English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

alphabet

19:01

ILIKENAMINGPEOPLE

Mitch

I mean no disrespect...

tchrist

@Mitch mode is 1 @ 10, median is 4, mean is 3.5, stdev is 2.74913

Mitch

Which probably introduces something that implies terrible disrespect...

I mean no disrespect...

But 'Kourtney' is an atrocious name

alphabet

@tchrist So the name "Mmbop" is about average? Good.

Mitch

Like naming your French restaurant 'Klassic Kountry Kuisine'

tchrist

19:04

@Mitch Because it's califragilistic.

Mitch

That's super

tchrist

Callipygian.

Mitch

That's big, but...

I don't mean to be off-color, but...

Ecru

tchrist

Callisthenical.

Mitch

@tchrist I always malaprop that into 'calliphrygian'

Which I can't imagine much other than 'Nice Turk's

tchrist

19:09

@Mitch I and IV are ok but V is a bit demented.

alphabet

Mitch

@alphabet Sassy Twitter

tchrist

Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes uses an older phrygian melody a couple of times.

From the Es woll uns Gott genädig sein movement, number 7, which he pinched from Luther. It only looks like it's in E aeolian at first glance, but you can find E phrygian there if you look for it.

J.S. Bach: Es woll uns Gott genädig sein, BWV 311

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Easier:

Es woll' uns Gott genadig sein (Chorale No 16)

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That's in Bm not Em because it starts V and moves to I (well, i). You do have Em triads (in inversion) in there, and there are curious harmonic moves. There's no perfect authentic cadence anywhere.

@alphabet I see you know where the wild things are.

You can see the phrygian sneaking through in places. Look at the V major at the end of the first repeat, moving to a V minor just past that first repeat, which is F♯ phrygian-looking.

It almost feels a little like medieval modal music more than something from the tonal period.

But only during those unexpected moves. It still sounds like Bach writing Luther's hymn. Which he was.

alphabet

19:38

Incidentally: our most entertaining congressman is out.

Alas.

#FreeSantos

M.A.R.

20:08

Like holy crap it's December already

Can someone stop the damn clock until I figure out where I'm standing at

Days are a blur

> Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

The lyrics moved me

alphabet

@M.A.R. So, did anyone in Iran hear about #FreeBritney? It truly amazes me that some people have not been informed of the most important news story of the past decade.

M.A.R.

@alphabet everywhere I go there are banners, petitions, riots about Britney's price

alphabet

@M.A.R. I assume that's a no. How dare the world not focus all its attention on the plight of an aging pop icon?

M.A.R.

I mostly leave my icons as the app's default logo.

I am spurting out random things so you wouldn't suspect I have no idea who or what is a free Britney.

@Cowp every tissue has "binding sites" for every compound, including vitamins. If vitamin C was washed out quickly, how would liver cells have used it for collagen synthesis? It's just that fat-loving compounds 'dissolve' in fat tissue as well, otherwise the vitamin A that is a precursor to the pigments in your eye is not dissolved in eye fat or anything.

@alphabet I don't think I'd want a Santos even if it was for free

So, what's his deal. I probably would have known about him more if he was some long dead chemist.

His face reminds me of my own high school years.

alphabet

20:29

@M.A.R. George Santos? Pathological liar who got elected to the House before anyone discovered he had fabricated nearly every detail of his life.

M.A.R.

Sounds exciting

And par for the course for American politics in this century.

> Santos is dedicated to being the safest, most reliable and lowest cost operator in Australia, and preventing harm to people and the environment.

alphabet

He even falsely claimed to have been a producer for the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a movie mostly known for receiving extremely negative reviews.

And to have been a former star volleyball player.

And to be the son of a 9/11 victim, the ancestor of Holocaust victims, and the employer of 4 victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

None of this was known until after he got elected.

Wonderful.

M.A.R.

Okay the other three I can understand but the musical?

Laurel

That's what pathological liars do. Lie about stupid stuff

Unfortunately I've known several

alphabet

He also pretended to be Jewish, to have worked for Goldman Sachs, to have attended college, to have run a charity for children with a rare skin disease, et cetera.

Pathological lying

Pathological lying, also known as mythomania (from Greek μυθομανία) and pseudologia fantastica (Latin for "fantastic pseudology"), is a chronic behavior characterized by the habitual or compulsive tendency to lie. It involves a pervasive pattern of intentionally making false statements with the aim of deceiving others, sometimes without a clear or apparent reason. Individuals who engage in pathological lying often claim to be unaware of the motivations behind their lies.In psychology and psychiatry, there is an ongoing debate regarding whether pathological lying should be classified as a distinct...

In this case I'm pretty sure it's a mental illness. He just lies habitually.

M.A.R.

20:38

Wait so there are like no background checks or something huh

tchrist

@alphabet #SeeFartSon? #FearStones, #SoftSerena? #FateSensor #NorSafeSet? #FreeOnAToss? #OFanReset! #RentAssOfFoe! #FretSeason #OftenSears #SaneForest #OfSrSenate #OfAssEnter #ReefNotAss! #SetSoreFan!

alphabet

@M.A.R. Normally, the person running against them would do "oppo research" to find potentially scandalous past behavior. In this case, nobody seems to have thought that anyone would tell such blatant lies about their entire backstory, so the Democrat running against him never bothered to check (say) whether he was really a former volleyball star.

M.A.R.

Dems living up to their renowned ineptitude

Laurel

@alphabet Yeah, with the liars I know personally, I think it's also a mental illness or some other kind of condition

Like one of them was probably BPD in retrospect. Got them out of my life because they were being a really awful person to me

alphabet

From Wikipedia:

> The dispute and subsequent termination made Spears a symbol of conservatorship law reform and human rights across the United States, and served as precedent for legislation designed to combat such abuse on a state and federal level.

> The revelations of abuse and mistreatment endured by Spears during this arrangement as well as years in public life led to a reassessment of her legacy and public image, which was heavily distorted by the media and tabloids in years leading up to her highly publicized breakdown.

As I said, the single most important historical event through which our generation has yet lived.

I dare say it even outranks Hiddleswift.

Laurel

20:56

@alphabet We don't know how that one's gonna end tho. It could last forever. Or go down in flames…

alphabet

@Laurel The coverage may die down, but the story will come back every time. It will never go out of style.

You see, such references are the truest sign of being cultured.

Jul 7 at 3:59, by Robusto

Flavors of the month come and go, but people still listen to Bach and Beethoven.

Jul 7 at 4:00, by alphabet

@Robusto People used to, before better music came along and displaced them.

Jul 7 at 4:07, by Robusto

Well, you're a raccoon. I suppose you can sift through the trash bins for some "good" music.

Jul 7 at 4:09, by alphabet

My favorite song is "incoherent growling and screeching."

alphabet

21:19

Today in resumptive pronoun attestations, this one from a YouTube video:

> He wrote a long letter, which his lawyer took one look at it and threw it away.

Huh. This YouTuber uses that construction a lot. I guess I'm not the only one.

Robusto

Jul 7 at 4:08, by Robusto

Me, I'll just dream on.

alphabet

21:44

I'm trying to figure out this guy's accent. He seems to have a slight Southern-ish accent but I can't quite place it.

tchrist

@alphabet That's just people losing track of their own sentence's structure/parse needing getting syntactic vertigo and needing to remind themselves what they had been talking about before some piddling several-word diversion flushed their working memory cache.

Or their first language does this. Several common ones do.

alphabet

As some have pointed out, it can also be an attempt to get past "syntactic island" rules, e.g.:
> In this pamphlet there are some words that you may not be sure what they mean.

tchrist

Those all just sound wrong to me.

alphabet

I claim that grammarians have underestimated how common this construction is in speech and informal writing; they show up everywhere once you start looking for them.

tchrist

Remains to be demonstrated.

Probably just biting off more than they can chew. It happens.

alphabet

21:52

I'm not sure how to actually measure this, of course, without some sort of massive manual corpus research.

And I think it happens far more often in speech than in writing. But it certainly is present even in writing, though it's very rare in formal contexts.

tchrist

You mean in curated texts, not in formal contexts.

alphabet

I suspect you'll notice it a lot more if you start listening for it. Though that applies to anything.

tchrist

No rough hack of a copyeditor would ever let such a coarse snafu slip past them, let alone any writer or editor worthy of being called such.

alphabet

Indeed. In any sort of monitored writing they (almost entirely) disappear.

Laurel

@alphabet what about COCA et al?

They have one that's mostly blogs and other internet stuff

alphabet

22:02

@Laurel The trouble is that it's a syntactic construction; you won't find it easily by just searching for strings of individual words.

They tend to happen when the relative pronoun is quite distant from the resumptive one, making it even harder to find.

To me, they don't always seem ungrammatical in all contexts, though they're informal and often sound awkward.

Laurel

You can use PRON and such to match pronouns. Proximity search has some hidden restrictions tho, but maybe you could find something that gets you some examples

alphabet

Perhaps. One I found on reddit a while back:

> Shortly after moving into the new house my son was made redundant and received a payout (which he spent most of it on Uber eats)

Xanne

@alphabet Interesting. If you figure it out, please tell us.

tchrist

22:35

@alphabet Unamerican!

Laurel

23:38

iWEB did not like my POS tags :/

What a POS

:p

alphabet

23:49

iWEB is?

Dannyu NDos

[DJ티비씨] 히든싱어5 싸이 편 - 2R '강남스타일' ♬ㅣ히든싱어5ㅣJTBC 180701 방송

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I hope this would be exported to the UK or the US or whatever.

The Hidden Singers.

Apparently there were Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, and Italian versions.

Laurel

@alphabet english-corpora.org/iweb

@DannyuNDos Like the Masked Singer?

Dannyu NDos

@Laurel That's a different one.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…