zompist bboard

I'm thinkin' he lives in a cave ...

BTW, what exactly does "HTH, HAND" mean?

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Είναι όλα Ελληνικά για μένα.

Come to West Virginia. Here, some dialects have three distincions: you (singular), y'all (small group), and all y'all (large group/everyone within earshot).

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

"Hope This Helps, Have A Nice Day"

I think some people actually use it non-ironically. I, of course, never do.

Just yesterday, I found another great German word to add to my collection of amusing "untranslatables": Morgenmuffel "person who is grumpy in the mornings". (Best translation IMD would probably be "not a morning person".) It turns out that -muffel is semiproductive for "person who is grumpy at the prospect of something", e.g. Krawattenmuffel "person who doesn't like to wear neckties", Partymuffel "party pooper".

We have a word in Norwegian, "slesk" (/SlEs:k/). Many words in English, including "slick", "slippery", "shrewd", "devious", etc. are semantically close, but none of them have the same all-purposeness and endless applicability to them. The most common usage of slesk is when describing something as being "cool", but in a somewhat insidious, crafty, shrewd way. A song can be slesk; a person can be slesk; a maneuver in a car racing video game where you sneakily nudge your way past another car, causing the other car to crash, is very slesk. Anything can be slesk by virtue of encompassing other things that are slesk; a person can be slesk by frequently acting in a slesk way. In short: anything that's simultaneously cool and somewhat nasty can be slesk. And like all good slang adjectives, it's homological: i.e., "slesk" is a very slesk word.

Slesk overlaps in meaning with another Norwegian word, "sleip" (/Sl{Ip/), which is cognate of and roughly equal in meaning to "slippery". Sleip differs from slesk primarily in that it has a less positive connotation. If a person is sleip, it usually means that he's clever, scheming, devious and probably not very likable -- not necessarily evil, but probably not the sort of guy you'd like to hang out with. However if he's described as being slesk, it means that he's scheming and devious, but in a cool, hip and strangely endearing way. Slesk really is a wonderfully slesk word, and I pity English for lacking it.

So far, slesk is sounding extremely close to the ordinary slang application of English "slick". A slick song, a slick person, a very slick manoeuvre--all have connotations similar to what you're describing in the register I'm most familiar with.

As far as I know, it has always been left as eigen in Britain. I've never come across a textbook that translates it. When I was at uni, we just used eigenvectors and eigenvalues. It was perhaps explained as characteristic value [I never heard proper being used], but the actual term used was always eigen.


Because "justify" sounds too dry and impersonal, too rational a reason for not spendng the money. Read what you quoted - MustangDan said that the focus is on your feeling after purchase. Justify has no such emotional connotation. It sounds like you're an accountant justifying expenditure from a budget. "Thoil" is closer to what I initially said "being able to stomach the expenditure". It is more of an emotional thing, a feeling. It isn't a rationally justified disinclination to make the purchase. It has a different emphasis from justify, and more emotional connotations. It's almost like you'd be disgusted by the purchase if you made it.

EDITED about a hundred times for some serious muppeteering of the quotes

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- "But this can be stopped."
- "No, I came all this way to show you this because nothing can be done. Because I like the way your pupils dilate in the presence of total planetary Armageddon.
Yes, it can be stopped."

I figured it would sound that way from my description. Well, in my mind there's some crucial difference between the two words, but since I can't put my finger on what it is it's likely that it is, in fact, just in my mind.

In my experience, this is (almost) interchangeable with "gongshow".

M

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<Anaxandridas> How many artists do you know get paid?
<Anaxandridas> Seriously, name five.

In danish slesk originally means sycophantic, brownnosed, sucking up,

although recently I have heard it useed by young people in a geeneric meaning of "bad, unpleasant".

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D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après. J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

Same here. I've heard that "characteristic X" is used, but never seen it, only eigenvalue, eigenvector, etc.

English also has no direct translation of German "nervig" or "genervt". If a thing is nervig, it is steppping on your nerves — genervt is the state you are in then.

Is it reasonable for me to guess neither Tengado nor Pharazon ever read all of a textbook published before 1900? Or even before 1950?
Check out E. W. Hobson, for example.

Quite possibly. Many universities no longer use them. In which case, it would probabaly have been more correct to say "Eigen became proper in British and ...." seeing as standard practise today among mathematicians, physicists and engineers is just to use the term eigen untranslated. [For the record, I'm British and have heard characteristic value occasionally, but I don't think I"ve ever heard proper being used]

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- "But this can be stopped."
- "No, I came all this way to show you this because nothing can be done. Because I like the way your pupils dilate in the presence of total planetary Armageddon.
Yes, it can be stopped."

WHICH is not dead! It lives on in my heart. Why does no one use it anymore?

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"Which" is not as specific as "what number" or "whatth". Possible answers to "Which president was Reagan?" include:

--"He was the one after Carter."
--"He was president during the 80s"
--"He was the actor from California"
--"He was the one who couldn't say the word 'AIDS'"
--"He was the one who challenged Gorby to tear down the Berlin Wall"
--"He was the one during the Iran-Contra Affair"
--"He was the Commander-in-Chief during the Invasion of Grenada"
ad infinitum

"Which" simply picks out one item from among many; it doesn't specify the manner in which that item is to be distinguished from others in the same category.

IMD, which implies out of a set group, while what implies out of anything and/or everything. So the question would "properly" be:

Which number president was Reagan?

because there is a fairly limited number of possible numbers (43). I guess I'm not very clearly explaining it, but which implies that there is a set list of correct or possible answers, where what doesn't. That's the reason why IMD it's which instead of what. Maybe, that's something very localized though and I'm being stupid and thinking it's more universal.

/end rambling

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That's how it works in my dialect as well; where do you reside presently?

I miss the french preposition 'chez' when used before a personal pronoun*, like

Où étais-tu quand tu m'as téléphoné?
Chez lui.

Where were you when you called me?
At his place/At his house

Onde você estava quando você me ligou?
Na casa dele.

*Except for 'chez moi', which will be used as 'at home'. In Portuguese, the same thing'll happen.

Où étais-tu quand tu m'as téléphoné?
Chez moi.

Where were you when you called me?
At home.

Onde você estava quando você me ligou?
Em casa.

And the other way round, I miss the English word 'squishy' in Portuguese.

Oddly, I miss those in English too, and I only understand a few well enough to have a feel for their usage. Eigentlich is one of those. The closest in English is probably "actually." One that has a rough equivalent in English but nothing as elegant is egal. "it's all the same to me" and "it makes no difference to me" are clumsier than "es ist mir egal".

The things I miss the most in German are English's space-filler phrases, like "y'know" and "well". Sometimes I accidentally throw them in when speaking German, particularly "y'know".

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<Dudicon> i would but you're too fat to fit in my mouth!!

I thought every language had "tag words" of some sort. What do German people say when they're in the middle of a sentence and they can't decide what to say next?
I know in Spanish, my puerto rican friend uses "si?" at the end of a sentence/or thought when she's not sure what to say next.

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لا يرقىء الله عيني من بكى حجراً
ولا شفى وجد من يصبو إلى وتدِ
("May God never dry the tears of those who cry over stones, nor ease the love-pangs of those who yearn for tent-pegs.") - Abu Nawas

Oh, it depends. I knew a Niedersachse who used quasi. (Not that it ever took her that long to figure out what to say next. She was one of the fastest talkers I've ever met anywhere.) Weißt du? exists in German as well, and ja and eben can be useful, too.

Which in discourse is usually shortened to ..., weißte? or a very unstressed ..., weiß(t)? (Anyway, in questions most if not all occurences of du are regularly reduced to -te: haste (ma'), kannste (ma'), machste (ma') etc. Also common IMD is Kannze ma' kuck'n?)



Oh yeah. Try to avoid them in school, though, since teachers usually hate zero-content filling words.

Do you also have reduction of Sie to /z@/ ~ /s@/? (E.g. Wissen Sie? > Wissense?)

Of course But that's very colloquial.

You're from West Virginia? What part? I have connections there, but they're mostly in you'uns or standard usage territory, and take as much from Pittsburgh as from what people typically consider Appalachian. I hear some y'all when I'm out there, but not a whole lot. It seems like y'all is much less stigmatized than other nonstandard you plurals, generally speaking, so it migrates easier than the rest.