English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

5:57 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body (97): Topic: The trend of vegetarianism by Tri Nguyen on english.SE

7:21 AM

@Cerberus There are many cases of i9 thermal throttling if not configured properly. It gets too hot and slows down and performs worse than expected.

@Cerberus There is base frequency and turbo boost frequency as well. But I think the actual performance depends on benchmark tests and real life usage on specific application software.

RegDwigнt

11:03 AM

@Tonepoet um. Why exactly did you post any of that at me. I didn't ask any of these things!

Cerberus

3:33 PM

@Jasper I'm sure it needs a big cooler and good ventilation if you're going to use it intensively (which I think few people would).

@Jasper Yes, I was talking about turbo.

Because the only cpu bottleneck with games is still single-core performance.

Jasper

Currently, Dell XPS 15 uses i7-8750H which has 6 cores.

Cerberus

I have six cores, too.

And I think desktop cores are generally a lot stronger than laptop cores, even if they have the same specs.

CowperKettle

Word of the eve: shipshape

Cerberus

Shipshape, spick and span, tip top.

Jasper

4:02 PM

@Cerberus Are you a processor?

Cerberus

Yes, and you?

Jasper

No, I am still a human.

Hello @TannerSwett, long time no see.

Tanner Swett

Hey there!

I come with a thought.

Jasper

Is Tanner a male name or a female name? I suppose it could be both.

Tanner Swett

As far as I know, it's chiefly a male name.

So. For hundreds, probably thousands of years, we've come up with new fields of study every so often (such as aviation and computing), and whenever we do, we have to come up with vocabulary to apply to this new field of study.

Jasper

4:11 PM

I see. I have learnt that no matter where I check, there will always be people of the other sex with the same name, so no point checking name websites.

@TannerSwett Yes, and this vocabulary could be a modification of some existing words.

Tanner Swett

There tends to be a sort of adoption process, where a piece of terminology coming from an older field of study, or from common language, is used in this new field of study.

Jasper

For example, we have groups, rings, and fields in algebra, which are certainly not groups, rings, or fields.

Tanner Swett

I've noticed something really interesting, which is that every so often, a "reverse adoption" occurs.

Where a piece of terminology originates in a relatively new field of study, and then gets applied to older fields of study, or common language.

One example is the verb "to take off", meaning "to leave the ground and begin flying". It was originally applied to aircraft; later, by analogy, it was applied to birds.

Jasper

A very interesting example.

Cerberus

@TannerSwett Yes: it works both ways!

Tanner Swett

4:15 PM

Another example is "default", meaning "value used when none has been given; a tentative value or standard that is presumed" (as defined at en.wiktionary.org/wiki/default).

Cerberus

And also between different scientific or technological fields. Consider the word payload.

Tanner Swett

This meaning of the word "default" originated in computing; later, it came to be used generally.

Cerberus

@TannerSwett Isn't that an old word used in ordinary English?

Or do you mean the way people leave out the word by?

Tanner Swett

The word "default"?

It's been used for hundreds of years, probably, but the first time it was used with that meaning was in computing.

Cerberus

At least the expression by default should be very old and non-technical?

Jasper

4:17 PM

By the way it is very nice to pronounce @Cerberus the Italian way. It sounds so lovely.

Tanner Swett

I don't think so. At least, before computing, "by default" would have meant "as a result of failure to meet an obligation".

Cerberus

@TannerSwett What meaning, exactly? Is it any different from the expression by default outside the omission of by?

@TannerSwett Hmm.

Tanner Swett

The "new" meaning of "by default" is "because no other option was chosen".

I wonder if it acquired that meaning by mistake.

In the old meaning, you'd have stuff like "Bob didn't show up to the tournament, so Mary won by default" (= "Mary won as a result of Bob's failure to meet his obligation to show up").

Maybe some computer engineer read a sentence similar to that one and walked away with the false belief that "by default" meant something similar to "because no other option was chosen".

And maybe from there, the usage became so widespread that we can't call it an error any more.

Cerberus

Ah, OK, I see your point: the meaning has been extended.

Isn't that nice?

Tanner Swett

thinking emoji

Looks like the author is talking about a person named Desault. :D

Jasper

4:24 PM

Does emoji and emoticon mean the same?

Tanner Swett

Nope.

Matt E. Эллен

@TannerSwett it does

Jasper

I placed an order for an Italian grammar book. Now the preorder has been postponed to one year later!

Matt E. Эллен

that's a long pre-order

Tanner Swett

An emoji is a code which a computer treats as a character code (meaning that computers treat emoji as though they were letters), but which is displayed as some type of picture.

Matt E. Эллен

4:26 PM

maybe the author got ill

Tanner Swett

An emoticon is a sequence of actual characters which is used for its visual resemblance to something, usually a facial expression.

Jasper

@MattE.Эллен In fact, on the publisher's site, the book has vanished, but the bookstore still lists it, maybe because they don't want to cancel the preorder, which I don't mind.

@MattE.Эллен Yes, I have been waiting to see this French language book for a few years. Probably author illness.

Tanner Swett

I bet that the new meaning of the phrase "by default" came from the notion of a "judgement being entered by default".

Cerberus

@TannerSwett Exactly!

Jasper

@Cerberus Are these from Google Books?

Tanner Swett

4:28 PM

What "by default" means is "as a result of the failure of the parties involved to show up to court", but it's easy to mistake it as meaning "as a result of the people involved not choosing any particular judgement".

Cerberus

@Jasper Yes.

@TannerSwett It is as you say: before at least 1900, I can only find legal and arithmetic uses of of the word.

Tanner Swett

As a bit of a tangent, Google Books has a surprise occurrence of the phrase "the plane took off" in a book written in 1837.

3

The usage is completely unrelated to aircraft or flight; the author just happened, by sheer coincidence, to write down a phrase which, a hundred years later, would become commonly used to mean something completely different.

Matt E. Эллен

the plane took off an inch of wood, perhaps?

Tanner Swett

Yup. Lemme copy-paste.

Jasper

@MattE.Эллен To me, a plane is infinite. For example, R^2 is a plane.

Cerberus

4:33 PM

The plane took off his heads.

Tanner Swett

"Willy looked and saw some of them laying down large planks of wood to make the floors, and fastening them with great nails; others were shaving the wood smooth with a wooden tool called a plane and every time the plane went over the wood, a thin piece of wood was shaved off, and curled up. Willy could not conceive how the plane took off this shaving."

Jasper

@Cerberus The plane took off two of Cerberus's heads, leaving only one.

Cerberus

Ah, that kind of plane.

@Jasper At least I'll still have one.

Tanner Swett

And that's the only 19th-century occurrence of "the plane took off" in Google Books.

Cerberus

@TannerSwett By the way, you can be sure that many terms from the new field of philosophy entered common parlance even in Antiquity.

And no doubt many technical terms from older arts and crafts had done the same before.

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…