zompist bboard

I'm not sure you can decide to have to do something, and "Are you gonna eat that" sounds an awful lot like "Are you planning to eat that". "I'm gonna pass" and "I'm going to tell Mom" are probably real counterexamples, though. As for "will", I'm not sure any of those are definitely prior decisions, ...

But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision. This is the sort of thing that's very easy to check with Google. Gooling "I'm going to" gives examples like these, none of which indicates a decision: So perha...

What asteroids are going to do is a prediction, which as I said can also be expressed with "going to". But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision. "I'm going to help you move" means I already decided that...

I don't know the technical terms, but in ESL the standard explanation for the difference between "will" and "going to" for voluntary actions is that "will" is for decisions made at the time of speaking (and offers andppromises made at the time of speaking) while "going to" indicates a prior intentio...

Hm, I guess I must have missed that amid all the irrelevant examples.

To some extent I think "I says" is what older people say where younger people would say, "I was like". It's not meant to be a literal quotation, but an approximate one for the purposes of storytelling. There does appear to be a fairly regular pattern[*] in English by which the suffix -ate reflecting...

I've always treated it as an initial-stress-derived noun, so DEfault is the noun while deFAULT is the verb.

To be fair, a teacher in a language-related field hardly counts as a random person when it comes to linguistic questions. I wouldn't care if I had, say, an Uber driver who thought the PEN vowel should be written as /e/ in a pronunciation guide, but when it was my CELTA trainer, it was rather frustra...

The only true stressed schwa in American English is in words like "pull" and "full" which in a dictionary are listed as having /ʊ/. Isn't this rather circular? Of course you'll conclude that schwa is /ʊ/ if you start with the assumption that the sound in words with /ʊ/ is a stressed schwa. Incident...

Could seems counterfactual when used with passive or non-volitional active verbs, but not with volitional active verbs, where it to me indicates the ability of the subject to do the action in question, whereas might to me can be counterfactual with all verbs. Agreed, but since "die" is non-volition...

I would say both "could" and "might" can be either counterfactual or speculative. "I'm so glad they got out in time! They could/might have died!" "No one has heard from them in weeks. They could/might have died." I keep going back and forth about whether one sense or the other is more common or more...

/ɹaʊt/ and /ɹut/ are actually distinct words for me. My route (/ɹaʊt/) home from work crosses over Route (/ɹut/) 50. I occasionally mix them up, but for the most part /ɹaʊt/ is the word for a path one takes, and /ɹut/ is a type of highway classification. I always say /ɹaʊtəɹ/ though. /ɹutər/ just s...

Stack cutters also have a slanted blade, as far as I know. The point is that the blade moves straight down as in the beheading device, unlike the glorified scossors Brits call a guillotine.

Yeah, in this case it definitely had the connotation of "global" rather than merely involving more than one nation. (Especially when contrasted with "Americanisms" that exist in more nations of the Americas than just the United States.)

Do you also say "paper cutter thing" for what we call 'scissors'? So what do y'all call a "letter opener"? An éviscéreuse ? Well I do now! Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one What do you mean "losing"? "Guillotine" was (more...

It's also funny to read the list as an American, because to my ear pronouncing Spanish 'll' words with the /l/ phoneme sounds like an affectation in the opposite direction. Rhyming "quesadilla" with "Godzilla" pokes fun at the speaker's exaggerated lack of sophistication, while pronouncing it more a...

I always assumed the "Genghis" spelling was from Italian, where it does have basically the same pronunciation as the original.

Well, it's without any mixture of Sanskrit, so of course it's ancient!

Rather than arguing abstractly about the influence of the movie on Google web hits, just do a case-swnsitive ngrams search that excludes (properly capitalized) movie titles? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pretty+woman+%2B+pretty+women%2C+handsome+man+%2B+handsome+men&year_start=1800&y...

Yeah, the likelihood of the politeness explanation has always been weakened for me by the grammaticality of "me and". If politeness explained the origin of the grammar, it seems like it should have applied equally to subjects and objects.

Both "Eurovision" and "the Eurovision Song Contest" are fine for me, but "the Eurovision" indeed seems wrong. The way I'd explain it is that it sounds like a compound, and we don't usually use "the" in proper noun phrases or compounds unless the head is a common noun, but it's a kind of contest, not...

Also, many species of spiders *have* gone extinct. It's just that there are about 35k (named) species still remaining.

I mean, I think there's something to it though. Icelandic didn't gain a word for "orange" until the mid-century and my grandparents will typically call things that I would call appelsínugulur either gulur "yellow" or rauður "red". Carrots are called gulrætur "yellow roots" and egg yolks are eggjara...

clawgrip wrote:Just as your boss at work is not someone you must kill in order to leave the area.

Speak for yourself.

That etymology itself shows that the pronunciation meaning is about 60 years older than the technical linguistic meaning.