Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury which was first published in a shorter form as "The Fireman" (Galaxy Science Fiction, Vol. 1 No. 5, February 1951). The short novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic and critical thought through reading is outlawed.
The central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a "fireman" (which, in this future, means "bookburner"). The novel's title refers to the supposed temperature at which book paper combusts. Although sources contemporary with the novel's writing gave the temperature as , Bradbury is beli...
@RegDwight — Stop flailing about. You lost the COLD war. Deal with it. The reason we didn't force Fahrenheit down your Commie throats is because we wanted to save the good stuff for ourselves.
Celsius is a crutch for people who can't remember the number 32.
The reason is that you thought you could roll Fahrenheit to Russia over the North Pole, but then it turned out the ice had melted, and the moloch of clumsiness fell through.
You know, I am enjoying free and fair access to soft drinks and other products of consumer utopia, too, in addition to enjoying free and fair access to democracy and no access to Rush Limbaugh at all. Not bad for someone who supposedly "lost" the cold war, if you ask me.
But I suppose there are some more complicated rules to pronounce я that would come closer to reality? As in, я is ponounced o after n, or whatever? I know Russian has heavy vocal reduction.
Sometimes, I find it easier to learn so many English vocabulary and expressions and usage by watching movies. If you're a non-native English speaker, you probably noticed some of them that help you learn.
What are good movies you watched that are great for learning English? (Expressions, usage, ...
What do we mean by "dialect"?
First of all, let me say that the distinction between "dialect", "slang", and "language" is fuzzy, arbitrary, and fundamentally a social (cultural, political) construct.
Two dialects of the same language can be mutually unintelligible (e.g. Moroccan and Baghdadi Ar...
I'm not saying I would get it exactly right; but in my experience it isn't much more difficult than, say, most German vowels, which sound more "pure" than Dutch vowels. Maybe you should listen to a speech by the Queen. Nobility is often accused of German-ish pronunciation.
@Reg: Is she? Well the thing is that very old-fashioned Dutch, which sounds affected now, is closer to German pronunciation than modern Dutch. So it is probably the combined effect of her father, her husband, and her upbringing that caused her affected accent.
But I know some other older people who sound almost as affected.
If anyone is bored to the extent of .. well.. the uttermost amount of boredom possible... and feels like... checking someone's essay (A) --- do not hesitate to say so! Just saying :)
A piece of advice: if you want mere language help, you could just replace a few words from a sentence if you want to know about a certain construction.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (or Beriya; ; ; 29 March 1899 – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Soviet politician, and chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin.
Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and shortly after World War II, when he simultaneously administrated vast sections of the Soviet state and served as de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of the dreaded NKVD field units, responsible for anti-partisan reprisal operations on both friendly ...
A privative is the absence of something, and as such doesn't exist. So cold is a privative, as it is merely the absence of heat.
This question is inspired by this answer about a single noun for an honest person.
It seems to me that the truth is merely the absence of all lies, and as such can be...
We amended question rep on meta so it is in line with the rest of the sites. So now, upvotes on questions are worth 5 points.
Additionally, we are planning another change to rep that restricts the amount of rep you can get from questions only, see: Should we cap reputation gained from questions...
Every single time I come close to reaching 2900 rep on MSO, TPTB come up with new creative ways to set me back.
I've noticed that AtillaNYC has been copying questions from other cooking sites verbatim. Is this acceptable and/or encouraged?
Edit by Dinah:
My original question is above except that I did not include any names. Below is an edit by hobodave as is the user link above. I'm not removing his ed...
Why do British speakers omit the article in constructions like "go to hospital" or "go on holiday"? Pretty much all American speakers would rephrase those as "go to the hospital" and "go on a holiday", I think. Is there any good reason, or forgotten sense behind those words that might explain why...
@MrHen My point is, if you can't wrap your head around the absence of articles in, say, Russian, then just look at all the cases where English uses no articles, either. (But closely related languages do.)
You can use either. There is functionally no difference between the following sentences:
The elephant will flee when confronted by danger.
An elephant will flee when confronted by danger.
Moreover, you can also use the plural with no article to say the same thing:
Elephants will fl...
Yes, that's our friend vgv8, sorry for that. But even he had some golden moments.
Someone edited my queston, moving the question mark outside the quotation marks. This is not correct usage in the U.S., as it is in International English. Which convention does english.stackexchange.com itself follow, when an issue like this arises?
We are considering replacing the Unanswered top level tab, with Review.
Still pending are a few performance tweaks, but once that is done we would like to make the switch.
The trouble is that there is functionality many people depend on, unanswered my tags no answers and so on.
We have th...