Sunday, June 27, 2021

Recent Questions - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Recent Questions - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Name for manipulativeand or ambivalent language. example: "I know him" vs "I don't know him" both true and false depending on context and specifics [duplicate]

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 11:30 AM PDT

Say you're acquainted with someone, you see eachother around and give a nod or a hello. This is an acquaintnce not a friend. You don't know much about the person.

To say "I know you" can be both true and false. Just as saying "I don't know you" can be both true or false. Depending on context and circumstances and how much 'know' the person means, the truth of the statement can change. It's an ambivalent language that can have multiple meanings.

Here is a different example(This may be something else entirely):

Say that your partner is being unfaithful to you but they go to a hotel. You're sure that this is happening and accuse them of having extra marital affairs at home. The person says "Baby oh baby, I haven't had anyone over, I swear it" in order to evade accountability, a break up or whatever else the reason. It's a true statement, but it's also false. It isn't overtly a lie, it's a lie by omission.

Is there a name for this kind of language? Always in flux, never delivers solid information, and can have different meanings from different angles.

A class representative of each class has different responsibilities. Is it a right expression? [closed]

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 10:07 AM PDT

A class representative of each class has different responsibilities. Is it a right expression?

I want to say, a class representative in each class plays different roles depending on the situation of each class. I have to use the words 'responsibilities' here. Help me.

Do we use (has or have) with an unknown gender? [closed]

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 08:55 AM PDT

Do we use (has or have) with an unknown gender?

For example: Which one is correct?

1.Who has been invited?

2.Who have been invited?

I'm asking this question because I know that we use "them" with an unknown gender but I don't know if it's the same case or not.

Single word for "I take no pleasure in this" or "I know this seems over the top, but it must be done"

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 08:29 AM PDT

Something that looks outwardly evil or self-serving, but is genuinely being done for moral and unselfish reasons.

As an example, a civil war surgeon is sawing off the arm of a screaming man to save his life from his infected wounds. A young boy is watching this and does not comprehend what is happening, and understandably thinks the man is being horrifically tortured. In this scenario my omniscient narrator would say: "The boy did not understand the _______ act he was seeing."

As in, this seemingly sadistic evil act, that is in reality entirely necessary and even virtuous.

What's the equal and opposite proverb of "Variety is the spice of life"?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:35 AM PDT

It is a little-known law that most proverbs have an equal and opposite. For example...

  • Too many cooks spoil the broth: Many hands make light work.
  • Fortune favours the brave: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
  • Actions speak louder than words: The pen is mightier than the sword.
  • A bird in hand is worth two in the bush: Nothing ventured nothing gained.
  • Etc...

What's a good antiproverb for "Variety is the spice of life"? I can't find one at the moment. I guess it would need to be something about preferring routine, having a favourite, or the benefits of doing things in a consistent way.

Which one is correct, credited with or being credited with? [closed]

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 06:14 AM PDT

  1. He enjoyed great popularity among his students, credited with speaking five foreign languages.
  2. He enjoyed great popularity among his students, being credited with speaking five foreign languages.

Double Quotes Within Double Quotes

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 11:22 AM PDT

I can't find anything that addresses how to quote a sentence that contains a word in double quotes. Here's the quote (also a sentence fragment). and a catchall "other" bin. Also, is it proper to use an ellipsis to precede a sentence fragment when quoting a fragment?

Can the phrase, "bred as we" obey grammatical rule?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 04:01 AM PDT

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,

Past the houses—past the headlands—

Into deep Eternity—

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from land?

This is Emily Dickinson's poem. I somewhat understand the meaning of the bolded part but still don't know how come this phrase is possible grammatically? Can I see it as an adjective phrase?

There will be John, Jay and I/me/myself at the meeting

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 03:31 AM PDT

There will be John, Jay and I/me/myself at the meeting

Which is the most formal here?

Looking for a single word for 'not meaning what you say'

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 03:29 AM PDT

I'm trying to find a word which conveys the meaning that the speaker knowingly uses empty words, or words to a specific effect, that he does not believe in. I have gone through all the possible matches, like "liar", or "ironical", "sarcastic", but I feel these are not right, and that my word is out there somewhere, I just cannot remember it. Could I be confused? If possible I would need this to be a 19th century word. it is for a story I'm writing. Thanks for helping

The definition of 'clause' in modern grammar: construction vs function

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:55 AM PDT

Most modern grammars recognize verbless clauses such as the boy on the roof in (1) and on the roof in (2):

(1) With the boy on the roof, they feared he might jump off it.

(2) When on the roof, he might jump off it.

In these modern grammars, thus, having a verb is not a necessary condition for being a clause.

Having a verb is not a sufficient condition for qualifying as a clause, either. In (3), for example, frequently asked is a verb phrase (VP) containing a verb 'asked' (in the form of a past participle) but is not considered a clause in the same modern grammars.

(3) Each week, we answer frequently asked questions about life during the coronavirus crisis.

Therefore, I conclude that having a verb is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being a clause in those modern grammars. With this in mind, let's look at this pair:

(4) The boy who was on the roof jumped off it.

(5) The boy on the roof jumped off it.

They mean the same thing but, in those modern grammars that recognize verbless clauses, who was on the roof in (4) qualifies as a clause (a relative clause) whereas on the roof in (5) does not.

Note that in (1) and (2) above, the boy on the roof and on the roof are classified as clauses not because of their internal construction but because of their external functionality. And also note that from (1) through (3), having a verb has no logical connection with being a clause. Then, why is it that who was on the roof is treated as a clause in (4) whereas on the roof is not in (5) when they seem to have the same function of modifying the noun boy?

By "modern grammars" I mean descriptive grammars compiling the past sixty years or so of linguistic research. "Modern grammars" are distinguishable from "traditional grammars", which are prescriptively established without the help of extensive linguistic research.

Examples of modern grammars include:

  1. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik)

  2. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (by Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech)

  3. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum)

  4. Oxford Modern English Grammar (by Bas Aarts)

What's the English equivalent to "svära i kyrkan" in Swedish?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:41 AM PDT

"Svära i kyrkan" literally means to swear in church, and to my understanding the figurative meaning is when someone says or does something that questions/defies a social norm in a softer manner than simply breaking rules. Its meaning is not just about misbehaving, but is a bit similar to the allegory of the child who points out that the emperor is naked.

As an attempt to exemplify, one could use it to politely caution for (and/or) soften one's critique of a certain routine at work: "I may be swearing in church now, but is it absolutely necessary that we [insert redundant task] every Tuesday"?

Another example could be when a person is frank and outspoken, in other words not being afraid to swear in church.

Is there an English equivalent to the figurative meaning of the idiom?

If she beats him he'll claim she <cheated/has cheated>

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 01:17 AM PDT

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by H&P (Page 126) has this example of non-deictic past:

If she beats him he'll claim she cheated.

CaGEL explains this sentence as follows:

The time of the (possible) cheating is not anterior to the time of my uttering [the sentence], but to the time of his (possibly) making a claim of cheating.

Can we change past cheated to present perfect has cheated?

If she beats him he'll claim she has cheated.

Is there's any difference in meaning?

Comma before "and" with two seemingly imperative clauses

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 05:03 AM PDT

Could some knowledgeable individual please tell me whether this sentence needs a comma before the "and":

"Share the good times and stay together with the family at the Grand Hotel in LA".

I am aware that two imperatives are separated by a comma when they are of a certain length, but here, "Share the good times" and "stay together with the family" both complete/rely on the final part of the sentence "at the Grand Hotel in LA". It is basically "Stay together with the family at the Grand Hotel in LA" and "Share the good times at the Grand Hotel in LA" as another. Does this mean that a comma is not called for because they both relate to the final part of the sentence, or is it still required?

I really hope I explained that well enough for you to understand. Any help would be very much appreciated, and lengthy explanations are extremely welcome (rules and all)! Thank you, everyone.

ADDITION: This would maybe demonstrate what I mean better: "Experience dining at its finest and get a great night's sleep at the Grand Hotel." Would there be a comma before "and" here?

'Less good' vs 'worse'

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 05:15 AM PDT

Garner's fourth , page 263, reads

Depend typically takes on (or, less good, upon). When a clausal complement follows the verb, to omit the on is a casualism—

Is good here an adverb?

Why not use worse instead of less good?

Perfect tense + +'for' vs. Perfect tense + 'over/during'

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:46 AM PDT

Page 423 of Collins Usage Guide reads,

To say how long something has been the case, use for:

  • (1) We've been married for seven years.

To mention how long something has been happening, use during/over:

  • (2) A considerable amount of rain has fallen during the past two years.
  • (3) Things have become noticeably worse over the past two or three months

What's this difference due to? different type of verbs?

We should seek common ground while maintaining different opinions. Does this sentence make sense?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 01:05 AM PDT

I am not sure whether "maintain different opinions" can be used here. Thanks a lot for your corrections or suggestions.

Using single quotation marks for shorter quotes, and double quotation marks for longer ones?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 01:17 AM PDT

Background

This website has had a fair share of questions on the use of single versus double quotation marks. The most popular question on this topic is a good resource on their use in American and British English.

To summarize, American English mostly uses double quotes and reserves single quotes for specific use cases, while British English theoretically prefers single quotes, though this is not necessarily the case in practice.

Question

However, I have noticed a pattern in the way some people use single and double quotes which is not mentioned in any of the style guides referenced in the question I linked to. Some people seem to use single quotes when quoting a single word or a phrase, and double quotes for anything longer than that. This would look like the following example.

While Alice said that this constitutes 'proof', Bob insists that "more evidence is needed before a conclusion can be confidently reached".

I am not the only one to notice this use pattern. In his answer to the question I linked to above, a user called "mafu" notes that

I found that in practice single marks are commonly used for single words or short sentences while double marks are used to denote longer passages of text.

Is this a legitimate thing? Is there any style or grammar guide that recommends or accepts this?

More Details

I was trying to figure out the origin of this use pattern.

A user called "jbelacqua" explains in a comment that he/she does this because he/she feels that, since double quotes require more effort to input on a keyboard, they befit longer quotes which justify that effort.

Also, this use pattern might have been inspired by programming, as discussed in this question. However, that refers to quoting single versus multiple characters, so I'm not sure if that could have carried over to quoting single versus multiple words.

Can you please explain the use of “in what” in this sentence below?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 06:09 AM PDT

I couldn't figure out the grammatical role of "in what" in the sentence below. What does "in" refer to in this case? Can someone explain it please ?

Burroughs killed Vollmer in what he first admitted to and shortly thereafter denied as a drunken attempt at playing William Tell.

Is there an adjective for "opportunistic" that lacks its connotation of amorality?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 02:37 AM PDT

A real life example might be that when a flight attendant asks this type of person whether they want pretzels or crackers, they ask if they can have both. If they can't, it's no problem. They just like to probe and see what they can get if they want more than what seems to be available to them. There's an audaciousness about them in that many people wouldn't do that, but this person still has morals and doesn't necessarily lie or steal to get what they want.

These are my opinions, but opportunism ("opportunistic") implies a lack of morals and evokes thoughts of graft. Self-indulgence ("self-indulgent") implies excess, and maybe gluttony. Immoderation ("immoderate") has a similarly "sinful" tone.

Taking another path, the best antonymic phrase I can think of for this concept is abnegation, but it also seems to have a moral connotation (this time positive) of sacrifice and self-denial. An example sentence might say that "one who abnegates denies themselves of things they could otherwise possess, whereas a ____ person seeks to get things they may not have otherwise had if they didn't probe for them."

Is there an adjective for this type of person with a more neutral "feel" and definition? I have tried looking at definitions and synonyms of the words mentioned above (and others) in Merriam-Webster and through Google.

Verb meaning to be earlier (than expected)

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:16 AM PDT

Given the sentence:

As the policy timeline continues to _________, we expect the industry to pick up momentum.

This phrase is used a lot in my writing and I have already exhausted some of the more obvious choices like "accelerate." I also thought "advance" might work here, but I don't think it conveys the earlier than expected implication.

A word for a temporary change of employment duties, but no change in position

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 03:03 AM PDT

I am hearing this work around the office that there is a position for a temporary 6 month change of duties while remaining in the same Job Title. It is pronounced sa-common. I cannot find the actual spelling of this word or its official definition. Thank you.

Well, just take a gander

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 07:16 AM PDT

Question on the term: Take a gander. I've seen and heard it used in two different ways.

  1. I'll take a look

Verb: (idiomatic) To take a look; to check or examine.

They all went downtown to take a gander at the new shops that opened there.

  1. I'll take a chance/gamble

Verb: Take a gander is defined as to make an attempt or venture a guess.

An example of take a gander is when someone asks if you want to try to answer a hard question in a trivia game, or help to solve a puzzle that is being done.

Online, I see option 1 to be a more common usage.

Trying to get a feel on how many would or have used it the 2nd way.

Are there any English words that contain a number or symbol? (excluding hyphenated words) [duplicate]

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 10:28 AM PDT

I realize these would probably be neologisms or maybe trademarks, but are there some obvious example "words" to use that contain a number or symbol? (eg 0123456789!@#$%^&*()

For the purpose of this discussion, lets exclude hyphenated words.

What does "About its lot" mean?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 01:20 AM PDT

In Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Chapter 2, when talking about how long the Electric Monk believed silly things, the book says:

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually about its lot.

I think the last sentence basically says that the Monk had believed for about twenty-four hours, but I'm not sure about the usage of "about its lot". What is the "lot" referring here, or is it some kind of idiom I'm missing? Googling it returned some vague Bible references and it doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.

You can find the whole chapter here, if it helps at all.

What's with the apostrophe in the standard spelling of the idiom "how's about"?

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:15 AM PDT

A recent question on EL&U asks Is it correct to use "how's" as short for "how does"? I have a series of tangentially related questions about a fairly common (in American English) phrase usually spelled as "how's about":

  1. Does the spelling "how's about" make sense under normal conventions of punctuation, and (if so) is the "how's" component of the phrase a contraction or a possessive?

  2. If "how's" is a contraction here, what words is it a contraction of?

  3. If "how's" is a possessive here, how might we restate the underlying idea to indicate the possessive aspect of how, without including the apostrophe-s?

  4. If the spelling "how's about" (with an apostrophe) doesn't make complete sense, is there a better way to spell it?

By way of background, I note that Robert L. Chapman & Barbara Ann Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, Third Edition (1996) offer the following entry on "how's about":

how's about prep phr by 1925 What do you feel or think about: How's about a drink? —Budd Schulberg

The first edition of this dictionary (1961) reported that "how's about" means "how about," suggesting that the apostrophe-s is simply an instance of proparalepsis (adding an extra syllable or letters to the end of a word). But even if we attribute the additional sound to proparalepsis, we have not yet explained why orthographically the spelling came out as "how's."

Not surprisingly, an Ngram Viewer graph of Google Books content shows "how's about" as being generally far more common than "hows about," "howsabout," and "howzabout"—three possible alternative spellings.

Looking for etymology or information on the alternate meaning of "I don't care to X"

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 09:54 AM PDT

Unless I'm mistaken, in most of the English speaking world, the phrase "I don't care to X" indicates that the speaker prefers not to do the particular activity. However, as I was reminded during a visit recently, in some parts of the southern US, it actually has another meaning that's roughly opposite. That is, that the speaker doesn't mind doing the activity. For example:

I don't care to get dirty.

would normally mean that the speaker doesn't like getting dirty, and would presumably try to avoid it. However, it was clear from context that the speaker meant that unlike others with whom she was comparing herself, she would be willing to participate in an activity that would get her quite dirty.

Does anyone have any information on the history of this particular meaning? Did both meanings come into existence simultaneously and one became non-standard or did one enter later? Are there other areas/dialects that use the alternate meaning? Any other information you happen to have would be appreciated.

"Connotation" vs. "Definition"

Posted: 27 Jun 2021 08:24 AM PDT

There seems to be some ambiguity between the connotation and definition of a word / word group / phrase.

The dictionary entry seems to be that a definition is more of a primary description of a word whereas connotation seems to be more of an alternative meaning or implication.

Further, despite the dictionary entry, I feel like I hear them used synonymously both on this site and in "real life."

So, long question short, what constitutes a definition and what constitutes a connotation?
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