English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

01:54

@Mitch How odd!

I wonder why you had assigned seats.

I have lots of memories both from school and otherwise.

In primary school, there was this new girl I didn't like.

Soon, she became my best friend.

We were 6, I think.

In the sandbox at school, we made holes filled with 'soft sand', which was money or gold or something.

She remained my best friend all through primary school.

And I still see her, though not often, because she has children and lives in a suburb of The Hague.

After school, we played 'gods'.

2

We could be the bronze god, the silver god, or the golden god, and you had to do quests for the god to advance.

We also made fake money and tried to con each other out of it using false contracts (e.g. contracts with hidden fold-outs and stuff).

We also drew brochures for heartening children's play camps.

With pictures of happy children and accompanying text.

On the back, the real situation at the camp was depicted.

The children would be forced to carve out and carry large rocks, and they would be punished most severely, and there was no food, etc.

3

We did much of these things during class, because we had little else to do, it was so boring.

We also made a little village of 3D paper houses cellotaped to our tables, with bridges to connect the tables.

Once they were done, after a few days, we would attack them with scissors and cut them up.

Then we'd recellotape them. Ad inf.

I could go on with 1001 things we did. So much time.

CowperKettle

03:01

In the first years of school, we played "knife in the sand" a lot, which was helped by the fact that there was a lot of hard compacted sandy ground in Noyabrsk.

In the simplest form of the game, two players divide a circle into two halves. Each must always stand on his part of the ground at the moment he throws the knife into the sand. If one leaves one's land, he has lost.

You must throw your knife into the opponent's land. If it sticks, good for you -- you could then cut a part along the path of the blade. You then add this part to your land -- provided that you could draw the line without your feet leaving your land.

Then the opponent throws the knife into your land, and thus until one of the players is unable to stand on his land while throwing the knife.

There was a lot of variations to the game, and there was another game with two round "cities" separated by a distance, and each player throwing the knife in the sand in a complex way in order to approach the opponent's city.

If you throw the knife from the position there the knife makes several turns while falling, it's a battle helicopter, for instance.

You draw a battle helicopter. You then are able to stand on this helicopter. You are one step closer to the opponent's city.

In order to destroy your helicopter, the opponent must throw the knife in the same fashion, and the knife then must stick into the ground. If it does not stick, bad news.

And so on, and so forth.

It was a turn-based strategy.

CowperKettle

03:24

> Memory is malleable," Wixted says. "And because it's malleable, we must avoid repeated identification procedures with the same witness and suspect. medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-urge-eyewitness-memory.html

> Even if the initial decision is "no, that is not him," the face will seem more familiar on any later test. Often, the witness loses sight of the fact that the face is familiar because of the previous lineup test and comes to believe that the face is familiar because it is in fact the face of the perpetrator (source misattribution).

Cerberus

04:34

@CowperKettle Sounds like fun.

I didn't have a knife.

CowperKettle

05:25

Word of the day: pipe dope

CowperKettle

08:22

Cervical cancer cases plummeted among British women who received a vaccination against the human papillomavirus, according to a study published Thursday.

CowperKettle

08:55

> the 1895 painting Self-Portrait with Cigarette (pictured) by Edvard Munch was met with criticism of his amorality and "degeneration"

Xanne

@CowperKettle “Pipe dope also acts as a lubricant and helps prevent seizing of the mating parts, which can later cause difficulty during disassembly.” Thank goodness.

Later

0

Q: Should the present perfect form of the verb "continue" not be used in the following sentence?

I have seen the following sentence in some article: Frankly, I think the point it makes is rather obvious, but to my surprise the publication was followed by a further flood of objections that - more surprisingly - continues to the present day. The context is that the author stated a controvers...

Mitch

09:52

@Cerberus We all thought it was weird too. Or at least the very loud voice in my head speaking for everybody thought so. I wonder what that girl's voice-in-her-head said? Probably the same. Plus "Why are all these other kids that I didn't choose to sit next to, why are they always trying to interrupt?"

@CowperKettle I remember playing a much simpler knife game, which was more like a dare, you just threw the knife closer and closer to the next guy's foot.

I mean yeah you take turns, sure.

But we were like 10 years old so we gave up pretty soon to go burn some stuff in the woods you know because knife throwing is dangerous.

Your games seem more elaborate and intelligent.

@CowperKettle Was the cigarette smoking considered the amoral/decadent thing? Or was that just a secondary thing?

Matt E. Эллен

having hands: the most amoral thing of all!

Mitch

Didn't everybody smoke back then? Or just not art critics?

@MattE.Эллен They are pretty racy.

@CowperKettle Was the cigarette smoking considered the amoral/decadent thing? Or was that just a secondary thing?

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch think of all the things they might have done!

Mitch

I have a photo of my mom when she was in her twenties, a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other.

So so decadent.

Matt E. Эллен

but is she wearing gloves?

Mitch

10:01

@MattE.Эллен ... ya know, I'm not sure. I bet it was the fashion at the time,

but I could be reconstructing that memory. so I'm not sure.

She was wearing a fancy party dress. not ostentatious, just fancy

CowperKettle

11:12

@Mitch Oh, I read about this game when I tried to found out about knife games in the West. I wondered why there there no safe games, like in Russia, and only such dangerous games.

Mumblety-peg

Mumblety-peg (also known as mumbley-peg, mumblepeg, mumble-the-peg, mumbledepeg or mumble-de-peg) is an old outdoor game played using pocketknives. The term "mumblety-peg" came from the practice of putting a peg of about 2 or 3 inches into the ground. The loser of the game had to take it out with his teeth. Mark Twain's book Tom Sawyer, Detective recounts "mumbletypeg" as one of boys' favorite outdoor games. == Overview == Mumblety-peg is generally played between two people, with a pocketknife. In another common version of the game, two opponents stand opposite one another with their feet shoulder...

Here it is

@Mitch We loved to find somewhere some cardboard boxes and burn them.

@Mitch I have a photo of my uncle in his teens, wearing a long trenchcoat and costume he tailored himself, and with long hair. So so decadent, and like Edgar Allan Poe

> Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December

The friend in the high boots also loved to tailor clothes, and produced homemade jeans, which were impossible to buy at stores in the USSR.

My uncle Yevgeny. He died of pancreatic cancer in the mid 2000s.

CowperKettle

11:43

Or maybe in his twenties, not teens. The photos are not dated

Glucosamine Supplementation Improves Physical Performance in Trained Mice

Mitch

@CowperKettle yes, that's the game and the name.

At the age we were playing it, we couldn't have gotten it from reading 'Tom Sawyer' directly, an I don't think it was in the movie produced during my childhood, so I'm guessing it was learned passed on by older boys (who may have read the book or picked it up in Boy Scouts where they play around with knives all day).

@CowperKettle For us it was plastic model airplanes and toy soldiers and the glue used to build them and very small firecrackers. Or at least that's what I saw older kids doing and what I aspired to.

Which could explain a lot about my childhood.

But that is another time.

But that is for another time.

@CowperKettle December is bleak? OMG, for us it is February. December can almost feel like extended fall. With March, even though it is usually as awful as February, at least there's hope.

December is worrying about being punched in the face. January is thinking wow this is weird I haven't been punched in the face much. February is being punched in face every day. March is being punched in the face thinking hmmm pretty soon I won't be punched in the face.

For context, being punched in the face is not desirable unless you like skiing.

M.A.R.

12:36

@Cerberus well now I'm imagining every kid to be a Tom Bombadil-style god

CowperKettle

13:24

CowperKettle

14:04

Neural networks, again: Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages

> The researchers studied a powerful neural network that has been pretrained to learn basic speech from raw audio, called Wave2vec 2.0.

reith

15:41

Hi. I wonder how to write a future conditional in past, it just doesn't feel quite right. Take this sentence: "If I go home tomorrow, I'll see my family". The week after, I want mention that fact again. I think it should be: "I knew If I went home the next day, I'd see my family". Is this correct?

What confuses me is the combination of of past tense and would+simple infinitive that looks like second conditional but my original conditional was first conditional. These two forms differ in level of certainty and probability.

Let's assume the probability of seeing my family on my visit to home, is low. In that case I'd say: "If I went home, I'd see my family". Now how to convert it to past? "I knew If I went home, I'd see my family" again?

CowperKettle

16:15

Current weather. Very slippery, minus 2°C. I fell on that corner.

> 49.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Tomorrow it will be half the world

CowperKettle

16:40

Fluvoxamine has shown good results in a large (1500 people) covid trial: thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/…

Cerberus

16:55

@reith This is perfectly correct. Alternative: I knew that, if I'd go home the next day, I'd see my family.

@reith Yes, it is the same.

After the backshift, you cannot tell the difference between 'neutral possibility' and 'hypothetical possibility'.

reith

@Cerberus Thanks.

regarding possibility, what I understand is possibility is subjective to some point in paste and somehow I have this feeling that being in future should not change this extent of certainty that I once had..

Let assume I have two different conditionals in my mind one is more certain, I use first conditional another is less possible, I use second conditional for this one.

time passes, and I don't really know, neither care what were the outcome of those conditions, but I want tell I had such thoughts in the past

I hope that make sense :D

the problem is both of those conditionals now map to one syntax

and the expression of level of probability will be lost

Cerberus

Yes.

You'll have to express that level in another way.

reith

Thank you so much for confirming this..

I've been hit by this several times so far and every time I think something is wrong with me.

Cerberus

Backshifting is an imprecise business.

Latin has similar issues.

CowperKettle

17:36

Ultralight and nonsense

aliexpress.ru/item/1005002612787187.html

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…