Language Overflow

Damkerng T.

6:13 AM

come 2.1 Be heard, perceived, or experienced:

> a voice came from the kitchen

> it came as a great shock

It's not that hard to find, if one tries. (That was only my second attempt.)

Damkerng T.

6:49 AM

@RegDwigнt Fine... I tried to explain you some rules that could be told me when I should use the Present Perfect instead the Past Simple Tense. There is NO such rule "pointing at a concrete time + the news was said X times ..." BUT there are such rules + recommendations: 1) "pointing at a concrete time" - the Past Simple have a look [link]youtu.be/r-UlHmyogmA 2) "the news was said X times" here you are a rule: 4th Edition, Raymond Murphy, Unit 13 (C): "We use the present perfect to give NEW information. But if we continue to talk about it, we normally use the past simple" — Vadim Sep 25 at 9:53

See how rule-based L2 leaning could turn out.

jimsug

Unless that L2 happens to be a programming language.

Damkerng T.

nods

> I understand the meaning of this sentence but I don't understand why the Past Tense is used. There is no pointing at a concrete time when he lost his keys + the news was said 1 time + at the moment when he was talking his keys was still lost. If he used the Past Tense he would mean his keys was lost forever kind of extra meaning he's sure he can't find them anymore ?

(some parts of the question)

Damkerng T.

7:22 AM

2

Q: How do I emphasize the 'BE' form of words without formatting?

I was reading a paragraph in Last Generation magazine. Here it is(sic) I was attending a closed meeting for recovering drug addicts, but I wasn't a drug addict. I felt the need to lie in order to be there with a friend who was a drug addict. As you can see, was was emphasized using ital...

Hmm... why the "sic"? Am I missing something?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

What is the (sic) for? — inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M 9 secs ago

Damkerng T.

LOL

Tanks!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Jets!

So, the example was probably poor usage? — meatie 11 hours ago

Oh boy . . .

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

7:37 AM

@Amit That's not what "sic" does. — inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M 27 secs ago

Damkerng T.

Ahh

2

Q: midnight run (meaning)

Example: Finally, don't worry about damaging the computer. Unless you do something really stupid-such as throwing a glass of Coke into the computer while it's running-you won't hurt your PC. The only component that you could conceivably damage-if you don't count chips zapped by the homicida...

meaning

We could ask the writer, if we really, really want to know.

If I'm not mistaken, it's him:

Ron White

Ronald Dee "Ron" White (born December 18, 1956) is an American stand up comedian and actor, best known as a charter member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Nicknamed "Tater Salad," he is the author of the book I Had the Right to Remain Silent But I Didn't Have the Ability (Dutton 2006, ISBN 978-0-525-94961-9), which appeared on the New York Times best seller list. == Early lifeEdit == Ronald Dee White was born in Fritch, Texas on December 18, 1956 to Charles Don White and Barbara Joan Craig. White served in the United States Navy. According to his own account, White joined the service at age 17...

Maybe it's another Ron White, but judging from the word choices used in the excerpt, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same Ron White.

(I meant it in a good way, BTW.)

Damkerng T.

8:13 AM

Passive voice of the Day:

> a) Many of them didn't accept it.

> b) It wasn't accepted by many of them.

a) is technically not equivalent to b).

Damkerng T.

8:27 AM

Ah, I just noticed that I don't know how to relate refrain the verb to refrain the noun.

(listening to 'Tamashii no Refrain')

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:45 AM

Hehe I never knew some people spell font as fount.

Damkerng T.

A typo, perhaps?

Damkerng T.

8:57 AM

0

Q: Long fingers tip to tip

Anne says, ‘It is all about me.’ He bows. ‘When finally you have out of More what troubles his singular conscience, you will find that what is at the root of it is that he will not bend his knee to my queenship.’ She is small and white and angry. Long fingers tip to tip, bending each o...

phrase-meaning

I guess it'd be something like this (but she isn't necessarily raising her hands).

Hmm... perhaps two hands come together, too?

Damkerng T.

9:43 AM

+1 to shin. Also, I can't say that I'm sure about your definition of "adjective phrase". If you search for "adjective phrase", you'd find that it's almost irrelevant to your example sentence. So, it may depend on the definition of "adjective phrase" your textbook uses, and because we have so many English grammars. (One source says they can count over 850 English grammars just before the 20th century alone.) — Damkerng T. 19 secs ago

This kind of question makes me think that the concept of parts of speech is overrated.

And when a teacher assigns this kind of exercise to their students and their students are confused like this, I can't help but wonder how they teach the grammar in their class.

Damkerng T.

9:58 AM

0

Q: Dissatisfaction among or to the

His tradition-bound attitude was a constant source of dissatisfaction among or to the younger members of the family. I believe that among is used in a correct form in this sentence. Among is used when referring more than two persons. So , why to is the correct form here because if I mark the ans...

sentence-construction sentence-meaning sentence-structure

Too prescriptive?

Damkerng T.

10:47 AM

From NYT, 2006: On average, Keller Fay finds that people discuss about a dozen brands each day. 8th para — Usernew 5 mins ago

Thanks for the example! IMHO, the example you found is incorrect, and this can happen even in news and reports written by native speakers sometimes. Note that it's "We Talk About" the title, but somehow it's "people discuss about" that sentence for some unknown reason. The "talk about" alternative is mentioned in Get It Right! usage note above. — Damkerng T. 26 secs ago

In the sea of text, we can find almost anything!

> On average, Keller Fay finds that people discuss about a dozen brands each day. The most discussed brands are media and entertainment products like movies, TV shows and publications.

Damkerng T.

5:52 PM

Lots of "like very much to" in Google Books!

3

Q: How is the expression "very much" used and is "I like very much to play volleyball on weekends" correct?

I know in general terms how to use "very much" but since my students started making specific questions and writing sentences like the one above I got very confused (I'm brazilian, and I just started working as an English Teacher). I would say that the sentence would sound better if it was "I lik...

grammar usage sentence-structure

So maybe it's really correct.

Damkerng T.

6:40 PM

In writing, the location after the modal is preferred: books.google.com/ngrams/… — TRomano 15 mins ago

^Worth noting

Damkerng T.

7:45 PM

There really aren't any moods in English. There were several in Latin, more in Greek, and even more in Sanskrit. But, as you point out, what are called "moods", or "modes", in English are usually just constructions with auxiliary verbs -- many of which are in fact "modal" verbs. Which is what English has, instead of moods -- modals. In general, an analytic language like English has a syntactic construction where a synthetic language would inflect for a mood or a tense or a voice or an aspect. English verbs just have two tenses left, no voices, no moods, no aspects. — John Lawler 41 mins ago

Hmm... two tenses, no voices, no moods, no aspects.

Wait, what about the passive voice!

(If only English had no tenses besides no voices, moods, or aspects, it would be exactly like Thai!)

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Interesting! View (n.) is way more common than view (v.), viewing and viewed combined.

Damkerng T.

Hmm... that's not really enough. It had to have no articles, either.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Oh, but how did you count them?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. ngram.

Damkerng T.

In COCA?

Or Google Ngram?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Google Ngram.

Damkerng T.

7:48 PM

I remember that we could ask Google Ngram to search based on PoS, but I can't remember exactly how.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Damkerng T.

Oh, do we have to ask for views_VERB (with s) explicitly?

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

(Inserting images with names containing other than alphanumeric chars and parentheses and commas is a big pain, so I named the image "vieweinged")

@DamkerngT. Lemme check.

@DamkerngT. Yes. :/

But still not matching.

Damkerng T.

Let's see what COCA has to say...

We've got more nouns than verbs of [view], but the difference in number of results is not as wide as in Google Ngram.

92234 vs. 30786

Past tenses are very popular!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:05 PM

@DamkerngT. Not surprising to me.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It's more common in speech, too.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I think so!

Anonymous

COCA results - spoken subcorpus - all subcorpora

Anonymous

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Sounds right.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

:o

@Snail saying ngram sounds right!

Anonymous

8:09 PM

@DamkerngT. There are at least two relevant definitions here. The first one, used by modern linguists, is a phrase headed by an adjective. The second one, which is not useful, is a phrase that "functions as an adverb".

Anonymous

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I would never say that.

Anonymous

The term "n-gram" isn't nearly specific enough to refer to any particular website.

Anonymous

Usually when I use n-grams, they have nothing to do with Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Anonymous

So the odds of me referring to that site as "ngram" are basically nil.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Well, I usually just say "the passive" :-)

Damkerng T.

8:17 PM

A-ha! That's really tricky!

Anonymous

But it's widely known as the passive voice among learners.

Anonymous

And heck, most everybody else, too.

Damkerng T.

I guess so!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

BTW guys much as I hate to say it (not really), chem's TRE seemed better organized and more successful than ELL's TCE.

Damkerng T.

Oh, I speculated correctly! I sent this one up to the HNQ list!

3

Q: "There are" with or without additional "there"

When starting a sentence with "there are" is it necessary to put additional "THERE" in the sentence? Like in: The Snieznik Mountains is situated in the East Sudets. There are a lot of charming forest areas (there), with the richest world of plants and animals in southwest Poland. Is there any...

grammar

(with just three clicks. :P)

Anonymous

8:22 PM

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M I can't say I agree. I can't say I disagree, either. What's a TRE? What's a TCE?

Damkerng T.

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Aww...

Anonymous

I guess Title Clean-up Event

Anonymous

But what's the 'R'?

Damkerng T.

Tag Reediting/retagging Event, iirc.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@snailboat The Retagging Event.

Anonymous

8:23 PM

Oh! You had a The Retagging Event!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

7

A: The Great Retagging Event - Episode 1: The one-taggers

TRE stats: Episode 1 - scene 1 (Friday 2015/10/02, 15:30 - 17:00 UTC): 187 edits No more nonclosed questions with only the homework tag. 120 questions tagged only with organic-chemistry were retagged. 8 people participated $\approx$88 edit reviews $\color{red}{\text{To be continued}\ldots}$

@snailboat Coordinated by . . . guess who!

Damkerng T.

TGRE!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

But prolly part of it was because I had gained some experience from TCE.

Damkerng T.

ell.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/29112

To approve or to reject, that's the question...

The title edit is okay, but the suggestion added grammar and grammaticality-in-context!

Anonymous

I dunno.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:27 PM

@DamkerngT. You had two other options . . .

Well, I reviewed it anyway.

Damkerng T.

This makes me think, is grammar really that bad?

Anonymous

Hey, the title's inaccurate.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Yes.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Oh, right! It was my mistake!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@Dam on chem we really hate meta tags, but we allowed "homework" to stay.

Anonymous

8:28 PM

If you can understand the formatting in the title, then the answer to the question it implies is different from the answer to the actual question below the title.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Because it's useful.

Anonymous

Grammar isn't a meta tag.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

There's no meaning in "experts in homework".

But it classifies stuff well.

I see no reason to keep grammar.

Because it's too broad.

Anonymous

I edited the title.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Wow, you edited it just 1 second after me!

Anonymous

8:32 PM

Oh! I couldn't tell from my phone!

Anonymous

I was just adding the teachers.

Damkerng T.

I like your use of parentheses better. (That's the only difference between our edits.)

Anonymous

I added the parentheses because . . . hmm . . .

Anonymous

Imagine:

Damkerng T.

Because it's now optional!

Anonymous

8:33 PM

> "Thank you, Lord, for [ those
> ] who care for me"

Anonymous

I think that if you have spaces there they should be non-breaking.

Anonymous

But! I didn't really think the spaces were needed, either :-)

Damkerng T.

I think next time I'll use { aaaa / bbbb } instead.

Anonymous

ell.stackexchange.com/posts/69757/revisions

Damkerng T.

I ran into a problem with writing "brackets in titles" in comments a couple times.

Anonymous

8:36 PM

Am I the only one on the site who doesn't like the way ordered/unordered lists of single-line quotes look?

Anonymous

You used to have to do some trickery to get blockquotes to show up to the right of a bullet point. I did it a few times because the quote was the first part of a larger list item.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@snailboat No.

Anonymous

But the trickery is no longer necessary, and lately we use that formatting all the time.

Damkerng T.

To tell the truth, it looks ugly.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

There was something similar in Meta.SE.

Anonymous

8:37 PM

Someone edited one of my answers to use it, but I reverted it :-)

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

> 1. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
> 2. (•_•)=ε/̵͇̿̿/'̿'̿ ̿

Damkerng T.

I edited it!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Hah!

OK I should sleep. Tomorrow is a ~~big~~ school day.

G'night guys!

Damkerng T.

(v_v) zzz

Anonymous

@inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M Rest well!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:40 PM

BTW, if you felt like it, copy-paste my code into an online LaTeX editor and tell me how ugly it looks like:

> \documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage[many]{tcolorbox}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{sectsty}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\author{\textsc{M.A.R{\small amezani}}}
\title{\bf Notes on crucial words of reading 1}
\newenvironment{FSCSC}{\fontspec{Comic Sans MS}\begin{center}}{\end{center}}
\newcommand{\tabh}[1]{\textbf{\color[RGB]{192,43,0}#1}}
\newcommand{\thehead}[1]{{\color[RGB]{0,0,102} \textbf{#1}}}

(It's incomplete. :P)

Damkerng T.

That's huge!

Where is that online TeX editor again? ...

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Most of it is just repeated section headings.

@DamkerngT. sharelatex.com

This one needs a free account though.

Damkerng T.

>

fontspec error: "font-not-found" ! ! The font "Lucida Fax" cannot be found. ! ! See the fontspec documentation for further information. ! ! For immediate help type H <return>. !............................................... l.19 ...Font=Perpetua Titling MT Bold]{Lucida Fax}

I tried it on overleaf.com.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. Aha.

@DamkerngT. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Damkerng T.

LOL

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:44 PM

You don't have Lucida Fax?

Damkerng T.

I think Overleaf doesn't have it.

It looks like it will turn TeX input into an image for me.

Let's see if my pdfLaTeX can work on it...

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

@DamkerngT. It uses XeLaTeX!

Damkerng T.

Oh, my XeLaTeX doesn't work well.

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

Damkerng T.

Not bad at all!

inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M

8:53 PM

@Dam these four summarize it.

Damkerng T.

! I can't find file `t3enc.def'.
l.852 \input t3enc.def

^My XeLaTex said.

0

A: She said to the Headmistress,"Madam, forgive me my fault and let me appear at the exam"

Indirect speech means that you'll relate what was said without quoting directly. This is done by news organizations all the time to sum up what politicians say. E.G. "Today in a press conference the president said the situation in ..." For your excerpt, first we need to drop the quotes and take ...

The last alternative is quite interesting! (It's in the passive.)

> The headmistress was asked by the student to forgive her her fault and let her appear at the exam.

Transcript for