English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

7:08 PM

@tchrist The more likely scenario is that all storms track our way.

I remember a guy from Nebraska telling me that back in the days it snowed like west hight there in their place. Nowadays it's not that much, I think it has to do with the climate change and stuff like that.

tchrist

@Robusto Not sure if it was obvious, but I meant they are expecting that for us here. Maybe it will run out of snow before it gets to you.

Robusto

@tchrist The more likely scenario is that it will pick up more along the way.

Mitch

Some storms just start and end on top of you

Robusto

Mitch

7:20 PM

We have so much snow...

Robusto

And no end in sight.

Mitch

....That I don't need a ladder to get to the roof

A Beautiful Mind

My mental illness has no end in sight.

Robusto

THE SNOW MAN

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds

________________________________

I figured it was time to trot this out again.

A Beautiful Mind

Interesting use of separation.

Robusto

7:24 PM

Interesting? More like necessary. Or respectful.

A Beautiful Mind

In the past, you used to use ------- to separare @xxx from the message.

Robusto

You remember that? You're focusing on the wrong things.

A Beautiful Mind

Well, my priority now is to get well. Not focusing on the wrong things, just happen to remember.

Mitch

Maybe he has the wrong eyeglass prescription

A Beautiful Mind

Ever since the day I was tormented by my mental illness, my priority has been to get well.

But year after year, it did not happen.

Mitch

7:29 PM

It will snow next year

A Beautiful Mind

What do you mean?

Robusto

I think he means it will snow next year.

A Beautiful Mind

Doesn't it snow every year?

Robusto

Depends on where you are. Here, usually yes.

A Beautiful Mind

It never snows here. I am not sure I like or hate snow. I guess it does not really matter.

Robusto

7:32 PM

If you had to shovel it, or drive in it, you might learn to hate it.

Mitch

I appreciate snow but I am tired of it

Robusto

I've hated it my whole life.

Mitch

I loved it as a kid, but it hardly ever snowed enough

A Beautiful Mind

Why are you people in a chat room on a Sunday? Don't you have better things to do?

Mitch

I'm avoiding shoveling snow

A Beautiful Mind

7:36 PM

I would never come to a chat room if I was not mentally ill.

I was finding the answer to a TeX question. That brought me to SE in the first place.

Mitch

My mental illness, among many, is...

A Beautiful Mind

After that, I notice you people saying interesting things in chat, so I joined.

It took me very long to figure out how to log into chat, because the usual way just does not work for me.

tchrist

@Robusto When I get falls like that, I like to let the kitties investigate the snow-canyon. The longhair likes to burrow in sideways, prolly looking for mousickles.

@Mitch Yes, Legion.

A Beautiful Mind

I wonder what Kit is doing now. She is now my best online friend.

@Mitch What is it?

Mitch

What is what?

A Beautiful Mind

7:42 PM

@Mitch Your mental illness is?

Mitch

What mental illness?

A Beautiful Mind

Now you are just messing with me.

Mitch

I have this forgetting problem was I talking about that?

A Beautiful Mind

I will go eat something.

Mitch

I just had BBQ and crepes.

It's complicated

Robusto

7:45 PM

@Mitch With marshmallow-asparagus sauce?

Mitch

I May have claimed I have mental illnesses (or not, I can't remember) but I'm not crazy

Robusto

@Mitch No, I am Spartacus!

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive title detected: “Hooker”, “whore”, “prostitute”, when to use which? by Yousui on english.stackexchange.com

Robusto

@SmokeDetector Ease down, Smokey. It's not a league game.

tchrist

There's certainly been a flourish of strumpets in the air today.

Mitch

7:50 PM

Which one of these ther does not belong?

Robusto

ther does not belong.

Mitch

Oh. They're pribably all on the 'poop' list

Strum pets can flourish in the air? I wondered what that smell was.

Robusto

You've heard of B♭ trumpets, D trumpets . . . a strumpet is just an S trumpet.

I hope the suet block doesn't run out soon in my bird feeder. I don't think I can navigate the yard anymore.

@tchrist: It happened again. I translated Ella se siente superior a él. as "She thinks she is superior to him" (a legitimate expression of the idea in idiomatic English) and Duolingo rejected it. It will only accept "She feels superior to him." Which is literally true, but amounts to the same thing.

Mitch

The snow is as high as our suet block would be if we had one and there weren't squirrels to eat it all.

tchrist

@Robusto Isn't there a place to add alternate correct answers?

Robusto

8:04 PM

@tchrist Dunno.

tchrist

@Rob Got kit?

readywisconsin.wi.gov/winter/HowToMakeAKit.asp

Robusto

Meh, I'll fall off that bridge when I come to it.

> You can now read 70% of all real Spanish text

tchrist

@Mitch You are supposed to hang suet from a thin chain neath a plastic squirrel-hat but too high for the bears.

Robusto

He doesn't have bears where he is. At least I hope not, because if he has them, I have them too.

tchrist

Me encanta que diga "REAL Spanish text" como si hubiera otro tipo que no contase como texto verdadero.

Mitch

8:09 PM

Bears! That's what's been missing.

orders bears from amazom

tchrist

@Mitch You're probably just not hanging out in appropriately ursine locales.

Mitch

70% !! You can now control other people's actions from your 70% brain usage power...stuff.

tchrist

it has begun to snow seriously here now.

We shoud go for an all-fifty record.

A Beautiful Mind

I just ate some noodles.

Mitch

Anything with them?

What style?

A Beautiful Mind

8:17 PM

An egg. My mum had the same. It's 4 am here.

In some soup.

tchrist

snow-forecast.com/resorts/Mauna-Kea

Mmm... And tea?

No drink.

Auntie-mom.

What is auntie-mom?

8:19 PM

Your uncle-dad's sister-wife, O pharaoh.

A Beautiful Mind

Geezis.

I am surprised at the number of SE folks who have shared secrets with me.

I guess when I tell them my problems, they say theirs too.

tchrist

Confabulationem.

Mitch

My problem is...

Something about roman legions

Or zombies.

Dead zombies the undead ones don't give me any trouble at all.

A Beautiful Mind

I think this chat serves as a sort of occupational therapy for me.

tchrist

In waters deep where dead things creep.

PLEASE CLEAR BLUE FLAG!!!

My finger spazzed.

And I am not requesting that azure gladden fields be extirpated.

Nor that Jasper be summarily banished nor varnished.

Mitch

8:29 PM

Hmm. Gladden. Isvthat like gilt?

tchrist

Gladden the Greeks call irides.

Blue flag is indigenous, gold an alien invader.

But a fair one.

A Beautiful Mind

@tchrist What blue flag?

tchrist

vation under the name of fleur-de-lis (flower-deluce), I. Qermanica being the common cultivated form. The wild species are very generally kuown In America as blue flag, I. versicolor being the larger blue flag and /. Virginica the slender blue flag. I.
verna of the eastern United States is the dwarf iris, and /. cristata of nearly the same range is the creBted dwarf iris. I. Pseudacorusot Europe and Russian Asia is the yellow iris or yellow flag. The roots possess astringent qualities, and the seeds when roasted are used in Great Britain as a substitute for coffee. /. feetidissima of wester…

A Beautiful Mind

You seem to post random big rectangles.

tchrist

Isildur was slain by orc-arrows, and the One lost in the River Anduin, at the Disaster of the Gladden Fields. Gladden is the elder name for iris, also called flag as in blue or yellow flag. We still use the word though disguised: glads are not so far from irides as you might think.

However, I had never heard it called roast-beef plant before the quotation above!

And now. You know. The rest. Of the story.

va buscando esta flor rosbif

Mitch

8:49 PM

Why did the elves bother coming east? And are they supposed to be the Irish or the Anericans? What's the key?

Gladiolus?

tchrist

Then awoke in the east. They came west because the horns of Tauros summoned them hither.

@Mitch Bingo

books.google.com/…

Iris foetidissima

Iris foetidissima (Stinking iris, gladdon, Gladwin iris, roast-beef plant, stinking gladwin), is a species of iris found in open woodland, hedgebanks and sea-cliffs. Its natural range is Western Europe, including England south of Durham and also Ireland, and from France south and east to N. Africa, Italy and Greece. It is one of two iris species native to Britain, the other being the yellow iris (Iris pseudacorus). Its flowers are usually of a dull, leaden-blue colour, or dull buff-yellow tinged with blue; the capsules, which remain attached to the plant throughout the winter, are 5–8 cm long...

tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Cuivi%C3%A9nen

Mitch

Plants are weird.

tchrist

lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Cuivi%C3%A9nen

lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Gladden_Fields

Why are merkins so hard on geography?

The Lower 48 necessarily including Florida and Hawaii and excluding Maine and Alaska. Try again. — tchrist 1 min ago

Robusto

9:29 PM

> Like the difference between there, their, and they're, it's a distinction that's almost never relevant, and therefore is usually ignored.

WTF is Lawler on about now?

Anonymous

10:01 PM

@Robusto I can't speak for Lawler. I can say, though, that most contexts allowing one of the three don't allow the other two

Anonymous

So even if someone mistakenly writes their in place of there, it's unlikely to cause confusion (although it might cost the reader some extra processing time)

tchrist

@Robusto He probably is thinking, well maybe I dunno, that in oral conversation virtually zero confusion ever arises out of misapprehending which of the three was truly used. The native speaker really never pulls up the wrong word in his head, whether literate or non-. And so at some level the orthography doesn't matter that much because the wrong one would be impossible.

@snailboat This puts those of us with a certain type of mind or formative education at a distinct disadvantage compared with folks who couldn't care (or know) less.

It definitely speedbumps me.

I'm just too used to looking carefully at the letters used in case some shady nuance is intended not to pause and flip through alternate readings or possibilities. Thing is, with these three, it is seriously hard to find real-world ambiguous cases. My theory is that this is why all three continue to enjoy a healthy existence.

But then again, purely FUNCTIONAL words simple don't have synonyms.

And all these are such.

There are no synonyms for personal pronouns, just to name one well-studied case.

A Beautiful Mind

I am suddenly having some traumatic thoughts again...

tchrist

Jasper, then I have something that may help.

A Beautiful Mind

I feel better just saying it out here, which is why I did.

tchrist

10:13 PM

I realize you live in a different time than I do, but it is not so far that the piquant poignancy of a certain seasonally appropriate article from Scientific American will stand no chance of stirring your creative juices of curiosity.

A Beautiful Mind

Note that I have both OCD and PTSD.

Of course, they are related, but that is too long to describe in this chat.

tchrist

So long as Valentine's Day triggers no more than the first and not the second, you'll be fine reading it.

A Beautiful Mind

Valentine's Day does not trigger anything, lol.

I don't really lol when I say lol.

Anonymous

@ABeautifulMind I don't think most people do

Anonymous

It seems like it's a discourse particle

tchrist

10:20 PM

Googling around for random Valentine's Day thingies with some scientific rationale behind them, I came upon this fascinating FMTEYEWTK Scientific American article. WARNING: It includes startling anti-depression recipes of proven efficacy.

A Beautiful Mind

@tchrist Interesting.

tchrist

Yeah, isn't it? I never imagined such a thing!

A Beautiful Mind

I am going to bed, good night.

I hope my miracle comes soon.

Anonymous

Have a good night, @ABeautifulMind!

A Beautiful Mind

@snailboat You should say 'hope your miracle comes soon' instead.

Anonymous

10:33 PM

But what if I would like to wish you a pleasant night?

A Beautiful Mind

Well, the night is not as important as the future.

Anonymous

@ABeautifulMind I'm not entirely comfortable with this miracle idea, so I would prefer not to say that exact phrase, but fair enough―I hope you have a nice future, including but not limited to having a good night :-)

Stack Exchange

Limerick Machine: A red deck should beat green and white Healing and boost decks are shite I need to get better At...

posted on February 15, 2015 by sgdi

A red deck should beat green and white Healing and boost decks are shite I need to get better At playing the meta So that I can put up a fight

tchrist

You have entered the Twilight Zone. Do not adjust your set. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal:

> Likewise I have noticed that many charities do not include "homosexual" in their buff but instead "Gay and Lesbian" (LGBT).

What sort of charities no longer include homosexuals in the buff?

Enquiring minds want to know!

0

Q: "Homosexual" or "Gay and Lesbian"?

I have faced a problem with my writing which I could really do with some clarification on. My question applies to both British and American English (which is fairly standard on the internet). Needless to say the context is a website whereby I allow the user to enter a sexuality and it is the Eng...

Or is the problem that they aren't buff enough anymore?

This is a fairly queer query: I am completely buffled by it.

I wonder which continent this poster is from. Or century.

Surely the best answer must be Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

11:01 PM

Here is a buffer.

tchrist

looks at Corny's buffer

They just upped the ante to 8-16 inches for me. I reckon that'll be on it's way to you by tomorrow night latest.

They've doubled the forecast twice in 24h. I wonder when they'll change their minds next. INCOMING @cornbreadninja麵包忍者

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

We were supposed to have some after 10AM today. Nothing yet, but they're out a-salting the streets.

We've had next to nothing this season.

Oh, well then: Snow, mainly before 4am. Low around 13. Northeast wind 5 to 9 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total nighttime snow accumulation of 2 to 4 inches possible.

tchrist

11:18 PM

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 They were telling me 2-4" yesterday. Doubled that to 4-8" this morning or so. Just redoubled it to 8-16" in the last hour or so, and extended the warning till 8pm tomorrow. It seems there are two waves (for me): one today and another tomorrow.

I wonder what those diffferent colors mean.

I'm in the magenta zone.

Or maybe dark periwinkle.

I think @Rob has Deep Purple.

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

He should go space truckin'.

@tchrist it says on the front page.

weather.gov

Winter Storm Warning/Winter Weather Advisory

tchrist

11:37 PM

google.org/publicalerts/…

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

The Heaviest Snow

Sweden's loudest metal band.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…