English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

00:32

(From "Marginalia" by Edgar Allan Poe)

alphabet

01:27

What is the point of romance novels? Escapism through fiction? Or is just smut written to make you feel like you're not reading smut?

M.A.R.

02:04

@alphabet someone's being salty

CowperKettle

@alphabet Smut? They're about love

Robusto

@alphabet Women don't get off on the same things men do. Deal with it.

CowperKettle

Thank God

I'd hate a woman who loves soccer

alphabet

I'm sure they make gay romance novels

CowperKettle

German of the day: Schnapszahl - repdigit

alphabet

02:10

I will avoid them.

M.A.R.

At first I thought he's talking about 'romance' era novels. Les Misérables would make for some interesting smut

Robusto

@alphabet Yeah, but if it is devoid of large throbbing members, I don't think many gays will give it much attention.

alphabet

@M.A.R. No, I mean the kind that fill a shelf on my local bookstore.

CowperKettle

> It is Engel's fifth novel, and her most famous. The story tells of a lonely archivist sent to work in northern Ontario, where she enters into a sexual relationship with a bear.

alphabet

The Colleen Hoover types.

@Robusto I get the sense that straight romance novels have more of that than you'd think.

Robusto

02:14

@alphabet I don't think either of us really reads straight romance novels, so who is to say?

@CowperKettle Yeah, that must be an outlier.

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle whose liberal? Whose conservative? Is the hyped up nonsense all over American media about political alignment being about being woke and gay or a racist gun-lover the definition used here? If so it's not hard to imagine women identifying as 'liberal'.

@CowperKettle Engel wrote it to let off some steam between publishing his political theories

Xanne

kindlealexander.com/…

M.A.R.

The collection of these works became known as 'Engels'

Xanne

Author, gay romance. Lots of stuff around.

M.A.R.

@Xanne the covers look AI-generated

Xanne

02:19

The gay versions are likely as formulaic as the straight romances—i.e., there are sex scenes that are explicit up to a point, that point being reliable for each author or series.

alphabet

@Xanne That's the sense I get with these novels. They seem to fall on a spectrum.

Xanne

A chatbot will give you a list tailored to your specs.

CowperKettle

In Russia, gay fanfiction seems popular among some women. They write it about some famous characters like Harry Potter. I mean women write it and read it

Xanne

@alphabet Yes; some are cross-genre, e.g., mystery, even a little sci-fi, country, Western, Paris, whatever.

CowperKettle

"A list of 20 gay fanfics on Harry Potter" ficbook.net/collections/16628953

Robusto

02:24

@CowperKettle I think whatever your taste, there is some person out there who will cater to it.

alphabet

@CowperKettle Yeah, this is definitely true in the US.

It seems...odd.

CowperKettle

> This is Malfoy, after all. “Shouldn’t you go to breakfast with your friends?” I thought you got up for this. - Not particularly hungry. - Go and eat something. “I’ll keep your bed warm, at least I’m safe from Pansy here,” Malfoy said, jumping onto Harry’s bed. - And bring me something to eat too. They will love watching you take food to your handsome boyfriend.

Xanne

Why odd? Relationships and sex.

CowperKettle

After all, Malfoy was the best actor in the whole movie

In terms of acting skills

CowperKettle

02:38

> Cold water swimming eases menopause symptoms. Women report reduced anxiety, mood swings & more, a new study reveals.

alphabet

@Xanne It just...feels weird to me. Why can't the heterosexuals stick to heterosexuality? Must they intrude on us?

Xanne

I don’t know why women write gay romances. But many authors’ names change with series in this area.

CowperKettle

tchrist

02:58

Passing (film)

Passing is a 2021 black-and-white historical drama film written and directed by Rebecca Hall in her feature directorial debut. It is adapted from the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen. Set in 1920s New York City, the film follows the intertwined life of a black woman (Tessa Thompson) and her white-passing childhood friend (Ruth Negga). Appearing in supporting roles are André Holland, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, and Alexander Skarsgård. Passing had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 30, 2021, and began a limited theatrical release...

alphabet

@Xanne It kind of reminds me of the "lesbian" porn produced for straight men (the appeal of which completely mystifies me).

tchrist

03:14

@Xanne The brief but unfulfilling reason, apparently, is so that they can themselves read these yarns. But this takes no step towards answering why in the world so many young heteronormative women would want to write, and read, romantic tales about male heterotransgressive youths. Tʜᴀᴛ question has been raised ever since Slash appeared over fifty years ago, and while noöne has found ᴛʜᴇ answer, anyone you ask will be quick to offer an opinion they're sure is fact.

tchrist

03:29

Rule 34 (novel)

Rule 34 is a near-future science fiction novel by Charles Stross. It is a loose sequel to Halting State and was published on 5 July 2011 in the US and 7 July 2011 in the UK. The title is a reference to the Internet meme Rule 34, which states that "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions." Rule 34 was nominated for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. == Plot summary == The novel is told in second-person narrative but primarily from three points of view. Inspector Kavanaugh of the Edinburgh police investigates spammers murdered in gruesome...

alphabet

As I recall, Sadly Porn gives the explanation that people imagine "fantasies" from which they themselves are excluded because, by doing so, they avoid the realization that their real life falls short of their fantasy one.

alphabet

03:49

> Generating your own sexual fantasy has no payoff [...] all that work you put in refining what you want becomes afterwards merely a memory of what you'll never have, you’re way better off spending hours a day watching videos of your deceased child. "Whoah, why'd you bring that up?"

> Because the mechanism is the same [as that of watching porn]. "Drowning out reality with unreal images?" No, drowning in video reality to drown out unreality, anything so your mind is not ruminating, fantasizing, the painful video memories seem masochistic but they are 100% defensive[.]

tchrist

@GratefulDisciple That's totally awesome. This evening I sat down and played through the first couple of dozen bars of the Prelude from the Liszt transcription of BWV 543 on the grand, about three times, deliberately altering the dynamics, rubato, and touch and pedaling so that all three runs sounded quite different. So many possible ways to play the very beginning!

I came to the point where I started to experiment with the sostenuto for the very long pedal-tone A throughout, at which point I decided it was time to make supper. Afterwards, I stumbled upon a 1997 DMA dissertation from Ann Arbor on the Liszt transcription of BWV 543 in which this issue was raised and discussed, amongst many others.

alphabet

> The suppression of the imagination came first and porn was the inevitable and much welcome defense against its loss [...] A demonstration with pornography’s own logic, take Rule 34: if you can imagine something, there's a porn of it. If this is a valid logical proposition we should be able to make the contrapositive to our horror: if there’s no porn of it, you can’t imagine it.

Never mind, my summary actually understated just how weird that book's claims are.

Dannyu NDos

04:53

The most infamous cat ever.

Robusto

05:18

Avenue Q - "The Internet is for..."

►

CowperKettle

Word of the day: hypodescent

It's absent from Multitran

CowperKettle

05:45

> After leaving the Senate, Goldwater became supportive of homosexuals serving openly in the military,[2] environmental protection,[3] gay rights,[4] abortion rights,[5] adoption rights for same-sex couples,[6] and the legalization of medicinal marijuana.[7]

Those Republicans..

CowperKettle

06:41

> With an absolute magnitude of −30.7, TON-618 shines with a luminosity of 4×1040 watts, or as brilliantly as 140 trillion times that of the Sun

CowperKettle

07:16

Индийская песня - Песни Смешариков | Смешарики 2D | Песенки для детей

►

"An Indian song" - from a popular Russian cartoon series -- @Vikas

Vikas

07:47

@CowperKettle Nice. Looks like they were dreaming about India and then woke up in the end.

CowperKettle

08:02

:)

The Japanese rover currently operating on the moon

Amazing.

Xanne

Wordle 952 4/6

🟨⬜⬜🟨🟩
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

CowperKettle

11:00

CowperKettle

11:35

> The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean? -- Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so. nytimes.com/2023/09/20/magazine/animal-communication.html

CowperKettle

12:12

> Which rock group has four men, including one named George and another who was shot to death?
Mount Rushmore

M.A.R.

12:54

-5

Q: Did anyone else see it live when CNN's Charles Jaco pretended to be in a war in the middle east, even putting on a gas mask?

I am in my mid fifties now, but I remember clearly the CNN coverage the Persian Gulf. It is actually true that the CNN host put on a mask while a siren was blaring in the background. Everyone on the set did. I saw it as it aired on CNN. There used to be a 30 minute long video available of the e...

CowperKettle

13:44

Terminology of the day: L5 sacralization

Portugal is too small for walking

CowperKettle

14:34

> In studies in Cantonese and Korean, subjects were able to read non-words in their native orthography without a delay relative to the speed with which they read real words in their native orthography. There is a delay noted with exception words in English, including the examples chaos, unique, and enough.

alphabet

> Andrew Butcher speculates that the lack of fricatives and the unusual segmental inventories of Australian languages may be due to the very high presence of otitis media ear infections and resulting hearing loss in their populations. People with hearing loss often have trouble distinguishing different vowels and hearing fricatives and voicing contrasts.

Robusto

15:22

Wordle 952 4/6

⬛🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Quordle 733
6️⃣7️⃣
4️⃣8️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

Daily Octordle #733
🕛9️⃣
5️⃣8️⃣
4️⃣🟥
🕐6️⃣
Score: 71

I call no fair.

Daily Sequence Octordle #733
5️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
🕐⓮
Score: 82

Robusto

15:54

tchrist

16:48

Different languages use the same tense in different contexts, and different tenses in the same context. Historical present is more common in languages like French or Latin where the past tense is comparatively unwieldy or long-winded or obscure; English uses simple past tense more than most European languages I'm familiar with. I think you have to put this down to experience. — Stuart F yesterday

He needs more experience in other languages. Using compound presents in lieu of pasts for perfective situations does happen in French and Catalan and such, but seldom elsewhere, at least as a general substitution rule.

> 1. Colombo trovò solo gli indiani ma non le Indie quando attraversò l’Atlantico.
2. Colom només va trobar indis però no les Índies quan va travessar l’Atlàntic.
3. Colón só atopou indios pero non as Indias cando cruzou o Atlántico.
4. Colón sólo encontró indios, pero no las Indias, cuando cruzó el Atlántico.
5. Colombo encontrou apenas índios, mas não as Índias, quando navegou através do Atlântico.
6. Colomb ne trouva que des Indiens mais pas les Indes lorsqu’il traversa l’Atlantique.
7. Colomb n’a trouvé que des Indiens mais pas les Indes lorsqu’il a traversé l’Atlantique.

CowperKettle

17:05

ninja米étoilé

18:32

@tchrist That was because the language feels like it's omitting/dropping a lot of things from a Romance point of view. You cannot say "J'ai appris l'anglais regardant des films", you need that "en" at least. Recently I also had "do something, so that they don't fall over". This "that" is not required. But I can't say "pour ils ne tombent pas" in French, I need that "que".

tchrist

@ninja米étoilé It's just English that can in some circumstances omit that that that you dropped there. :) Nobody else can.

It would make no sense to drop que in French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

ninja米étoilé

@tchrist Right. So when I review texts from people who don't have this feeling that these can be omitted, I feel like I'm mowing the lawn so to speak. But it seems the language is making its way inside my brain.

tchrist

@ninja米étoilé What I was commenting on is that I thought StuartF may have overreached about simple pasts being rare in European languages. Sure, French has avoir + past participle (a trouvé, a traversé) and Catalan has anar + infinitive (va trobar, va travessar), but you don't find that sort of thing so "mandatory" in other common Romance.

ninja米étoilé

Oh, I'm simply talking about the removed question "I learned English watching movies". What you're discussing now seems about something else.

tchrist

Oh hah!

Sorry, I am perpetually contextually clueless.

ninja米étoilé

18:40

No worries, plus I have a terrible grasp of topics related to verbs.

That being said, J'ai mangé de la poutine hier would be quite common.

tchrist

I would think so.

ninja米étoilé

Finally recently I seem to be replacing lots of "of" with "for". Another thing changing in my understanding of the language although I can't put my finger on it. Something about affinity.

tchrist

You would just translate that into simple past in English.

ninja米étoilé

Oh, what is the simple past again, ate?

tchrist

Like where might you replace "of" with "for"?

Yes.

You kind of "can't" say "I have eaten some poutine yesterday" in English.

But this morning is possible.

Or already.

Cerberus

18:45

@ninja米étoilé It should be noted that so is an adverb, which fits anywhere, while pour is a praeposition, which has very strict positional requirements.

ninja米étoilé

Oh, right, many of those things I realize only when I try to make up a guideline to explain it to some other learner. @tchrist

tchrist

@ninja米étoilé Oh now I see which one you were talking about! Yes, you need a connective of some sort.

Cerberus

@tchrist The simple past is very common in many languages!

tchrist

In English, you do not always need one.

@Cerberus Yes, I find it so. I bet StuartF just knows spoken French. :)

Cerberus

Does he count the imparfait or only the passé simple?

tchrist

18:48

I bet he's only thinking for the perfect/preterite. Native Germanic speakers often gloss over or underappreciate the imperfectives in Latin and its daughters.

I thought of that very same question myself.

Cerberus

In Dutch or German, the simple past is ubiquitous, it is the standard when anything is about the past. Same for simple present, m.m.

ninja米étoilé

@Cerberus But isn't so a conjunction in the "so they don't fall over" context. Anyways.

tchrist

> Looking over these examples that analysis doesn't make sense to me given how a far simpler explanation exists.

Cerberus

@tchrist Make hates it literally: past simple = passé simple.

tchrist

I can omit how there if I please.

Cerberus

18:50

@ninja米étoilé It is actually an adverb, but adverbs can easily take over the function of a conjunction. That's an easy switch, which has happened for many speakers with respect to so.

tchrist

But French needs something before that looking over.

Cerberus

Praepositions sometimes become conjunctions, too, but that is much rarer.

tchrist

en révisant ces exemples, en parcourant ces examples

ninja米étoilé

En passant en revue, for instance.

tchrist

Right.

ninja米étoilé

18:51

I'm poor at analyzing stuff, usually I repeat it over and over and decide whether it sounds right or not.

tchrist

Catalan for some reason does not, which is a bit odd: mirant aquests exemples.

Cerberus

It stayed true to Latin?

tchrist

But Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese not only do not take a preposition there, they cannot do so. They just use the gerund by itself.

ninja米étoilé

@tchrist The of/for thing is most likely changing a turn of phrase from of+substantive to for+-ing fromt the substantive. Anyways.

of storage - for storing

Cerberus

Can you use it in a sentence?

tchrist

18:56

So essaminando questi esempi, repasando estos exemplos, olhando para estes exemplos. If you want to use a preposition you have to use an infinitive not a gerund: al repasar estos ejemplos — because you need a substantive not a modifier for the prepositional object.

We can provide many storage solutions. :)

ninja米étoilé

A great method of storage of containers. For storing.

tchrist

Oh oh, that's the other direction. I misthought.

They aren't containers for storing other things within. They're about the storing of containers themselves.

ninja米étoilé

Yes. d'entreposage de contenants.

It's French with English words.

tchrist

heh

ninja米étoilé

Reviewing such sentences is greatly useful to me, it triggers my reflexes in English and makes me realize I've come a long way. Still a learner though.

user 85795

19:08

Developing new reflexes is the hardest part.

ninja米étoilé

True that. I've had to tone down some expectations too. I can never sound like a native speaker for instance, since I don't live an environment which would make it so.

But I no longer care. I'm most definitely a Québécois.

tchrist

@Cerberus Apropos cela, prepositions and adverbs or adverbials particles and transitive participles can over time can change or expand their word classes. We've now got Edwin on a bounty quest hunting for better understanding of current nomenclatural friction about all this, but a rose by any other name shall still smell as sweet. Only function matters, not labels.

2

Q: What part of speech is "Here"?

Merriam-webster's definition for here/there as a noun is "here"=this place, and "here" as an adverb "here"=to/in this place ; at this location. In this sentence: "He's living around here". What part of speech is the word "here"? He's living around London. At this point of view, "here" acts like a...

parts-of-speech

ninja米étoilé

Pragmatism.

tchrist

The problem with embracing CGEL's queer notion of "intransitive prepositions" is that this makes no sense in every other language that has prepositions, locative and other adverbial particles, and deictic locatives.

Cerberus

@tchrist I realised that immediately I said it.

ninja米étoilé

19:12

Anyways, ninja means calisthenics awaits. Cheers!

tchrist

So of course a Portuguese native speaker is questioning it all, and being confused. No surprise.

Cerberus

@tchrist I think the problem is making their terminology confusing on purpose, in this case. A praeposition should come before something, or it is a praeposition no longer.

tchrist

heh

Check out these course notes for Somali "prepositions" and "particles".

Cerberus

I did it after we came home: conjunction, not praeposition.

tchrist

Oh but didn't you know they've banished most conjunctions now, too?

They call those prepositions as well.

Very dizzying word games they play.

Cerberus

19:17

Super annoying.

Academics love using confusing terminology. It is a plague.

Cf. Chomsky's ridiculous terminology.

tchrist

And you simply CANNOT do their stupid party trick in Romance languages or the grammar just falls apart. So why they think it helps people with English I have no idea.

user 85795

Chomsky is looking really old these days.

tchrist

You know why, right?

user 85795

He's 90+

tchrist

Because he's just a fin shy of a C-note, that's why.

So what else do you expect?:)

user 85795

19:23

Ok, 100-

tchrist

IEEE round-towards-even rule. :)

user 85795

and survived a pandemic while in his upper 90s

😷🤯

alphabet

Resumptive of the day:
> I think we have a pretty healthy, strong relationship, which we're about to find out if that's true or not.

(I'm recording these because I contend that, while people judge such sentences as ungrammatical, they're actually very common, particularly in speech, and you typically wouldn't notice them unless you were specifically looking--or listening--for them.)

tchrist

19:41

@user85795 No, no, no: fin doesn't mean a hairsbreadth sliver shaven off something else. It's fin as in a fin or a sawbuck —where fins and sawbucks are the more noteworthily benjamined versions of nickels and dimes, doncha know!

It's a clipping of the Yiddish pronunciation of German fünf: finf > fin.

user 85795

Right, right.

tchrist

But sawbucks you can blame the Romans for.

That's why it appears in later verses of that famous barbershop number that opens with:

> Many are the times I wish I had more money!
Many are the times I wish I had more dough!
Give me half a chance or a split second glance
And I'll bend your ear to tell you so.

user 85795

Have you heard or use of the method of loci for memorization @tchrist

tchrist

19:57

@user85795 Memory palaces? Yes, certainly.

Although now I can't remember whether I should attribute that one to the Greeks or the Romans.

Hocus pocus keep the focus
Look out now here comes a locust!

user 85795

I'm using a checker board as a memory palace.

tchrist

Not Kasparov vs. Topalov?

user 85795

Nah, just an empty board.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…