English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

02:13

@Robusto "Three may keep counsel if two be away; and if I thought that my cap knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire and burn it."

> "Is your man secret? Did you ne’er hear say,
“Two may keep counsel, putting one away?”"
(Shakespeare)

Robusto

02:33

My point exactly.

Araucaria - Him

@alphabet Thanks for the list :)

alphabet

@Araucaria-Him Out of curiosity: what's your intended use for it?

CowperKettle

Solar stations in Texas has hit a new record, achieving briefly an output of 16.6 GW gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Solar

Doubling in 5 years is not bad

Oh, my mistake.

It's not doubling, it's 20X in 5 years

Robusto

@CowperKettle Gotta watch those orders of magnitude.

CowperKettle

All solar panels, no cattle

Robusto

02:49

Ain't ya got nothin' better to do?

CowperKettle

I'm writing a blog post about a mechanism that increases the suicide rates in women taking progesterone pills

But I'm constantly diverting my attention.

It's an outstanding research.

Robusto

@tchrist: Remember we talked about the death of copy editing? Well, here's a sentence from The Atlantic: "If that’s the case, then the aisle pandamonium can’t be chalked up to passengers’ misbehavior or to honest confusion at the gate." (From The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop).

And here I thought China took back their damn pandamonium.

CowperKettle

03:22

Word of the morn: mittelschmerz - pain during ovulation.

alphabet

04:20

What is the ruling on celebrating Valentine’s Day?

> 1. It is an innovated festival for which there is no basis in Islam.
> 2. It promotes love and infatuation.
> 3. It calls for hearts to be preoccupied with foolish matters that are contrary to the way of the righteous salaf (may Allah be pleased with them).

Dannyu NDos

06:46

South Korea and Cuba are friends from today.

M.A.R.

09:49

@alphabet IOW, "love is for pansies"

tchrist

13:18

@Robusto Howsoever little the grassbears would to their tastes in Allfiendland find, I ween.

tchrist

13:50

> “The agenbite of inwit gnaws at him, robs him of the malefic majesty that makes screen villains entertaining.” —Film critic Richard Corliss describing Peter Sellers’s portrayal of Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov’s novel Lolita

jlliagre

tchrist

@Cerberus Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments.

tldw: because you can't have apartment buildings higher than two stories in Canada or three in the US without having two different staircases.

Because people were constantly incinerated in big wooden structures with only single staircases. So they changed building codes, but not towards fireproofing but towards escapability.

Laurel

@tchrist Interesting. My own condo building has two sets of stairs, and there's only 12 units in that section (3 floors)

tchrist

Local codes can be more restrictive, just rarely less. But it might simply be for convenience there.

Laurel

14:10

Probably convenience. I don't remember other condos being like this when I was house hunting

There are two entrances to my building, though I almost always use just the one because that's where I park my car and the mail's on that side too

Araucaria - Him

@alphabet A load of close-voting maniacs who never, ever answer grammar questions and have no rep relating to anything grammatical are trying to instigate a new close reason for grammar questions. They're being led by Edwin, who was one of the people closing everything that breathed on the questions list (but does occasionally answer grammar type questions). I want to see how the individuals concerned fare on the list.

Laurel

14:26

@Araucaria-Him Fortunately it's not possible to "instigate a new close reason"; close reasons can only be swapped out with the approval of two moderators and I'm certainly not going to backpedal on this (at least not unless the situation takes some sort of unforeseen turn I guess—but this is pushback just like I anticipated).

M.A.R.

@Araucaria-Him Isn't asking someone about "problem close voters" like asking a Patrician in Rome about "problem Patricians"?

@jlliagre Never give methhead pandas ammonium

Laurel

I'd really like it if people focused on how we can improve question quality instead of trying to return to the dysfunctional former status quo. I even outlined the steps to do so in the main post ("todo" at the bottom). Sadly I'm pretty busy lately to kick it off myself

M.A.R.

14:47

That sounds like work.

Takes a nap

Mitch

@Araucaria-Him As much as I agree with you that this small set of people should stop close voting so much, I also agree with the intimation by @M.A.R. that 'finding a list' like this is somewhat... what's a good word... authoritarian?

Robusto

@tchrist +1 to Corliss for using a trope (metaphor? you decide) from Joyce's Ulysses.

@Laurel Weren't you scolded once already for bringing up work items in chat?

@Araucaria-Him I feel your pain. EA and the aptly named "Killing Time" are horribly destructive. And KT has earned dozens of gold badges for these practices alone. But I think that to come up with a solution would be to meddle in site practices a bit too much. Perhaps bringing back the 5-vote close might work, however? Laurel?

#Worldle #755 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
🧭⭐🚩🗣️🪙📐
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

Laurel

15:04

@Robusto Better than youtube comments about hemorrhoids or something

Robusto

@tchrist Wait, wasn't that James Mason in Lolita?

@Laurel feels a nap coming on

Laurel

@Mitch The thing is, past answer history isn't a great argument here. If you try to use it to discredit people who want these questions closed, why wouldn't it also discredit people like me, who want the questions open so they can receive answers I couldn't even imagine? (or on ELL, I guess, for answers I definitely could imagine :p)

There's also a good chance that some of these users (like EA) do answer grammar questions

Robusto

Wordle 971 3/6

🟨⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟨⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Laurel

15:26

@Robusto We probably do have enough active close voters to go back to 5. Is it a good idea? I have no idea. I do enjoy the benefits of having 3 votes to reopen (well, not personally, but I observe it and I like it). I think we could keep reopen votes at 3 while changing the close votes to 5, but that would be unprecedented and we'd probably need some stronger justification

M.A.R.

Jul 21, 2023 at 12:03, by M.A.R.

@alphabet from experience, a higher close vote threshold would translate to far fewer questions being reopened than closed. An SE site with a habit of closing questions would find three, five, as many people as you want to close questions, but the reopen queue would become totally pointless.

FTR, when I did used to lift a finger to clean up one SE site or the other, I was certainly in the trigger-happy rather than the make-love-not-close-vote camp.

In an ideal world, questions would get closed faster, not slower. But in the ideal world, people would also have a clear idea of what to and not to close, based on what would lead to a productive thread rather than dogma

tchrist

@Laurel I'm not sure that's a site config, to be able to have disparate counts needed for close and reopen votes.

Laurel

@M.A.R. "in the ideal world, people would also have a clear idea of what to and not to close, based on what would lead to a productive thread rather than dogma" That's what I really want to happen. I think you can really see this being my mindset in the new close reason meta question

@tchrist I would have to dig up the source, but I really think it is possible. I think it came up when I was doing the work on the close reason. Actually, I might know where to find the info…

alphabet

15:42

@Araucaria-Him I'm with you. I find it ridiculous to suppose that being "too easy" on its own is a reason to close a question. If the question is the sort that only a non-native speaker would ask, it should go to ELL.

I'd say that we only have the "dictionary" close reason, not because those questions are too easy, but because we don't want our site to just turn into a giant, poorly-maintained dictionary.

But easy grammar questions that could easily come from native speakers? Who, exactly, is hurt by such questions being (able to be) answered? Are we worried about being...too helpful?

It's not like you're obligated to answer any open question. If you think it's too easy, you can just...not answer it and let someone else do so.

2

Mitch

16:37

This very recent question hits most of the proper close-vote reasons... (there's a 'but' coming)...

1

Q: Help for conjugating and writing in 17th century English

I am writing a script in which all the characters speak early modern English. I have learned a bit about Old English, but I am not an expert so I am also consulting multiple artificial intelligences, but they all yield different results. I need someone to help me conjugate these sentences and tel...

... but how awesome would it be to have an answer for this kind of thing... the most on-topic question of all.

So what if it is genref? So what if it is too broad? So what if it has opinionated answers? So what if any well-formed specific version was asked is probably a dupe?

Somebody could just 1) give the EME/Shakespearean -est/-eth conjugation again 2) explan how LLMs are ~~shit~~ not always great at this and 3) tools for easing some of the hard work of scholarship for non-anachronistic word use.

I nominate someone else to do this.

What I really want to do is... what I really want someone to do is write something about how Shakespeare ~~is overrated~~...

how Shakespeare shouldn't be invoked as a standard to follow for Modern Standard English ... hmmm... I don't think anybody does that anymore, and I don't think anyone ever thought that if they'd only read some and compare it to any newscaster.

how Shakespeare shouldn't be invoked as a standard to follow for Early Modern English... it's all poetry making stuff up right and left and right down the middle.

I mean if you have nothing else then I suppose Shakespeare is OK.

M.A.R.

16:52

You would have been halfway through an answer by now

Mitch

@M.A.R. Yes, I know.

The other half is the hard part.

all the references and links and such

MetaEd

Wordle 971 3/6

🟨⬛🟨⬛🟩
⬛🟨⬛🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Mitch

@M.A.R. OK, here:

You have a lot of questions here. There are answers on ELU for how to conjugate -eth/-est/etc (links in other comments). As to word choice, there are links (somewhere) to Middle English and Early Modern English dictionaries, and also selections of texts from those periods to check against. As to ChatGPT/Bing, they are not trained on enough ME or EME texts to give reliable era appropriate text. You can use it but it won't sound authentic to even casual consumers of narrative works from those eras (more likely the output will be poisoned by the scads of awful quasi-Shakespearean fanfic). — Mitch 48 secs ago

MetaEd

"The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. It could not be better expressed." ---Mark Twain, Letters From The Earth

M.A.R.

@Mitch Mitch for president!

@MetaEd if he was writing letters from the Earth how would he have met seals or mermaids?

MetaEd