English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2014-11-10

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12:03 AM

@JasperLoy That is a nice site indeed.

12:45 AM

@Cerberus Have you heard of the Assimil series for learning languages? It is very popular in Europe, it seems.

12:57 AM

Jasper, I have never used any method for learning languages, except at school.

Nothing for adults.

OK. The company's website is only in French, not English, lol. The French are very reluctant to use English, it seems.

They are indeed!

9 hours later…

9:30 AM

Limerick Machine: sci-universe: Cat And Owl Are Best Friends No no no. [The owl...

posted on November 10, 2014 by sgdi

sci-universe: Cat And Owl Are Best Friends No no no. [The owl and the pussy cat are married](http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/pussy.html). Don’t you guys learn nuthin?

1 hour later…

10:40 AM

@Andrew, truly you have the most remarkable talent for pronouncing completely silently the initial un- in ”Unfortunately, feigned philologic philandering is sexplicitly off topic on ELU; please try Hot Topic™ instead.”

I emailed Berlitz to ask about the difference between 'X in 30 days' and 'Basic X' books for language X.

Hi @Arrowfar!

user116848

@JasperLoy Hey. How are you?

I have been thinking a lot about some secret issues these few days. I hope I have finally gotten them sorted out.

user116848

Like?

Well, they are secret.

user116848

10:51 AM

haha okay.

Some of the issues have bothered me for a decade.

@Cerberus I cannot fathom why you of all people should be a closet Vikings fan, considering all their raping and pillaging of hapless dwellers upon the North Sea’s frozen strands. Gore aiders and abettors make monsters of minstrel and monachal alike.

11:08 AM

Word-Exercise-of-the-Day™ for 2014’s day #313: “Compare and contrast imprescriptible with imprescindible.” Lest Lewis and Short should be in short supply, time will be allotted for exploratory etymological expeditions up and down the musty stacks of Wardour Street.

@JasperLoy At no cost to yourself, were you but to stop subscribing to *Playboy*®, I trust that you would discover that after a decade your issues had faded into racy insignificance.

11:31 AM

@tchrist I know no about about them than their name and that it is something about sports.

I am going to eat dinner with my mum now.

Have fun.

What will you have?

12:04 PM

It's the same every day. Rice, egg, spinach, chicken.

It costs only 3 USD per person.

Is that a lot or a little in Singapore?

It's reasonably cheap. But it is delicious. I come from a poor family.

That would be amazingly cheap here.

Such stalls are often called 'economic rice'. It is not a very good translation, of course.

We would probably call them something like "quick rice"—"economic" would not fall trippingly from the tongue.

12:13 PM

I wish we had such stalls.

But to eat the same thing every day?

By the way, @JasperLoy, is it easy for someone from a poor family to go to a good school and later university, in your vast country?

I tend to eat the same things most days for lunch. If I could get real Japanese ramen every day, I would eat that without complaint.

@Cerberus If one is smart, yes. School fees are not exceptionally high here, and there are many kinds of scholarships available. However, I do not think highly of any of the local universities. Some may have good international rankings, but when I did my undergrad math, the courses were lacking in breadth and depth.

@Robusto So do I—but not for dinner.

@JasperLoy Hmm right.

I said "lunch" . . .

Those international rankings are rather unreliable in many ways...

But still, I think your country had good biologists and doctors.

@Robusto Right.

12:18 PM

I used to use single quotes until I came to this site. It influenced me to use double quotes. These days, I feel like using single quotes again.

We have an appalling lack of noodle shops where I live and work.

We have many here...

But none so cheap as Jasper's!

There is a decent one in a food court at the Korean mega-market one town over, but it's a pain to drive to.

I want stalls, not shops!

Right, I want stalls near my house.

Yeah, I pay around $9 for a bowl of noodles.

12:19 PM

My mum almost never cooks. And I have never ever cooked. But she cooks instant noodles for me which I like, with an extra egg on top.

@Robusto Hmm so €6, that would be a normal price here.

There are Japanese restaurants in almost every shopping mall here.

@Cerberus Your conversion is out of date. $9 is around €7.25 now.

We do not have malls, but we have Japanese restaurants everywhere. But they are usually far from cheap, except some sushi bars.

@Robusto Oh, the dollar has appreciated.

I appreciate that.

12:22 PM

Your poor exports!

I know!

Cheap coin is best.

There are shopping malls every 5 train stations here, with each train station about 5 min away.

Prolly a good time to go to Europe.

Always!

12:23 PM

But it's winter, with the holidays coming.

Or to China, which will no doubt become only more expensive every year.

I have not really explored the idea of going to Europe for grad school, partly because of the language factor. Maybe I should.

@Cerberus You would have to pay me to go to China.

Why that?

I don't like breathing "fortified" air.

12:24 PM

Well, there is the countryside...

And gas masks.

There are many people from China who come here to work and eventually get citizenship.

I don't want to visit a crowded, smelly, noisy place. If I want that I'll go to Times Square.

user image

I think 1 in 3 here is a foreigner now.

Air pollution.

12:26 PM

In the mental hospital I visit, almost all the doctors are from India and the nurses from Philippines.

The construction workers here are mostly from India.

I bet you can't get enough of those Filipino nurses.

@Robusto None of them are Marias.

@JasperLoy No wonder India is such a shambles. All of its construction workers are abroad.

I think the people from neighbouring countries flock here because they can earn so much more than in their countries.

Naturally.

12:30 PM

I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

0

Q: Moderators’ position on hectoring

What should we do about hectoring? An unrelenting flurry of hectoring comments has become a problem both on the main ELU site and on also here meta. What is our moderators’ position about hectoring? How should normal users respond to hectoring? At what point does hectoring merit the more ...

discussion comments moderation self-governance trolling

My country is an economic success, I admit, but that is all it has, nothing else.

I refuse to accept "cultural differences" as an acceptable justification for trolls.

@JasperLoy Why so few people from Indonesia and Malaysia, which countries are much closer than India or even the Philippines?

@Cerberus Oh yes, there are many Malaysians too. I just did not mention. And the Indonesians and Filipinos also work as domestic helpers or maids.

Where is Achilles when we need him? Sulking in his tent?

It shouldn't take his boyfriend getting martyred to draw him into decisive action.

12:35 PM

There is a user called Twink who goes to the math room these days, lol. He has two boyfriends.

@JasperLoy OK.

@tchrist Who is this?

@JasperLoy I think he was a troll who got banned.

@tchrist So is this about Walter?

@Cerberus Well, I think he does not really troll these days.

Hmm.

I thought his gay act was a joke.

No, I think it is real, lol.

@tchrist I was so tempted to render a mock comment: "Explain to me why you think it important to bring up such a trivial issue on Meta."

Instead I edited your post for number agreement.

12:42 PM

@Robusto You should have asked that in a Meta question.

@Cerberus We'll never know.

@Robusto A better vent for your frustrations.

@Robusto That's actually a fair question, and I would answer it here.

One can look up English, French, German, Italian and Spanish words all on oxforddictionaries.com, amazing.

The one I hate is when people feel they have to translate or summarize in a coimment what you said in an answer. An example:

One subtlety that's easy to overlook here is that not only does Tokyo have more "syllables" in Japanese, they're also split up differently. The Japanese is roughly To-oh-kyo-oh, rather than the Toh-ki-oh common in English. — Bradd Szonye 9 hours ago

Umm, I said that, Bradd.

12:45 PM

The answer is because he just won't stop, and he even goes so far as to accuse others of bullying him in a meta-question of his own, demanding that moderators explain the policy on bullies. But he himself he being a bully here, and that is an hypocrisy up with which I will not put. He has driven off even the sweetest and most gracious amongst us, people who have tried to help him: witness Mari-Lou. He is untrainable and unstoppable.

@tchrist We're talking about ivanhoescott?

Yes.

But I named no names, as is proper in a meta post.

I made it about a policy not a person.

Or feigned to.

You have failed.

Well, ok: I made it about Hector. Fair cop.

Brave Hector, dead at the hands of Achilles.

12:48 PM

But the thing is, I still don't know whether the preferred superhero in this instance is Achilles or Beowulf.

If he is just a Hector, then we need Achilles.

Maybe Grendel.

But if is he a troll, we need Beowulf.

If he is a troll, we need the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

And even if such hectoring is permissible in whatever culture he comes from, I do not feel it is conducive to domestic tranquility on ELU.

What culture are we talking about? Scottish?

12:51 PM

I don't know.

I can only suspect.

He has hinted that he is Japanese, but this is so incredibly out of cultural character for someone from those isles that I suspect he is lying about that. Which means he is a troll.

Or he is psychotic.

I suppose even Japan can have psychos, alas.

Again and again (for n ≥ 4) he demands that downvotes be explained, always with the trailer of “don’t worry, I won’t revenge downvote you”. My spidey-senses tell me that this is classic projection.

Please leave the reason for the downvotes. Don't worry I won't revenge-downvote you. — ivanhoescott Oct 17 at 2:01

There are many other examples of that. It's a standard line of his.

Since he thinks of it, he must in fact do it.

I would never think to append such a disclaimer.

He does. Why?

@tchrist I sincerely doubt he's from Nippon.

@Robusto Exactly.

It is too out of character.

Also, his English doesn't do the things you would expect of native speakers of Japanese.

15 years ago, interesting Japanese dramas aired on TV here. Today, they are replaced by boring Korean dramas.

When the Japanese get confrontational, it generally involves a katana.

Which means he is lying, if my memory is correct.

I don't recall where he said he was Japanese.

But I mistrust all liars: they have proven their word worthless.

1:04 PM

"Well, we all lie from time to time," he said honestly.

I lie all the time on my bed.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for a bully to demand that bullies be dealt with.

May his wish be granted.

I said help vampire, and I stand by those words.

Acta non verba

By their postings shall ye know them.

1:26 PM

Ivanhoe doesn't vote at all (I checked). So his claim about not revenge voting is vacuously true

1:39 PM

@tchrist BTW, I've seen that Mari-Lou is not immune to this kind of badgering.

1 hour later…

2:39 PM

2

Q: Was the blue screen of death ever just a blue screen?

Etymologically speaking, at least according to Wikipedia, the term Blue Screen of Death: originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop ...

etymology terminology

Not a question about English. Really a question about computer terminology.

Is Siri the new Clippy? Discuss.

2 hours later…

4:42 PM

@Robusto my thoughts exactly. But... it is in the OED so I have to begrudgingly defer to some kind of authority that the phrase is a 'thing'.

@Mitch "Paramecium" is in the OED too, but that doesn't mean we have to discuss biology on ELU.

Or taxonomy, for that matter.

@Robusto Is Siri that annoying? The only thing wrong with Clippy was that it was cartoonish. If not for that one nail-pulling, blackboard scratching problem, the context sensitive help might have been OK.

@Mitch Clippy was annoying. Another example of Microsoft encumbering the user with help.

@Mitch Also, I was being facetious. I'm not really asking for a discussion on that topic.

@Robusto BSoD has enough answers already (I'm playing devil's advocate using straw men, and argumentum ad auctoritatem, also ignorantium because they're all dumb.

@Robusto Oh.

How bout them Cubs?

You mean the Bears? They suck.

And it's "How about them Cubbies?" if you're a true Chicagoan.

4:47 PM

haha...whatever. no I meant the Cubs. because I don't know what time of year it is.

That's not what Einstein said.

What is "argumentum ad auctoritatem"? Do you mean argumentum ad verecundiam?

"So Einstein goes to heaven and St Peter says too him...

appeal to authority

*says two him

says too

@Robusto Oh. Maybe I do.

But anyway, OED is an authority so would be expected to know.

Or maybe you don't. I learned it as verecundiam but I see that there are overlapping concepts:

Argument from authority

Argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ab auctoritate), also authoritative argument and appeal to authority, is a common form of argument which leads to a logical fallacy when misused. In informal reasoning, the appeal to authority is a form of argument attempting to establish a statistical syllogism. The appeal to authority relies on an argument of the form: A is an authority on a particular topic A says something about that topic A is probably correct Fallacious examples of using the appeal include any appeal to authority used in the context of logical reasoning, and appealing to the position...

Search for verecundiam on that page.

4:52 PM

huh. I was going to use verecundiam but it just didn't look right. so I googled and it told me auctoritate so I went with that. But now I realize that everybody just uses the 'v' word, and that 'appeal to shame' is just weird.

Are you guys interested in the Route du Rhum or this is only a French event?

I know nothing about it.

@crl I might be interested in it if I knew something about it. Is rum involved?

The Route du Rhum is a transatlantic single-handed yacht race, which takes places every 4 years in November. The course is between Saint Malo, Brittany, France and Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. The first competition, won by Canadian Michael Birch in his boat Olympus Photo by a margin of 98 seconds over second-placed Michel Malinovsky in Kriter V was held in 1978, and was marked in tragedy by the disappearance of Alain Colas during the crossing. Current record is 7d 15h 8m 32s, on the 10 November 2014 by Loick Peyron. The 2006 race began on 29 October 2006, with a maximum of 60 boats competing in...

Oh, boats. No, I have no interest in billionaires and their wasteful pursuits.

5:03 PM

it's not like Americas cup

It's totally different.

They only use one hand. Left or right, your choice.

:))

Is food involved. Then I'm in.

freeze-dried food

@crl unijokes.com/joke-7431

that doesn't sound like good food.

@crl You're supposed to say that there are some French chefs who specialize in meals made from freeze-dried ingredients.

But you can't say that because it will never happen. Ever.

5:08 PM

I only eat fruits and vegetables currently, so I've weird tastes

fruititarian? how about leaves?

how about cake?

salad yes too

no cake because I dislike butter or fat things like oil

salad is great, but if there is a choice between salad and something else... salad is the first to go.

salad vs cookie

@crl how about olive oil (does not go good in cakes though)

totally cookie.

5:12 PM

people here eat a lot of olive oil, "Mediterranean diet", but I avoid it too

[ SmokeDetector ] Bad keyword in title, Phone number detected: सोने गूगल +91-9950211818 vashikaran lo ve marriage by naamram190 on english.stackexchange.com

5:27 PM

python is a beautiful language

5:42 PM

@Mitch I don't like boats and food together. If I want to be sick in the water, I'll get in the tub and watch an Adam Sandler movie on my tablet.

1 hour later…

6:54 PM

> So, so . . . life is an old casino in a wood.

7:34 PM

8:12 PM

@JohanLarsson Haha, nice.

I already baked a pie with the apples by the time she finished with that pineapple.

Gf has an apple cake in the oven now

I think she's trying to take advantage of you.

Reminds me of an old joke.

1st Irishman: I know this bar where for fifty cents they give you all you can eat, all you can drink, and then take you in back and get you laid.
2nd Irishman: What? Do you mean to tell me you know a bar where for fifty cents they give you all you can eat, all you can drink, and then take you in back and get you laid?
1st Irishman: That's what I said.
2nd Irishman: You ever been in there?
1st Irishman: No, but me sister has.

0

Q: Meaning and etymology of "twigged to"

It seems to be slang with the meaning of 'to catch on; understand'. "I twigged to the con." "He's twiggy." "Be careful! He might twig."

meaning etymology

Gen ref.

do you participate in any open source projects?

8:23 PM

No.

Feb 15 '11 at 14:47, by Robusto

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Samuel Johnson

A wise policy.

One reason could be that it the only place where you can collaborate with good devs.

Yeah, but who has time for that? Maybe when I retire.

I would really like to work with programmers who are better than I am.

I hear ya.

I kinda hate being the smartest guy in the room (in my field).

I don't think I'm good but never meet anyone who is better.

When drawing CAD I worked with a great guy. He knew a lot.

8:29 PM

The boss I had five years ago was the only one I ever met who was smarter and faster at what I do than I am. But I still was able to teach him a few tricks, and one of the reasons I knew he was good was that he was grateful for the knowledge.

yeah that is a really good sign.

prolly < optimal that he was working as a manager

@JohanLarsson He was a tech lead: a coder first, manager second.

was it a good fit for him?

(Would you have him do that in your company)

@JohanLarsson Yeah. Definitely.

8:38 PM

How does it work?

I think abrasive wear from contact

trumling (Swedish)

I used one of those when I worked at McDonald's in high school. They work by abrading the skins. The bottom walls of that thing are like coarse carborundum.

oh abrasive walls?, I've seen also a blade at the bottom of the potato peeler

No, you don't. Those are vanes.

ok

8:43 PM

Their job is to bump the potatoes up so they don't get stuck at the bottom.

Why aren't you people voting to close this question?

9:36 PM

Energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume or mass, though the latter is more accurately termed specific energy. Often only the useful or extractable energy is measured, which is to say that chemically inaccessible energy such as rest mass energy is ignored. In cosmological and other general relativistic contexts, however, the energy densities considered are those that correspond to the elements of the stress–energy tensor and therefore do include mass energy as well as energy densities associated with the pressures described in the ne...

Would be nice with a hydrogen-powered phone.

Fast charge

10:02 PM

@Robusto What about a banana boat? a boat made of bananas.

@Robusto I voted for it to be asked at Urban Dictionary. It has its place.

10:49 PM

@crl You just lost me an hour looking at peeling machines. The ones that actually showed how the insides of the machines work were great. THe one's that showed a metal box with someone puring in stuff and the peeled stuff coming out the other side.... just not as good.

10:59 PM

Hello.

hej

11:15 PM

Hej.

Hoi.

How is Queen Silvia?

Or is it Sylvia?

no idea, is she sick?

Not that I know.

Just general interest.

I don't follow them closely

She must be old.

If you followed them closely, you'd probably make them nervous.

yeah

how are things Mitch?

11:42 PM

Hah.

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