RegDwighт said: @Robusto wow, that's formatting to the max. Bold and italics and monospaced and in quotes. John has outlawlered himself.¹
It occurs to me that this is something we can measure.
I propose that a single character’s lawler weight (lw) be the standard unit of measure of the typ...
In the following sentence:
John McAdam and Thomas Teleford made important advances in road construction during the early 1800s.
Why is "made advances" not the verb? Are predicate and verb the same thing?
Edited the above for reopening so that John Lawler's excellent answer might be resurrected. And @MετάEd's new typographical unit is not cast upon the dust pile of EL&U history.
@KitFox You mean there's someone who hasn't seen those yet?
I'm supposed to understand it, but see my comment.
I have seen the word predicate used in several different ways. Sometimes a distinction is even made between predicate, predication, and another term I forgot. (It may have had something to do with combinations of verb phrase, complements, and adjuncts/satellites.) I was wondering what criteria you used to delimit the predicate in your answer. — Cerberus14 mins ago
@Cerberus Excellent question. Let's see if he responds. Look, I'm just excited to have this kind of discussion in EL&U. I'm sick to death of all the "What does until mean?" questions and it's way past time we elevated the conversation.
It is really interesting how our brains twist our common sense to accept cray stuff as normal life. Like one time where I dreamt of 3 red, green and blue suns and I didn't care.
Also I like -t suffix better than -ed. Not sure why.
@JohnLawler: So you truly mean predicates as used in predicate logic. I believe the conversion from natural sentence to logical proposition is always and necessarily somewhat arbitrary, depending on personal choice (which is not a problem). But it does make me wonder what you based your conversion on. For example, why not pick made advances as your predicate? Or made? Or made advances during? Do you base that on focality/topicality, or what? — Cerberus7 secs ago
I wouldn't mind if the world were run by Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene. It would be way better than any of the current politicians, and more colorful, too. And if it did screw up things from time to time, it could just rebuild them to make a better world.
When I am searching some meaning of english word, it striked in my mind that what is the meaning of the word "English". And why this language called as "English"? What is the reason behind this? If anyone knows, lets clear now. Thanks in advance.
@Jez When they start penalizing smokers for every single break they take, or making you clock out to go to the bathroom, or docking pay for visiting chat sites, THEN they'll be in a position to dock pay for chatter.
@KitFox hooray! now if only he liked it. So far he doesn't like pizza. doesn't like baked mac and cheese. doesn't like baked pasta with sauce and cheese.
A vegetarian friend of mine posted a status on facebook:
You are what you eat. That's why I don't eat cows, chickens or pigs.
My main point was that being (called) "a vegetable"(=brain-dead) is no better than being (called) "a cow"(=fat), "a pig", or "a chicken"(=a coward). A counterargumen...
@KitFox He's a picky eater. It's hard to predict what he'll eat. Plus he's started following his picky sister's lead; if she rejects something he might reject it too.
@Cerberus I looked up "apple" on Urban Dictionary and there's like a million pages of definitions for "a shitty company that makes overpriced products" or whatever.
Guy 1: Hey, want to go to the Apple Store and get a iPod Touch? Guy 2:No. I would rather spend money on something that's worth 400 bucks. Like cocaine and hookers.
> a 4-8 player game consisting of only men standing in a circle surrounding an apple. The players start to masturbate, last one to ejaculate has to eat the apple.
@RegDwighт His original answer was so awful I can't believe anyone bothered to try to fix it up.
You people are masochists.
> Apple Res talk; Term used to describe a person with a percentage amount of indian lood that claims to be indian only/especially when its beneficial... Yep, she's an apple alright; red on the outside, white on the inside.
How do you pronounce "a href"?
E.g. if you want to say this in a videotutorial tutorial:
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com">link</a>
I didn't found that in dictionaries and people try to avoid to say and pronounce that in videotutorials so looking forward for your answers.
@Cerberus heheh. to be fair the iphone was much better than almost every phone on the market at the time, at least in terms of basic PDA functionality and the ability to browse the web.
well, the iphone wasn't perfect. but it was a pretty nice phone. It's still a nice phone. Apple deserves their success with that product. What they don't deserve is monopoly on similar products or rounded rectangles.
@Robusto Well, yes, and no. For example, with a Google phone I can install an OS that doesn't send data to Google. And Google won't try to convince people that that makes me a criminal.
@Cerberus heheh. When the first iphone came about the only problems it had were the fact that it was so dependant on iTunes and the fact that you couldn't install software on it. Otherwise it was no different from any phone on the market.
@Robusto Yes. but at least I have the freedom to separate from the herd. Actually you don't need to root your phone to install CyanogenMod. Well, not the nexus phones, anyway. You just unlock the bootloader.
@Cerberus what does "multitasking" mean on a phone, anyway?
@Robusto Well... the carriers... yeah. But the iPhone per se doesn't make that worse. Apple has negotiated various deals with carriers, some of them are probably harmful to consumers.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It means playing music/radio in the background, navigating in the background (by audio), copy-pasting stuff from your browser, quickly switching between programs...
@Cerberus Well, the iphone could play music in the background. It didn't have copy/paste. But it also didn't have many apps so there probably wasn't much call for "multitasking"
@Cerberus because people don't understand what it means. Or because it means different things to different people, and they added a feature that can be given that label. Or because they got criticism for not having that feature so they made a minor change to make it appear as if they did.