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12:07 AM
29
Q: Comma before last item in a list

Chris DwyerShould I put a comma before last item in list? I would like crackers, cheese and some soda. I would like crackers, cheese, and some soda.

 
@MarkSzymanski Ah, yet another "oxford comma" question.
But it's very strange: the question doesn't say what it's a duplicate of. Is that what you were actually remarking on?
 
12:22 AM
@Martha: I have already added that in a comment just now.
 
Yes, I saw that (thanks for doing that, btw), but I think the lack of a "this is a duplicate of ..." message at the top is some sort of bug.
 
1
Q: Are there other repeated single word sentances like the Buffalo sentence.

kriegarMy friend told me about the Buffalo sentence. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. I was wonder...

This really bugs me. The link in the question answers the question.
 
some people are just lazy
 
4
Q: Analyzing Will Ferrell's "I Thought" joke

makerofthings7I'm reading Will Ferrell's Twitter where he wrote Just thought a thought but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I thought. Does the sentence still have the same meaning if you remove the last "I thought"? Is this grammatical word play possible with other words? Is ther...

That one's even more recent.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if that is where they got the link
 
12:29 AM
And gah: some idiot has upvoted the new question.
 
@Martha Yeah, I noticed that nearly everything gets upvoted at least once.
Ack, the comment just added blows my mind.
 
1:27 AM
Anyone with a free slot, do consider joining the History Q/A proposal...:)
 
1:41 AM
@Cerberus Do the Dutch really wear clogs out to do stuff or is that seen a completely touristy thing?
 
 
1 hour later…
2:42 AM
@Billare I think the wooden shoes have always been worn by people in the country, mainly by those who work outdoors. I am not sure how wide spread they used to be. In modern times you will still see them, though they are probably rarer than in the past, if only because many people have migrated from the country to the city. I have never seen anyone in an urban environment wearing them. I have seen them on peasants and workmen in the country, though.
I believe they are also worn in some areas in Germany.
Their point is that they are cheap (even if you have no money you can just carve them out of a log yourself) and water resistant. They won't get wet if you walk around through low puddles; and if they do get wet you can dry them in no time, because they cannot get soaked with water.
Oh I must be off to bed... bye!
 
 
6 hours later…
9:12 AM
@Martha When I hit "edit", the message was right there in the source code. No idea why it wasn't displayed. (In fact, I am somewhat certain that I had seen it right after closing the question). Anyhow, I then hit "save" without touching anything else, and the message (re-)appeared, and the edit history *almost* reflects that no changes were made, except for the edit summary that reads "added 5 characters in body". Really strange.
@Billare Heh. History.
Feb 25 at 15:57, by Orbling
That's the one stack I have to avoid. @51
Feb 25 at 15:58, by Robusto
@RegDwight — I might fall prey to that one myself. Get thee behind me, Satan!
 
9:25 AM
@Robusto: nicholas ainsworth now accepting answers. Three and counting.
 
10:11 AM
It should be clear to him he can accept also previously asked questions, should not it be?
(Never write when you didn't sleep at all.)
 
11:00 AM
Hola.
 
Allo!
 
I should write ".Hola." because Spanish has punctuation at the beginning and end of a sentence. Note the upside-down period ...
 
Hm. There's a mid dot in Unicode, do they have a top dot as well?
 
Just has to be upside-down. Same baseline.
 
˙Hola.
 
11:04 AM
Another example of Commie one-upmanship.
 
¿dıɥsuɐɯuʍop-ǝpısdn uɐǝɯ noʎ ʎןuıɐʇɹǝɔ
3
 
OK, have a star for your upside-downmanship.
I forgot, you're on the other side of the world, where people walk around upside down.
 
Shiny!
 
Now I gotta go. See? You chased me out. So you can say you've accomplished something today.
 
@Robusto Yes, that's why we're sometimes missing articles, too. They just fall out of our pockets. Gravity sucks.
Oh. Okay. TTYL.
 
11:11 AM
I thought that should happen to Australians.
 
11:22 AM
(I will change my nick to "The always late parentheses-version-x man.")
(I am sure I am known for that, by now.)
 
11:41 AM
hazaa
 
Navashigah!
 
Are those names of file-sharing networks?
 
don't you hate it when...
...you make up a word only to discover it's not made up, but real, and with a meaning you didn't intend.
 
Hehe. Well, tackle on a few more syllables here and there.
 
i will!
tack, that is
 
11:44 AM
Geez, did I just say "tackle"?
Haha.
 
muscle memory no doubt
 
It's a Navashi-sharing network.
 
I will add this to my collection of bagles and noönes.
 
New York bagel, I hope.
 
Happy New Your?
 
11:46 AM
Bah!
Happy new Me!
 
Hey, no editing in shape!
 
It was an edit in hope, not in shape.
I stopped being in shape ages ago.
Or was that "being sharp?"
OK; I stopped.
 
Greetings!
 
Aaaargh! The fileservers seem to be on a go slow, the water supply to our kitchen is cut off, and I'm running out of things to waste time on.
 
11:51 AM
Hey what's wrong with noöne?
 
No one is wrong.
 
Poor Rhodri! My advice: get some water from the bathroom, make tea, and read a book? Or maybe waste time in this chat?
 
I'll go for the latter. Entertain me, people!
 
Oh!
Well I must say the squirmish meme by Palin is better than I expected.
 
@Billare did you get all those quote marks out of your system? ;-P
 
11:54 AM
No water to the bathroom either. We have to go a whole floor downstairs to make tea :-(
 
indeed, i plan to use squirmish next opportunity
 
Yikes.
x2
Oh damn I gotta go, work...
Later!
Have fun squirming and not having water!
 
Have fun, or whatever passes for it at work :-)
@EdGuiness It's a rather neat portmanteau when you think about it.
 
@Rhodri and appropriate to the circumstance and person!
now, i just need to be vigilant for distasteful skirmishes in my day job
so I can spring out this lovely new word
plenty of opportunities to use misunderestimated, not so many for squirmish
but i'm a patient man
 
::nods:: Patience is a virtue. Also a category of card games.
 
12:01 PM
Virtue is also a card game. virtuegame.com
 
Wow. If that was available in the UK, it would be very handy for me.
I help out with a Scripture Union kids camp. In particular, I take a crate of boardgames suitable for 12-15 year olds along.
 
Scripture Union, is that like a holiday thing? Don't tell me it's exposing children to religion?
 
Yes, we do indoctrinate children.
Into the glories of Python, at least :-)
 
not that they should be protected from fair exposure of course. when I said "exposure" I was really thinking indoctrination
ahah... you read my mind!
anyhoo. back to the grind. ciao.
 
I prefer to think of it as inspiration.
Cheers.
Don't enjoy yourself too much.
 
12:12 PM
I'm sure the muslim/jewish camp helpers think the same. :O oops, now I've outstayed.
ciao again
 
12:39 PM
@EdGuiness — The Muslims and Jews have a new camp now? Have they abandoned Camp David then?
 
I thought they'd both moved into Camp I'm-Not-Talking-To-You?
 
Hm... I think I'll just stop posting answers altogether. This site has become a doggy-dog world. Just look at the "tolerate" question.
 
nuts. i've hit the rep cap for today, so i lost my motivation to answer any more questions
@RegDwight it's not nearly as bad as SO
 
@JSBangs You can still get rep for accepted answers.
@JSBangs Thank God.
 
(Tole rate?)
("Another one hit the cap...")
 
12:48 PM
(Headwear abuse. It's a terrible thing.)
 
(Yeah... I can barely understand why a person with an empty head would wear headwearing.)
("She sells sea shells by the sea shore.")
 
@RegDwight — I have had zero motivation to post answers lately. Just phoning it in, going through the motions.
 
@RegDwight At least there's division in the ranks about the "I am sat" question.
4
Q: Is "I am sat" bad English?

z7sgI believe it is incorrect and instead either the present continuous I am sitting or the predicate adjective I am seated should be used. I hear this quite often, however, and ultimately usage overrules formality. Does anybody know where this originated or how to describe it grammatic...

 
If it weren't for the chat I'd have dropped this site like a bad habit.
 
@Rhodri Who! J D OConal is back. Haven't seen him for quite some time.
 
12:53 PM
I was thinking much the same.
 
@Robusto Now, now, now.
Mar 14 at 13:53, by RegDwight
But hey, now that you've taken the lead, no running off to Writers.SE or some other foolery. Do stick around.
 
i really only have one time for active participation on one SE site at a time. if linguistics.SE ever opens, I may leave english behind...
 
Robusto promised not to run off to W.SE anytime soon.
 
@RegDwight — But it's just no fun anymore. Bunch of vultures waiting to pounce on the one or two meager questions that come in.
 
@Robusto We've been having up to 50 questions per day lately.
 
12:55 PM
Seriously, I need a new hobby during my compile time because this isn't filling the void.
 
I don't remember the last time we had less than 20 questions on any given day, workday or weekend.
 
w.se has even fewer questions than this, so that's not going to help. but both Q's and A's there tend to be much longer and more subjective
 
@RegDwight — 50 interesting questions? 50 articulate, intelligent questions? What is the ratio of chaff to wheat here? Or, to put it another way, the S/N ratio seems very low to me.
 
@Robusto The chaff ratio is pretty much exactly the same.
 
if our top users are experiencing burnout, then we may actually have a problem
 
12:57 PM
Our very first question ever asked for the difference between can and could.
On a general note: if you don't like chaff, then vote it down, vote to close, flag as noise, whatever, but don't just sit on your hands.
I've been running amok this morning, closing like 20 questions in a row. All of them should have been closed by the community.
 
@RegDwight — That's still better than
5
Q: Is "I am sat" bad English?

z7sgI believe it is incorrect and instead either the present continuous I am sitting or the predicate adjective I am seated should be used. I hear this quite often, however, and ultimately usage overrules formality. Does anybody know where this originated or how to describe it grammatic...

 
@Robusto i'm sorry, but what exactly is the problem with this question?
 
@Robusto How so? I think the latter is an interesting question, actually.
 
That kind of question makes me so want to give a sarcastic reply.
 
Well, that's no sign of anything. You are sarcastic all the time.
 
1:01 PM
"I sat sit on my SAT every sat."
 
It's like the point in a chess game when I'm bored with the position and I will sac a piece just to make things interesting again. Not a wise policy, nor a good strategy. But at least it's not boring.
 
i'm actually a fan of this question: english.stackexchange.com/questions/18586/…
writing a better response now
 
@Robusto Heh. That's an interesting point, actually. I've been spending tons of rep on downvotes lately.
 
That's another thing. The time shift is awful. Most of the decent questions happen when I'm sleeping or otherwise engaged.
So I start to give supercilious answers, like this one:
1
A: "Knocked up" to mean "woken up"

RobustoThis is a difference between American and British English. In England if you knock someone up you get them out of bed. In America you usually have to get them into bed to knock them up (unless you're both in high school, in which case you will have to tilt the seat back in your parents' car). And...

 
@Robusto That must be a cognitive bias. Because I have the exact same impression, and we are like seven hours apart.
 
1:07 PM
@Robusto i'm upvoting that
 
@RegDwight I am interested in Linguistics.SE, the problem is I thought Jewish life & learning would be quicker to launch into beta, (271 commits and counting), but it's interminably stuck at 90%. As soon as that launches, I"ll commit, as I'm committed to two other proposals other than that already (Philosophy.SE and History.SE).
 
thoughts: we're getting a higher percentage of ESL-type questions, but I don't really see this as a problem because they're legitimate questions, and the askers seem to be sincere. OTOH we could be a lot more aggressive about closing GAFT/D questions, especially if they're contributing to noise on the site.
 
@Robusto Thanks for the link, I'd missed that one. And I have supercilious information to add, too.
 
@Billare, why did you comment for dup but not cast a close vote on english.stackexchange.com/questions/18631/… ?
 
@JSBangs I can't cast close votes.
@JSBangs Not high enough rep.
 
1:19 PM
My current procedure on any "please proofread this" question is as follows:
1. Leave a "welcome, we love you, but this is off-topic" comment.
2. Wait a few days, hoping it gets improved or closed by the community.
3. Check back only to find out that *nothing* has happened.
4. Close (and possibly downvote) with extreme prejudice.
 
@RegDwight — Could be. But perception, as they say, is reality.
 
@Billare O RLY? i thought you had more rep than that
 
Generally speaking, the community is being quite hesitant to close-vote lately.
People leave comments and flags, but no close-votes.
 
@RegDwight i'll take that as a gentle hint to close like a madman
 
@JSBangs Nope, I am lowly and repless.
 
1:21 PM
And some folks vote to close and offer an answer. Weird.
 
@Billare you only need 3000 rep. you'll get there soon
 
@JSBangs I dunno, I take that as a gentle hint in the other direction. By which I mean, some people seem to think, "why should I bother close-voting, let the mods handle this". Which is bad. This site should be driven by the community, not by my mad closing skillz.
 
@RegDwight: Oh, BTW, I got The Flanders Panel and started reading it.
 
@Robusto Excellent!
IIRC, it's much shorter. Some 160 pages or something.
 
@RegDwight — You do have mad squabbles when it comes to closing questions, dude. But I want to see you close a question upside down now! Until you do that, I will withhold my applause.
 
1:25 PM
hmmm. the privileges page tells me i have the ability to create tag synonyms, but i have no idea how to do so
 
@Robusto I'll skip that phase, thank you. The next question will get closed uphill, both ways, barefoot in the snow.
 
[Withholds applause]
 
JD O Conal is hardcore.
 
@Billare In general? Yes. Or do you mean something in particular?
 
@Billare — Who dat?
 
1:27 PM
 
@JSBangs Would a question asking about Grimm's Law be on topic?
 
If J D O Conal is so hardcore, how come I'm the only one who's upvoted his answer so far?
 
@Robusto Because it was wrong just 11 minutes ago?
 
@Robusto Heh, I merely on glanced at it, I had a hard time parsing it at first glance
 
@RegDwight — No "A for effort" then?
 
1:31 PM
@RegDwight allows me to view but not to create. i wanted to make [definition] a syn of [meaning], and i found the place to suggest it on the [definition] tag page... but it won't let me until i get 5 rep for that tag
which is ridiculous, b/c there's only one question w/ that tag
(which is why it needs to be synonymized)
 
@JSBangs Ah well, that's a known issue. (The restrictions used to be even more draconian, they've relaxed them quite a bit.)
 
@RegDwight The problem, IMO, with alot of these restrictions is that they generalize stuff that works on StackOverflow to all the sites
@RegDwight at StackOverflow, absolutely high rep is essential to edit tags and edit tag wikis, since there is no way for question askers to answer questions without filtering with tags
 
@JSBangs On a second thought, I think you've got it backwards. (Which is a common problem, too.) You have to navigate to the [meaning] tag and suggest [definition] as a synonym there. Not the other way round.
 
@RegDwight so their stability is of supreme importance. not so much on a growing site.
 
@Billare Well, arguably that's what the beta is there for.
 
1:35 PM
@RegDwight aha! works now
 
@RegDwight Arguably.
 
@Billare I mean, we were given 90+ days to get it right, with extremely relaxed rep requirements for everything.
 
@RegDwight I really don't think Beta conditions are the same as main site conditions. Particularly, opening up to the broad StackExchange network opens up a different set of questions than you might have in the beta.
@JSBangs About Grimm's law question..
 
I just this moment realized that StackExchange is a pun. Duh.
 
@Billare Yeah, sure. Absolutely. The whole process is still relatively young. They are still figuring it out and tweaking it all the time.
@Robusto Congratulations!
 
1:38 PM
@Billare i'm on the fence. so long as the question is about Grimm's Law specifically as it applies to English, i have no problem with it. But it's the sort of thing that might go better on the hypothetical ling.se
 
Oh good, here comes @Martha. She can THWACK Jeff & Joel for the StackExchange pun.
 
She can't thwack that hard.
 
Who am I thwacking and why?
 
@JSBangs I'm not sure how to post it so that it might expressly apply to only English.
 
BTW, there's an interesting article in The New Yorker this week about Watson and the whole Jeopardy debacle. Adam Gopnik writes that puns are one of the reasons computers still flunk their Turing tests. So I think that rather than thwacking puns, we should be rewarding them, as evidence of a higher order of thought than is commonly seen from mere machines.
 
1:41 PM
Would "How does Griimm's Law apply to English" be a good question?
 
@Billare — Well, that's strictly a question for Linguistics.SE.
 
@Robusto I have to laugh so hard every time I see someone's name is Gopnik.
Gopnik is a stereotypical class of young males up to 30 years old found in Russia and post-Soviet countries, similar to a Chav or Ned in Great Britain, characterized by aggressive behavior, specifically towards the weak, predilection to the criminal subculture, abuse of alcohol beverages (specifically beer and vodka) and specific fashion preferences. The term ' () (plural gopniki, gopota, gopary) is slang used in Russia. Origins of the term * The term "gopnik" was probably derived from slang term gop-stop, meaning street robbery. * Another version is that "gopnik" derived from the acro...
 
@RegDwight — You think it's a pseudonym? A nom de plume ?
 
I think it's just another case of Pina.
 
Didn't these used to be called yobs in Britain?
 
1:44 PM
@Robusto That's another extremely obscene word in Russian.
 
I thought all Russian words were obscene to some degree.
 
@Robusto Well, every word in every language is obscene to some degree.
 
gtg
 
CU.
 
Adam Gopnik, (born August 24, 1956) is an American writer, essayist and commentator. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker—to which he has contributed non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism—and as the author of the essay collection Paris to the Moon, an account of five years that Gopnik, his wife Martha, and son Luke, spent in the French capital. Background and education Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but was raised in Montreal, Quebec. Gopnik's parents, Irwin and Myrna Gopnik, served as professors at McGill University, from which Gopnik received hi...
 
1:46 PM
@Robusto I know, I know. I think even Pinker mentions him somewhere.
 
@Billare you can always just try to post it and see what happens.
typically if a Q is interesting but off-topic, I'll leave a comment with the answer but also vote to close
 
@JSBangs Uh. I'm not so sure, actually. Why deprive Linguistics.SE of an good question? That's how we got a lot of questions that would belong on Writers, but cannot be migrated because they are too old now.
 
it will be a very long time before linguistics.se gets off the ground
it's only at 38% commit
 
Yes. It will also be a very long time before German.SE gets off the ground. But that doesn't mean that questions about German should be posted to SO for the time being.
 
@RegDwight @Billare is not sure whether his Q is on-topic or not
my point is that the only way to find out is to ask
(well, not the only way, but one of the ways, and arguably the best way under the current circumstance)
 
1:53 PM
Well, I am not against the question as such, quite the contrary. I would really like to see some advanced questions here. However, my point is that it would be a pity if it got closed here, possibly with a few good answers, only to not get migrated to the much more appropriate Linguistics once it does go live.
 
We have a winner in the gracious concession stakes:
1
Q: Should one use 'a' or 'an' when the following word is in parentheses?

AlainThis question is a little hard to summarize in the title. I sometimes like to use parentheses to add additional (but nonessential) details to a sentence - like I did just there. My criteria for such use is usually that the sentence could be read with the text in the parentheses, or excluding the...

 
@Rhodri yes, now if only we could actually close the question there
 
@RegDwight can close it. It has 4 close votes already.
So he could offer a 5th, non-hammer vote.
 
@JSBangs Alas, I am a minnow of insufficient reputation
If only we had someone with a Modly Hammer of Righteous Closure around
 
we should get @Robusto to donate some rep to poor @Rhodri and @Billare, since he has plenty
 
1:57 PM
The Indians in the office are gathered around a projector watching a streamed edition of the India-Pakistan cricket match. They got here at 5:00 a.m. to start watching, and it's been going on for 5 hours. Longer than a frickin' Wagner opera.
 
@Rhodri My hammer is motley, not modly.
 
@JSBangs — I'm a miser, can't you tell? They'll have to prove themselves as Lebowski Achievers.
 
@Robusto It's always hammer time in Iceland!
 
@JSBangs I propose that we lock all ArthurRex questions and only unlock them to be answered by Rhodri. He will get a whole bunch of 100-rep bounties in no time.
 
1:58 PM
@Robusto yeah, and i'm saving up to get myself some mod tools at 10K, so I can't spare any at the moment
 
@RegDwight — So now you're in Iceland? The only place worse off than Russia? My, how you get around.
 
@RegDwight O_o i thought Rhodri was a girl
 
@JSBangs — Just think of all the time you wasted being nice.
 
As previously stated, my wife and I make a point visiting a different country each year.
I could be anywhere right now.
 
@RegDwight — Except U.S. or U.K.
 
2:00 PM
Except Novosibirsk.
 
@RegDwight visited Romania yet? That's where my wife is from
 
@JSBangs No offence, but I'd rather visit US than Romania.
 
Feb 16 at 12:30, by Robusto
You're a man? Shit, I've been wasting all this time chatting you up ...
 
One of my classmates was from Timisoara.
 
@RegDwight and he described it as a demonic hellhole, or what?
FWIW my wife's from the opposite side of the country from Timisoara
 
2:03 PM
@JSBangs Erm, no. @Rob's picture even looks a bit like me.
 
@Robusto You should know by now that there are no men here, only sissy girls and American Dads in nurse drag.
 
@RegDwight — Say what you want about "American Dad", but I've paid my deoxyribonucleic debt to the gene pool. Some of the rest of you still have to kick in with your share.
Or not. We might be better off ...
See? It's been 50 minutes without a new question on E&U.SE.
 
@JSBangs Well, not a demonic hellhole, but the general impression around these parts (generally supported and propagated by immigrants from Romania themselves) is that it's extremely poor and underdeveloped by EU standards, corruption runs amok, unemployment and illiteracy are through the roof, and the only people who make any money are fortune-tellers.
@Robusto Try looking away from the monitor for a sec. That should get us 40 all-new, high-quality questions.
 
@RegDwight also you're from Bulgaria, right? so Romania is probably not far enough away to make for a good vacation. IMHO Romania is far nicer than Romanians themselves give it credit for as Romanians have a deep inferiority complex... but it should not have entered the EU, as that actually made things worse.
 
Actually, I'm still waiting for Romania and Moldavia to re-unite.
 
2:11 PM
@RegDwight — I've been trying that. Doesn't help.
 
@RegDwight not gonna happen anytime soon. You think Romania is bad? Moldavia is 10x worse.
 
Here you are, vultures. Go nuts!
 
@JSBangs One of my aunts is from Cisinau.
 
0
Q: has been vs have been

asdaI am answering an online english grammar test and encountered the following question Where was Jack yesterday? - I don't know. He ________ seeing the doctor. My answer is: might has been Correct Answer is: might have been Why not might has been? "He" is singular?

Help some poor schmuck cheat on his online test.
 
@Robusto That question is okay. He's not cheating.
 
2:14 PM
@RegDwight then you know.
 
@RegDwight — I'm exaggerating for effect.
 
don't get me started on the EU. it's a decent idea for the highly developed economies of north/west Europe, but opening it up to the less developed countries of east/south europe was a disaster. viz. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy to some extent
 
My great-uncle had a factory in Temesvár, before they up and renamed it to Timisoara (or however it's spelled).
 
at least Romania is still technically solvent
@Martha Timișoara
 
@JSBangs Yeah, if Greece could bring the EU in so much trouble, I wonder in how much trouble Romania could get them.
 
2:18 PM
@JSBangs I can't do the s-cedilla easily, so I think I'll continue to write it as Temesvár. At least I know what that means (Temes-castle, where Temes is an old personal name. Really old. As in, 11th century.)
 
In fact, never mind Greece. Ireland.
And Germany's been cheating on their tests for decades, too.
 
@RegDwight yep. it's bad for France, Germany et al. and bad for Ireland, Greece, etc. Everybody loses! Hooray for the EU!
 
EU is just the short form of eeeeeeeuuuuuuuuu!
 
Okay, now I am officially worried.
1
A: "has been" vs "have been"

AlexMight is an auxiliary (modal) verb (it's actually the past tense of may), and those always require the following verb to be the plural form. Other examples of this are can/could and shall/should. (Which is why the (in)famous "I can has cheezburger" strikes us as ungrammatical: the correct form wo...

Whoever upvoted this, didn't read it.
 
@RegDwight or doesn't know plural from infinitive
downvote, downvote man!
 
2:28 PM
@JSBangs I was busy commenting. But now I have.
But back to my point about people not voting to close:
0
Q: Are there other repeated single word sentences like the Buffalo sentence?

kriegarMy friend told me about the Buffalo sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. It is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. I was w...

I see comments, downvotes, and flags all over the place. But no votes to close. What's a poor boy to do?
 
FWIW, I was in a hurry, and from a quick skim of the question, I wasn't sure if it really was a duplicate or not.
 
2:48 PM
@Martha Not blaming anyone in particular. I wouldn't have been too sure myself, actually, at the time you left your comment. What makes me wonder is not anyone's behavior in particular, but the overall picture: we've got a downvote on the question, a NARQ comment, two possible-duplicate comments, one of them upvoted thrice, obvious duplication of effort in all three answers, the OP admitting it's a dupe, plus some flags to sweeten the deal.
So what I'm looking at is the sum of all that vs the overall number of close-votes, which is zero.
And this situation is not new, I just happened to think of this particular question first.
 
@RegDwight Well, one of those comments and flags was mine and I can't close things. So that may be part of it.
In other news, I discovered flagging things.
 
@RegDwight At least @Alex has fixed his error now.
The world does improve. Slowly.
 
@Rhodri Ah, excellent. If only it always worked like that.
Downvote duly retracted. Pinging @JSBangs.
 
00:00 - 15:0015:00 - 00:00

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