The Reading Room

And then I got very excited because I always wanted a literature site here (but was scared off from starting one because it had failed before)

@Randal'Thor Yep :)

...the newest member is #648. Some of the questions here have thousands of views -- those will have to come mostly from sites other than Lit, hence HNQ

@Randal'Thor I'm getting there. I have 5 consecutive days, so far :P

12:48 AM

@Shokhet Oh, hey, @terdon is here! I was thinking he might be useful to have around on this site.

What is occuring when the notification counter is higher than the number of notifications you have?

@Randal'Thor I have no clue who he is. I just looked at literature.stackexchange.com/… to find the newest user :)

@Benjamin Which notification counter?

@Randal'Thor The one in the top navigation bar.

Q: Review Count - Fix It or Lose It

Maybe the review counter?

36

Another meta question identified a bug that was marked as designed. To summarize the bug, the little number that appears next the Review link in the header shows an incorrect value most of the time. Wrong posts number on SO Review section I would like to propose that the feature be dropped...

12:51 AM

@Shokhet He's a guy who doesn't like Wheel of Time, so we've had some friendly fights over that ;-) But he does seem quite knowledgeable about literature.

@Randal'Thor Heh. WoT is on my to-read list. It's scary long, though....

@Benjamin If you get e.g. two comments on the same post, that gives you a red "2" in the top bar but only a single highlighted item (the last comment) when you actually click the dropdown.

@Shokhet No/

@Randal'Thor Ah, that explains it.

@Randal'Thor That's what I've been hearing

Q: When did Robert Frost write "Two Tramps in Mud Time"?

1:13 AM

5

Googling the poem, and utilizing Wikipedia, I could not find the answer to my question. The book I own ("101 Great American Poems") which contains the poem also does not give the year of its creation - it gives the birth and death years of the featured poets, but not the publication year of the s...

poetry publication robert-frost

Are questions like the above on topic?

@Benjamin Why not? It's about literature, isn't it?

@Shokhet But it is simple Trivia and shows little research effort.

@Benjamin That's a reason to downvote, not to VTC.

@Benjamin I thought that particular question showed pretty good research effort -- the OP searched in the copy of the book he owned, which did not contain the info he wanted. Then he also Googled and looked at Wikipedia. I think he did his due diligence

@Randal'Thor Also true. Unless we plan on making a custom close reason for "general reference"

At least until such time as Literature instates a special close reason for "not enough research effort", like ELU has.

Also, what Shokhet said.

1:18 AM

@Randal'Thor That would be a good discussion on Meta. Do you think we need one of those here?

A: Is the distinction too subtle between downvoting and voting to close?

Once again, allow me to link to my essay on why a close vote is not a super-downvote:

16

A CLOSE VOTE IS NOT A SUPER-DOWNVOTE. Sorry for shouting. But this is a really important point which far too many people apparently fail to grasp. Downvotes are used at the discretion of the individual voter, and mean "this is a bad question". They can reflect the voter's opinion of the qualit...

@Shokhet At this stage, no. We don't have that many poorly researched questions. ELU is literally overrun with them.

@Randal'Thor Okay

To be clear: I wasn't advocating a close reason. I was advocating a discussion around a close reason

Sure. But the site is still young, and until we have a bigger volume of questions (or one particular type of question which is becoming a huge problem) it's going to be hard to tell what we need special close reasons for.

@Randal'Thor Makes sense

If memory serves, a CM posted the question on LH a while after the site entered public beta

No time to find it now; class starts soon

Btw, @Shokhet, is it "Shokh-ay" or "Shokh-ett"?

I like to know how to pronounce people's usernames in my head :-)

Even if it's difficult with people like Wrzlprmft, Wipqozn, and Wbogacz.

muru

1:22 AM

(I pick one that's easy .. nobody's going to hear it, after all. :P )

@Randal'Thor "-ett," but the kh is a sound you probably can't do :)

@Shokhet Ah, it's not just an ordinary "kh" like in "loch" then?

@Randal'Thor I'm not sure how to pronounce "loch." I've heard "lock" but I've also heard "lokh."

This guy does a pretty good job of it, but I haven't watched enough to see whether he differentiates between ח and כ

Heth

Ḥet or H̱et (also spelled Khet, Kheth, Chet, Cheth, Het, or Heth) is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ḥēt , Hebrew Ḥēt ח, Aramaic Ḥēth , Syriac Ḥēṯ ܚ, and Arabic Ḥā' ح. Heth originally represented a voiceless fricative, either pharyngeal /ħ/, or velar /x/ (the two Proto-Semitic phonemes having merged in Canaanite). In Arabic, two corresponding letters were created for both phonemic sounds: unmodified ḥāʾ ح represents /ħ/, while ḫāʾ خ represents /x/. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Eta Η, Etruscan , Latin H and Cyrillic И. While H is a consonant in the Latin...

Sorry. That's the letter. Here's the video: youtube.com/watch?v=PlmbiM_ASIE

@Shokhet It should definitely be "lokh" and not "lock".

Can't watch the video now, sorry.

@Randal'Thor Okay, so probably that sound, then

Incidentally, my username is probably transliterated incorrectly. The Hebrew word is שוחט, but most use kh for the letter כ

Anyways, gotta go

See ya!