English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Mitch

00:00

But I can take pride in that they were all own goals

Robusto

Strands #353
“Pick your own prefix”
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HippoSawrUs

I think that's why millennials never left the nest. Their parents were trying to compensate for routine nearly-dying generational trama.

Robusto

00:29

@HippoSawrUs Mine left. College does that to kids.

Cerberus

Connections
Puzzle #619
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It was quite doable.

It's just that blue has five terms that match the category.

Xanne

00:59

Connections
Puzzle #620
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CowperKettle

Indonesian of the day: sampai-sampai (until)

Xanne

Strands #354
“Together for the present”
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CowperKettle

Xanne

Wordle 1,342 4/6

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HippoSawrUs

01:23

@Robusto Lucky you.

We paid for college, threw them out, then gave them the house.

I feel like we should have a doctor after all that, but no…

CowperKettle

03:50

Colon epithelial crypts are glands that contain stem cells that help renew the intestinal lining

CowperKettle

05:54

What do you a Russian that works for Tesla? A Muskovite.

CowperKettle

08:12

Oarfish | This Legendary Fish That Announces Tsunamis

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Vikas

09:25

@Mitch It doesn't work here. I think rare.

@Mitch It's extremely common here to call your neighbors uncle if they are friend of your parents. No real relations needed.

CowperKettle

> According to Birmingham, Dostoyevsky's protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov was partly based on a minor French poet turned murderer, Pierre François Lacenaire.

Pierre François Lacenaire

Pierre François Lacenaire (20 December 1803 – 9 January 1836) was a French murderer and poet. == Biography == Lacenaire was born in Francheville, Rhône, near the city of Lyon in eastern France. His parents were Jean-Baptiste Lacenaire, an honest and successful bourgeois merchant, and Marguerite Gaillard. Upon finishing his education with excellent results, he enlisted in the French Royal Army, eventually deserting in 1829 at the time of the Morea expedition during the Greek War of Independence. He then became a criminal and was in and out of prison, which was, as he called it, his "crim...

HippoSawrUs

12:41

In what action movie does some good guy yell at somebody to 'Get in the gondola (or what the hell ever)' through a broken high-rise window, meaning the window washer's platform?

My Neuriva is not working.

Thanks for nothing, Santa.

Maybe my pilling shaver will work.

I should ask for better things…

Like a new Columbia jacket.

Maybe next time.

Oh, the important part: OPie needs a New Yorker to answer this question.

0

Q: Word that most people use in everyday conversation for the suspended platform (cradle, boom, gondola, gantry)

What do most people call this hanging (suspended platform) thing that window washers use? I’m not looking for the exact technical term, just the word common people use in everyday conversations. Here is the answer from AI but I never heard any of those terms in real life: In the U.S., professio...

GratefulDisciple

13:45

@HippoSawrUs Learned new term today: "binding mural". A smart move for publishers, making the set more attractive on the bookshelf rather than a monochromatic color for all volumes, especially for sets consisting of more than 2 dozen encyclopaedia volumes like yours and Britannica. I remember for one edition Britannica has a plush binding cover melded to the hardback which make it soft to the touch and rich looking, but it's monochromatic jade color.

CowperKettle

> A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated with a gene-targeting drug while in the womb for spinal muscular atrophy, a motor neuron disease. The “baby has been effectively treated, with no manifestations of the condition.”

nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00534-0

@HippoSawrUs "Last Action Hero"?

> That line is from the action movie Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995).
In the scene, Bruce Willis's character, John McClane, yells, “Get in the gondola, or whatever the hell it's called!” to Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Zeus, after they are chased by bad guys.

ChatGPT's answer.

LLMs are extra-stupid in terms of having no commonsense world-model, but amazingly knowledgeable.

CowperKettle

14:03

wsj.com/business/media/…

GratefulDisciple

@CowperKettle Just to note: the repeated form sampai-sampai has a different connotation of "until" and is deployed in different use cases than the single form sampai, which is much more common and flexible (see wiktionary).

From the first 3 examples of 'sampai-sampai' here, it is deployed to introduce: 1) an effect on a person (impressed one until), 2) an ultimate effect (so severe until), and 3) an influence reducing effect (until it is insignificant)

CowperKettle

Meet Japan's newest species: The Skeleton Panda Sea Squirt

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@GratefulDisciple Ah!

GratefulDisciple

@CowperKettle It's amazing how one language can has a single word that connotes multiple meanings which in another language requires multiple words. I would be hard pressed to find a single English word for sampai-sampai, probably because sampai itself is SO pervasive and flexible in Indonesian discourse. You notice that in those 3 examples, the word "until" is not used in the English translation (BTW the translation of the 1st example is not very good).

I'm sure you'll find many examples in Russian language too. When choosing a translation for The Brothers Karamazov I was aware of the trade-offs different translators have to make.

I would translate the 1st example this way: "I [persistently] keep to my dancing [hobby/schedule] in between chemo and radiation therapies, so much so until my cancer doctor is impressed." In this sentence sampai-sampai = "so much so until"

CowperKettle

14:21

Nice!

GratefulDisciple

14:32

In the Indonesian language repeating a noun is a replacement for "several". "anak-anak" = "several children". Repeating a preposition(?) is rare though, but I guess the same principle apply: adding intensity to "sampai". Another interesting word is "tiba-tiba" meaning suddenly. "tiba" itself means to arrive.

Robusto

14:43

@GratefulDisciple Why did we used to spell the capital of Indonesia "Djakarta"? Is there some extra emphasis there? Now we spell it "Jakarta"?

MetaEd

14:56

@alphabet Pyrrho's philosophical project, if you can even call it that, is basically best stated in the negative

tchrist

> Last week, he amplified baseless claims about the judge who overturned Trump’s funding freeze on federal grants that named his government employee daughter.

I miss the days when the Washington Post employed actual copyeditors.

Robusto

@tchrist I miss the days when anyone had copy editors.

I've seen such examples in the NYT itself. But this is nothing new. A literary agent I knew back in the 1980s lamented finding typos in Farrar, Straus and Giroux books.

MetaEd

15:14

Wordle 1,342 3/6

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Robusto

Shit, I meant that this is nothing new. hahahaha hoist on my own petard!

Stupid short window for editing here.

tchrist

@GratefulDisciple That’s quite interesting because a well-documented characteristic of pidgin languages (in general, but also including English pidgins specifically) is that pidgins often use reduplication to represent noun plurals in that same child-child fashion as you mention here, all so that they can dodge the inherent complexities of morphological inflexion. They also like doing that with superlatives, like bad-bad instead of worst.

MetaEd

Strands #354
“Together for the present”
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Robusto

#travle #799 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

#WhenTaken #359 (20.02.2025)

I scored 907/1000👑

1️⃣📍1.8 km - 🗓️17 yrs - 🥈164/200
2️⃣📍1.7K km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥈153/200
3️⃣📍172 m - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥇197/200
4️⃣📍358 m - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇198/200
5️⃣📍3.4 km - 🗓️5 yrs - 🥇195/200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,342 4/6

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tchrist

@Robusto ftfy: nihil novi

nihil novī nisi commūne cōnsēnsū, nihil sub sōle novum

@Robusto Alas and alack.

Robusto

15:24

@tchrist Thanks for the edit.

tchrist

The pleasure was mine.

MetaEd

Connections
Puzzle #620
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Robusto

> Trump is escalating his attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by calling him a “dictator.” The U.S. has pressed Zelenskyy to submit to peace talks with Russia, which have excluded Ukraine thus far. Yesterday, Zelenskyy said he wants the U.S. to stop using disinformation when talking about Russia's war on Ukraine after Trump accused Ukraine of starting the war.

Good luck with that.

Lambie

@Robusto Yes, but it is important to call out the lies.

Robusto

@Lambie It's 1984 again.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

CowperKettle

15:36

I built an Omni-Directional Ball-Wheeled Bike

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GratefulDisciple

@Robusto "Djakarta" is the old pre-1972 spelling, the time of my parents. People in my generation grow up with the new spelling "Jakarta". See Wikipedia). So if you come across those words, probably they are from older books and documents.

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple That's how old I am.

GratefulDisciple

@tchrist I'm sure there's a linguistic terminology for that.

@Robusto :-)

I don't know why the old system is called "Republican" (first time I hear the term used for what Indonesians call "Ejaan lama" = "Old spelling"). The transformation is quite straightforward: all "dj" becomes "j" such as Djakarta -> Jakarta.

Googling a little, I found Van Ophuijsen Spelling System influencing the old spelling. Parallel to that is how we pronounce the alphabet. There is a Dutch way (that my parents use) and there's the current way (that I learn from childhood).

@tchrist I never speak Indonesian to my kids when they were young (so not to confuse them), but still one of them makes the mistake saying "more better" which sounds very cute.

tchrist

15:56

@GratefulDisciple All very young children do that.

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple That would make sense. I believe that the Dutch way (@Cerberus?) of pronouncing J would be the way English speakers pronounce Y.

tchrist

@Mitch I'm thinking of you here....

I (wouldn't've / I'd not focus) so much on contractions written with apostrophes because unstressed weak forms that occur naturally in speech most often go completely unrepresented in writing. Instead you should look for do-support, post-auxiliary uses of not, negated auxiliary inversion, and the complete absence of ‑s inflection on third-person present-tense singulars which is seen only in modal verbs but not in other auxiliaries. NB: OED says that uninflected "He dare" (like "He will") is still common in the north of Britain. [...] — tchrist ♦ 15 mins ago

Look especially to negative and interrogative yes–no contexts for semi-modal use as modal syntax persists longer in some speech communities than in others. ❶ He does not need to call < He need not call. ❷ He does not dare (to) call < He dare not call. ❸ Does he need to call < Need he call? ❹ Does he dare (to) call < Dare he call? ❺ Does he not need to call / Doesn't he need to call < Need he not call / Needn't he call? ❻ Does he not dare (to) call / Doesn't he dare (to) call < Dare he not call / Daren't he call? // Corresponding examples with ought I leave to you, oughtn’t I? :) — tchrist ♦ 11 mins ago

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto If I remember correctly, "y" was pronounced something like "igrek". Now we say "ye" (I think, it's a long time ago).

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple That's "igrek" to me ...

tchrist

@Robusto yclept teutonisch

Robusto

16:00

@GratefulDisciple parallel to i griega

jlliagre

16:35

#WhenTaken #359 (20.02.2025)

I scored 848/1000🏅

1️⃣📍170 m - 🗓️18 yrs - 🥈161/200
2️⃣📍1.2K km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥈164/200
3️⃣📍65.5 m - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥇197/200
4️⃣📍197 m - 🗓️9 yrs - 🥇187/200
5️⃣📍2.0 km - 🗓️24 yrs - 🥈139/200

https://whentaken.com

> In Latin, Y was named I graeca ("Greek I"), since the classical Greek sound /y/, similar to modern German ü or French u, was not a native sound for Latin speakers, and the letter was initially only used to spell foreign words. This history has led to the standard modern names of the letter in Romance languages – i grego in Galician, i grega in Catalan, i grec in French and Romanian, and i greca in Italian – all meaning "Greek I". The names igrek in Polish and i gờ-rét in Vietnamese are both phonetic borrowings of the French name. In Dutch, the letter is either only found in loanwords, or …

Wordle 1,342 4/6

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Daily Octordle #1123
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Daily Sequence Octordle #1123
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Laurel

16:50

@GratefulDisciple Somehow this comment made me correctly remember about the French pronunciation: busuu.com/user/pages/french/alphabet/_03-body-2/…

jlliagre

Daily Extreme Octordle #1123
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Score: 70

Mitch

17:06

@tchrist That's news to me!

Jan 4, 2022 at 19:22, by Mitch

@Cerberus "Nihil sub sole novum" sub sole non novem

Robusto

Connections
Puzzle #620
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Mitch

@GratefulDisciple To clarify 'igrek is what you call the letter, not how you pronounce it. If you parse the name differently you'll see that it is really calling it what it is 'i grek' or a Greek 'i', which the Greek's presumably pronounce different and therefore need a different letter form to write it.

Robusto

I'd never have gotten purple on its own.

Mitch

just like how 'omega' and 'omicron' should be parsed as 'o mega' and 'o micron' or Big o and little o.

@Robusto Purple seldom makes sense even when told the 'answer'

Robusto

@Mitch You often need to be up on all the latest pop culture trash.

Strands #354
“Together for the present”
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Mitch

17:18

@Robusto dude you need to watch more tiktok and insta

TV ain't gonna watch itself

Robusto

@Mitch Phone ain't gonna watch itself either.

Mitch

@Robusto I'm literally watching it right now

Robusto

@Mitch You're so literal.

I mean, figuratively you're so literal.

MetaEd

@Robusto I am literally gobsmacked by this comment

Robusto

17:35

@MetaEd That's gotta hurt.

MetaEd

@Robusto I am literally dying.

Robusto

@MetaEd What color?

MetaEd

@Robusto Plaid. Literally.

Robusto

You're plaid that game long enough, so dying is a good option.

3

A: Can you be literal about non-literal things?

"I'm literally going to fit him for cement shoes." This would mean more than simply "I intend to kill him." It would mean "I intend to encase his feet in cement and throw him in the river [or lake, or ocean, etc.], thereby killing him". That said, the sort of person who would actually kill...

One of my favorite answers on the site.

Mitch

@Vikas Here (US) it's only close friends of your parents (and only when you're a kid). Regular neighbors, people who live near you, even if you see them everyday, as a kid you'd call them 'Mr. Smith' as an adult by their first name (no matter how old). In the US you don't tend to know your neighbors that well.

Robusto

17:42

Daily Octordle #1123
8️⃣🕚
7️⃣🔟
4️⃣9️⃣
6️⃣5️⃣
Score: 60

Daily Sequence Octordle #1123
3️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
Score: 59

Daily Extreme Octordle #1123
5️⃣🕛
7️⃣4️⃣
8️⃣🟥
9️⃣🔟
Score: 68

GratefulDisciple

18:10

@Mitch Yes, that's more precise "what we call the letter".

@jlliagre Wow, didn't realize it's more widespread than Dutch. Yet another aspect of my growing up story jumping (by plane) from East to West then fill in the blanks about nations in between, and backwards in time, to become a more complete citizen of Humanity.

@Laurel Here's an IPA(?) guide to call the letters in the Indonesian alphabet (current). Couldn't find one for the old spelling.

HippoSawrUs

@GratefulDisciple I thought I made up that term… I'm always too late and simple. But I like it.

Thanks for reminding me why I shouldn't cancel Prime yet.

GratefulDisciple

@HippoSawrUs I thought that's an established term. Maybe I should ask ELU for the proper term?

HippoSawrUs

@CowperKettle I meant to end quote, or paraphrase, after gondola (or whatever the action hero, I think, called it).

GratefulDisciple

18:26

@HippoSawrUs The World Book publisher call it Spinescape Binding but I like your term better.

HippoSawrUs

@GratefulDisciple Maybe it is. My best answers are always from a place of… 'What would I call it?' [Google, google…] 'Yep, that's what it's called, alright. [Posting, posting…] Then Edwin complains b/c it's GR or Post Lite, so I just delete it.

@GratefulDisciple Oh, that's interesting though.

I'm too old to create a Lexicon.

I'm just going to buy one.

Or my hubby will.

That's the cost of not being social, almost always.

I don't make the rules.

Oh, I'll tell him it's functional art.

That eats up social time.

I know, I'm like a genius, after the fact.

GratefulDisciple

18:42

@HippoSawrUs I post the question anyway, let's see how the community responds:

0

Q: What is the term for a type of binding that has a contiguous picture across multiple books in their spine?

The spine of multi-volume sets of books sometimes a panoramic picture when placed side by side in the bookshelf, such as this 2018 edition of World Book Encyclopedia: Another example for paperback books, for an edition of Harry Potter: What is the term that publishers or book binding companies ...

single-word-requests

HippoSawrUs

@GratefulDisciple My dad's World Book set was so textured, I had to clean the covers with a soft brush.

Many years later

GratefulDisciple

@HippoSawrUs We sometimes underestimate our potential. My wife is not afraid to invent new words which made us laugh; it's refreshing to hear.

HippoSawrUs

It was the best thing he ever bought us

MetaEd

@HippoSawrUs I remember that texture. The set I remember was fake leather texture, and I think it was dark blue

HippoSawrUs

@GratefulDisciple We are the original source, you know.

And he searched the world over for a yellow bike with floral banana seat and wicker basket, so…but you couldn't get the World Book at Sears. You had to wait for some weird guy to knock on your door, sell you a set, blow up your bathroom, and leave.

GratefulDisciple

18:51

@HippoSawrUs And that's how my mom got me a Time-Life book series. Loved the pictures. Thankfully the bathroom was intact.

HippoSawrUs

I would like to save $400 and buy the older set, but I want the aliens to know that we (aka they) re-elected Trump and that's why all the planes are in the ocean and the people transcended or raptured off somewhere.

See: raptured off. Phrasal verb. We can just say whatever really.

Usage is more fun than language, per se.

@GratefulDisciple I could only afford the Gunslingers and the Civil War volumns, but I was the most popular gal in the military-guy book swap group.

I really didn't want them to bend the binding or dent the corners, but they loved them more than I did.

Whatta ya gonna do? Time-Life was awesome.

My dad had a home repair set; keep it covered with a clean dish towel at all times. LOL.

@MetaEd Dark blue? Maybe you were relatively young and rich at the time and just didn't realize it.

All we could afford was Lexicon in the '80s.

Our family World Book was early '70s, with Childcraft set. Loved them so much.

Okay, I have to read all these NG History mags now. To justify myself. I could've got 20 years worth for free. But it just seemed like a bunch of half-naked ladies at the time. They threw them all in a wheelbarrow… :-(

HippoSawrUs

20:00

@GratefulDisciple SPINESCAPE® is registered. Huh, who knew. How does EL&U treat registered words? I guess it all Depend®s. Hahaha, I crack myself up…

Xanne

22:24

Strands #355
“"To infinity and beyond!"”
💡🔵🔵🔵
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🔵

Robusto

Misery

►

"Ukraine started the war." —Donald J. Trump

"If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine." —Me

By "Me" I mean a friend who just said it to me, but doesn't know the source. Stay tuned.

HippoSawrUs

23:06

@Robusto The face of advancing mental illness.

Why do people always wait till there's mass murder to say: You know, that guy never did look right in the face…

CowperKettle

Albert Einstein vs Stephen Hawking. Epic Rap Battles of History

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In three days' time, it will be exactly three years.

HippoSawrUs

23:26

I'm scrolling exclusively under Questions–Newest.

CowperKettle

> 🇰🇷 South Korea: 100%
🇸🇧 Solomon Islands: 99%
🇻🇳 Vietnam: 98%
🇴🇲 Oman: 96%
🇸🇾 Syria: 95%
🇸🇴 Somalia: 94%
🇮🇶 Iraq: 93%
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan: 92%
🇮🇱 Israel: 89%
🇮🇷 Iran: 88%
🇲🇾 Malaysia: 87%
🇳🇬 Nigeria: 87%
🇨🇳 China: 85%
🇹🇭 Thailand: 84%
🇦🇫 Afghanistan: 82%
🇿🇦 South Africa: 81%
🇯🇵 Japan: 73%
🇮🇹 Italy: 72%
🇹🇷 Turkey: 69%
🇪🇬 Egypt: 68%
🇮🇳 India: 61%
🇷🇺 Russia: 61%
🇧🇷 Brazil: 60%
🇨🇦 Canada: 59%
🇵🇰 Pakistan: 58%
🇬🇷 Greece: 55%
🇲🇽 Mexico: 48%
🇦🇺 Australia: 44%

Lactose intolerance, in % of adults

It's curious that 61% of Russia's citizens are intolerant to lactose

HippoSawrUs

I don't have time for semblances of life before 2015 and such.

CowperKettle

Was there life on Earth before 2015? Scientists still have no consensus on this.

HippoSawrUs

Wow, that seems high.

I drank a whole gallon of milk in one day before.

CowperKettle

Four liters?

HippoSawrUs

23:30

Ketoacidosis craving

Let me see…

1.89L x 2

So 3.78L

We don't buy gallons anymore

Empty nesters

CowperKettle

HippoSawrUs

23:48

I go outside and think I'm probably telepathic, years in advance, and everything will make sense later, for everybody involved without my ability. Then I go inside and just press touch-up on the dryer again. What could 10 more minutes possibly hurt?

Xanne

Wordle 1,343 4/6

⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Connections
Puzzle #621
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Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…