English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Sudhir

06:00

So you're native speaker of English?

David Wallace

Yes, I am.

So is Mahnax, by the way.

Sudhir

Great!!

I wonder beauty of this wonderful language.

David Wallace

Really? I find English one of the ugliest languages in the world.

Sudhir

No, its awesome.

Being a native speaker of Hindi, I always spend time in learning it.

David Wallace

All languages take time.

Sudhir

06:04

New Zealand is an awesome country.

David Wallace

Have you been here?

Sudhir

No

I've seen its beauty.

Such a cool country.

David Wallace

I would never leave

Sudhir

I know.

I think there won't be any problem related to job

population is less

David Wallace

Which means there are fewer jobs. There is quite a lot of unemployment here

Sudhir

06:10

Oh.

In my country there is same trend.

RegDwighт

09:51

???????? is it something else's answer. — Raghav 1 hour ago

This is hilarious.

It's a comment on

-3

A: Synonym for a specific usage of "after all"

replica Handbags – Style With A Classic Design Black handbags are certainly the most stylish and versatile chanel handbagss in the world today. They are very feasible handbags. Black handbags are today renowned for their most alluring designs and shapes throughout the world. They are very crispy...

And thank god someone posted this:

0

A: Should I refer to a person by his/ her name?

I would recommend to use like this - Hi : This is with respect to........

Becauise obviously @robusto's competing answer is so utterly useless.

tchrist

11:19

Gee, and you guys think ELU is harsh:

-12

Q: Perl Script to edit the contents

I have a text file whose contents are like this : NC_000001 CLC SNV 15820 15820 0 . . ID=CLC_1;Variant_seq=T;Reference_seq=G;Variant_reads=51;Total_reads=51;Variant_freq=100.0; NC_000001 CLC SNV 69270 69270 0 . . ID=CLC_2;Variant_seq=G;Reference_seq=A;Variant_reads=42;Tot...

perl

tchrist

12:10

RESOLVED: All questions with a view count of 1,000 or above should be Protected.

-1

A: Meaning of "makes no sense"

arguing about such thing makes no sense

-1

A: How does one correctly pronounce the letter 'H': "Aych" or "haych"?

There is no right or wrong answer, it depends on where your from and how your are brought-up etc...

english.stackexchange.com/a/109846/2085

Ok, maybe 100. Sheesh!

According to data from Xcel Energy and estimates from those familiar with indoor growing, a single light used to grow 16 square feet of pot consumes about half as much energy as the average Colorado house in a one-month time frame.

Far be it from them to actually use the sun to power their grass! Gosh.

> Mills writes in his study, published in April 2012 in Energy Policy, “indoor cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $6 billion each year — six times that of the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry — with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. homes.”

> Pot’s criminal status has led to “energy inefficiencies in the process,” he writes, as some growers keep their plants inside to hide from cops and use “noise and odor suppression measures that undercut ventilation efficiencies.” He also notes that off-grid generators that run on diesel or conventional fuel can be extremely inefficient.

It took them all article to get around to the obvious solution: use the sun, that’s what it’s there for.

Maybe Iceland could grow pot. They have a lot of sun during the summer, and geothermal heating, too.

Banana production in Iceland

Although Iceland is reliant upon fishing and aluminum production as the mainstays of its economy, there is also some banana production. However, this does not occur on a commercial scale, but was an experiment to show that water from the hot geysers could provide a localised climate sufficient for this. The BBC quiz programme QI claims that Iceland is the largest European banana producer. However, in 2010, the largest European banana producer by far was Spain (although most or all of the production is in the Canary Islands, which lie off the coast of Africa), followed by Portugal, Greece an...

Natural steam vents turn a what would otherwise be a bleak subarctic island into a land of bananas. Too many bananas, in fact.

> Farming town? In Iceland? Well, there were no amber waves of grain, but there were greenhouses that grew tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, among other delights. These were built over steam vents, harnessing the free energy to allow the propagation of these otherwise impossible crops. On the day we visited we saw a burning pile of bananas outside one of these greenhouses.

If they can grow nanas, they can grow pot.

MετάEd

12:31

@tchrist Classic. edit.ethz.ch/socio/education/fs12/envirsoc/merton_1936.pdf [PDF]

tchrist

> "Yes, yes," said my friend, making a connection. "That's the way it is here. The price of bananas has collapsed, so the farmers are burning them to create a shortage."

Yeah, that’s what pot growers say, too. :)

Lord it takes Safari forFMever to load PDF.

Robusto

@RegDwighт And it's interesting that my answer got a down vote exactly two minutes after Kris commented on the other answer. Coincidence?

tchrist

Co-winky-dinks, in fact.

@MετάEd Still can’t get to it. Hm.

Robusto

Why doesn't Kris just go ahead and down vote all my answers and get it over with. He never saw an answer of mine that he didn't want to punish, it seems.

tchrist

@Robusto Because he knows the revenge-daemon will have his ass if he does.

Nemesis will not be forestalled.

Robusto

12:36

So, @Kris ... explain to me please exactly why you downvoted this answer. — Robusto 46 secs ago

An answer from two years ago, ferchrissakes.

tchrist

Good luck with that.

Yeah, but you’re still net +8 on it today.

Robusto

I just want him to know that I know what he's doing.

MετάEd

@MετάEd I disagree that how one writes initialisms is somehow off-topic here. This is not “mere” typography. Go down that road and you’ll be saying that using hyphens for dashes and vice versa is off-topic, and that’s just wrong. — tchrist 20 hours ago

The question isn't how one writes initialisms. The question is whether to use the en-dash or the hyphen in one.

That's pure typography.

tchrist

So?

It’s English.

MετάEd

You're saying that, but I don't see it.

tchrist

12:38

Do I use a hyphen or a dash when I write red–green color-blind?

Tell me that is not English.

Other tongues have other laws.

MετάEd

@tchrist Okay, that is not English.

tchrist

Should I put a space before this : or before this ?

KitFox

@Mitch That's because it's still in rough draft form.

tchrist

If it were French, there are places where you do.

Because it is English, you do not.

Therefore, proper-vs-improper use of punctuation is certainly an English matter, don’t you think?

MετάEd

@tchrist That's still pure typography. The space, in or out, does absolutely nothing to the syntax or semantics of the text.

tchrist

12:40

It’s like the German, that post are always putting commas in wrong place.

Robusto

@tchrist Christianity never lived up to the St. Matthew Passion. If it had, my life might have been different.

MετάEd

But that's going too far afield. Write a sentence in which the meaning changes depending on whether you use an en-dash or a hyphen in an acronym.

tchrist

And Good Friday to you, too.

MετάEd

Because that's the question.

@tchrist As God famously said, "What's good about it?"

tchrist

I don’t think acronyms want any sort of \p{dash} punctuation in them myself.

MετάEd

12:42

@tchrist But that's not the question, is it.

tchrist

But if one admits them, then certainly can be a difference.

MετάEd

@tchrist So you say.

tchrist

There is a difference between a red–green color blindness and an hypothetical red-green color.

Dashes separate, hyphens join.

And that is certainly an English matter.

Do you disagree?

Anyway, it wasn’t I who reöpened that question, but our moderation team.

Perhaps you should take this to our Meta.

MετάEd

@tchrist I disagree until I have a sentence in front of me in which the meaning changes depending on whether you use an en-dash or a hyphen in an acronym.

For that matter, I don't see your point about red-green.

But I don't concede that they are equivalent. (dashes in acronyms, dashes in red-green)

Robusto

I think you're reading way too much into that line. I doubt few in the audience will give the grammatical issues of that statement a first thought, much less a second. — Robusto 14 secs ago

MετάEd

12:53

@Robusto People mostly see themselves in art.

If it made you laugh, great. If it made somebody else cry, great too.

Robusto

I'm just saying dangling modifiers in TV shows blow right past all but the most pedantic ears.

tchrist

@MετάEd IWLAL-BTWBGIB: “I would like a lady—boy, that would be great in bed!” “I would like a lady-boy that would be great in bed.”

:)

KitFox

You missed a couple of words there.

tchrist

And they say punctuation duzzint matter in writing!

@Kit This fellow has come back and edited his deleted answer. Is it worth undeleting?

english.stackexchange.com/a/109847/2085

Why are the North Koreans so belligerently sabre-addled, anyway? Is this one of those The Mouse That Roared moments?

KitFox

@tchrist No.

RegDwighт

13:02

@Robusto except it won't ping him because it's on an answer he hasn't commented on.

tchrist

@KitFox I didn’t think so, but I thought the question worth asking. I never know whether my knee-jerks are communally shared.

RegDwighт

If you want to let him know, you'll have to do so on the other answer.

MετάEd

@tchrist The word "reaching" doesn't even begin to cover that "example".

tchrist

@MετάEd Reaching around, maybe.

MετάEd

@tchrist You're still thinking about MLP porn, aren't you.

Robusto

13:07

@tchrist Because they're bat-shit crazy?

@RegDwighт Fuck him. And everybody who looks like him.

Matt Эллен

answering a question sure does work up an appetite

MετάEd

-2

Q: What is the difference between "Glossary" and "Terminology"?

I think they mean the same thing, but I can't figure it out

vocabulary

What's another word for thesaurus?

KitFox

feeds @Matt

Matt Эллен

omnomnomnomnomnom

Ima cook food. mmmm stir fry

tchrist

@MετάEd Treasurebook.

KitFox

13:11

I had an argument with the cute girl today. Damn it.

tchrist

@MετάEd The-lizard.

Matt Эллен

@KitFox damn it

Robusto

It's a talent to find humor where none was (probably) intended in the first place. :) — Kris 14 mins ago

So you're saying Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't intend the line to be humorous irrespective of the grammar? — Robusto 19 secs ago

KitFox

No, no, not the Lizard. You mean that show with the midget.

Matt Эллен

well, it will only bring you closer together in the long run, so long as it wasn't a really big argument of monumental proportions that will cause a generations long feud.

Robusto

13:12

Also—and let's get this on the record here—adding a smiley to a statement doesn't make it funny.

MετάEd

@KitFox No, no, not The Wizard of Oz. You're thinking of that newpaper cartoon.

tchrist

@KitFox The one with Khan?

@Robusto What, adding a laugh-track doesn’t make something funny?

Robusto

Exactly. Cf. The Big Bang Theory.

KitFox

No. The Wizard. From the eighties. With the midget who was Willow.

tchrist

@KitFox Oh him. Yes, he is a tiny man.

KitFox

13:14

@MετάEd No, no, not The Wizard of Id. You're thinking of things you shouldn't run with.

(It's a bit of a stretch.)

Robusto

@KitFox Warwick Davis

RegDwighт

@Mitch people keep telling me that about olives. It takes one hundred to acquire the taste, blah blah. Screw them. I keep eating hundreds of olives upon hundreds, and they still taste like garbage. The only way to acquire taste for olives is to lose the sense of taste. At which point you might as well eat actual garbage rather than wasting a fortune on olives.

KitFox

@Robusto Yes, thanks.

Robusto

He was also in Life's Too Short, the Ricky Gervais show.

tchrist

@Robusto Noted.

Robusto

13:15

@tchrist That's Ricardo Montalban and Hervez Villechaise (sp?).

tchrist

Ayup.

@RegDwighт The American ones fast-processed with caustic-to-the-point-of-corrosive lye taste of nothing at all, I assure you.

KitFox

I just like them for the brine.

Robusto

Interesting story about Villechaise. When he wanted to renegotiate his contract, Aaron Spelling called him in for a meeting about it. When Villechaise arrived, the lobby was full of white-suited midgets chanting "Da plane, boss! Da plane!" And that was the end of the matter.

RegDwighт

@Robusto you wouldn't believe how many people on Reddit are convinced, to this day, that it's recorded live in front of actual audience.

tchrist

@KitFox I actually drink that particular brine, or try hard to otherwise use it. The ones from the American black olives. It is catching.

Robusto

13:17

@RegDwighт And yet there are still those who would argue that the zombie apocalypse hasn't arrived yet.

KitFox

That would explain my desire for brains.

RegDwighт

It also boggles the mind how many of them think that that chubby girl is the sexiest being alive.

KitFox

Did you know that the human brain is approximately the same consistency as olives?

@RegDwighт What chubby girl?

RegDwighт

Penny.

KitFox

She's chubby?

tchrist

13:19

What’s that funny American salad-mo(u)ld with lime jello and avocado and mayo and cucumber and shredded carrots and black olives called?

Robusto

@RegDwighт Don't even get me started on TBBT. I hate that show so much, and not because it merely sucks or because I have any particular nerd axe to grind.

@KitFox She's about as attractive as the average waitress at Denny's.

tchrist

@Robusto What, just spare animus to spread around?

MετάEd

@KitFox No, no, not a plasma sword?

RegDwighт

@KitFox chubby arms, short legs, on which she can never stand straight, and a face that's a dime a dozen.

tchrist

@RegDwighт Okie.

As in Where the wind comes rollin’ down the plain.

KitFox

13:20

@MετάEd I was thinking scissors. Scissors, wizard. Look, I'm still sick.

RegDwighт

The only mildly interesting character on that show is, of course, Sheldon, but they've been milking it for too long. They have no choice but overdo it.

MετάEd

@KitFox You're thinking of a collection of weird illusions.

Robusto

@tchrist What else does one do with spare animus?

MετάEd

@Robusto Rotate it in every few months.

tchrist

Welcome to the Blue Channel!

Robusto

13:22

@RegDwighт It's the same show over and over and over. I think they have a madlibs notebook as a script template.

@MετάEd Yes. That way it wears evenly.

MετάEd

@Robusto Exactly. You wouldn't want bald spots on your animus.

tchrist

@RegDwighт What other hit prime-time series has for their lead character a stereotypical gay Texan?

KitFox

@MετάEd Yes, master. gapes at wall

RegDwighт

Who's gay now? I haven't watched the last three seasons. Only zapped into an occasional episode that sucked.

tchrist

Jim Parsons, actually. From Houston. Like Sheldon.

RegDwighт

13:25

Ah the actor?

KitFox

I like The Big Bang Theory.

tchrist

Yes, the actor.

RegDwighт

I've been wondering that.

tchrist

Nothing to wonder about.

KitFox

I think it's cute, the way dumb people try to make smart people look funny and interesting.

RegDwighт

13:25

I'm no close friends with Jim Parsons so I had no choice but wonder.

MετάEd

We are big BBT fans at home.

RegDwighт

@KitFox the dumb people being the screenwriters?

KitFox

@RegDwighт Yeah.

RegDwighт

I see.

KitFox

And most of the people who watch it.

tchrist

13:26

Did you know he’s over 40? He must drink the blood of newborns or something.

KitFox

So they can feel like since they get the jokes, they must be geeky smart too.

tchrist

> In May 2012, The New York Times reported that Parsons is gay and at the time had been in a relationship for the last ten years.

From Whippi paedia.

RegDwighт

@tchrist the last time I zapped in, they all looked like forty-somethings.

KitFox

Still, it makes me laugh. And I think most of the girls are cute.

RegDwighт

And many of them are forty-somethings. That Lennard guy was already a teenager in Roseanne.

KitFox

13:27

And the little runty guy has hair like my husband's.

Yeah, Leonard. That guy.

Robusto

Someone other than myself has problems with The Big Bang Theory.

tchrist

Did you know that the chick who plays Amy Farrah Fowler actually does hold a PhD in neuroscience?

RegDwighт

@KitFox Bah. The only other show in which every single female character drives me up the wall is Dexter.

tchrist

Mayim Bialik

Mayim Hoya Bialik (; born December 12, 1975) is an American actress widely known for her roles as Blossom Russo on NBC's Blossom (1990–1995), and currently as Amy Farrah Fowler on CBS's The Big Bang Theory, for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Early life and education Bialik was born in San Diego, California, the daughter of Barry Bialik and Beverly (Winkelman). Her grandparents emigrated from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the late 1930s. Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel's na...

Robusto

> There’s a saying which made its rounds in geekdom recently – “Real nerds watch Community”. Now I take issue with the idea of “real nerds” but the sentiment still stands. Whereas The Big Bang Theory sees nerd culture as an object of ridicule, Community celebrates it.

@RegDwighт Every other "regular" character on the show drives me up a wall. But Deb is particularly awful. She has two gears in acting: disapproval and hysteria.

KitFox

13:31

Maybe I shouldn't watch that one then.

My brother recommended it to me.

RegDwighт

@tchrist big deal. Dolph Lundgren holds a degree in chemical engineering. That doesn't instafix his output as an actor.

KitFox

I don't watch TV much, so maybe that's why I'm not so opinionated about TBBT.

tchrist

@RegDwighт Didn’t mean to say it did. Just seems surprising.

KitFox

I think I've seen maybe twelve episodes.

@tchrist Why is that surprising?

tchrist

@KitFox That someone gets a PhD and then decides to do something more interesting. Ok, maybe not.

RegDwighт

13:33

@Robusto right on. Particularly noticeable throughout the John Lithgow season.

Robusto

@RegDwighт Yeah. Especially because Lithgow is such a fine actor himself.

RegDwighт

She couldn't spend a single scene without breaking into tears.

tchrist

@Robusto Never heard of it. But Wikipedia says it’s another comedy set in a fictional Colorado town. What, South Park wasn’t enough?

Robusto

@tchrist You've never heard of Community? It's one of the most brilliant satires on America ever to hit TV.

RegDwighт

They stopped airing it here, BTW.

I sure hope they will resume.

KitFox

13:35

@tchrist Hey, she and I went to school at the same time. I wonder which program she was in. I probably saw her posters at the annual neuro conference.

tchrist

@Robusto But I’ve never had TV.

Robusto

Then you are missing much, my friend. TV has emerged as an art form in the past decade or so.

Took a long time, but it finally got there.

RegDwighт

Only in the US.

Robusto

@tchrist "But you are aware there's this thing called televison, and on television they show shows, right?"

KitFox

hee hee

tchrist

13:37

@Robusto Bisdelieves

Robusto

Also, how do you know about TBBT if you are unaware of TV?

Well, I guess that could be explained by the fact that TBBT isn't really TV.

RegDwighт

He reads the comics.

tchrist

@Robusto Somebody sent me a disc. Not kidding.

RegDwighт

Someone wants to kill you?

Robusto

@tchrist I'm going to have to say you need to have your eyes opened then. Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad — these are all complex works of art deserving of serious attention.

tchrist

13:39

They were European. Out of retaliation range.

RegDwighт

My English-fu is not strong enough for The Wire. Or whatever language they are speaking.

tchrist

Is it in dialect?

RegDwighт

I honestly can't tell.

Perhaps Martian.

tchrist

Thieves Cant.

RegDwighт

I only understand "motherfucker". On the plus side, that's every other word. So I can still kind of follow along.

tchrist

13:41

More mafiosi?

Robusto

@RegDwighт I can see where it would be difficult. Urban black dialect is even hard for me to parse without latency.

tchrist

Oh, it’s an urban black show?

I have no idea. Honest. Just asking.

RegDwighт

Yeah we talked about The Wire on a couple occasions.

Robusto

@tchrist It deals with all strata of Baltimore, so that includes urban blacks.

tchrist

Can non-urbans and non-blacks still identify with it?

> The show's female lead, the lovely Penny, doesn't even have a last name, for God's sake.

Robusto

13:43

@tchrist And what did you play it on? Your computer?

tchrist

Ouch.

@Robusto Sure.

But I have an old analogue TV from many decades ago I can plug it into with a player.

It doesn’t receive anything, of course.

I should really be going to be diddling around with the Indians only now.

RegDwighт

Is NTSC even still alive?

tchrist

Isn’t that what they still use?

RegDwighт

That's my question.

tchrist

I cannot tell from the WP article one way or the other.

> systems using the NTSC framerate and resolution (such as DVDs) are still referred to informally as "NTSC". NTSC baseband video signals are also still often used in video playback (typically of recordings from existing libraries using existing equipment) and in CCTV and surveillance video systems.

RegDwighт

13:46

The last time I heard about NTSC was in the SNES days. Or Famicom, as it was called in its NTSC version.

KitFox

I have a TV for Netflix and video games.

tchrist

> The NTSC standard has been adopted by other countries, including most of the Americas and Japan. With the advent of digital television, analog broadcasts are being phased out. Most U.S. NTSC broadcasters were required by the FCC to shut down their analog transmitters in 2009. Low-power stations, Class A stations and translators were not immediately affected. An analog cut-off date for those stations was not set.

I just know that I cannot get any analogue signals, because there are not any anymore.

RegDwighт

Yeah I heard the brouhaha all the way to this side of the pond.

tchrist

But apparently DVDs still use that same frame rate.

RegDwighт

Okay. Next question: do DVDs still exist?

tchrist

13:48

29.97 interlaced frames per second.

@RegDwighт Lotsa them in the inconvenience stores.

Robusto

@RegDwighт Yes. I still have them. But I've switched to Blu-Ray for stuff I want to keep and streaming for everything else.

tchrist

> There is a large difference in frame rate between film, which runs at approximately 24.0 frames per second, and the NTSC standard, which runs at approximately 29.97 frames per second. Unlike the 576i video formats, this difference cannot be overcome by a simple speed-up. A complex process called "3:2 pulldown" is used.

Robusto

@tchrist We usually called it "drop-frame" when I was in advertising.

tchrist

Drop and down do seem related.

RegDwighт

I only have a couple CDs, most of which I got for free from friends disbanding their collections, and even fewer DVDs.

And I wonder, what will they feed us as the successor to the MP3 format, now that everyone's stocked up on MP3s?

tchrist

13:51

You have MP3? Really? I only have OGG myself.

RegDwighт

Don't give them ideas. They'll find ways to package and sell OGGs.

You have a multibillion-dollar industry whose business model has been, for decades, to sell us the exact same stuff in different formats over and over and over again.

tchrist

$  find ~/Music/ -type f | grep -i '\.ogg$' | perl -nle '$s += -s; END { print $s }'
67652061045

$ find ~/Music/ -type f | grep -i '\.mp3$' | perl -nle '$s += -s; END { print $s }'
8553833789

Robusto

@tchrist I would have figured you for FLAC, but OGG makes sense.

tchrist

Ok, guess I was wrong.

But it’s still an order of magnitude different.

Robusto

@RegDwighт There's even an American word for that: Disney.

tchrist

13:55

I can’t read all those digits.

pokey(tchrist)% find ~/Music/ -type f | grep -i '\.mp3$' | perl -nle '$s += -s; END { print $s }'  | commify_numbers
8,553,833,789
pokey(tchrist)% find ~/Music/ -type f | grep -i '\.ogg$' | perl -nle '$s += -s; END { print $s }' | commify_numbers
67,652,061,045

Much better.

RegDwighт

@Robusto nah, that is the rare example of the model failing.

Robusto

I simply do not believe you have 67 billion tracks.

tchrist

Eh?

Read again.

RegDwighт

Yeah I avoided that question to not seem dumb. Thank you, Rob, for seeming dumb in my stead.

tchrist

-s($file) is the inode’s st_size field, which is an off_t.

RegDwighт

13:57

Gesundheit.

This is not TBBT. Speak English.

Robusto

Oh, OK. 67 gigs of OGG, 8 gigs of mp3.

tchrist

Just think of it as stat($file)->st_size.

RegDwighт

That's a lot of Bach.

KitFox

I just hooked up my MiL's boyfriend's VCR the other day.

So we could watch The Lion King on the big screen.

Robusto

@KitFox Are you trying to be the female Jasper?

tchrist

13:58

pokey(tchrist)% find ~/Music/Genres/Serious/Johan\ Sebastian\ Bach/ -type f |  perl -nle '$s += -s; END { print $s }' | commify_numbers
        16,263,299,330

KitFox

@Robusto No, I was making coffee.

Robusto

It is an open position around here.

RegDwighт

"My MiL's boyfriend's VCR" sounds like a new Naughty America franchise.

tchrist

Is it?

Only 16 gigs.

RegDwighт

Except one F is missing.

KitFox

13:59

Ick. Ick. Ick.

MετάEd

@KitFox Dead fish?

Robusto

@RegDwighт It ought to be a Chuck Lorre show.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…