Airymouse

@DanWhite I think "Canola" is just to assuage the sensibilities of the consumer. It's still called rapeseed oil on the commodity exchanges. The common names of many fishes have been changed for the same reason. For example the Patagonian toothfish shows up on menus as Chilean sea bass.

We borrow the a to put in" rigmarole." And if you want to fuss about pronouncing candies, I recommend "nougat." I tried out the Oxford Online Dictionary pronunciations on my wife. She mistook the US pronunciation for "nugget" and was was baffled by the British pronunciation. (We use the US pronunciation as given by the Cambridge Online Dictionary.)

I'm in the wrong room, but I'm trying to keep from getting my comments moved down here by a moderator. Your comments about 1/7 hold for any fraction of the form 1/(p-1). where p is an odd prime whose decimal representation repeats in exactly p-1 steps (1/7 =142857...) The next such prime is 17 (1/17 = .0588235294117647...) Once you know the first p-1 digits, the rest just add to 9 (e.g. for 1/7 1+8; 4+5; 2+7 so from 142 you get 857. It is unknown if there are infinitely many such primes.

@deadrat I didn't get your joke, but I am impressed that you can figure you that for me the West Virginia state line is about a forty-five minute drive away..

@deadrat I do not believe Bless your heart is an imperative. I think you are wishing for God to bless. Similarly, "God damn it" expresses a wish for God to damn it, not a command to God to damn it.

There was an art teacher teaching calligraphy, who had her students draw some Arabic calligraphy that turned out to mean something religious, like God is great. She got in trouble for that, and the sentence at hand has a great deal of religion in it. I'm not saying it's sensible to teach art or English without ever mentioning the world's great religions. But a secular sentence would be safer.

@John Lawler My previous comment was addressed to you, not DJClayworth, with whom I quite agree.

I wandered over from Math Stack, and it's obvious I'm in over my head. I've taught mathematics, but never English. Still I'm tempted to say to you, "Well bless your heart." This is a Southern saying, which translates in Modern English as "I don't believe you, but I'm from the South, so I'm too polite to say so." Isn't "bless" in the subjunctive? Surely, I'm not ordering God to bless you, and I would expect the indicative to be "Well God blesses your heart."

@Fumble Fingers I grant you that what I would call the subjunctive of indefinite future is dated, maybe even obsolete, but I think it will stay in the sentence, because it is needed for the rhyme. Also any choir director will tell you that it is hard to get a final s sound in sync. So the person in charge is likely to prefer "appear."

In both cases I pronounce the two spellings differently. I doubt that accompanyist is a reformulation of accompanist. My guess is that accompanist came later. It's spelled accompanyist in Oliver Twist and I don't know of a major author who used the word before Dickens. But all my musician friends insist on accompanist. As for mischevious, I think that IS a misspelling.

@sumelic I believe stanch and staunch are two different spellings of the same word, as are accompanist and accompanyist. But I feel bullied by people who want stanch for the verb and staunch for the adjective - I don't know what they want for the noun- and who insist that accompanyist is a misspelling. Try typing accompanyist in a comment and see if it gets red-lined. I'd like to know if others agree and if they know other dual spellings that are picked on. But I know the closers would pounce.

@sumelic My impression is that at Math stack, if you're not allowed to comment, you can pose the comment as a question provided that your question does not require clarification from the previous questioner.

@sumelic Back in the days of yore we took an SAT exam, call verbals. It dealt with vocabulary, reading comprehension and some grammar. Lucky I, it skipped punctuation. There have been several posts about ACT questions, some of which struck me as debatable.It seems I have a simple rule: If I get it wrong, it's a bad question.

@sumelic Now that I've seen a few questions from the ACT exam, I see why everyone is captious (nit picking we call it.) I don't suppose there's any way to know how Mark Twain or William Faulkner would have fared, but if you think Dickens would have passed, just read the first sentence of "A Tale of Two Cities." The only punctuation mark ACT would have liked was the period.

@Luc Wyn If you read one or two pages from Chapter 1 of press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7576.pdf you will get a feel for what Walpole had in mind when he coined the word. Serendipity began as incredible, unbelievable good fortune and has devolved to mere good luck. Fortuitous began as "by chance" and has become" having good fortune." Over time the meanings have converged.

I think there should be a room for questions that have been put on hold. For example, Luc Wyn asked for the meaning of "serendipity" and was told that he could have googled the answer. Here's what I would have said:

I got away with this subterfuge, but I felt I was just lucky to have escaped punishment. By the way, I knew a teacher of something-or-other who believed that "rule of thumb" derived from an, alas now defunct, English law that allowed a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Rivals "pretzel" I think.

From Math stack:This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker. - From Review – naslundx Does this rule of thumb apply here? A few days ago, I wanted to comment on a question about the propriety of embedding a complete sentence in a sentence, so I asked a question about a sentence with a double dash, in which I had embedded a sentence.

@sumelic I've noticed that a comment or question is much less likely to be down voted if it appears on Math stack than if it appears here. It's curious that "down voted" and "voted down" have different meanings, like" up ended" and "ended up" I suppose.

@ Sumelic Here's a line from "The Devil's Curst Wife:" The devil he got to the forks in the road; Ol lady you're one hell of a load!' I'm not saying the line is correct, but it certainly is old. Your Y.G.D.P is impressive. Here's another southwest VA idiom, which I like: It may have rained, I might should have brought the laundry in.

(Just keeping the room above freezing) It's a good thing I'm not allowed to comment, because in my dotage I find that want to wander off topic. Take the question of "crossroad" vs. "crossroads." Yeats published in "Crossways," but I think "crossway" is unusual. On the other hand, I've heard crosswalk, rather than" crosswalks" as the word for the intersection of paths.

I'm about to head to your Y.G.D.P. and I'm hoping for a map. My guess is that the area covered by the two uses will nearly coincide and will comprise central and western Pa, W.Va, southwest VA, western NC, eastern Tenn. southern Indiana, Illinois and Ohio, and perhaps western NY.

One commenter implied that everyone accepts "The dog wants out." Do you agree? Another construction that seems to tag along with "needs or wants ---ed" is the use of "right" to mean "very." I think we all accept "Right Reverend Smith," but what about "it's a right pretty day?"

and the better students picked up this "error" because our university is located in southwest Virginia. I think our language would be well served if authorities treated regional English as correct, but I admit that half the mystery of Masterpiece Mystery is trying to figure out what the characters have said.

What is a frozen room? Do you know of a book that collects the folktales that accompany false etymology? I think such a book would be interesting. I was interested in the post about" needs fixed" vs." needs to be fixed." I have a friend who taught English as a foreign language. The students, all foreigners, had to pass a test called TOEFL and that test treated "needs fixed" as a mistake. My friend found this frustrating, because she was trying to get her students to listen to the conversations

There it was explained that the word, pretzel, came from the habit of 14th century European monks to bake these treats as a reward for those who learned their catechism. Alas, I have forgot the twists and turns needed to come up with the explanation of the sound "pretzel."

Georgia Cracker has nothing to do with a whip cracker, asparagus does not have it's root (oops) in sparrow grass, and "to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" has nothing to do with the coefficient of expansion of a brass monkey railing on board a British warship. Without delving into issues of etymology, surely you will grant that this last explanation is farfetched. I saw my favorite story on a bag of pretzels.

Yes that was the post that caught my eye. The post I wanted to chat about was the on the etymology of "sincere." The folk stories that accompany false etymology are often elaborate, fanciful and creative. If I were asked to explain why "sincere" came from a word for wax, I know I could not have invented a story as good as the tale proffered by the poster. John Ciardi deals with some of these stories in his Browsers' Dictionary. According to him,

@sumelic Sometimes the distinction between the verb and the adjective is made by changing the pronunciation of the verb and leaving the "ed" unchanged: The cat lived nine lives and so it was nine lived.

Those who put your question on hold, because the answer is just a matter of opinion, should go over to Math Stack and ask if number theory, graph theory, set theory and so on should all be renamed.

@comprehensible and I think it is absurd to think that Sense 1 can, or should, be ditched.

@comprehensible Your question, Is the word Theory semantically too vague for modern technical use? is the subject of the first chapter of Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth. In this chapter, Only a Theory?, Dawkins chooses two definitions from the O.E.D. , which he labels Sense 1 and Sense 2. As Dawkins points out both senses are in common use,

About to go off line to a party. I would have said about empathy vs. sympathy that the difference was like the difference between "condole" and "console." A consolation prize is supposed to make the winner feel better, but there is no indication that the company awarding the prize shares in the winner's sorrow. Would this comment have been egregious?

@sumelic Lucky I, (as I understand that my communications may be being monitored, I am being extremely cautious about my grammar) I now have just enough units of reputation to be allowed to chat. Am I allowed to comment about questions in chat even if my reputation is held in low esteem? Am I in the right room to chat with you?

@Mazsura Sorry I didn't mean to misspell "too." To me the person who climbs a ladder to rescue a child from a burning building is a fireman, and the person who digs a ditch to try to contain a forest fire is a firefighter.

@Mazura I'm new to E.L.U and so I am reluctant to comment above ground. But down here in the chat room there is less danger that someone will tag, flag or drum me out of the corps. I was annoyed that a couple of people banded together to close off your topic, which has obviously garnered interest. I have just gained the power to close a topic, so I can say with authority that this site grants this power to easily: I assure you that I don't know enough to use the power judiciously.

@Martin Sleziak I am a newcomer and may well be in the wrong room. A few days ago someone asked to show that if a/b and c/d were fractions and a,b,c, and d were positive, then (a+c)/(b+d) is less than or equal the max of a/b and c/d. I am not allowed to comment, but I wish someone would tell the poster about Farey addition and all the interesting things that follow from adding fractions the way we all wanted to in the beginning. Is it bad form for a banned commenter to say something here?