English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Criggie

00:01

...turn your hearing aid up !

alphabet

00:16

@Lambie The question is: since "you" is second person, why is "dumb old you" third person?

Lambie

The man wants to go. Dumb old you wants to go. Dumb old you is the subject just like the man. third person singular.

alphabet

@Lambie But we say "You want to go," not "You wants to go." So why does adding the "Dumb old" mean we have to replace "want" with "wants"?

Mitch

@Criggie grumbles something about kids these days

alphabet

Normally a modifier doesn't change the person of the thing it modifies.

Lambie

Because it ain't you want. It's: Old you [subject] wants to go. It's the old you that is third person. Gees.

Mitch

00:21

@vikas I'm hearing about heat advisories and closure in South India. Is it bad up north too?

@Lambie but but but

Lambie

Young Jim wants to go. Old me wants to go. Etc. etc.

alphabet

@Lambie Exactly. But why is it the case that "old you" is third person? Why does the adjective "old" change a second-person pronoun into a third-person one?

Mitch

> You want to go, old you wants to go

Why does 'old' change things?

alphabet

And why does it still have a second-person meaning--it still refers to the addressee--but a third-person form, in terms of subject-verb agreement?

I suspect it's because adding a modifying adjective makes the "you" behave more like an ordinary noun, thus making it third-person. But I dunno.

Lambie

Why do you do that? You first ask a question to which you know the answer then do a bait and switch. Not nice. Because only object pronouns can be subjects of a sentence. The old me would never do that. The new them is too much.

Mitch

00:27

Me neither

alphabet

@Lambie I'm not sure how I bait-and-switched you; certainly I wasn't trying to antagonize you, just to figure out what your explanation for this phenomenon was.

Lambie

And the object pronouns require modification to be grammatical. Otherwise, you'd get: Me wants to go and You wants to go, both of which are not grammatical in standard English.

alphabet

OK, now you've given me an answer to the question!

That's all I was asking for, and it should suffice as an answer to the question. Based on the OP's examples, I'm pretty sure that this was the source of their confusion.

Lambie

@Mitch There are a ton of them: The new you is very pleasing to the eye. The old them is very boring. Etc, etc. Only object pronouns with a modifier.

alphabet

You humans are so confusing. Us raccoons have it all figured out.

Did you know? Once a month, any truly dapper raccoon will break into a Sephora dumpster, smash open a bottle of expired argan oil, and roll around in it to keep his fur sleek.

CowperKettle

01:14

> زخاك من اگر گندم برآيد
از آن گر نان پزى مستى فزايد

Mitch

@CowperKettle Gesundheit!

Criggie

01:36

@CowperKettle mmmm beer bread - extra good with beer-battered fish and chips.

CowperKettle

02:27

Criggie

I want a chip buttee now.....

CowperKettle

Chip butty

A chip butty or chip barm is a sandwich filled with chips. It originated in fish and chip shops in the British Isles in the 19th century, though the exact origin is disputed. The chip butty is associated with British working-class culture. == Sandwich == The chip butty is a sandwich filled with chips, often served with malt vinegar or ketchup. The British food writer Tim Hayward recommended using "undistinguished" soft white bread, as "this is not the place for artisanal sourdough". In The Guardian, Tony Naylor recommended using buttered soft white bread and lightly fried chips seasoned with salt...

user 70432

sounds... greasy

CowperKettle

> According to the National Federation of Fish Fryers, it was created at 19:45 on May 8, 1863 in Oldham, Lancashire, at Mr Lees, the second-ever fish and chip shop in Britain.

user 70432

(note: willpower is enhanced through talking yourself out of a "que")

...and salty

CowperKettle

02:40

The snake salad.

Ingredients: mayonnaise, pepper

user 70432

How is that a "salad."

Dannyu NDos

I don't get 1. why [ä] hasn't got a dedicated letter, and 2. why American /ɑ/ doesn't sound like an ㅏ for me.

CowperKettle

I'm so dead tired after riding the bicycle for only 27 km yesterday

Three more such rides, and it will be over 1000 km this year.

Criggie

03:06

@CowperKettle Is this the stop-start riding you mentioned the other week ?

I find that longer rides are less tiring if I can just get up to speed and stay there. Stop-starting is very taxing.

user 70432

@CowperKettle take your time you're not competing with anyone

The last thing you need is an injury.

CowperKettle

03:21

@Criggie Yes, I'm a food delivery guy

I should deliver village-to-village, that would result in fewer stops

2 days ago

I put on studded tires, but still produced more than 1 cuss word per 100 meters.

Criggie

03:51

Oh yoinks - snow is not good for speed.
Says the rider who has never ridden in snow.

@CowperKettle another thing is to try Strava ? It will help you measure your progress over time.

alphabet

04:07

@CowperKettle That sounds like one of those foods that was invented to be served to prison inmates but became unexpectedly popular.

CowperKettle

@Criggie I've been using it since 2018 :)

Time spent on physical activity, over the last 12 months

Criggie

04:32

@CowperKettle strava.com/clubs/SEBicycles

Cos of course we do

CowperKettle

04:47

@Criggie I've joined it :)

CowperKettle

05:16

4

Q: How does ignorance make a barren waste in "To the Nile" by John Keats?

The sonnet "To the Nile" (1818) by John Keats reads as follows: Son of the old Moon-mountains African! Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile! We call thee fruitful, and that very while A desert fills our seeing's inward span: Nurse of swart nations since the world began, Art thou so fru...

Great poem

user 70432

05:35

Great answer.

Robusto

06:33

Schindler's Lift ^

5

Vikas

07:37

@Mitch I don't know about South India but in my area it's definitely hot. It suddenly got hot.

CowperKettle

08:25

@Vikas My condolences! I would not want to be in such a temperature

Vikas

08:58

@CowperKettle I think humidity is still in control so far. Otherwise, it would be more uncomfortable.

CowperKettle

09:24

@Vikas Do you have an air conditioner unit now?

I recall that you did not have one

> While many theories of working memory had shown the presence of persistent activity, which the authors found, the persistent inactivity was something that the model predicted and had never been seen before. medicalxpress.com/news/…

A mathematical model predicted the existence of a new form of memory in the brain - and subsequent tests showed that it existed indeed.

Araucaria - Him

Daily Octordle #835
9️⃣🔟
7️⃣6️⃣
🕚3️⃣
8️⃣5️⃣
Score: 59

Vikas

10:36

@CowperKettle Actually I have. It's just my parents don't have. I live in the room at top floor with sun facing roof. So my room gets more hot. The rooms at ground floor are better.

jlliagre

11:27

@Vikas Are the bottom rooms at the first floor or the zeroth floor ;-)

Vikas

12:47

@jlliagre I mean they are on ground level. Maybe it's called zeroth?

Araucaria - Him

13:03

@alphabet I agree with everything you say apart from 'The answer seems right'. All the answer says is that such NPs take third person agreement. But that's what the OP has noticed although they aren't confident. What does 'created a third person reference' mean apart from 'takes third person agreement'???

What is 'a third person reference' when it's at home? Maybe the answerer meant that the pronoun is not deictic. But it is deictic. If you know what the answerer meant, please do let me know!

'Cuz I'm struggling!

@alphabet Nice reference. I'll keep that for future usage.

Mitch

@Vikas I just looked on Google Weather at a number of southern Indian cities: Chennai, Puducherry, Hyderabad and they all are about 33C but they have warnings for 'excessive heat' and say things like 'feels like 40C'

Vikas

@Mitch Maybe more humidity.

Mitch

But Ellenabad 'feels like' more.

Vikas

43

Mitch

@Vikas I thought the 'feels like' number was supposed to reflect humidity.

Vikas

13:13

Also we don't know how accurate it is.

Mitch

Anyway, it seems like whatever heat wave the south was experiencing is also affecting the north and maybe even worse.

The 'feels like' # comes from a calculation, so presumably a 'robust' number. As to how we interpret the label 'feels like', yes, that may depend on the person.

Vikas

@Mitch Maybe.

@Mitch 43 for me could feel like 50 to you?

Mitch

@Vikas 50 is kind of a lot for anybody. But yeah 43 is probably unbearable to me now.

When I was a kid though, I remember more than one summer (in Virginia, further south than from the Boston area) it was ~42 (and was a headline in the newspaper for breaking records).

And my memory of that then was that it was 'not that hot. why is everyone complaining?'

But 1) I was a kid and kid's are dumb.

2) I was running around barefoot and without a shirt most of the summer when outside.

3) I spent most of my summer at the community swimming pool

4) I had a nice air conditioned house to go back into

I also didn't have to work outside, like in construction. Even when the temperature is temperate, that seems unbearably hot in the sun.

@vikas Have you read the book (or seen the movie) 'White Tiger'?

alphabet

13:30

@Araucaria-Him Yeah, fair enough, the explanation it gives doesn't really make any sense.

Vikas

@Mitch I haven't.

alphabet

I do question the pedagogical value of declaring certain parts of the language off-limits to non-native speakers, as that answer does. Why are ELL answerers trying to gatekeep arbitrary grammatical constructions?

Vikas

@Mitch Maybe you got used to it.

alphabet

File this under "Just because you're a native speaker does not mean you know how to teach English." Along with a number of other ELL answers.

Mitch

13:45

@alphabet Same for ELU

@Vikas IT's a story (in India) about a guy from a small poor town gets a job in the big city and how things fall apart for him.

It makes a lot of very very cynical generalizations about Indian society: corruption, vice, social divides.

jlliagre

14:04

@Vikas Okay, so that means the ground floor isn't the first floor for you. That's the European way too.

#WhenTaken #71 (08.05.2024)

I scored 707/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 451.6 metres - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 200 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 6 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 200 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 4996 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 116 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 7194 km - 🗓️ 20 yrs - ⚡ 66 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 1617 km - 🗓️ 16 yrs - ⚡ 125 / 200
https://whentaken.com/

Good start then not so good.

tchrist

14:35

@Lambie It's because personal pronouns are NOT subject to modification. An NP must be a personal pronoun or a longer noun phrase. They are not like a noun that takes determiners, demonstratives, adjectives, noun attributes, or prepositional phrases. They enjoy their special syntactic status only so long as they remain unstained by the trappings of normal nouns. The moment you corrupt them with tawdry embellishments like that tired old Boston you of humbler means, their magic dissipates.

They lose the right to command their verbs into concurrence by person and number. They become common nouns.

It's like when a person goes and verbs a juicy noun into a verb. It wasn't juicy-verbed.

So once you've gone and changed the syntactic class of some word, it needs must discard the awesome privileges of its former station. Think of this as a form of zero derivation.

> abracadabra
ickylickysticky
muckamuck
overcover
overrecover
Shahanshah
shipmanship
sterraster
taratantara
trinitrin
undergrounder
uricosuric
wishtonwish

0

Q: Words That Have the Form A-B-A

I do not know the term for words like this, but an example is ABRA-CAD-ABRA. Are there words like this in the English language? Also, what is the term for this kind of word (if any)?

vocabulary

... for length(A) > 3

Lambie

14:59

@tchrist I choose to say it differently: I said that object pronouns (me, him, us, them, you) used as a subject must have a modifier** to be grammatical because **Me wants x." is not grammatical. You want to belabour it, problema seu.

tchrist

I refuse to include such agglomerative monsters as bumper-to-bumper.

@Lambie That's reasonable.

My hises aren't like his myes.

user 70432

Linguistic theory of question - Maria Polinsky

►

tchrist

So yours is all mine despite the fact that all mine are not yours.

Mine deeper.

Or more deeply, if you prefer.

Words with the form A-B-A are called sonata allegro form.

Sonata form

Sonata form (also sonata-allegro form or first movement form) is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century (the early Classical period). While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement. The teaching of sonata form in music theory rests on a standard definition and a series of hypotheses about the underlying reasons for the durability and variety of the...

user 70432

15:24

tattarrattat

Araucaria - Him

19:54

-326

Q: Our Partnership with OpenAI

Today, we announced an exciting new partnership with OpenAI. We’re pleased that OpenAI shares our commitment to socially responsible AI. You can find more details about this in the press release. We share updates on partnerships here on Meta because we believe in providing a space for you to ask ...

discussion featured generative-ai overflowai

WTF???

Mitch

20:14

@Araucaria-Him I hope they don't use ELU as training data. What a mess that would make.

OK just Sven Yarg's answers. That would be OK.

alphabet

20:30

@Araucaria-Him I think SE is getting the short end of the stick here. OpenAI will get to add some fancy new integrations to ChatGPT, which will surely see widespread use. SE will be able to develop "OverflowAI," which seems like a largely useless, gimmicky product that won't actually attract many customers.

The main new feature seems to be that ChatGPT will be trained even more on SE content and be able to provide links/attribution to it.

Presumably it makes sense if SE is getting paid handsomely, which they do seem to hint at. They claim it will let them "fund initiatives to benefit the community," which presumably means "spend a token amount on goodwill gestures and keep the rest as profit."

They're a for-profit company, not a contributor-run community, so such partnerships are unsurprising.

tchrist

21:16

@Araucaria-Him The figures above represent the number of weekly posts seen on Stack Overflow for the current week and for this same week one, two, three, and four years ago. My completely uninformed guess is that they're clutching at any possible revenue stream they can. That doesn't even measure site visits or user engagement, etc. They keep doing big layoffs, too.

From stackoverflow.com/site-analytics

Dannyu NDos

Nothing better than egg-and-cheese fried rice.

Criggie

21:40

@DannyuNDos two! TWO egg-and-cheese fried rice!

Dannyu NDos

No, five.

Araucaria - Him

@tchrist Can I just say, before I digest all of that, that whoever designed SE stuff to spit out that kind of graph - where no-one knows without counting and calculating all the way across what year they're in - must surely be contributing to the general malaise here at every given point that such a graph gets wheeled out ... :-/ (<-- I don't know how to do a furious face)

tchrist

@Araucaria-Him It's a terrible graph. I do have access to sane graphs but I'm not allowed to share those ones.

Araucaria - Him

@tchrist What year did Monica happen?

tchrist

The site analytics was a quick piggybacking off the mod analytics. But somehow they messed up the bottom axis in that transition.

@Araucaria-Him 2019, right before Yom Kippur IIRC.

jlliagre

21:51

in Chez Cosette, Apr 19 at 13:47, by jlliagre

I retrieved analytics data and plot it with a usable X axis legend. (French Stack Exchange activity).

tchrist

@Araucaria-Him It wasn't that:

@jlliagre oh thank you

Araucaria - Him

@tchrist Hmm. That certainly doesn't show it was that, but it doesn't rule it out either, imo. (Along with other morale reducing behaviour and decision-making)

MetaEd

Wordle 1,054 4/6

🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛🟨
⬛🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

tchrist

22:07

@Araucaria-Him I doubt que l’Affaire Monique would have had an affect on the visitations plot lines.

Araucaria - Him

@tchrist Faire enough

tchrist

Ou bien l’Affaire Monégasque, je dis. :)

Araucaria - Him

@tchrist But, in the longer run, it becomes less and less fun, and less and less rewarding, to contribute to a site where people are not enthusiastic and awed but more depressed and disillusioned in terms of what they're contributing to. And that, in turn, makes it less alluring for users.

tchrist

@Araucaria-Him Oh certainly.

jlliagre

In fact, I just overwrote the X axis.

Araucaria - Him

22:21

@tchrist And also, maybe, there's the dawning realisation that much of the social media that people were once heavily invested in is somehow tainted, ruined actually.

The joy, for example, of Facebook (which I never experienced) keeping people in contact with their peers and friends from wherever they were around the globe (or town), becomes somewhat diminished after knowing that their data's been raided (nice word) to help tilt elections, or for the purposes of governments spying on their people.

I doubt that general malaise at the enshittification of social media is going to be helped by SE joining up with Open AI. But who knows. (shrugs)

tchrist

@Araucaria-Him Sometimes you have highly periodic tides of soaring popularity that come and go and come again as regularly as hemlines, but ofttimes those neophytes' waves in popular culture can happen only once in all of eternity, never again to grace the strand with their swells. Not all rivers can you step into twice and be at the same place.

Araucaria - Him

22:41

@tchrist Well, you can never do the latter, perhaps.

But perhaps you can try to build a good bank to sit back and watch from

Hasta pronto, chicos!

(that was for you, Mitch)

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…