zompist bboard

In a semi-formal/journalistic register for published American English, "for you and me" is considered the preferred arrangement.

Both I and my brother-in-law agree that it is either a tin or a cookie tin, depending on how precise one wanted to be. Though when talking about doing things with it, it would also be one of those cases of synecdoche where we'd use the contents of a container to indicate the container along with its...

I keep reading the "Hither" as "Hitler", which certainly doesn't help my confusion...

Name a penguin species that does not live in Antarctica (sub-Antarctic islands are okay) Emperor How many people participated in a protest in your local area so far in 2018? One million How do you like your tea? Hot Name a widely accepted natlang family that you don't believe in Indo-Aryan Which in...

The only image I can see is the one with the plates. Incidentally, on the plates, my understanding is that while there are fully oceanic plates, there are no fully continental plates; instead, just parts of various plates (sometimes large portions) are continental. I'm thinking of like, the North Am...

Is the "Roommate we" related to the Medical we, i.e. "How are we feeling today?"? (A usage one of my linguistic professors characterised as "marked ++obnoxious".) Perhaps. The first time I heard the joke formulated, it was specified as the "spousal we", so it's probably more of A Thing. I imagine i...

In some dialects, us appears in the first person singular but only in dative roles (e.g. Give us a kiss! ), which I find really interesting because I don't know of any other morphological separation of direct and indirect objects in English. It's not only after "give" either. I think that's an arti...

You probably already have thought of this, zompist, but a thing that could be useful in the beginning of the book is basically "This is what syntax is" and "This is what syntax is not". Just as a quick primer on explaining what the book will be covering. Or maybe I'm just the one who doesn't really ...

linguoboy wrote:

Axiem wrote:I laughed at it, but he and I are both from St. Louis.

...and hence easily amused.

I'm not sure if I should agree with that or be offended by it...

I laughed at it, but he and I are both from St. Louis.

I've been watching Lindsay Ellis' video essays a lot recently, mostly because I've been waylaid by a persistent cold and didn't feel like doing much other than sit and watch critique that hopefully helps me be a better writer. She has a new one out that's a critique of the Netflix movie Bright, a lo...

If I couldn't call that a "torch" (which is my first instinct as an American), I'd call it a "firebrand". A "firebrand" for me is almost always a person. So called by the metaphor that fire-is-emotional, and taking the term from the term for something burning . In other astonishingly obvious etymol...

linguoboy wrote:

Axiem wrote:If I couldn't call that a "torch" (which is my first instinct as an American), I'd call it a "firebrand".

A "firebrand" for me is almost always a person.

So called by the metaphor that fire-is-emotional, and taking the term from the term for something burning.

If I couldn't call that a "torch" (which is my first instinct as an American), I'd call it a "firebrand".

behavior that is exclusive to one sex. ... "How many guys do you know who menstruate?" *cough*trans men*cough* Yes, I thought of that at the time I wrote that. Though that doesn't particularly change its ability to suss out non-gender-neutral language: even if the answer is "one", you've identified...

"Guy" is not gender-neutral. When you say something like "we need a Linux guy", everyone will picture a man. My example was bad because of the use of the plural; I much more often hear it in the singular. Another example is that our weekly reminder to fill out our timesheets frequently includes some...

...huh? I hear 'gal' all the time, generally as the feminine counterpart to 'guy'. Then again, I work in an industry that's male-dominated, and with terms that have historically used "guy"—so, at my company when using those terms, we'll throw in 'gal' also. For example, "We're looking for a couple o...

"Bint" is a word that I can't define at all, but associate with British English. I don't know that I've ever heard an American say it.

Vijay wrote:It can't be a dangling participle if there's no participle, can it? AFAICT it's just syntactic ambiguity of what it's modifying.

This is me having the consistent problem of calling this a "dangling participle" even if it's a non-participle modifier that's dangling.

Dangling participle. Does the "in a Seven-Minute Podcast Monologue" refer to when he did the sexual harassment, or the acknowledgement?

You are standing in line/in a queue at a service counter. Somebody who was not standing in line/in the queue when you arrived shows up and takes a place in line/in the queue ahead of you. They have just ____? "butt in line" or "cut in line". The former is more colloquial than the latter (I remember...

I'm pretty sure that in talk/walk/stalk, I pronounce the <l> as /ʎ/.

I would understand "rubbernecking" to be this behavior, and I've heard people around here use the word, but I can't offhand think of when I used it to describe what was going on. More often than not, when my spouse wonders what took so long to get home, I just say "there was an accident".

Yeah, now that you mention it, using the possessive sounds better, though I would pluralize it: "She bailed on our plan". Both "plan" and "plans" sound fine to me, though, and I can't figure out if I have any different connotation in them. "She bailed on me" to me implies that she and I started doin...

But what if you infer incorrectly because the information you need is simply not present? There are many situations where such sweeping ambiguity is simply unacceptable and indeed catastrophic. Imagine working with dangerous chemicals with such ambiguous instructions explaining how to handle them, ...