The specific of John Doe is probably that it rhymes - and John is a very common English name.
It's a very old (medieval) English usage but is now only really used in AE, John Smith is the typical generic name in BE, but it isn't used as a legal term in Britain.
There is a similar usage in cryp...
@RegDwight — I think that is the Cavernous Abyss of Black Despair. Just what we need to clear the air of all the Baby-Wipes and talcum powder redolence that's been pervading this place of late.
I'm not entirely sure how I can settle with a good 1 to 10 quality rating labels, where 1 is very poor and 10 is great, for example:
Very poor
Poor
Slightly fair
Fair
Average
Slightly good
Good
...
...
Great
I don't know what could be 8 and 9, but I guess the labels can be changed/impr...
We want to indicate that jeans are for only female at the etiquette.
So options:
Only female,
Only woman,
For woman,
For women,
For female
Which one is viable or are there any better one? Thanks
To treat or cure (a person, condition, etc.) by means of medicine; to give medicine to.
One example: "He finds that even the ills of human personality—insanity, for example—are better medicined in accordance with physical hypotheses and by explicitly physical methods."
the silly thing is, it doesn't have a transitive definition of 'bottle' meaning 'smash someone on the head with a bottle', a common definition over here
@z7sg Hmm. I think partially dead, slightly fair, you're stickin' an adjective with an adjective it can't really modify, so it doesn't make sense. But with very pineapple it's different parts of speech (adverb+noun?) and that made even less sense.
From the New Oxford American Dictionary:
doornail (noun):
a stud set in a door for strength or as an ornament.
(as) dead as a doornail: quite dead.
Note that it is “doornail” with no space.
@z7sg Although, I guess I said non-pineapple. So then it could be an adjective if I hadn't used "a". Like, very pink, very non-pink. Huh. I don't know. I don't think there's one class for these things.
@JSBangs I kind of got my mom on facebook, but mostly to try to cut down on the emails she sends every time she's thinking of anything. And the emails were an effort to reduce the phone calls that I couldn't take while at work (or before that, college)... gotta love family ;)
@aedia i'd say that Indian buffets (almost all of them) are quite good. indian food, unlike most cuisines, actually improves from simmering under a heat lamp for hours on end
@JSBangs I hadn't thought of that, but there is an Indian buffet around here that's not half bad. A lot of Indian restaurants here, though, do buffet-style lunches and regular dinners, so I don't often get out for the buffets. Have to order a selection with your dinner companions instead.
Hmmm, can't trust all you can eat buffet places, personally.
I want my food cooked on demand, especially for me. Or, better yet, go to a Mongolian place and have them cook it on demand, for me, right there in front of me.
@MrDisappointment mongolian grills are good in principle, but in practice i find that they're typically mediocre. cheap ingredients, preparation rushed too much, etc.
however, the buffet i'm going to tonight also includes a mongolian grill, as many of them do these days
@JSBangs Deep down, I have to agree; but yeah, the principle is sound, and once you know a great place, well, you know. Some of them do come off as a cultured Subway.
@OghmaOsiris Hello and welcome! I see you. :) Unfortunately, I'm about to go away again for some lousy meetings things where people talk instead of getting stuff done.
Look at Jeff's latest salvo in the jokes debate: scroll down to the last comment - he's marked it "@kia" but it's fairly clear he means @Kosmonaut... and @Kosmonaut, please take a few deep breaths before reading it - his comment is quite uncalled for...
@Kosmonaut It certainly is. I was tempted to respond with (well, actually several things), but something along the lines of pointing out how much he's not paying you...
From our point of view - he is being totally out of order
In the past days, a question has been deleted by a diamond user (not one of our moderators), and some questions have been closed as off-topic because of something that was added to the FAQ (again, not by our moderators).
Does that mean we are not doing a good job in closing questions that do not...
I've got better things to do with my time than be publicly insulted by some condescending asshole who scored in the 99th percentile on his English GMATs.
Jeff can't just go from "Hey grammar girl our English site is kinda awesome" to "english.se has enough severe quality issues as-is without adding pop culture guidance and ESL joke translation services to the litany of standing problems." in just a few months with nothing in between.
The way I see it, either you hand over control to others or you keep it for yourself. If you keep it for yourself, then it's your responsibility to moderate the site 24/7.
That's the thing, I am on the site 24/7, I am in chat all the time, he has my private email address, we could have talked. Even if he's allergic to ananas.
@Robusto I even think there can be a happy medium between the two... where you mostly stay hands off, but provide guidance here and there if you feel it's going off course a little. Which is more or less the opposite of what he's done :-(
@Kosmonaut — I'm relatively new here, and we've talked little. I am struggling to understand what's even going on right now. But I have an interest in linguistics and I want you to know that I feel I learn so much every time I read one of your answers. I would be terribly sad to see the site without you.
Honestly, when he just told me just now that my phonological connection to the pun question was a "flight of fantasy" and was disappointed to even see my remark, I can now see for sure that he is actually just trying to attack me. Not outwit me, just bring me personally down.
In longish lists of comments the list gets abridged and a "more comments" link shows up at the end, kind of like an ellipsis. Normally, one would expect that such a list would be trimmed at the end, but on English.SE (and possibly on other SE sites) the elisions can occur anywhere in the list.
F...
But I don't think he's actually trying to take you down specifically. I think he has still failed to grasp your point (well, all of our points, I guess)...
Like the walking thing you mentioned: I know hundreds of people who can walk, but how many of them could program a robot to do it? Or even teach it to someone who's lost the ability? This is what he is failing to get...
@Kosmonaut You're right, he doesn't react well to that...
But I'm not happy with an EL&U where such questions should be closed for those reasons — I no longer have any feel for what questions should be open — and I see no point in continuing in an endeavor where I would have to continue this battle in order to move forward.
My boss and my advisor don't give me this kind of shit, and they pay me to do it.
"Joel and I have always positioned Stack Overflow, and all the other Stack Exchange Q&A sites, as lightweight, focused, "fun size" units of writing." — Jeff Atwood
The specific of John Doe is probably that it rhymes - and John is a very common English name.
It's a very old (medieval) English usage but is now only really used in AE, John Smith is the typical generic name in BE, but it isn't used as a legal term in Britain.
There is a similar usage in cryp...
When writing papers, I meet typos/grammatical errors in references now and then. Should I correct them, or leave them as they are?
I'm not entirely sure how I can settle with a good 1 to 10 quality rating labels, where 1 is very poor and 10 is great, for example:
Very poor
Poor
Slightly fair
Fair
Average
Slightly good
Good
...
...
Great
I don't know what could be 8 and 9, but I guess the labels can be changed/impr...
We want to indicate that jeans are for only female at the etiquette.
So options:
Only female,
Only woman,
For woman,
For women,
For female
Which one is viable or are there any better one? Thanks
From the New Oxford American Dictionary:
doornail (noun):
a stud set in a door for strength or as an ornament.
(as) dead as a doornail: quite dead.
Note that it is “doornail” with no space.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…