English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

@RegDwighт I did get the only badge available for the old queues, that was the silver "reviewer" badge "1000 reviews, over 200 actioned in the old review system"

That was a ridiculously difficult badge to acquire.

I was last to get it, I think, before the new system

@Cerberus: sound familiar?

12:54 AM

Lord Cthulhu, but it is quiet here during the bitter watches of the night! Why doesn’t R’lyeh have burlesque shows?

3:23 AM

@MattЭллен Heh, not quite. Only in this room.

People don't talk about films nearly as much in real life.

Johan Larsson

4:34 AM

@Cerberus you there?

5:38 AM

sneezes

user19161

5:53 AM

@cornbreadninja I have a tissue for you.

user19161

@Cerberus Except that life itself is one long film.

Hi

Everyone

6:18 AM

@JasperLoy thank you.

Gigili

8:08 AM

Wha? The hats are gone, THE HATS ARE GONE!

user19161

8:38 AM

@Gigili Good! They look terrible!

user19161

In other news, I have attained 26k, but I won't be bringing it to 27k, so it's time to retire...

10:11 AM

@Reg Congrats! :)

A: Why do "consulting engineers" advise, not consult?

@tchrist I finally sorted access to OED.

2

OED says that this use of the word consulting does in fact mean giving advice and stems from a now-obsolete sense of the French consulter, to give (professional) counsel. They suggest that the word should be parsed as a noun used attributively, rather like "loudspeaker" in "loudspeaker cabinet", ...

10:37 AM

@AndrewLeach Ah good.

12:09 PM

3

Q: When do I use the comma?

The monitor being ill, we'd better put the meeting off. The river having risen in the night the crossing was impossible. In the above two sentences, one uses the comma and one does not. So, when do you use the comma? Are there any rules?

punctuation comma

Dupe of this, and possibly many others:

3

Q: When do I use the comma?

The monitor being ill, we'd better put the meeting off. The river having risen in the night the crossing was impossible. In the above two sentences, one uses the comma and one does not. So, when do you use the comma? Are there any rules?

punctuation comma

Proof: Barrie's already answered it.

hi

hih

hi

Is English older than French?

I thought English was a bastard version of German, French, etc.

Depends what you define as "English".

Well, both English and Old English

I mean the language

Not talking about you fellas :)

Well, obviously the language, but OE is so different from modern English, and OF from modern French, that it gets difficult to define a start point.

There was a point of intersection somewhere around 1066, I think!

(I'm older than many Frenchmen, and younger than many others)

1:06 PM

@Noah Bastard is a prejudicial term.

@AndrewLeach In 1066 the defeated English spoke Old English. The conquering Normans spoke Norman French. Over the next few centuries the languages blended.

1:32 PM

Whaaaaaa what's with the sudden influx of crap.

It's like it's Saturday again or something.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Why the heck do people say things such as "represents correct usage" instead of a simple "is correct"?

A: Is it necessary to use "the" before using verb+"ing" in specific contexts

They representin'.

0

The milking of a cow is not a painful process at all like you think is verbose and ungrammatical. Process is almost always an expendable word. It would be better expressed as: Milking a cow is not as painful as you think. I am afraid it has never been explained how does the whole dream shar...

Check out the comment exchange. Bill Franke must be tearing his hair out.

Hah.

He didn't think he'd have to drink quite so much pineapple juice.

Q: Pronunciation of -ED endings

1:43 PM

Serves him right for messing with The Joker.

-2

I noticed that final -ed has different pronunciations. what's the general rule for knowing the correct pronunciation ?

grammar

Here's another one.

Do tell me, why the tag?

Dunno. I used it as edit fodder, though.

"What's the general rule for knowing the correct pronunciation?" The rule is: know the correct pronunciation!

That's about as general as I can get.

Uh, sounds pretty specific.

Okay how about this rule: Know!

Better. Could be shorter, though. How about just: no.

1:46 PM

O!

Oy.

Fran?

Cheezey.

You probably can't access this because of your FDR licensing issues, but this one is for @johnlawler:

howdy from the road.

Howdy road.

1:50 PM

road hard. put up wet.

Where travel to?

lindenhurst, IL

Near Chicago?

I saw that giant truck stop and everything.

ish

I've closed like ten questions in the last ten minutes, and I could have closed five more. This is disheartening.

We should just shut down the site for weekends.

1:52 PM

:€

@cornbreadninja I grew up about ten or fifteen miles from there.

whoa!

I had friends up in Antioch, near there.

I saw that on the map. it shows up on gmaps before lindenhurst will.

+1 for all you had to go through for so little reward. — Robusto 6 mins ago

1:55 PM

what is ELL at, 87% or something?

Yeah.

@cornbreadninja Friends? Relatives? Business?

@RegDwighт What else can we do to put it over the top?

@Robusto I am with boyfriend and his parents. we are visiting his dad's sister.

@Robusto really, our next truce should go like this: downvote questions and upvote answers until at least 100 Reversal badges have been handed out.

There are way more than 100 answers on this site deserving of that badge by now. Heck, probably way more than 100 answerers.

I still want Sportsmanship.;

1:58 PM

I don't think I'll be ever getting that one.

without semicolons

@Reg: Can you use Entwicklungspolitik to mean "political development"? I thought it just meant "development policy."

@cornbreadninja I was like a dozen upvotes away from it when I first ran for mod. That was two years ago. Still no badge.

lame.

@Robusto as in English, the different meanings require flipping the words around.

The head of the noun phrase being at its tail.

2:00 PM

@RegDwighт I thought so. Then I will call bullshit on my colleague.

He is so annoying, especially when he tries to speak German around me.

@cornbreadninja also, I have 553 useful flags, but still no Marshal badge.

latercakes, gents

CU

His accent is so poor I have to tell him to write it down.

Bye @cornbreadninja

Seriously, his German sounds like some crummy comic's impression of what he thinks Russian sounds like.

Well, they are both Indosomething I'm told.

2:02 PM

Indomyface.

Indo-you're-a-peon?

Is that what MySpace and Facebook will be called after the merge?

Q: What is the etymology of the word librocubicularist?

Could be.

0

I’m aware of the meaning of the word (someone called me one the other day!) but I’m very curious as to the etymology or origin of this word. Where an earth did it come from? Particularly as it has no entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. I have done some online research on this word but have f...

etymology

Aww, come on.

The etymology is "You just made it up."

It's an eggcorn of the German "Librocubicular ißt", itself an ellipsis of "Librocubicular ißt Spaghetti mit Sauce".

Actually, not. It's made up by someone else.

What a trivial pursuit.

2:06 PM

@Robusto Oh. I was right.

It's etymology is obvious, then.

What a worthlessly expensive word.

I voted to close as gen ref.

Ha.

I must eat cake.

CU.

Some days you eat the cake ... and some days ... why, the cake eats you.

Is saying he is bossing everyone around common in AmE?

Looking it up on Google Books reveals only 4 entries.

And is there a better way to say the same thing.

books.google.com/ngrams/…

Flatliner.

2:11 PM

@Robusto How do you get the image from an nGram?

I use a screen snap utility.

Previsouly you could have copied it, but now right click doesnt seem to work.

@Robusto Mmm. Is there any way to extract the URL of the image?

It's not an image. It's a <rect>. Pure HTML.

Actually <svg>, but HTML nevertheless.

online.wsj.com/article/…

CERBERUS

Google doesn't want their servers cluttered with NGram images, evidently. They are also distributing CPU cycles to the end-user. Good job, Google.

2:18 PM

@Robusto Hell with Google.

@Robusto IE doesn't do SVG, but they get that to draw it itself, too.

I don't know why they didn't use <canvas>.

@AndrewLeach There's so little that IE does do, it's tempting just to stop trying to coddle Microsoft. My company already has decided to embrace CSS3 and let the chips fall where they may in IE. You want to see border-radius, text-shadow, box-shadow? Get a real browser.

I work at a client site. The client has just started to think about upgrading the corporate workstation build past IE6 (that is, they are beginning to test IE8).

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUU ...

IE6 is dead as disco. Nobody should support it. Microsoft dropped support for it years ago.

The client's on extended support, but I think even that will not be continued past next summer.

2:26 PM

Besides, anyone still using IE6 won't notice anything different from their normal experience, which is completely lame on every site they ever visit.

Hmm, why have a meta tag with the URL in it?

> <meta itemprop="url" content="http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=librocubicularist&year_‌start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=">

2:58 PM

I don’t think Benjy Peekaboo has had a very auspicious beginning.

And FF is being intentionally dense:

Now I don't read IPA, and it's just taken me 5 minutes to track down this online IPA reader, which is apparently the best of a bad (or non-existent) bunch. I'm guessing @tchrist's ˌoʊkeɪˈhiːɹjəˌgoʊ might be Okay! Hi, J-Lo!, but I gotta say I'm surprised IPA apparently can't be easily (and clearly, intelligibly!) passed through speech synthesisers. — FumbleFingers 14 hours ago

It’s not quite as bad as Martha’s patently anti-intellectual “gibberish”, but sheesh.

Hey, I don't read IPA either, but I figured it out in about ten seconds.

Arguably those two de-facto diphthongs could also be written with the second of their pair as a superscript, but I have only seen Lawler do it that way.

The symbols one uses all the time, namely for English, one comes to learn quickly enough.

3:19 PM

@tchrist His answers haven't fared much better, unfortunately.

I think when ELL does get going there are going to be far more [migrated] on the front page of ELU than [closed]. I wonder if that will raise complaints.

english.stackexchange.com/q/96826/2303

I think the author of that sentence probably meant cannot be overstated rather than cannot be overestimated. What do you expect from Microsoft Student?

Self-delete.

unbowlderizes the Philosopher’s Stone

A: Correct use of "is" or "are"

3:43 PM

-1

you should use ARE , because in your sentence you named three specific names and if you want to use a pronoun instead of them , that pronoun is THEY , which can not be used with IS .

He just doesn’t get it.

Okay

user19161

@MattЭллен Let me know what the OED folks say about that archaic vs historical thing when you have gotten a reply. I will delete my answer if it is wrong as I don't want to ruin my reputation, even though I have none.

@tchrist I think this is Notrron S. That/s why I deleted my answer.

user19161

@Robusto I wanted to answer it but that incorrect comment on the post caused its deletion, sad.

3:49 PM

@tchrist Is it a book

@Noah Doubts.

user19161

@Noah When did Nortonn become Notrron?

@Noah ?

@tchrist a few seconds ago.

I think he is just dumb.

Not all dumb people are Nordie.

3:50 PM

@tchrist I remember him asking the same question. Plus its a new user with 1 reputation.

user19161

@tchrist Ah, I think I look a little like Harry Potter as well.

@tchrist Nordie is pretty smart by the way. I dont know why he keeps coming.

@JasperLoy You look more like Cheng Chang Woo.

No offense, dude. Just kidding.

user19161

@Noah WTF is that?

But truth be told.

@JasperLoy That's a person's name.

user19161

@Noah Yes, but who is it? Any link?

3:54 PM

@JasperLoy lenscratch.com/2010/04/cheng-chang-wu.html

user19161

@Noah Oh no he doesn't look like me at all. You aren't even sure what I look like. All you have seen is a couple of extremely low resolution pics. =)

@JasperLoy Oh, was that you that @TRiG posted the posters of here yesterday?

user19161

@tchrist No, those aren't attractive enough. =)

user19161

@Noah Wow, now you have called him affectionately by Nordie. Try calling him Nordie next time you see him.

@Noah listenever has been around for a couple of months. That's enough time to be smoked out and merged, which hasn't happened. Yet.

3:59 PM

It isn’t affectionate. It’s depreciative.

user19161

@AndrewLeach Their questions are also of a different nature. Nortonn is about prepositions, and listenever is about interpreting Harry Potter and such.

user19161

@matt Have you gotten a reply from the OED folks?

nope. they're on holiday apparently

@MattЭллен What were you asking?

I did go to the Edward Lear exhibit at the Ashmolean. It was super effective!

@AndrewLeach about archaic vs historical words

user19161

4:03 PM

@AndrewLeach About the use of "archaic" and "historical" to mark words and the difference.

A: Archaic vs Historical in dictionaries

3

An archaic word is one that is no longer in everyday use but sometimes used to impart an old-fashioned flavour, while a historical word is one used to describe a thing of the past. On the other hand, a literary word is one that is connected to literature. As can be seen, these three mean slightly...

Oh yes.

user19161

I think only they can give the answer, since it is their word choice.

Sounds reasonable.

Only smarties have the answer.

Aren’t smarties booties?

user19161

4:04 PM

But I was thinking archaic might mean pre-historical. That is another possibility...

Pleistocene.

I used to collect smarties lids

I wonder if I still have them? probably not

@MattЭллен Upper-case letters or lower-case letters?

@JasperLoy yeah, that's one of the comments

user19161

I was also thinking why "dinosaur" is not marked as historical. Because "dinosaur" is still commonly used, or "historical" refers only to things of "culture". Again, only they have the answer.

4:05 PM

@AndrewLeach I was going for both. I didn't get very far.

Hiya.

Prehistoric means before writing.

Hello!

Oral histories notwithstanding.

So, @Cerb, have you seen Groundhog Day?

user19161

4:07 PM

Also, for all Debian fans, you will be glad to know that the next release will still have GNOME as the default DE, though the default does not matter.

Everything in order in this room?

@MattЭллен Uh no?

What is it about?

OMG

Smarties

Nestlé Smarties are a colour-varied sugar-coated chocolate confectionery popular primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, France, Greece, South Africa, and the Middle East. They have been manufactured since 1937, originally by H.I. Rowntree & Co.. Smarties are oblate spheroids with a minor axis of about 5 mm (0.2 in) and a major axis of about 15 mm (0.6 in). They come in eight colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, pink and brown, although the blue variety was temporarily replaced by a white variety in so...

user19161

@Cerberus Ready for your inspection.

@Cerberus it's about a guy who repeats the same day over and over until he starts killing himself

4:08 PM

Uh...

So it is a film?

user19161

@MattЭллен Sounds like a stupid movie.

@Cerberus yes

Okay.

And you like it?

user19161

Avatar was shown on TV. Didn't bother to watch a second of it.

user19161

What's so great about Avatar?

4:08 PM

oh, well, when I saw it I thought it was OK, but it's become something of a meme

►

Oh my. That should be Smarties.

@Cerberus it's also go a lot of people debating about it for some reason. I forget what

Oh well, play ’em as they lie.

@MattЭллен I may have vaguely heard the name come by, but not consciously.

PUT SMARTIES TUBES ON CATS’ LEGS MAKE THEM WALK LIKE A ROBOT

4:10 PM

BRB phone.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

And the rap version:

Yo. We talkin 'bout old-school spear Danes
Kings of the people, man, the glory they had,
Princes representin' by kickin' ass in battle

representin is a long word.

Rap musicians use long words. Just not librocubicularist.

Anyway, there was a paper about all that.

4:15 PM

But hwæt was used in almost exactly the same way as yo to begin an utterance.

That was their point.

It's more like "Listen up!"

Hey!

A paper? Just one?

Recent.

Connected Beowulf with some pop-culture stuff.

4:16 PM

Well, I've known that for decades. Me old Old English prof taught me that.

@Robusto Yes, it's a good word, what?

Oh, you mean the rap part. As for that, it's a conclusion I drew for myself long ago.

I think I pasted the paper link here.

Maybe it was in a comment, though.

But I recall doing so.

I'm talking decades ago.

@Robusto "Ellen fremedon" What's that about my family?

4:18 PM

Exactly.

Your name means strength or courage, right?

Oct 1 '12 at 0:47, by tchrist

In this study, we consider the functions that formulae perform in two genres which
exist in written format as texts, but maintain close links to oral forms, namely Old
English (OE) verse, specifically the epic poem Beowulf, and weblogs, or “blogs”.
We identify five important functions of formulae found in common across OE verse
and blogs, classifying these functions as discourse-structuring functions, filler
functions, epithetic functions, gnomic functions, and tonic functions. In addition, a
sixth type of formulaic function necessarily tied to the written medium, the

Oct 1 '12 at 0:47, by tchrist

From the paper “Hwæt! LOL! Common formulaic functions in Beowulf and blogs”

@MattЭллен Actually, the literal translation is, "MattЭллен can't spell freedom."

v.s.

it's disputable. My uncle, who researches our genealogy as a hobby, says it's something to do cloth making, from the word "Ell"

@tchrist I don't see LOL being equivalent.

4:20 PM

I couldn’t remember the reference.

You’d have to read the paper. I’m not sure how they get these things published.

And they did.

o' course it could be a form of Helen, meaning "of light"

Here.

@MattЭллен Or a contraction of "Hell on earth."

> The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the formulae found in the Beowulf and blog samples fulfill certain functions which alternately (1) link these emergent text genres to analogous oral forms, in the case of the first five functions mentioned above, and (2) mark the genres as written forms, in the case of the sixth function.

@tchrist TL;DR

4:23 PM

no shit

I prefer to remain a dilettante.

> We identify five important functions of formulae found in common across OE verse and blogs, classifying these functions as discourse-structuring functions, filler functions, epithetic functions, gnomic functions, and tonic functions. In addition, a sixth type of formulaic function necessarily tied to the written medium, the acronymic function, is identified in both genres

Gnomes.

They have gnomes.

Not sundials?

As if that's not perfectly obvious already.

@Robusto well, a tramp in Sydney did call me the son of the devil.

4:26 PM

Just one?

@MattЭллен Tramp. Bum. Vagrant. Hobo. Derelict. Vagabond. Street person. Bag lady. Homeless. Wayfarer. Rover.

Your choice.

Looks more like a scamp than a tramp to me.

Scamp was Tramp's son.

Fortunately I had to look that up.

Heh.

> The use of hwæt as the opening word is not unique to Beowulf: Eight other OE poems begin the same way, testifying to hwæt's formulaic character in this function. The importance of these examples is not simply that they are formulaic, but that they unmistakably invoke an “oral” setting. In other words, above and beyond its discourse structuring function, the use of the hwæt-sequence marks the text as spoken.

What do you say at a noisy bar when you’re trying to get the barman’s attention so you can get a drink?

4:59 PM

I try not to frequent noisy bars. In my experience attention-grabbing is normally done with hand-signals, which rely on peripheral vision.

I just can’t think of anything one might say that wouldn’t come off as rude.

I just lean forward and smile sweetly

I have something of a noise-sensitivity processing bug. Confuses and oppresses me. I try to avoid it.

also, I'm patient

@MattЭллен Be careful what bars you do that in. :)

5:01 PM

@tchrist Me too. I get all the background and nothing of what people are saying to me.

Yes, I think we have the same bug.

I can’t filter.

An aural dog’s breakfast.

It's probably a physical design flaw rather than a processor bug.

How so?

If the ears don't pick up enough sound from the front, but instead gather what's happening from other directions. The shape/contouring of the outer ear is quite significant.

Oh. I am somewhat hard-of-hearing in my left ear. It means I can’t tell direction.

5:04 PM

Yup. That happens. We have warbling phones in the office instead of bells (who has those now?) and I can't tell which one is ringing.

I often look the wrong way. And I can never tell where the ringing phone is coming from. Very annoying. Even in my own pocket.

How about police sirens? The wailing ones are hopeless. A British two-tone is, or rather was, far better for directionality.

If you mean can I tell whether it’s before or behind me, no, not usually.

This is annoying, because it is fundamentally a get-out-of-the-way signal, and you have no idea which way to dodge, or to not do so.

Same problem with somebody using their bicycle bell/horn/noisemaker on me when I’m on foot. I tend to freeze for fear of jumping into their way.

I find that with sirens. I think the wailing siren's design is more omnidirectional than the two-tone used to be: that definitely pointed forward. The new one doesn't actually help.

Ours go up and down — I think.

Except I think that fire engines and police cars use different sounds. And I can’t begin to tell you which is which.

5:12 PM

Our fire engines round here have truck horns as well as the sirens. Which only proves the point about sirens.