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 Discussion on question by Bruno: "cut…

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FumbleFingers
Thu 14:57
I’m voting to close this question because it's asking us to assign a definitive meaning to an element within a poem (apparently, a translated poem, at that! :)
 

 Discussion on question by rosstex: Is…

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FumbleFingers
Thu 03:05
@ermanen: So far as I know, everyone in the Anglosphere has access to the AI linked to Google searches. When I search for is florid a compliment, before the actual results the AI says No, "florid" is generally not considered a compliment when describing someone's writing or speech, as it means excessively ornate or flowery, implying that the language is overly elaborate and potentially unnecessary, making it more of a criticism than praise. Being AI-generated, it'll be slightly different each time, but the question will always be meaningfully answered. And ELU isn't a dictionary!
FumbleFingers
Thu 03:05
Full OED definition 1.a. 1656–67 Blooming with flowers; abounding in or covered with flowers; flowery. Obsolete. Definition 2 (figurative) Profusely adorned as with flowers; elaborately or luxuriantly ornate. Often in somewhat disparaging sense: Excessively ornate. ... Definition 6 1656– Flourishing, lively, vigorous; in the bloom of health. Now rare.
 

 Discussion on answer by FumbleFingers…

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FumbleFingers
Dec 27, 2024 17:34
@DjinTonic: "helicopter" there is an "adjective of type" (the type of pilot associated with the noun "helicopter"). As opposed to an "adjective of quality", such as "qualified" or "experienced" (using what are usually called "past participles" as adjectives). But it's all just terminology and analytical frameworks - the actual subject matter (intimately familiar to confident native speakers) is unaffected by the labels.
FumbleFingers
Dec 27, 2024 17:34
@DjinTonic: Speak for yourself. It doesn't upend anything for me to call a word used as an adjective an adjective, even if that same word (sound, string of character, whatever) can be used as a noun or a verb in other contexts (where I would call it a noun or a verb). But I weary of pedantry, and refer you back to my point that linguists and grammarians were completely unable to provide programmers with an accurate enough description of English to allow computers to reliably handle natural language. I have yet to see chatgpt come out with an idiomatically unacceptable construction.
FumbleFingers
Dec 27, 2024 17:34
@tchrist: I did actually search Google Books for the possibility of a wildcard card, but apparently no-one has gone that far in print. So far as I'm concerned, though, any such usage would be pretty much on a par with a PIN number. Whatever - "noun, adjective, modifier,..." are all just labels for classifications that attempt to describe how we can break down the elements that make up utterances. They're not really worth arguing too much about - a label is either useful or not, depending on the exact context.
FumbleFingers
Dec 27, 2024 17:34
In support of my position, look at how many decades were wasted trying to program computers to understand and generate "natural language" before we had sufficient compute to tackle the problem using neural nets. Natural language doesn't actually have a "fixed" set of categories that can be fully covered by rules. For most purposes here on ELU, terms like noun, verb, adjective, adverb are more useful than "modifier". But either way, any such labels apply to instances of use, not the characters in the "word" itself.
FumbleFingers
Dec 27, 2024 17:34
I reject that criticism. The cited usage is as an adjective, and I don't accept that the eight characters in the text string "wildcard" should be labeled as a noun. That's the whole point of me giving an example showing those same eight characters being used as a verb. If you fundamentally disagree then by all means downvote the answer. I'm not gonna change my mind, no matter what anyone says.
 

 Discussion on question by Omega: How …

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FumbleFingers
Nov 29, 2024 16:30
I addressed what you're calling the "real" question with the first sentence of my first comment - Is it smooth or does it have whole fruits / pieces / bits in it? All else was an attempt to get more precise details of your exact context.
FumbleFingers
Nov 29, 2024 16:30
Omega: I never mentioned "advertising". I simply said that just as a picture on a packet of breakfast cereal might include "garnish" that wasn't actually included in the product as sold, similar "embellishment" could occur in a restaurant. As commented elsewhere, you only normally get pictures on menus in fairly downmarket eateries such as burger bars, were I've often been sold something that falls woefully below expectations when compared to the picture on the menu, And imho a bit of chopped fruit could well be seen as "optional garnish" on cream crepes at a beach cafe.
FumbleFingers
Nov 29, 2024 16:30
A packet of breakfast cereal might feature a picture of it in a bowl with berries or chopped pieces of fresh fruit sprinkled on top (especially, muesli). Obviously nobody ever expected that fruit topping to be in the packet, but eventually trading standards bodies got involved, so in the UK today they always have to put a disclaimer by the picture: Serving suggestion. Maybe from OP's restaurant's perspective, the menu pic just happened to show a bit of "optional fresh fruit garnish" that they didn't have to hand on that day.
FumbleFingers
Nov 29, 2024 16:30
Is it smooth or does it have whole fruits / pieces / bits in it? Where orange juice with bits in it is a fairly well established usage - but that's really a drink, not "food" (nor even an essentially liquid "dessert", if consumed using a spoon).
 

 Discussion on question by Wish Play: …

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FumbleFingers
Nov 10, 2024 15:29
It's being capable of finding the right tag, not to find. You could put stress on the negated and non-negated can's to emphasize the difference with something like You can't do that, but I can. But you don't really want to be speaking like that to the boss (it sounds more than a bit presumptuous to me). Besides, the actual contrast is really between the people, not the ability, so it's probably more natural to stress the pronouns: You can't do that, but I can.
 

 Discussion on question by Dan: Are sp…

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FumbleFingers
Nov 9, 2024 16:25
Who cares what any one person "hears" when reading effectively "contextless" text (where we can't even be sure whoever wrote it knew exactly what he was doing when he chose whether and where to put an apostrophe? If you want to be unambiguous, choose different phrasing
FumbleFingers
Nov 9, 2024 16:25
Whatever the intent was, the reality is it's a dead end exploring the limits of natural language - it's not like refining to the nth degree how exactly the most obscure construction in a computer language should be implemented by the compiler (where we require precision, and can't tolerate ambiguity). English just doesn't have the flexibility to handle certain situations unambiguously using the kind of shorthand syntax that works 99.99% of the time. And it ain't worth bothering for that 0.01% case - just use far more words until you've made the meaning clear.
FumbleFingers
Nov 9, 2024 16:25
Anyway, I refer both of you guys to this comment thread re "pathological" cases..
FumbleFingers
Nov 9, 2024 16:25
@Barmar: I know we're on ELU, not ELL (and it's a well-posed question, Dan). But I think "1960's chart listings were radically different to 1950's" is just a clunky way of saying "The chart listings of 1960 were radically different to those of 1950". And let's not forget - in speech, you couldn't tell those apostrophes were there anyway, so the meaning might have been "The chart listings of the 1960s [decade] were radically different to those of the 1950s".
FumbleFingers
Nov 9, 2024 16:25
Don't use the possessive / Saxon genitive to reference 1960's music (or 1960s' music). The word 1960s is a plural noun adjunct, as with the singular noun adjunct jazz music ("jazz" being a type of music - a noun, not an adjective).
 

 Discussion on question by Ariel Casso…

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FumbleFingers
Sep 26, 2024 01:30
Do you mean when a person who normally speaks "standard" English says something like "We wuz robbed!" (in relation to, for example, his favourite football team being beaten)? I might call that "inverted (linguistic) snobbery". Standard "inverted snobbery" refers to claiming to despise wealth & social status, and actively endorsing things associated with lack of the same, so "inverted linguistic snobbery" would imply making a virtue out of "incorrect / dialectal / substandard" speech patterns.
 

 Discussion on question by Nawal Allu …

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FumbleFingers
Aug 23, 2024 19:27
Wherever the question came from, it looks highly "domain-specific" to me. The obvious "transformation" from "assertive" to "interrogative" starting with X is true gives Is X true? But since your list of options doesn't include the possibility of choosing Is Vijaya the new English professor? it seems clear to me that only people who've been specifically schooled to answer such a bizarre question would naturally make sense of it.
FumbleFingers
Aug 23, 2024 19:27
I’m voting to close this question because it looks like homework
 

 Discussion on answer by Michael Harve…

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FumbleFingers
Aug 8, 2024 02:26
@Eric: Maybe Indians aren't very informed about political history (most people aren't, imho), but they're surprisingly knowledgeable about the linguistic "history of English" - which is particularly relevant to a site devoted to learning English. The overuse of continuous English verb forms is a bit of an aberration (under the influence of Hindi, I'm pretty sure). But in many cases where IE deviates from "mainstream" English, it's because IE has retained features from Victorian English that have been discarded from the mainstream.
FumbleFingers
Aug 8, 2024 02:26
I'm a bit crestfallen to see that in 8 years, my answer about this same "Indian English" usage hasn't attracted a single vote up or down. I can't find the scripts for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Ain%27t_Half_Hot_Mum (70s UK sitcom) online, but I'm sure they'd contain a lot of lines from Rangi Ram (Michael Bates playing the Indian "bearer, punka walla") starting with I am having... rather than I have...
 

 Discussion on question by Řídící: How…

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FumbleFingers
Jul 16, 2024 19:02
@Mitch: It's Off Topic because we already have a way of pronouncing the name of that country in English, using English phonemes. Introducing non-English phonemes to satisfy the socio-political aspirations of non-Anglophone parties is just daft.
FumbleFingers
Jul 16, 2024 19:02
@Barmar: To be fair, the English-speaking peoples surely have a right to define their own language. Undeniably, the umlaut Ü is not an English letter, so it has no place in our orthography, and almost certainly the way Turks might pronounce it will involve phonemes that don't exist in English. Hence the entire question is Off Topic "Not about English".
 

 Discussion on question by Salim uddin…

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FumbleFingers
Jul 10, 2024 17:13
English always has alternatives. I know your need could carry the same "multifaceted" functionality just by turning you into your
FumbleFingers
Jul 10, 2024 17:13
@tchrist: I'd like to vtc for "lack of research" because it's well covered by Wikipedia, but that's not dictionaries. Is there an approved route for my vtc, or should I not be trying to close it anyway? It doesn't look like an ELL question to me. Is it a question for SO Linguistics?
 

 Discussion on question by AdjunctProf…

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FumbleFingers
Jun 27, 2024 21:32
...consider Capriccio Italien is a piece by Tchaikovsky in Italy. It's not easy to see how the last two words relate to the subject. Perhaps the only copy of the score is kept in a Milan opera house? Or it's only ever performed in Italy!
FumbleFingers
Jun 27, 2024 21:32
Your question title is misleading. There's no problem about discarding the "active" verb if you've only got an "adjectival" element such as [a painting] by Hodler It only becomes an issue if you've also got an "adverbial" element such as in 1896 or in Italy..
FumbleFingers
Jun 27, 2024 21:32
oic. In that case I guess the short answer is it's (probably) "ungrammatical" to have TO BE as the only verb that could possibly be referenced by adverbial in 1896. So This painting is by Hodler in 1896 is at least in principle syntactically invalid. But I wouldn't waste time trying to decide whether you can get away with not including an "active" verb. Just include one, and you won't have anything to worry about.
FumbleFingers
Jun 27, 2024 21:32
It can't possibly be "grammatically incorrect" to include a verb such as made, produced, painted before by [artist's name]. There's no syntactic or semantic error in, say, This painting was painted by Hockney. It's just a matter of idiomacy. Lots of forms are perfectly grammatical, just rarely or never actually used.
 

 Discussion on question by Aristocrati…

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FumbleFingers
Jun 26, 2024 16:42
@tchrist: Apparently I'm not the most "reductionist" speaker on the planet! The longest one-syllable word in English is squirrelled. Described and spelt in British English, but the one-syllable enunciation itself (skworld) is American!
FumbleFingers
Jun 26, 2024 16:42
@tchrist: That's RAHZbries, not RAWZbries! I've never understood why anyone would have trouble articulating the consonant sequence sk, so AAVE ax = ask makes no sense to me. But an awful lot of Brits avoid the dn sequence (inflicted on us by Wodin), so Wednesday becomes Wensdy. Who needs all those extra sounds?
FumbleFingers
Jun 26, 2024 16:42
@tchrist: perimeter and barometer (and probably many other words of the same basic form) would almost always be 3 syllables to me (I delete the first vowel altogether). I find it hard to believe you don't hear that in your area.
 

 Discussion between Paul Tanenbaum and…

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FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:57
...Bizarrely, I become relatively conversationally fluent after spending less than a fortnight in a monastery where the monks weren't supposed to engage in idle chit-chat! Apparently, talking to a foreigner didn't count. Whatever - I see so many questions here that have "unignorable" shortcomings in syntax, vocabulary, or idiomacy, yet they ask "which is correct" about alternatives that all seem fine to me.
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:56
I'd been studying French for years before I ended up at Caen (Normandy, France) uni for a year as part of my degree course. It quickly became obvious to me that I might as well have been a deaf mute for all the difference it would have made in verbal interactions with Francophones (except most of them were French students who were only interested in practicing their English with me! :)...
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:38
It's the same as when a learner asks about the difference between two or more words. People feel compelled to find the tiniest nuance of difference (spurious or not), when so often it's not that important.
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:38
I just think we need to be careful about "correct / incorrect" in the context of learners. There are just so many contexts where in practice it really doesn't matter which of two or more alternatives you use, but questions like this often virtually force many native speakers to endorse just one version. Even though if they were in casual conversation with another native speaker, they wouldn't think anything of it if they heard one of the alternatives. And imho, that's the level most learners should aspire to reach (not the level that gets marks from pedantic examiners).
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:38
Absolutely! I might interpret "non-standard" different to you (I might think it's just "less common", you might think it's "less correct").
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:38
Just out of interest, would you still say the same if it had started This morning I bought a new laptop... ??? How long ago does the purchase have to be before you accept Present rather than Past Perfect for the preceding process of saving? What if the speaker is just leaving the shop? I just bought a new laptop...
FumbleFingers
May 26, 2024 19:38
I am! And I disagree with the pedantic "not considered correct grammar", as you probably expected! In the OP's specific example #2, I have no objection to Present Perfect being used by even the most careful speaker, to add "immediacy" to the fact that the saving up extends from way in the past, to only just yesterday. It's a context-specific way of being "emphatic" (to non-pedants! :)
 

 Discussion on question by Kagetsuki: …

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FumbleFingers
May 17, 2024 15:16
Maybe in whatever language you're translating from, people are accustomed to seeing symbols mixed in with text, but Anglophones don't do this much. Under normal circumstances I'd suppose a heart meant something to do with "love", but I confess I have no idea what the two symbols in your example text are supposed to mean. I'd just remove them as a pointless distraction, quite apart from your formatting problems.
FumbleFingers
May 17, 2024 15:16
♡ and ☆ aren't part of written English, so you shouldn't expect to be able to incorporate them as if they were. I don't think this question is really about "the English language" at all.
FumbleFingers
May 17, 2024 15:16
Question marks and exclamation marks are "symbols", and they've always served to "replace" full stops / periods. And I personally find it very annoying if when I "cut & paste" a command to enter into my Linux terminal, I accidentally copy a period that some misguided "proofreader" has added to a bit of text online. But punctuation is for representing true natural language, not "dingbatty" text with symbols. I'd solve the problem by discarding the symbols, not the periods.
 

 Discussion on question by Han: Consti…

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FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
@YosefBaskin: I'm sure you're right. Personally, I've no idea what "the substitution test" means here, but I rather suspect the OP has no idea that although "the radio" and "it" might appear to be equivalent as references to "the object being turned down", they certainly aren't interchangeable with "The radio is too loud - please turn it down". Where "It's too loud - please turn down the radio", is of course also fine.
FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
Well, I have no idea what the OP will make of all this. Nor am I convinced that the label "phrasal verb" is useful here. But I'm sure that even though it doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the comments, there's an additional constraint on "phrasal verbs / verb+preposition idioms" in that if we substitute a pronoun for the object, only the BrE-favoured format works - always "Turn it down!", never "Turn down it" (unless "it" is a side road! :)
FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
@BillJ: At one level, "turn down the radio" consists of three constituents: "turn + down + the radio" is "valid". But "turn" + "down" are two very closely connected elements that in many ways function collectively the same as single-word verbs such as mute, silence, muffle,... It's possible to put an object between the verb and the preposition if and only if those two words have that special "tight connection". Which is obvious and natural to us as native Anglophones, but it may be counter-intuitive to nns that you can only "break" the pair when they are a pair!
FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
@Lambie: You don't like to give an inch, do you? It's obvious from the way OP has isolated "down the radio" as a "syntactic component" that he doesn't understand the relevant syntactic constraints concerning phrasal verbs. Whatever - I'm not trying to teach you anything!
FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
...but that's hardly important anyway. My primary point was that you can put the object in either position when it's a "phrasal verb", but you can't do that if you're just turning down a side road (to "turn a side road down" is nonsense). It's essential that learners understand this distinction.
FumbleFingers
Apr 6, 2024 09:48
@Lambie: There's a US/UK usage split that I wasn't aware of before. Per this chart, turned the TV down is now (slightly) more common in BrE than turned the TV down. But as this chart shows, the preference in AmE is very different.