript for "ELL". We've been collecting questions.
 
g'morning, @Reg :)
@DavidWallace how do you mean? The other close reasons would exist. Most sites don't have GR in fact.
 
How about proofreading help?
 
11:58 AM
Could work.
 
Well, we haven't discuss all this so I can't say for sure, but it would probably be too localised
oh, well, there you go. dissent already!
 
Kind of like codereview.se.
 
Not dissent. Just saying that GLU gets quite a few of those, and ELL is kind of GLU for English.
Anyway, at this point ELL is a free for all.
 
11:59 AM
I shall continue my quest for mediocrity then.
 
What it ends up being nobody can tell, and not even what it should end up being.
 
Hehe. Hey neither of the Carlo_Rs have been around. Did they get banished or something?
 
I think he's long been unbanished, but hasn't shown up yet.
 
But more than once? I know that the first Carlo was unbanished, I think before the second guy even arrived.
 
12:01 PM
He did threaten to leave should sim get elected.
 
Oh, I didn't know that. I thought he liked Sim.
The first one, I mean.
 
it got unpleasant for a bit
 
Wow, then you missed so much tasty dramah.
Jul 30 at 20:43, by Carlo_R.
If simchona was elected moderator, I leave ELU. She has often given great example of intolerance. I have seen this directly (I've been subjected to acts of terrorism and a lot of harassment from this one). His strange behavior and crazy, his obsession, is demonstrated by his flag 976. With this ELU will die. I'm making a last ditch attempt to understand these things from the co-founders, so they sent away this person totally insane mind.
 
Hah!
Bet she doesn't want to go into a private room with him now!
 
@RegDwightАΑA Can we trade in all our dramah for drachma?
 
12:03 PM
Togrog?
 
Kwatlu?
 
@Robusto dramah is more valuable.
 
"... they sent away this person totally insane mind".
 
@RegDwightАΑA No, no ... I said drachma, not rouble.
 
When and if ELL comes along, Carlo_R should be invited to be a moderator there.
 
12:04 PM
uh. hmmm
 
user image
3
 
I'm still cracking up over the incident that went something like -
Simchona: Why do you want to talk to me so badly?
Carlo_R: I'm sorry, but English is my second language.
 
@tchrist those are the best parties
 
@DavidWallace which of the OVER 9000 incidents that went like that per day?
 
See? You can tell David Wallace is in the southern hemisphere. He says "when and if" whereas northern hemispherers say "if and when" ... something to do with the coriolis effect, I suppose.
 
12:06 PM
Touche, @Reg
 
@MattЭллен Would that be Pan troglodytes or Pan paniscus?
 
@tchrist LOL
 
Pane e tulipani.
 
Panem et circenses.
 
12:08 PM
Plumes et curricula.
 
Peter Pan. By J. M. Barrie England.
 
@MattЭллен How is it a lost kingdom, when they know exactly where it was?
 
Too much persiflage before breakfast. Coffee now.
 
Mum, where's my kingdom? Just where you left it, dear.
 
@DavidWallace you know cartographers, always trying to create some kind of sensationalism. "Lost Kingdom" this, "Sunken City" that, "Floating Sky Fortress" the other
 
12:12 PM
El Dorado
Greenland
 
They should trade them all for horses.
 
Not Doritos?
 
Doritos when and if the horses get hungry.
 
Not sure if you’d want to shovel out their stalls following the Mexican Hat Dance.
 
That's my mediocre question! When and if vs if and when. Robusto, you've been very helpful.
 
12:16 PM
Well damn, the fuckader came back.
 
Any particular fuckader?
 
3
A: Alternative to “façade”

SigueSigueBenThis seems more like a programming question than an English-language one, but here’s my answer anyway: I question whether you need a suffix for these classes. Unless you have both Customer and CustomerFacade classes, you should just call your single class a Customer. If you do need the second c...

Shows what programmers know about English.
Well, or French.
CustomerFuckade != CustomerFaçade
 
The OP seriously puts a non-ASCII character in his class names? That's Facaded up!
 
I fucing spellings that make us add not one but two new rules to the English language.
 
If you want to air your views on ELL @David, there is this thread already.
 
12:18 PM
@DavidWallace What’s wrong with that? Oh right: filesystem issues.
 
And "I'd like to type this without having to know the facading unicode number" issues.
 
 # a few character sets
 my @ɪsᴏ   = qw( Latin1 Latin2 Latin15 );
 my @μsoft = qw( cp852  cp1251 cp1252  );
 my @鯉    = qw( koi8-f koi8-u koi8-r  );
Mousey works.
 # think of << as the "hasta" operator :)
 my @ciudades_españolas = ordenar_a_la_española(<<'LA_ÚLTIMA' =~ /\S.*\S/g);
 .....
 .....
 LA_ÚLTIMA
It would just be unthinkable to use those identifiers without their tildes.
 
Right, so if you're paying me programmer's rates, do you want me to spend my time cutting code or looking up Unicode charts?
 
 my $déjà_imprimée;   # le nom d'une ville

 # Greek hypermegas
 my @ὑπέρμεγας = ( );

 # Ok, now we’re just showing off  :-)
 my $ʇndʇno = uʍopəpᴉsdn($input);
 
And the last time I worked on hispanophone code, all the diacritics had been dropped.
 
12:21 PM
There’s showing off, and there’s spelling words right.
Well, if it was in a language where you had to, that’s one thing.
And interacting with the filesystems counts as having to.
 
And there's giving one's client value for money. I'm sorry, I'm a professional programmer, not an ASCII-art leech (or I guess it's specifically non-ASCII art)
 
But if they’re purposefully spelling them wrong just out of sheer cussèdness, then that’s fuced.
I was a grader for prof who made us take points off for spelling errors.
In code.
 
Have you ever known a programmer other than the OP of that post to put the required cedilla under the word Facade in a class name?
 
In code comments, too.
Class names in Java have to interact with the native filesystem.
This is Not A Well-Defined Problem.
 
And the prof was right to do so, except in the case of a diacriticised letter being replaced with its unadorned form.
 
12:23 PM
Huh?
That’s still a spelling error.
 
What huh?
 
It’s not an adornment.
We are not decorating a Christmas tree.
 
True, but programmer time is measured in dollars.
 
Obviously not in smarts.
 
(pounds, euros, dinara, whatever)
 
12:25 PM
Hah, this is funneh.
-3
A: Are contractions of "I am" or "I would" rude?

mosidIt's possible that it is for software technical issues that arise from using such characters.

 
Tell me, Mr Vallace, would you like to wisit Sveden? Ve’ve collated our V and W together, which giwes them an interchangeability that vill sawe you a spot on the bus. It is not a spelling error vhen ve do these wery fine things.
 
Right. Little Johnny drop tables, or however the story goes.
If you ever get a job programming in a country where everybody's keyboard lacks a W, then feel free to type my name as Vallace. Absolutely.
I would prefer that to \u0057allace or whatever it would be.
 
Ẅallace?
 
Vhy not?
 
Aug 14 at 12:28, by RegDwight АΑA
 
12:29 PM
Tom, have you ever worked as a programmer in a non-anglophone country?
Or more importantly, worked on code that wasn't written in English?
(Perl doesn't quite count as foreign, not even when Torkington writes it)
 
This anglophonic-monoglot idea that diacritics are effete niceties of the sub-English world readily omissible by manly men is a cultural imperialism of the most insidious kind.
2
The Oxford Comma toon above was my good-morning present from Nat.
 
No, it's what programmers in other countries do. As I discovered when working on code written by a team of people in Spain.
 
I know.
So they’re bad programmers who don’t understand encodings, then?
Let me guess: was this Java?
 
I had better be careful what I say from here, in case I don't get invited back.
Putting non-ASCII characters in identifier names just makes things harder for everyone.
 
I say that because of its massively fucked-up idea of a "default platform encoding" for its own source code and for files whose encodings are not explicitly stated.
Java makes portability a nightmare.
 
12:34 PM
If my name had a # in it, would you use it as an identifier in Perl?
 
${"If I had to, Da#id, I could"}++;
 
But I, as your employer, would not want you to.
One of the most important attributes of any piece of code is its maintainability. Being easy to type is part of that maintainability.
 
We slaves do whatever our pimp ordains.
So you’re saying that writability trumps readability then? Hm.
 
True. But I don't want to have to use curlies and quotes around my identifier names. No matter what language my employer speaks.
No, I'm not saying that writability trumps readability.
How does escaping stuff help readability?
I recently had to help one of my co-workers who couldn't decide whether he needed 7 backslashes or 8 backslashes at the head of some grotesque regular expression that was being passed from one place to another, each with its own escaping convention. My best advice - try it both ways and see which one works, but I think it's 7.
 
No, I don’t like what \u004A\u0041\u0076\u0041 does there. Who does\u003F
“How many licks does it take to get the center of a tootsie pop?” ≣ “How many backslashes does it take to get to the center of a troff macro?”
 
12:41 PM
I appreciate your philosophy, Tom, but if I work with programmers in Spain again, I will do what they do. Which is to drop the tildes and accent marks. I'm sorry if that offends you. But it seems to me to be the only sensible course of action.
 
In both cases, just keep going till you get there.
They do this in comments and program documentation, too?
 
The comments were 6 and 1/2 a dozen.
The paper documentation was mostly in English. Sort of.
 
How . . . consistent.
The English in Spain stays mostly on the plane.
O así siempre me lo pareció.
 
Yeah, I've never been to Spain. Just maintained a digital presence.
 
We’ve gone to some trouble in languages like Go and Perl, and yes even Java, to make it possible to use Unicode in your source. It saddens me to see that effort go to waste.
pace the local filesystem.
 
12:46 PM
Possible != practical.
 
practice, practice, practice
Need moar coffee.
@DavidWallace Yes, I have.
 
And you spelt all your identifiers according to the local conventions?
 
And I teach them to put use utf8; at the top of every compilation unit, and all is well.
I showed them that they could.
They had had no idea this was possible.
 
How did their keyboards look?
 
Their teclados had teclas of rare device.
But they actually used semi-fractured English for their code.
 
12:49 PM
Aha. The best type.
The identifiers used by my Spanish colleagues were often many words long, where some of the words were Spanish and some English.
Within the one identifier.
 
It’s been argued that it is fractured English which is the one that has become dominant on the world stage, rather than thine or mine.
 
If all fractured English were fractured the same way, that would probably be OK.
 
I’ve been reading specs written by programmers in the subcontinent of late, and it is . . . challenging at times.
 
I don't know. I still get grumpy at having to misspell words like colour and centre in HTML / CSS.
 
So you don’t care for cultural imperialism after all?
 
12:52 PM
And don't get me started on light grey and medium gray.
 
I still get grumpy over having to misspell HTTP_REFERRER.
 
Yeah, that's rather a good one.
 
Or the Perl idiots who thought that numify made more sense than nummify in the internal API.
 
For some reason, this conversation has reminded me of the Sarajevo taxi driver who asked me when NZ was FINALLY going to have a civil war to get rid of the English.
 
As opposed to a revolution? :)
 
12:55 PM
Oh, whatever. He was speaking Bosnian, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of my translation.
 
So you’re saying that it’s not the English you’d need to drive out, but the Americans? :)
 
I guess "revolution" is probably more accurate.
Well, his argument was that NZ is an English colony, and therefore we need a war.
 
A civil war is a failed revolution.
 
Americans didn't really come into it.
 
Sarajevo? Well, I guess that fits.
 
12:56 PM
Yes, but I didn't dare say so.
 
I don’t think ER would put up a fuss if you decided to ditch the honors [sic] system again.
 
When one is in a taxi, one is at the mercy of its driver.
 
Which reminds me, I have to go look for what cool new orographic terms have come in from the UK overnight.
 
What's she going to do? Give us the grumpy Olympic face?
I have to go to bed.
Nice talking to you, Tom.
 
Good night!
 
12:59 PM
Good night everyone.
 
Good night David.
 
So ... are Perl number strings also numinous?
 
My argument, precisely.
Their numina are showing.
Unfortunately the usage has mummified.
 
"International Herald Tribune, August 18-19, 2012 (source: I have only the paper copy)" — XVD
So, really, the only paper copy. They had a press run of one?
@tchrist You misspelled mumified. "To mumify" means to silence someone forever, then wrap them up and bury them.
 
I went round and round and round with the idiots.
This is what happens when you have programmers with 2000-word vocabularies, most misspelled.
 
1:05 PM
Well, don't even get me started on that.
 
I missed knock in my orographic names list. < Gaelic cnoc for hill.
Common component of Scottish place names.
 
My company has a code base with many words misspelled. But to correct misspellings you have to refactor lots of legacy code and who wants to do that? So I have to live with abominations like getSingelton and the like.
 
Ah here’s a good comment: I spent altogether too much of my undergraduate years on Scottish and Viking toponymy. Depending what you want these for have you considered the -bólstaðr, -staðr, and -setr triple? They're probably not what you're after as they relate to parcels of land more than to the underlying topography but they're all that come to mind at present.
I knew -stad.
 
Did you know -dun?
 
Yes.
 
1:07 PM
And -tun?
 
But I’m looking for things that can be used as standalone nouns.
 
I wonder how -dun (hill) => dune (sandy hill). Where did all the sand come from?
 
I can do a steading, < -staðr, even though it is not actually orographic.
You know that dingy and dun are rellated?
 
No, but I'm not surprised.
 
> β.The Sc. form dyn, din, has now esp. the sense of dingy-coloured as opposed to white or fair.
That’s under dun.
 
1:10 PM
I need to get my Anglo-Saxon Dictionary out of the attic, I guess.
 
Oh, I see.
Our dune is from:
> ODutch dûna, MDutch dûne (Dutch duin, mod.LG. düne) = OE. dún: see down sb.1
Not related to the other then.
 
Ah, down — now that makes sense.
 
Yes.
Where is @Cerberus when you need him?
 
Place names are more interesting when you understand the etymology. For example, Ōsaka means "big slope" and Nagasaki means "long peninsula."
Tokyo means "Eastern Capital" while Kyoto means "Old Capital".
 
That one I actually knew, because I was looking at the kanji.
> My maiden name was Waldren, Wald is Saxon for forest, my first marriage made me Warren. My last marriage made me Carr which is Norse for the boggy corner of a Field, which was my grandmother's maiden name. Except that for some reason it was spelled FEILD.
> As well as knock and knoll, you can have knowe and knapp. To go with kame, you can have craig. And howe is either a burial mound or a hollow like haugh depending on your part of the world.
I had how and haugh.
> Geo and gloup decribe a rocky inlet at the coast, and you've got skerry, but clett and stack are also used for similar but smaller features.
> In Northumberland you also have heugh, as found on Lindisfarne.
> On the Yorkshire coast there is a headland called Filey brig(g?) - I don't see brig or brigg on your list.
Aren’t those great?
 
1:18 PM
Interesting.
 
More middens: coup = Rubbish dump as in "This bedrooms like a coup". Pronounced cowp.
I what Mr Cowper says?
Or Mr Chicken?
 
Frickin' Acrobat. Is there another piece of software that needs such frequent updates?
 
Windows.
But yeah, corks my ass, too.
I like the rock-n-roll rhyme of knock and knoll.
I think it might get dicey using clett and stack together. :)
Why don’t things look wrong until I hit return?
 
Because you don't read them until you post them. I have the same failing.
0
Q: 'slag of a mother'

Xavier Vidal HernándezInternational Herald Tribune, August 18-19, 2012 (source: I have only the paper copy): "Luckily for Des, Lionel is distracted from his suspicions about his slag of a mother when his criminal career is derailed by his winning the lottery". I'm uncomfortable with the phrase "slag of a mother" in ...

Read comment chain. That XVD is like extra VD.
 
And close as GR.
 
1:36 PM
Hello.
 
Hiya, @Cer.
 
How are you all today?
 
Hi ho, hi ho. . . .
 
It's freaking hot here.
 
Above body temperature?
Meaning, a living one’s, not a stiff’s.
 
1:38 PM
In the sun, yes, well over.
 
I thought you were in the north, where it seldom breaks into the triple-digits.
 
In the shade, a few degrees under.
If it broke into the triple digits here, we'd be boiling...
 
If you have single-digit humidity — or whatever that is in metric — you should be fine.
Speak English, dog!
 
Cool here today. ~20° C.
 
That’s because you’re in the house.
 
1:41 PM
20 C...Oh, I can only dream of heaven, and it must be like that.
 
It’s a mite cooler downtown, but not much.
The interesting bit is the monthly plot.
Well, that didn’t work.
 
Oh, Lord, thy hearth is cool, wherefor it must be heaven!
 
Yesterday I went up to 14 kilofeet. Kinda chilly.
Autumn has begun there.
Notice that we have no dew. Ever.
 
Don't you mean leaguefeet, or whichever handy measurements you people use?
Humidity is 5 % here.
 
As God the Lord of Israel liveth, before whom I stand: There shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.
 
1:51 PM
So be it.
Thankfully I've never had to read the bible.
 
Oder auf Deutsch.
How can you have 5% humidity in Amsterdam?
 
I'm in the country.
 
So far from the sea?
At least the German version has a proper orchestra.
 
ola!
 
The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And key-low-me-durrs to go before I sleep.
And key-low-me-durrs to go before I sleep.
So much for the scansion.
 
1:56 PM
@tchrist regarding this ... english.stackexchange.com/a/24819/588
 
notes that ed is waving
 
waving?
 
♬ Centimeter worm, centimeter worm, measuring the marigolds ♬ Seems to me you’d stop and see ♬ How beautiful they are! ♬
Doesn’t do much for the scansion there.
An ola is a wave.
An hola is a hello.
 
Oh, I was wrong: it's closer to 44 percent.
 
SEE! Tolja!
 
1:58 PM
@tchrist oh, thanks. I'll remember that.
 
You did a Fahrenheit-to-Celsius conversion on 44F to 8C, but on the humidity.
Shame on you!
 
I assume you're referring to spanish?
 
All right, being in your song and dance.
 
As it were.
 

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