English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:01

It doesn't make sense as a reply to my message, not to me at least.

You're basically repeating what I said?

Mitch

00:13

I'm saying not just 'less common' but rather 'is not used at all except maybe by people trying to sound British.

Which may have sounded like a repeat because I did not emphasize that it is -rarely- used by US speakers

Cerberus

I just worded it carefully.

Regardless, I am usually disinclined to believe absolute statements.

Mitch

I worded mine carefully too, to reflect more accurately what I think the reality is

@Cerberus 'rarely' isn't absolute.

Cerberus

I'm playing a game now in which figures the Cult of the Absolute.

Mitch

00:28

You're playing a game which the Cult of the Absolute figures in?

Cerberus

If you must put it like that.

CowperKettle

@MetaEd In my cat's case it was not marketing. He starts having blood in his urine each time he is switched from a specialized anti-stone-formation feed. This spring, after he tried out this feed I bought by mistake, I had to take him to the clinic, where they inserted a catheter to drain his urinary bladder.

Mitch

The stuffiness of deutschifying the preposition is compounded by the amphibole of 'figures'. Ie It leads me down the garden path of 'in which figures' ie which figures is it in?

Lambie

@Mitch I ain't saying, which I already said. :)

Mitch

@Lambie Did I forget?

Lambie

00:41

@CowperKettle Feed is for horses or cattle. Cats just eat food, like us.

@Mitch No, I never said.

Mitch

Ok cool just looking out for my own...what's the word...

Where you can't remember stuff...

And

It's

To

Hard

Pick the right

Aphasia!

No that doesn't sound right

Robusto

@Mitch Sure it does.

Mitch

snort

It's like when there's this word in the tip of your tongue and you describe it in excruciating detail and someone says the only possible word which could fit that description and the asker says 'no that's not it's. That's happened several times in SWRs

Robusto

@Mitch Why I don't answer SWRs anymore.

Also why I don't answer anything anymore, but ...

Laurel

But what about the rep?

Mitch

01:00

When I first showed up on ELU, I had a whole bunch of questions pent up over the years and some were SWRs and I thought ELU was exactly that kind of place to ask them (or at least it was more likely to get reasonable help than other places).

CowperKettle

When I first showed up in this world, I had a whole bunch of questions, and ALL of them were SWRs.

Mitch

And then I didn't understand why people were so belligerent about it 'Look man if you can't think of the word for me fine but if you're so angry why bother responding'

@CowperKettle there's a word for that

I'm sure

Maybe

Wording is hard

Cerberus

@Mitch That is fair.

Though what does it have to do with German?

Word order would be quite different in German.

It is very English.

Mitch

Sure all the separable verbs, but the construction we're talking about, relative clauses where the NP being relativized is the object of a preposition, in German that grammar is always 'indem NP' moving the preposition to the front of the relative clause.

I'm not sure about 'always'.

Cerberus

Sure, but that is also normal enough in English.

alphabet

01:13

The two kinds of ELU questions: (1) "please explain this extremely complicated syntactic phenomenon" (2) "what is a word for happy but also sad"

At least, the two kinds that don't get closed

Mitch

It's not obligatory in AmE, or more specifically it is very formal (New Yorker style) but not in regular AmE

alphabet

H&P give like ten different rules for circumstances that favor or disfavor preposition stranding. Overall it is more characteristic of formal speech, but...it's complicated.

Compare: "There were many obstacles, despite which we still succeeded" vs *"There were many obstacles, which we still succeeded despite"

Cerberus

I don't think despite can really work like that.

It's a bit of a stunted preposition stub.

CowperKettle

alphabet

01:32

There are a lot of rules like that. Compare also: *"That is the rug which the key from under is damaged."

CowperKettle

By adding "even though.." at the end of any statement, you can create the sense of intrigue out of nothing, even though..

Robusto

01:47

@Laurel Who needs rep?

Mitch

01:59

@CowperKettle oh? Go on...

Robusto

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]

►

Dannyu NDos

nethackwiki.com/mediawiki/…

Opinions appreciated.

Is there really no single word for "neither blessed nor cursed"?

CowperKettle

Program in C — The Memory Unsafety Anthem

►

Mitch

02:21

@DannyuNDos no there's no such word. And for most opposites there is no such word or the word is more rare

Or there is a generic like 'medium'

Tall medium short

Big small

alphabet

@Robusto Gimme internet points I want them so I can show them off to my no friends

Mitch

Hot lukewarm/tepid cold

Long midsize short

Green ?? Red

Happy ?? Sad

True equivocal false

Here ??? There

CowperKettle

> “The A17 Pro processor in Apple's iPhone 15 Pro has 19 billion transistors. Intel's Ponte Vecchio supercomputing processor has more than 100 billion. By the end of the decade, Intel expects processors with -- if you can imagine it -- a trillion transistors.”

alphabet

@Mitch Isn't "fine" roughly halfway between "happy" and "sad"?

Mitch

@alphabet it's generic and could work for other semantic dimensions

It doesn't -mean- 'neither happy nor sad'

CowperKettle

02:27

@Lambie I just transferred it subconsciously from Russian, where we use the word korm (корм), meaning "feed", for cats. Like cattle feed etc.

Mitch

That was the question asked. But what is sufficient for the needs of the OP is different

Dannyu NDos

Green - Yellow - Red. At least in the spectrum.

Mitch

Uncursed should be fine. UnX doesn't mean ' the total opposite from X' it means 'not cursed'.

@DannyuNDos yellow would not be the first thing I would think of. The spectrum and color is a lot more complicated than that

One might say brown is half way, or gray also

If you're going for 'not green' -and 'not red' there's a lot of room in colors for that, there's no ine thing that is best

Ie no one thing that is neither red nor green

Dannyu NDos

And as for "Here - ??? - There", Korean has two words for "there": 거기 and 저기.

Mitch

Different languages do different things, so it is even more complicated

Dannyu NDos

02:32

...though, that distinction is not about the distance.

Mitch

Sometimes it works out, like 'lukewarm or tepid' but there's just no guarantee

Dannyu NDos

거기 is generic "there", while 저기 means the place is far from the listener also.

alphabet

@CowperKettle In English we like to pretend pets are people.

Mitch

Cursed and blessed are not the most common concepts so unlikely to have a middle ground (beyond some generic

alphabet

So if you keep a pig as a pet, you give it food. If you keep it as livestock, you give it feed.

CowperKettle

02:33

@alphabet Same in Russian, but the word for cat food is cat feed here.

Language is not directly logical.

Otherwise I would never know any of you.

There would be no need for ELU and ELL SE

alphabet

Indeed.

Mitch

@alphabet but if you use the same bag of stuff to feed it, it may be labeled pig feed whether a pet or not

alphabet

@Mitch Indeed. You feed it feed as food.

Mitch

@CowperKettle I had a French teacher who said French was.

Totally logical that is.@jlliagre

@alphabet Genau

And once the pig gets big enough, it may become food in turn

If you've fed it enough

alphabet

Not if it's a pet, one assumes. Idk, do they cremate pet pigs yet?

Mitch

02:37

If it's a pet, a too big pig may get you fed up

alphabet

I've known someone with a pet pig. Very labor intensive.

Mitch

@alphabet don't go round the back of the vet's office

alphabet

Still better than those people who get their pets taxidermized.

Dannyu NDos

Also, it's quite fascinating that most language don't seem to have a single word for "not (to) know" while Korean does.

모르다 is the single Korean word for that.

"Ignorant" would fit, but that's an adjective.

alphabet

Well, there's "dunno."

Dannyu NDos

02:44

Though "dunno" is a single word, it is a contraction; one cannot write "will dunno" or "should dunno".

alphabet

Just checked a thesaurus. TfD helpfully lists "fuck" as a synonym for (one sense of) "know."

Dannyu NDos

D:

alphabet

It's not wrong, but I wonder where an author would exchange one for the other.

Dannyu NDos

Is it just my experiences, or is it actually unnatural to write "won't know" or "shouldn't know"?

For examples:

"You won't know that." → "You won't understand that."
"You mustn't know that." → "That's classified."
"You shouldn't know that." → "You'd better ignore that."
"You might not know that." → "You might've had no idea about that."

Cerberus

Some of those could be appropriate in the right context?

Dannyu NDos

02:53

Really?

Cerberus

You mustn't know that, I can't think of a context for that.

The rest ought to fit in some story.

@alphabet In the Bible?

alphabet

@Cerberus And other extremely old-fashioned contexts. Hence the odd euphemism "to know someone in the Biblical sense."

Cerberus

Exactly.

alphabet

@DannyuNDos "You might not know that" is certainly idiomatic.

"You shouldn't know that" means something different than "You'd better ignore that"; likewise with your other pairs.

Cerberus

Yeah, the last one is the normallest one.

The first one is also fairly to write a story around.

alphabet

03:05

I'm sure there's some denomination progressive enough to adopt a Bible translation using the word "fucked."

Cerberus

Imagine an arrogant man telling someone else that of course ho won't know this technical aspect.

Dannyu NDos

@alphabet "You should've been ignorant about that"?

Wait, that's a different tense

alphabet

@DannyuNDos You can know something but still ignore it, so "You shouldn't know that" means something different from "You'd better ignore that."

Dannyu NDos

Oh

alphabet

"Ignore" usually means "pay no attention to," not "be ignorant of."

CowperKettle

03:34

M.A.R.

06:33

@CowperKettle what about M? Also what's their inclusion criteria?

Xanne

07:07

Wordle 823 4/6

🟨⬜⬜🟨🟩
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨🟨🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

CowperKettle

08:18

> "I will have a cheeseburger, one cola, and a medium package of fries"

jlliagre

09:53

@Mitch I concur, French is just pure logic.

CowperKettle

Non-Euclidean Therapy for AI Trauma [Analog Archives] #SoME3

►

CowperKettle

10:05

Bernard Morin

Bernard Morin (French: [mɔʁɛ̃]; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018) was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist. == Early life and education == Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to glaucoma, but his blindness did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. == Career == Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere, i.e., a homotopy which starts with a sphere and ends with the same sphere but turned inside-out. He also discovered...

A blind French mathematician who helped display the process of turning a sphere inside-out.

CowperKettle

10:25

Cognates of the day: ébauche and bush

George Bush Jr is an ébauche of George Bush Sr

jlliagre

10:39

@CowperKettle There is a chronological issue: Jr can't be an ébauche of Sr.

CowperKettle

@jlliagre Ah, indeed..

Mitch

11:14

@jlliagre he also taught us IPA, had the class over for dinner once, and told us stories of visiting Sartre regularly.

So I can't fault him for lunacy in some areas.

jlliagre

@Mitch \ly.na.tik\ and \ˈluː.nə.tɪk\ are false friends.

Mitch

11:30

@jlliagre what does the French one mean?

jlliagre

11:44

@Mitch Moody, temperamental

We are less affected by the Moon ;-)

Mitch

False friends may be better friends

Vikas

Better friends may be false

Mitch

12:05

Better is the enemy of good

Vikas

Enemy wants better goods

Mitch

A good enemy is worth more than a bad friend

jlliagre

12:32

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Mitch

12:57

Two heads are better than one

Robusto

13:18

But three's a crowd.

Robusto

13:32

#Worldle #607 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐🏙️🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sep 20, 2023 🌍
🔥 36 | Avg. Guesses: 4.31
⬜🟧🟥🟥🟩 = 5

globle-game.com
#globle

Another island guessing name-game.

Wordle 823 6/6

🟨⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩⬛⬛🟩⬛
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Another one-slot letter-guessing game.

Mitch

@Robusto tell that to @Cerberus

Robusto

@Mitch Oh, he knows. He knows. He might not admit it, but he knows.

Imagine you're trying to think and your other two heads are barking all the damn time.

jlliagre

13:59

Wordle 823 5/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜
🟨🟩⬜🟨🟨
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

jlliagre

14:10

#deluxewaffle69 3/5

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⭐🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬜🟩⭐🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩⭐🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

wafflegame.net

Mitch

14:43

Please excuse my impending rant re the following:

4

Q: Discussion arising from "can not " and "cannot"

I saw the following passage in Professor West's homepage, and I hadn't noticed this point before. See https://dwest.web.illinois.edu/grammar.html#cannot "Can not" and "may be". The expression "can not" should not exist in English (I am horrified to hear that it now does appear in some dictionari...

mathematics

Here's the ranty part... almost entirely people there in answers and comments are stupid. Thery're not willingly taking a devil's advocate. They're just ignoring context entirely.

The author of the web page in question is giving -editorial- advice, necessarily prescriptivist advice. Which is also a guideline. Which is also a rule, something to be fixed if not followed.

And the rule is intended to insure clarity, because 'cannot' has one meaning -and- is the standard in writing forever, whereas 'can not' is ambiguous (in an obvious way, as he describes.

-And- this is for mathematical writing, where if anywhere one should be prescriptivist (in expression and thought). Mathematical definitions themselves are so prescriptivist that you can make up a nonsense word (they often do) or take an existing word (they often do) and just assign it a new meaning and you -must- use that definition. That's how it works.

In other words...

Feb 5, 2021 at 17:03, by Mitch

Aug 13 '19 at 19:18, by Mitch

Aug 1 at 14:32, by Mitch

Jul 14 at 18:02, by Mitch

Dec 4 '17 at 21:05, by Mitch

Sep 2 '16 at 15:26, by Mitch

Aug 1 at 19:27, by Mitch

Jun 27 at 21:28, by Mitch

Dec 17 '15 at 15:36, by Mitch

people are idiots

Consider context before complaining.

Of course, the context of ELU is that people come from ten different directions that are not the right one, and answer with whatever randomly flits across their brain from half perceived keywords about stuff they half know, rather than explaining from reliable knowledge and experience.

Why didn't I just give a (less tendentious) answer there?

I'm glad you asked.

Because this is more fun.

jlliagre

#waffle607 3/5

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⭐🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩⭐🟩🟩
🟩⬜🟩⭐🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

🔥 streak: 10
🏆 #waffleelite
wafflegame.net

Cerberus

@Mitch Woof.

jlliagre

15:14

Ouah, ouah, ouah !

Daily Quordle 604
8️⃣6️⃣
4️⃣5️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

CowperKettle

15:51

Girkin's people have smuggled a statement he made from out of jail. He calls for an uprising of pro-Empire forces, in order to forestall an inevitable (in his view) coup by "Liberal forces".

Hmm. On the other hand, this could be read simply as his decision to run for President. t.me/strelkovii/6367

It's ambiguously worded.

Vikas

16:14

Cerberus

@CowperKettle The whole 'foces' talk sounds very 1917.

alphabet

@CowperKettle I'm sure this will really help his criminal case.

CowperKettle

Anti-PowerPoint Party

The Anti PowerPoint Party (APPP) is a Swiss political party dedicated to decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint and other forms of presentation software, which the party claims "causes national-economic damage amounting to 2.1 billion CHF" annually and lowers the quality of a presentation in "95% of the cases". The party advocates flip charts as an alternative to presentation software.APPP was formed by former software engineer Matthias Poehm and Port Lincoln footballer Billy-O-Roderick ahead of the 2011 federal elections in Switzerland. Prior to founding the party, Poehm wrote a book...

user 726941

@Vikas all we need now is the white sheet Klan version.

62.8 trillion digits

CowperKettle

16:56

MetaEd

Wordle 823 5/6

🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

this is what happens when I think "hey! I can guess this!" instead of following my own method

CowperKettle

17:15

The Gutenberg Library has uploaded thousands of audiobooks on their site, available for free. They were created using an automated AI reader.

archive.org/details/…

I picked one at random, and it's not bad, I can distinguish everything.

Laurel

17:31

@CowperKettle Does it sound like AI?

MetaEd

only a few seconds in and I have to stop playing it. The way it handles punctuation ...

Michael Rybkin

17:51

Could you guys please tell me if this sentence sounds fine to you?

Foreign exchange controls are various forms of controls imposed by a government on the purchase/sale of foreign currencies by residents, on the purchase/sale of local currency by nonresidents, or the transfers of any currency across national borders.

MetaEd

18:10

@MichaelRybkin I personally would write "various controls" or else "various forms of control" (without the s). And to make this sensible when reading it aloud I would write "purchase and sale" (instead of using the solidus).

jlliagre

18:54

Rootl game #111

🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩
🟩🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩
🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

https://rootlgame.net/

Robusto

@MetaEd A familiar trap.

Michael Rybkin

@MetaEd of local currency - does that sound fine to you as well with no article?

Robusto

@MichaelRybkin "Foreign exchange controls are various forms of controls imposed by a government on the purchase/sale of foreign currencies by residents, ~~on the purchase/sale~~ of local currency by nonresidents, or ~~the~~ transfer [no plural] of any currency across national borders."

Michael Rybkin

19:38

@Robusto Thank you.

CowperKettle

@MetaEd Compared with volunteer human readers, it's passable.

Which is strange to admit.

I could not listen to books read by volunteers.

Laurel

@CowperKettle So it doesn't sound like you're on hold at a big company then? Ugh…

If you don't know what I'm talking about, lucky you

MetaEd

@CowperKettle All audiobooks should be read by Steve Inskeep.

Robusto

20:05

@MetaEd The one I'm listening to now sounds like it was narrated by Paul Frees in his bombastic voice.

But it's a good story, so ... yeah.

Mitch

@CowperKettle What is so bad about the volunteers? (I have no idea)

I only listen to audiobooks on long car trips and I suppose they are good because I don't really notice anything. Like the voice actor won't do 'voices' or rather they do do voices for the different characters whoo say things, but they don't go overboard, just a subtle enough difference so you know it's 'that' character.

voicing the other sex can sound strange/off putting if exaggerated.

@CowperKettle I just listened to a couple minutes. Very impressive. has the prosodics pretty good (exclamations vs regular sentences, etc).

Sure, there are problems, like appropriate pausing.

Laurel

@Mitch I read this as "voicing the sex…"

Mitch

But there's been a lot of progress, and a lot more to go.

@Laurel yeah don't read it that way

but anyway... automated auto reading will decimate the voice actor jobs -or- make publications that no one would ever attempt to pay to have voice acted into an audiobook

MetaEd

20:26

I drive about 12 hours a week to and from work. I'm a big consumer of audiobooks and podcasts.

Mitch

you should put comments on those recordings (on the gutenberg page)

Laurel

Anyway, while it's been pretty common to close certain SWRs as too specialized, it's weird this was closed as being too basic:

-1

Q: A term for mixture used for palatography

When doing palatography, one needs something to paint the tongue with. It is usually a mixture of olive/sunflower oil and powdered charcoal. The question is, what can this substance be called? Is it a colouring, paint or/and dye? What is the most suitable word?

single-word-requests word-choice vocabulary

Robusto

21:16

Daily Octordle #604
7️⃣3️⃣
🕚8️⃣
🔟6️⃣
4️⃣9️⃣
Score: 58

Daily Quordle 604
5️⃣4️⃣
7️⃣6️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

SmokeDetector

21:43

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Email in answer (79): Meaning of "Be Mr Late Better Than Late Mr"‭ by Thomas Henry Buxton‭ on english.SE

Robusto

23:28

Rootl game #111

🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…