English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

13:00

Perhaps SE wants to keep that a secret.

Matt E. Эллен

maybe I'll start tracking it! lay the truth bare

but I suppose it wouldn't tell us about people leaving, only people who get deleted/destroyed

Cerberus

They could make a stat "users crossing the threshold of being inactive for six months".

> IS Khorasan is verzwakt door een serie nederlagen, waarbij het zijn territorium in de provincie Nangarhar kwijtraakte. Maar de groep heeft volgens The Soufan Center een ambitieuze nieuwe leider, Shahab al-Muhajir, en blijft aanslagen plegen. De vraag is echter hoeveel rekruten en speelruimte hij krijgt nu de Taliban de teugels van de Afghaanse staat en geavanceerd Amerikaans wapentuig in handen hebben gekregen.

Matt E. Эллен

They've got "[users who] acted on at least one day [in the week or month]"

Cerberus

"The Islamic State in Afghanistan has been greatly weakened, but it has a new, ambitious leader who might turn things around. However, now that the Taleban have captured huge amounts of advanced American weaponry, perhaps they will suppress the IS (IS and Taleban are enemies)."

Wouldn't that be funny.

Matt E. Эллен

Yes. An interesting coincidence

Cerberus

13:06

The Taleban capturing billions of dollars of advanced American weaponry from the former Afghan army will actually help the Americans suppress IS.

We shall see.

I read that Biden's approval rating has decreased sharply, even in his own country.

His first big mistake, perhaps.

Matt E. Эллен

Perhaps

Both he and Trump promised to withdraw troops. I wonder if people voted expecting that to be an empty promise, too

Cerberus

I think American voters wanted the withdrawal.

Mitch

Back to the discussion about experts leaving ELU...

There never really were.

Cerberus

Touchés.

Mitch

It's not like SE where everyday practitioners, engineers working every day in a knowledge field fixing there own work, seeking answers to their own work, realize they can also help others.

There are literally millions of wordsmiths out there, journalists, foreign language teachers, general academics, etc etc who would be able to answer every single one of the questions on ELU, no matter how asinine or entitled, with quality terseness and depth and understandability.

Yet they are not here.

Cerberus

13:20

Where?

Mitch

Sure there's a handful, a very small handful, of professionals who must have a lot of additional time on their hands who answer every so often with intelligence and support. And there are a handful of amateurs who also answer similarly.

But for the most part it is junk.

Cerberus

How negative.

Is this about all of SE, or just ELU?

Mitch

@Cerberus Just ELU. I don't really know SE except as a very informal SE programmer (ie programming by cut and pasting from SE) and it's 1) a lifesaver but 2) hit or miss quality wise.

Cerberus

Naturally.

I suspect you copied your code from SO?

Mitch

We all know that Urban Dictionary is junk, but the news will refer to that well before ELU is even thought of, researched, and then dismissed because it purports to be by experts but isn't. Whereas UD is authentic, it doesn't have pretensions and so can be, well, not trusted, but more easily judged

@Cerberus little pieces

Re the 'Afghan vs Afghani' blow up yesterday. No one in the world thought to consider ELU as a primary source.

Matt E. Эллен

13:28

@Mitch philistines

Mitch

But to your point @Cerberus, yes I see that charity would be the better move to improve quality than button pressing/rule of law following.

@MattE.Эллен Realists

Matt E. Эллен

fair

Mitch

But really, SE has been headlined, has almost become recognizable to the mainstream.

(by 'SE' I mean the first programming Q&A not the platform.. I can never remember which is which)

Matt E. Эллен

SO

Mitch

so...

which one is that?

Matt E. Эллен

13:31

StackOverflow

Mitch

and...

which one is that?

Robusto

@RegDwigнt I hate when your instrument decides to play tricks on you. Flute doesn't have much that can go wrong—other than operator error. My worst was miscounting one time and coming in a measure early in a quiet section. Right out there in front of God & Everybody.

Matt E. Эллен

The Q&A site for fixing code, but not Code Review

Mitch

OH

and SE is the whole big platform?

Matt E. Эллен

yes

Mitch

13:33

so you're saying that all this time I've been shaking hands with my left hand?

goddamit

Matt E. Эллен

It's confusing because of the company name changes. It was Stack Overflow Inc. then Stack Exchange Inc. and now it's Stack Overflow Inc, but the platform for public Q&A is Stack Exchange

Mitch

Anyway, I think the 'ass' question is interesting sociolinguistics, even if the questioners wording is a little 'ranty'.

Matt E. Эллен

I need to retrieve my oven pizza

Mitch

@MattE.Эллен If I knew that I would be even more confused.

And I'm confused enough as it is

@MattE.Эллен No worries, I keep going and you can check the transcript later.

Cerberus

@Mitch Oh, authentic, is that it.

Mitch

13:39

No need to edit the ass question much or at all, just bend it slightly to whether profanity (or 'ass' in particular) is considered acceptable in certain registers... mention the softening of other profanity in English in general acceptablility in the news, 'cunt' in Scottish English, then throw in some Russian mothers and woo hoo you're done.

Cerberus

@Mitch What blow-up?

Did I miss anything?

@Mitch Yay.

Mitch

@Cerberus That's my analysis. You -know- it's not experts so you trust that they're kids just saying shit not very well.

Cerberus

@Mitch Agreed.

@Mitch Bend it slightly, OK.

Sound advice.

Mitch

19 hours ago, by Mitch

Cerberus

Does that constitute a blow-up?

Robusto

13:43

@Mitch Does this mean the inhabitants of Spaghettistan are called Spaghetti?

Mitch

@Cerberus For me, yes.

Cerberus

In my days, nobody would have noticed. Now, WWII, that was a blow-up.

Mitch

(Jake Tapper is a primary news guy on CNN)

(and twitter is not unimportant)

Cerberus

No comment.

Mitch

@Cerberus Oh. Yeah. I guess.

Cerberus

13:44

Someone posted something on Twitter, noted.

Mitch

@Cerberus You have revealed yourself by your pointed disengagement.

@Cerberus haha. but...

Cerberus

Unless you mean the picture is blown up in chat.

@Mitch Oh, not again...

Mitch

@Cerberus no it's about the same size

Cerberus

Oh, OK.

Mitch

maybe I spoke too soon.

about the blowup

Cerberus

13:46

How is that possible?

Speaking too soon, on Twitter?

Mitch

twitter is a bigger deal than ELU so there's that

and by bigger deal I mean

Cerberus

I hope it shall die soon.

At least it has never become large like Facebook.

Mitch

I haven't checked.

Robusto

@Mitch: End of an era in Watertown.

Russo's is/was an awesome store. Great produce, cheeses, you name it.

Mitch

@Robusto The guy is tired.

Robusto

13:50

When I worked in Waltham we used to go down there to get sandwiches all the time.

@Mitch Innocence is no excuse.

Mitch

@Robusto No one goes there anymore, because it is too crowded.

Robusto

Thank you, Yogi.

They just finished renovating their parking a few years ago.

Mitch

Best place for last minute xmas trees.

Robusto

My son lives in Watertown and he's very sad about this.

Russo's was not a factor in his moving there, but it was a "nice to have" extra.

Cerberus

> In Zuid-Afrika ontstond verontwaardiging toen bleek dat farmaceut Johnson & Johnson vanuit een fabriek in Zuid-Afrika meer vaccins exporteerde naar Europa dan hij in Zuid-Afrika zelf had verstrekt. Zuid-Afrika bestelde 31 miljoen vaccins, maar ontving vooralsnog slechts 2 miljoen doses voor de eigen bevolking.
Volgens onderzoek van The New York Times werden in de Aspen Pharmacare-fabriek, in de havenstad Port Elizabeth, de afgelopen maanden zeker 32 miljoen doses van het Johnson & Johnson-vaccin ingepakt voor export naar Europa. Het contract schrijft voor dat Zuid-Afrika niet het recht he…

Mitch

13:54

@Cerberus It's a strong presence but of a particular kind. Also things change over the years with twitter, but Facebook seems to be even stronger in what it always has been.

Cerberus

South Africa has exported 32 million doses of the Janssen vaccine to Europe, but received only 2 million itself.

As for the A–Z vaccine, South Africa pays 2.5 times as much per dose as does Europe...

Robusto

@Cerberus Deficit spending?

Cerberus

I think it is just power politics and a poor negotiating position.

"The Janssen contract says SA cannot prevent the factory from exporting vaccines."

It's not the government that does this, but the Western multinationals.

And Europe is apparently accepting all those vaccines.

Even though few people even use the Janssen vaccine here.

Mitch

@Cerberus Also, it is a private company who just happens to have multinational infrastructure. just because there's a factory in SA doesn't mean necessarily that it's producing for SA.

Cerberus

Pretty disgraceful.

@Mitch No, but it's still pretty horrible.

Mitch

13:57

@Cerberus No disagreement that it -looks- bad

Cerberus

And Europe was being all whiny about how many vaccines it was exporting compared to how many it received itself.

I'm sure there will still be a huge net export surplus for Europe, but still.

At least India stopped exports at some point.

Mitch

In some sense, all the manufacturing should be directed towards sending to India and China and Africa

and having a small percentage for NA/SA, Europe

Cerberus

Now that we have enough vaccines here, yeah, probably.

At least I think we now have about enough.

Mitch

PSA for everybody: you should not forget to get your -flu- vaccine this fall (Sep or Oct).

And for the olds (I'm not sure what the age recommendation is) but consider also a shingles vaccine (for adult chicken pox/varicella).

Cerberus

14:15

@Mitch We do not get that here!

Only if you're over 60.

@Mitch I thought chicken-pox immunity was for life?

Matt E. Эллен

I get the 'flu vaccine because I have asthma

and old people get it because they can't run away either

healthy people don't generally get a 'flu shot here

Cerberus

Same here.

Mitch

14:49

@Cerberus hm... I don't think so. I think maybe if you got it as a kid, it may reappear later in life as shingles.

@Cerberus I think here it is for all adults?

@MattE.Эллен hm... I used to work at a hospital and every fall they had a tent out for all employees (clinical or not) to get a flu shot.

Cerberus

15:02

@Mitch I thought that was a different disease, a kind of herpes.

@Mitch That's nice. But you probably have to pay for it?

Matt E. Эллен

I think chicken pox is a strain of herpes

> The most common late complication of chickenpox is shingles (herpes zoster)

Cerberus

> After a chickenpox infection, the virus remains dormant in the body's nerve tissues for about 50 years. This, however, does not mean that VZV cannot be contracted later in life.
The immune system usually keeps the virus at bay, however it can still manifest itself at any given age between 1 and 60, causing a different form of the viral infection called shingles (also known as herpes zoster).[32] Since the human immune system efficacy decreases with age, the United States Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) suggests that every adult over the age of 50 years get the herpes z…

Odd.

So the same virus has different names?

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch I think some workplaces here offer it, but on the whole it's not expected to get the shot unless you are "at risk"

i.e. it's not free if you're not at risk

CowperKettle

15:20

After years of research, neuroscientists have discovered a new pathway in the human brain that processes the sounds of language. The findings, reported August 18 in the journal Cell, suggest that auditory and speech processing occur in parallel

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Yeah you could probably get it here if you pay. Though I'm not sure whether the government had bought enough vaccines to allow that.

Man_From_India

How does these sound? Are they really incorrect?
1. The objective of the project is developing a framework.
2. Our objective of the project is developing a framework.
3. Our main objective of the project is developing a framework.

Cerberus

I would not use a possessive pronoun (our) together with a semi-possessive phrase (of...).

Man_From_India

Well in that case what about "my objective is developing a framework"?

Cerberus

Maybe use a different preposition if you really must use our.

@Man_From_India Perfectly fine.

Your no. 1 also sounds fine to me.

Man_From_India

15:25

If you don't mind my asking, you are native to US or UK

Or better question, native to AmE or BrE

Cerberus

No, but this is fairly standard usage.

Ask on ELL if you want more answers.

English Language Learners.

Man_From_India

I searched COCA quickly and

My finding is that when "objective" is preceded by a genitive pronoun like "our/my objective" you can use "verb+ing", still rare. But "the objective" as it is is almost never used with "verb+ing", except in conversation, that too rarely. On the other hand there is no problem with vwrb + ing when "objective" is preceded by a modifier like "primarily/secondary objective". — Man_From_India 13 hours ago

But another probablyly BrE user thinks verb+ing is wrong. So a little confused. And that why I asked you if you are native to BrE or AmE

Cerberus

@Man_From_India I think Astral Bee is wrong.

He's probably overthinking it.

A gerund can be used without an article. He really wants to add the article (the developing of...), but it is not required.

It's just a slightly different construction.

Man_From_India

Yes I don't agree with what grammatical point he made in his answer.

Cerberus

And his argument why just developing should be wrong is mistaken.

Man_From_India

15:31

nods

Cerberus

He assumed developing must be a participle rather than a gerund.

But the real question is, can the gerund be used without an article here?

Man_From_India

From COCA I furnished some example sentences over there in my comment. And it seems it can.

Cerberus

The examples you posted there are good.

It can happen to the best of people: you over-analyse a sentence and you get stuck in the wrong perspective.

When Astal Bee looks back upon his answer later, I'm sure he will agree that the article is not necessary and that your examples are sound.

CowperKettle

Лесной пожар вблизи Екатеринбурга | E1.RU

►

A fire near Yekaterinburg, at Lake Glukhoye

Man_From_India

Yup but now that you said "the objective of the project is developing a framework" is good, it doesn't go well with my findings on COCA

Mitch

15:35

@Cerberus @Man_From_India Varicella zoster virus is not the same as herpes simplex virus, although both belong to the same family of herpesviruses.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle At least they didn't try to make it seem dramatic with the music.

@Man_From_India How so?

The only argument against that construction is that it is ambiguous in theory (the object is busy developing?), but, in practice, the ambiguity is not there.

Mitch

@Cerberus se the wiki on shingles I just linked to. TLDR - paraphrasing "No. If your immune system gets weakened, the varicella virus (from an initial youthful chickenpox infection) can breakout as shingles (a different disease/different problems, but caused by the same virus)

Cerberus

@Mitch Then how can the former virus manifest itself as chicken pox, then later as shingles?

I assume the names in the article are the names of viruses.

I see two different names (varicella and herpes), so I assume those are two different viruses.

Or aren't they?

Man_From_India

In the morning I quickly ran a search on COCA like this probably "the objective [be] vvg" and found nothing good there. @Cerberus

Cerberus

@Man_From_India google.com/…

Two examples from books.

Mitch

15:42

@MattE.Эллен so they're related (herpes zoster and herpes A/B/C) but are not the same and have different expressions. VZV gives you chicken pox (which is flu-like plus the blisters), but herpes simplex gives you cold sores and genital warts

Cerberus

Four with "the object is preventing". google.com/…

Mitch

@Cerberus So in the US insurance is usually awful in comparison to Europe, but I think I only had to pay a $10 copay for a flu shot (it was free at the hospital as an employee)

@Cerberus yes, that's weird

Man_From_India

@Cerberus good finding. Btw did you check COCA?

Cerberus

@Mitch That's €10 more than here!

Mitch

@Cerberus I don't know enough about the mechanism to answer 'how'. I'm just reading that it does do it.

Cerberus

15:48

@Man_From_India Nope, I hardly know what it is, I think a corpus?

@Mitch Nor I.

Mitch

@Cerberus varicella = herpes zoster = VZV

> Shingles and chickenpox are distinct human diseases but are closely related in their life cycles. Both originate from infection of an individual with the varicella zoster virus (VZV).

Man_From_India

@Cerberus yes AmE corpus. And thank you for your valuable comment there under the question.

Robusto

TIL Swahili is a mix of Bantu and Arabic, and the name is from an Arabic word meaning "of the coast."

I always thought it was a very original African language.

Mitch

I'm pretty sure that it is primarily Bantu, but with a lot of Arabic vocab. where 'a lot' is very... vague.

ie it is not a creole, just has a lot of borrowings

Robusto

@Mitch I would surmise that the borrowings mostly involve trade.

Mitch

15:54

ie there is more evidence that English is a German/French creole (which might be controversial, or it might be acceptable)

@Robusto yeah, vocab about stuff

Robusto

The point, though, is that Swahili is not Bantu.

Mitch

I don't think Swahili does any kind of vowel ablaut to get inflections.

@Robusto Oh.

There, with the little I know, I would disagree.

Robusto

Hmm.

Swahili people

The Swahili people (Swahili language: WaSwahili) are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting East Africa. Members of this ethnicity primarily reside on the Swahili coast, in an area encompassing the Zanzibar archipelago, littoral Kenya, the Tanzania seaboard, northern Mozambique, the Comoros Islands, and Northwest Madagascar. More recently, Swahili identity is centered around any person of African descent who speaks Swahili as their first language, is muslim and lives in a town on the main urban centers of most of modern day Tanzania and coastal Kenya, northern Mozambique and the Comoros, through a process...

Mitch

Depending on what you mean by 'is', I would say Swahili is a Bantu language with 20% Arabic vocab, it does not do grammar at all like Arabic and does it a lot like other Bantu languages.

And it doesn't hav a loss of a lot of Bantu grammatical features as one might expect if it were a creole.

Robusto

I just paper-clipped that from a book I just read.

Mitch

16:00

> Historical linguists do not consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant, since Arabic influence is limited to lexical items, most of which have been borrowed only since 1500, whereas the grammatical and syntactic structure of the language is typically Bantu.

Wikipedia, I know, but it is something.

Cerberus

@Mitch Most odd! Why varicella zoster = herpes zoster?

@Mitch How do you know so much about Swahili?

Robusto

@Mitch I think lexical items are not insignificant, especially if they comprise 20% of the language.

Cerberus

True.

Mitch

@Cerberus look man I don't know who mad up these words. Maybe under the microscope they all look like snakes?

Robusto

4 mins ago, by Mitch

Wikipedia, I know, but it is something.

Mitch

16:06

@Robusto Sure but 'significant' enough to change its categorization?

Robusto

That is above my pay grade.

Cerberus

"Significant" requires definition at this stage.

Mitch

@Cerberus How does anybody know anything that they don't live? I've read about it.

@Cerberus 20% vocab

Cerberus

Recently?

@Mitch Then the discussion becomes meaningless, about a tautology.

Mitch

In the past couple years?

Cerberus

16:07

OK.

Then how come you read so much about Swahili over the past couple of years?

Mitch

@Cerberus No I think a discussion can continue if we agree on some things.

@Cerberus Why does anybody read anything beyond the point of a gun? I was interested?

Cerberus

@Mitch There is no point in discussing whether X is significant if you agree that 1) significant means 20%, and 2) X has 20%.

It is a finished syllogism.

@Mitch OK OK.

Mitch

My expectation is that if you have studied or have grown up with Arabic, you will be able to recognize a few Swahili words but that's as far as learning Swahili will go.

Robusto

It also needs to be allowed that mere percentages of lexical items says nothing about usage of those items.

Mitch

@Cerberus But if you translate a number into 'significant' and then use 'significant' in other versions of its meaning then that won't get you anywhere.

@Robusto Yes, everything has qualification. what the frequency of use of any word is, what contexts each word is, etc etc.

Cerberus

16:13

@Robusto Depends on what the percentage really means. Percentage of words found in a corpus? Does the same word count twice when found twice? Etc.

@Mitch Yes, but that is not relevant in the present context.

Mitch

@Cerberus Oh. I think that is exactly the issue.

Robusto

French and Latin each comprise ~28% of English words, while Germanic languages (incl. OE) weigh in at 25%, yet about 70% of words used in English are Anglo-Saxon in origin.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus Well, not really

Maybe in the capitals it was better.

But in the countryside it must have been bad.

A totalitarian regime is very good at concentrating efforts on a limited number of points.

Cerberus

Context?

Robusto

@CowperKettle Over what time period?

Mitch

16:18

"Is Swahili a Bantu language or is it a mix of Bantu and Arabic?"
"The data says 20% of its vocab is Arabic"
"20% is significant"
"If a language has a significant % foreign vocab vs native then it is a mix and not primarily native."

Robusto

@Mitch Where did you get that?

Mitch

@Robusto I'm writing it myself as a description of the justification here in chat that "Swahili is a mix".

Robusto

We still need more data.

Hell, we always need more data.

Mitch

Yes.

So as a proxy, if all we knew were that 20% vocab of swahili were Arabic, then I wouldn't go so far as to say that Swahili is not Bantu, and that it is a mix of Arabic and Bantu.

Matt E. Эллен

only if you want to be accurate. I, for one, want to lie to people, so less data is ideal

Mitch

16:22

I'd be more likely to say that English is not Germanic but is a mix of French and Germanic.

Matt E. Эллен

Dinosaurs and humans cohabited!

Mitch

ew

Robusto

@MattE.Эллен You should have your own conspiracy-theory "news" outlet here.

Mitch

it is in all the drawings

Matt E. Эллен

It was a different time, don't judge them by our morals

@Robusto I'll call it faux news

Robusto

16:23

Already taken.

Matt E. Эллен

:D

Mitch

We are closer in time to T Rexes roaming the earth than T Rexes were to Stegosauruses

Cerberus

@Mitch Then you require definitions.

You need to explain what "be Germanic" means.

Otherwise, it is a meaningless word game.

Robusto

@Mitch A fact that clearly bothered them. Many T. Rexes were in analysis for years because of that.

Cerberus

@Mitch Yeah, that's funny.

Robusto

16:29

Also, 20-25% of T. Rex vocabulary came from Stegosaurian.

Cerberus

How archaic.

Robusto

Some say that *rrrawrrrr was not really Stegosaurian, but leading scholars have traced it that far back.

The Stegosaurs pronounced it *rewwwwrrr but it's the same word.

Mitch

@Robusto wipes splurted tea off screen

Robusto

@Mitch I figured you'd like that one.

CowperKettle

Famous Gomel (Belarus town) volunteer Ilya Mironov received 25 days of arrest for the slogan "Write letters" on his T-shirt
Ilya is famous for having written more than 2500 letters to political prisoners. He was detained near pre-trial detention center,where he wanted to hand over another batch of letters.

Matt E. Эллен

16:52

-2

Q: Correct unicode character for the apostrophe in generic alien names?

I am specifically asking about alien names in either science fiction or fantasy stories (novels, movies, whatever). This includes place names and not just names of individuals. It should exclude names of humans in real life, except for comparison purposes. For instance, the family names O'Neill a...

Robusto

@MattE.Эллен Why would there be a "correct" Unicode character for SciFi writing?

Yeah, please don't accept that here. We've got enough of a trash heap going already.

Matt E. Эллен

@Robusto I don't get it either. they're names of imaginary people typed by real people using whatever orthography they like. Why would Unicode get involved?

@Robusto oh, no, I just thought any unicode buffs in the room might want to look

Robusto

@MattE.Эллен In other words, where is @tchrist now that we really need him?

Matt E. Эллен

:D

Robusto

0

Q: Are a and ʌ pronounced the same?

As in write vs up or must vs nice. I don't seem to find any difference. Could anyone tell me if there is one please?

pronunciation

I don't even know what this person is asking. Needs "details or clarity" ... not necessarily in that order.

Cerberus

17:00

Yeah, that is a bad question.

CowperKettle

17:19

Illustration showing the average increase of living space of working class people in Dutch cities from an one room flat in 1900, to a worker's flat in the 1930s to a Bijlmermeer flat in 1970.
All inhabited by a family.

Cerberus

17:32

Yeah, progress is steady.

Now, however, people in Amsterdam have less and less space per person, because of exploding housing prices.

CowperKettle

My mother's family lived in Flat No.1 until 1960. A family of five. In a one-storey shed.

All in a single room.

And without a separate toilet. The toilet was down the corridor.

Cerberus

Quite uncomfortable.

But people were used to it.

CowperKettle

And without a bath. They went to the public bathhouse, a big building built for washing many people.

Cerberus

That was also common here.

And these kinds of kitchen.

Guess what the round lid covers.

CowperKettle

When they first moved to a two-room flat with an actual water tap and a toilet, my mom (as a girl) used to run multiple times to the bathroom and check out the water tap. You just turn the tap, and water starts flowing.

Cerberus

17:35

Yeah people used to use pumps.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus A pot for cooking?

Cerberus

Wrong!

Guess again.

CowperKettle

A toilet bowl?

Cerberus

Ding!

Imagine if mother was cooking and father needed to evacuate himself.

CowperKettle

Nice, a cozy kitchen/toilet )))

Cerberus

17:36

Quite.

They could chat and see what the other was doing while she was cooking and he was doing his business.

Robusto

A great read on how people used to house themselves, room-by-room, is At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson.

CowperKettle

> - The USA will soon fall due to our counter-sanctions!
- Wash yourself faster, you **cking patriot, they have only switched on the water for half an hour!

A popular meme.

Cerberus

People still have showers in their kitchens here, though in closed cabins.

Contrsankshiy, funny word.

Robusto

> In even the best houses, floors were generally just bare earth strewn with rushes, harboring “spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fishes and other filth unmentionable,” as the Dutch theologian and traveler Desiderius Erasmus rather crisply summarized in 1524.

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life .

> In humbler dwellings, matters were generally about as simple as they could be. The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders and why an honest person—someone who keeps his hands visible at all times—is said to be aboveboard.

Cerberus

Interesting.

That may also be behind the etiquette of never keeping one's hand below the table at dinner?

Robusto

17:49

Could be.

> Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishments severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker’s dozen.

Cerberus

Although I think the rule is not always observed in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Robusto

I think I would look askance at someone whose hands were below the table for any significant length of time.

Cerberus

One often sees Englishmen do it at dinner.

It is not considered as sinful there as here!

Matt E. Эллен

our rule is "no elbows on the table"

Robusto

How about forearms?

> Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.

Ibid.

Matt E. Эллен

18:23

@Robusto I think those are taboo, too, but less so

Mitch

18:35

@MattE.Эллен no elbows, no forearms....what do you just hold your arms and hands hovering over your plate?

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer (88): It seems natural to say "who'd've" in speech, but is this incorrect? by idiot on english.SE

Robusto

@Cerberus If you're of such a disposition, perhaps you could get your country to take over and rout the Taliban?

We are not Team America: World Police.

> How do you ask the last soldier to die for a mistake?

Afghanistan was just Vietnam all over again. A mistake.

Matt E. Эллен

18:58

@Mitch hands in the air and wait for dessert

Cerberus

@MattE.Эллен Glad to know that one's international!

@Robusto Forearms are fine!

@Robusto Perhaps, but we don't have the resources.

And we didn't invade the country.

@Robusto But that is just what America did.

Robusto

@Cerberus Neither do we. Not for an endless resource sink like that.

Cerberus

America does, as she has shown us for twenty years.

Robusto

@Cerberus Agreed. It was stupid then, it's stupid now. Wars don't age like fine wine.

Cerberus

What is more, she could do it at a fraction of the cost, by no longer investing in the failed Afghan army but simply using 10,000 soldiers of her own to keep the Taleban at bay.

Robusto

19:10

@Cerberus Now you're appealing to the Vietnam fallacy.

Cerberus

Most of the billions expended were a waste.

At least I'm not falling for the Trump-Biden fallacy...

Robusto

We spend lavishly for weapons that will never be used, but when it comes time to make our people much more secure with sane healthcare programs, we can't be bothered.

@Cerberus I don't know what that is. But all of the trillions we've wasted there and in Iraq were thanks to George W. Bush's feeling the need to have a swagger in his step and a bulge in his pants. I think there must be cheaper ways to give stupid presidents a hard-on.

Cerberus

Yes, the invasion of Iraq was certainly a bad idea.

I have my doubts about the invasion of Afghanistan.

Robusto

It was also a lie.

Cerberus

Yes.

But, once you have taken over a country, you have taken on a certain responsibility.

Robusto

19:17

I don't know where you read that. But again, it's easy for you to say after the fact. I think it is and was a mistake, and I don't think it's a good idea to keep on going with a mistake, especially a failed one.

> According to classical economics and standard microeconomic theory, only prospective (future) costs are relevant to a rational decision. At any moment in time, the best thing to do depends only on current alternatives. The only things that matter are the future consequences. Past mistakes are irrelevant.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…