@Robusto Ha ha! (Sent by my clone, I'm on the beach.)

The Mathematics of Growth Mindset

I think I like Joni Mitchell's recording of that song better.

@MichaelRybkin No, I saw him being tricked is what you should say there. Or I saw him get tricked.

But not I saw him be tricked. That doesn't sound right.

I have no explanation for any of this, just telling you how it sounds.

You saw them taking advantage of him. You saw him being taken advantage of. You him get taken advantage of.

But you can see them take advantage of him.

The be version doesn't sound right.

☝️👍

To be or not to be...

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Exist.

> Memory is the residue of thought.

@tchrist Thank you very much for your help.

@Mitch Oh yeah, like when the grandparents buy a 2-y/o a corn popper (Fisher-Price toy) even though they're Deaf and the child can run already. Hate it when that happens.

@alphabet Okay, but you'll have to abbreviate more, like OK or whatever. Maybe just K now. I'm not sure.

I feel like the world will probably end next year, so I should just go offline and chill with my immediate family for the time remaining, or just two of them. Just tell them they're wonderful for a year or so, and make them stuff with my bare hands, and junk like that.

Maybe after summer, on Halloween; I'm good at Halloween. That's about it.

@tchrist Absolutely. She was the best singer/songwriter to come out of the '60s, for my money.

@Robusto I saw that. I don't understand where he's going with it.

@tchrist I know.

Some of my favorite "non-hits" by Joni.

Oh well, this whole fucking album was a masterpiece.

The music of our youth imprints on us forever.

And in a way no later music ever seems to approach.

@tchrist Yeah, but doesn't it feel like the music of today isn't even trying to approach that?

I can never tease out my own biases from what I seem to perceive people appreciating. It was a time combining great civil unrest with a radical exploration of self and consciousness and lifestyle. Its now-legendary troubadours laid down touching ballads and exuberant anthems with grace notes whose echoes still resound more deeply in my own mind than anything written since.

I've probably got hundreds and hundreds of songs from those times engraved forever in the deepest vaults of my mind.

If not thousands.

First fail in a long time.

@MichaelRybkin I saw him be tricked several times over the course of his career and yesterday, I again saw him being tricked. I saw him be robbed several times in the last year and yesterday I saw him being robbed again.

@MichaelRybkin The producers say the movie will be released on [date].

@Lambie I'm not asking to improve the sentence. I'm just asking whether it sounds fine as regular English to a native speaker. An answer such as "yes, it does" in case the sentence is alright will be more than enough for me.

Otherwise, an improvement would be helpful.

@MichaelRybkin Many times on ELU and ELL people ask questions about short, little phrases. Although I saw him be tricked or being tricked are both grammatical, the lack of context is painful. [pronoun or noun] + object + be OR being [past participle active verb]. To make this effort [by me] useful, I would add that the verbs feel, hear, listen [to], notice, see, watch can all work like this.

@HippoSawrUs As a child I just didn't understand the point of those things.

As a parent of young children, I just didn't understand the point of those things.

As a sane person I just don't understand the point of those things.

@tchrist New French roadsign. (Sent by my clown.)

Slow down, cat taking a stroll

@jlliagre Nous avons besoin de chats plus rapides.

@tchrist It's very hard to appreciate music after the 70's.

@Mitch That's because all octogenarians are deaf.

Yes, there are many catchy tunes. And I'm sure they have something important to say. And I feel like just an old person complaining about how the youths don't have enough feeling.

But I think a reasonable case can be made that new music is just not that good anymore

@tchrist there's that.

Also repetition.

But in defense I've heard that Taylor Swift song about 'lonely Starbucks lovers' a thousand times

@Lambie Thank you

And its not -that- good.

Whereas -every- Beatles song is excellent.

Their worst songs are great.

Maybe not everything on their last couple albums.

The kids will probably flag you to death now.

@tchrist I'm flagging myself as I speak.

I mean a lot of those Beatles songs are pretty stupid

Flagellant!

That's one's repetitious. :)

@tchrist Folk songs tended to gravitate either to the starkly obvious or the childishly cute.

@Mitch Thank you very much. That's a good point you made.

@Robusto No quick chats in chat.

@tchrist It was ispired by the book Тихий Дон

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer (93): What is the meaning of "pranging" in this context? Is it US slang? ✏️‭ by florence023‭ on english.SE

This is worth posting again from lo these many years ago:

Hi! So MW says the second meaning of verbiage, "wording" is now well established and can be considered standard (merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbiage). Is that true, does the OED say that too?

Why would a native speaker choose to write this instead of wording or language? I was looking at the change history for a document and I saw "Added verbiage for..." many times over.

@jlliagre Le chat en balade est vraiment excellent. Dans mon coin souvent des écureuils ou des chats essayent de traverser le rue et c'est vraiment dangereux. Moi je pense qu'on devrait construire des passerelles pour les animaux, mais les utiliseraient-ils ? Ou simplement faire passer les autos dans des tunnels partout, ce qui permettrait au moins de récupérer le monoxyde de carbone qui s'en échappe.

@دولةفلسطين "Added wording for..." wouldn't make sense in most contexts, assuming it's supposed to mean "Added information about"

@دولةفلسطين This is a matter of taste. Rest assured that, were you to use the term in the second sense according to M-W, you would not be alone.

@alphabet Ok thanks, "language" then. I can see now that it is off.

@Robusto Thanks!

Is this usage more American?

@دولةفلسطين I don't know. You hear it a lot here in the US, but I can't speak for the UK.

It is unlikely I would use it, because in French it does not have that second sense and it's really just meaningless drivel and this meaning would interfere with me selecting it in English. It would never come to my mind in context.

@دولةفلسطين people don't have to speak as the dictionaries say :-)

@user85795 Oh, I know, and I don't, but to make a long story short I found this in the change history of a very serious document and since I only knew the meaning in French, I had a good laugh. Which is why I checked in the dictionary. But Merriam Learners (Britanica) doesn't even present this second sense. MW does though.

I like dictionaries, that's how I learned English at first. Using a dictionary to translate my computer manual, line by line.

@دولةفلسطين You do you. That's why we have synonyms aplenty in English.

Right.

But usually when I write I must write for native speakers so I want to write like they do, and sound natural. Otherwise they'll tell me something like "your language is outstanding" which just mostly means it's not idiomatic really.

@دولةفلسطين You don't have to write like a hick to speak with hicks.

Of course not, but that's not what I mean. I have a long experience dealing with native speakers, and when they tell me I speak "better" than them, I know it's just it's not typical, too formal or long winded, but most of them don't know what "idiomatic" means so they say that.

Also because many use French to elevate language, I speculate they might perceive gallicisms as a form of elevation. But it's just poor English is all.

Anyways.

Took me a long time to get this.

@دولةفلسطين Google's dictionary lists it as "US," so this may indeed be a usage only found in the US

@alphabet Thanks, in this very case there is no doubt someone in the U.S. wrote this change history.

@دولةفلسطين Yeah, I hear ya. When I went to work in Germany many years ago, I had textbook German. My boss complimented me on how well I spoke. But I was intensely jealous of the native Germans who spoke lots of slang. So I worked hard to learn more, and about six weeks after I started I tried showing off my new knowledge to my boss. He just gave me a quizzical look and told me, "You know, your German has really gone to hell" (Dein Deutsch hat sich wirklich verschlechtert).

@دولةفلسطين Most English speakers don't know French, so they wouldn't even recognize Gallicisms except as oddly unidiomatic verbiage.

Merriam-Webster is almost exclusively focused on American English, so it tends to reflect American usage. (For instance, its pronunciation info only reflects General American.)

@alphabet I use gallicism to mean sentences with more prepositions and a French ordering of the clauses, not so much lexical stuff.

@Robusto Exactly. The native speaker always wants you to do better than them or to be textbook. They're wrong about that.

@دولةفلسطين Still, most Americans wouldn't recognize those as gallicisms and thus elevated.

@alphabet I speculate it sounds a bit like the British legal texts. Something like that.

Old and long sentences.

Yes, those can sound too formal, though of course it depends on the sentence and the context.

Annoyingly, most native speakers don't actually understand their own language as well and thus give terrible explanations of things.

Apparently I've repeated the same sentence twice in this chat.

True that.

Like I was watching The Wire and in the newsroom there was that funny discussion in some piece on how people were evacuated from a building on fire. Luckily the editor picked up on that.

"trust me" is a 🚩

@دولةفلسطين Isn't that usage of "evacuated" correct? Are there people who dislike it?

@user85795 I'd call out certain specific users and examples but I'm far too kind a raccoon to do such a thing.

You know me, just a friendly neighborhood burglarizer.

Yet, if you trust no one, then no one will trust you.

In the words of famous raccoon pop star Asparagus Spears: "Burglarizer, burglarizer, I'm a, I'm a burglarizer."

@دولةفلسطين Britanica Dictionary literally gives the example sentence: "During World War II, children were evacuated from London to the country."

The New York Times has headlines like "Nearly 2000 Migrants Are Evacuated From Brooklyn Tent Shelter Before Storm."

That video is dumb and wrong.

I don't have an opinion, just something I noticed watching this.

Likewise, a while back someone posted a video about elocution, specifically the importance of not skipping any consonants in one's speech. Fun game: count how many consonants the maker of that video doesn't pronounce.

@دولةفلسطين Indeed, I'm criticizing the video, not you.

There was that Geoff Lindsey video about how nearly everyone--including people giving very formal speeches--pronounces "asked" as "assed." But I'm sure that, if you assed ELL, everyone would tell you about the importance of pronouncing that /k/.

Finding a reliable source is a challenge. In the Wire everyone pronounces axe.

Indeed. That pronunciation of "ask" actually is one non-native speakers would be ill-advised to imitate, of course.

@alphabet It's not dumb and wrong. It's just an excerpt taken out of context, the larger context being presented and the dialogue written by someone who used to work at that newspaper.

@Robusto I mean the character in that video is dumb and wrong about the usage of that particular word.

There's a difference between a dumb person and a person who does dumb things, I suppose. See: Trump and Biden, respectively.

@alphabet But he may not be wrong in the context of journalese. Different levels and kinds of language are practiced in different domains.

@Robusto The New York Times uses "evacuate" that way. I'm pretty sure every newspaper does.

And look, I buried the lede.

@alphabet Different paper, different stylesheets.

@Robusto I doubt you'll find any paper that avoids that usage. The editor says that "To evacuate a person is to give them an enema," not "This specific usage of 'evacuate' is the standard one, but we're too anal for it."

How arrogant to say that another's approach to language is "dumb and wrong."

Yes, like the Government of Canada recommends the singular they I noticed, but not all style guides do.

He's dumb and wrong to claim that this is anything other than the standard meaning of the word.

He's welcome to not use "evacuate" that way, but he should get his facts straight about what the word means.

The meaning of meaning.

@alphabet Look, it's a moment in a TV series. Not something to elevate your dudgeon to the stratosphere. You don't even know whether that is presented as satire.

The Wire is truly great. I've watched it 3-4 times now. Love it. Language wise it's very insightful.

@دولةفلسطين Same here. My contender for one of the two greatest TV shows ever.

@Robusto Just let me be mean and angry and insulting, OK?

I can't stop you, except to kick/mute you, and I won't do that. You're just giving your opinion, "dumb and wrong" though I may suppose it to be. ^_^

Actually, I characterized it as "arrogant," which is in my mind a more accurate description.

Thank you for finding a more appropriate word to describe me.

Raccoons join the "tiny house" movement

;-)

@Robusto lede poisoning has been a serious issue for a century