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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 12, 2020 4:48:48 GMT
Ah. I mistook your posting, Vv. I thought celebrities had named their child Betoota Advocate.
Having now read the article, I’m less worried. Lyra sounds a lovely name for a girl and Seaborn is probably a family surname used as forename. My brother has the middle name Stansfield by that method (to honour a childless aunt whose surname would otherwise die with her). My first girlfriend (er, yes) was similarly given the middle name Voden. Neither seems to have caused a problem. Antarctica? Unusual, and likely to give rise to jokes about barrenness and frigidity, but otherwise rather special. Better than Paris, certainly.
(And by the way, Betoota dear: it’s “its”.)
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 12, 2020 7:56:29 GMT
[...] (And by the way, Betoota dear: it’s “its”.) The Advocate is not exactly tidily punctuated, but I try to ignore that because I find some of its articles amusing after the standard takes on news.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 13, 2020 18:01:26 GMT
I’m with DM. I think Lyra is an attractive name and using family names as given names is so frequent that it is unlikely to be unremarkable unless it produces an unfortunate sequence of initials. LASS seems OK to me — after all Lyra is a girl. It would have been different for a boy named, for example, Leonard. He would likely have problems in the school playground.
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Post by Verbivore on Sept 14, 2020 23:00:03 GMT
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 15, 2020 4:41:53 GMT
Non-verbal accents: Interesting, Vv!
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 15, 2020 5:10:38 GMT
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no-one there to hear ...
A new forest-philosophy conundrum appeared today in a BBC article on the US West Coast fires. Having described the way many people are moving out of cities to live on the edge of forests, the article said “more wildfires risk being started accidentally near forested or other areas with flammable material”. For it to be at risk of being started, does a wildfire exist before it has been started?
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 15, 2020 15:59:42 GMT
This idea of non-verbal accents is interesting. I travel a lot in different parts of the world and, whilst being obviously of Caucasian stock, I am never mistaken for American or Australasian but I have often been misidentified as German. Most strangers initiate interaction in English. Is this because English is the international lingua franca or because I am correctly recognised?
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 15, 2020 21:19:05 GMT
This idea of non-verbal accents is interesting. I travel a lot in different parts of the world and, whilst being obviously of Caucasian stock, I am never mistaken for American or Australasian but I have often been misidentified as German. Most strangers initiate interaction in English. Is this because English is the international lingua franca or because I am correctly recognised? I've noticed the German thing in France and Belgium. Usually people will assume I'm British, but sometimes they ask if I'm German; they've never mistaken me for a native of a Romance country. I'd have thought we dressed differently from Germans, but I'm unsurprised not to have been misidentified as Dutch, because generally they have an identifiable mode of dress: all short, leather jackets and small-lensed spectacles.
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 18, 2020 8:14:18 GMT
In the reporting on Covid-19, I’ve noticed frequent use of “take a decision”. I stumble at that, preferring “make a decision”.
I’ve Googled a bit, and find claims for a general pattern that: - in American English, it’s “make” - in British English, “make” includes the preparatory process of information gathering, whereas “take” covers just the final moment of choosing one particular option.
Behind all that, though, I have the nagging, tip-of-the-tongue feeling that the phrase “take a decision” is an accidental conflation of two phrases: “make a decision” and “take a something”. But what is the something, there? I’m convinced it exists, and is none too abstruse, but I can’t bring it to mind. Any thoughts?
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 18, 2020 11:24:12 GMT
Have we had these before? I had to look up "chiasmus", and I don't understand the last one, but I laughed aloud at several of them.
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 18, 2020 12:52:07 GMT
Loved those - especially the last one. (Look again, Twod, for what “irony” may refer to.)
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 18, 2020 13:50:03 GMT
< make / take a decision >
I suppose I can understand the allegedly “British” distinction but don’t think I would employ it. What is wrong with “decide”?
My daughter recently sent me the linguistic funnies but I don’t understand the last one.
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Post by Dave Miller on Sept 18, 2020 14:27:05 GMT
My daughter recently sent me the linguistic funnies but I don’t understand the last one. Here’s the important irony: Hyphenated Non-hyphenated
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Sept 18, 2020 17:27:10 GMT
Ah! I see! Thank you. I’m a bit slow today but I’m not sure that irony is the right word? I think there maybe another, more particular, word that relates to this. I feel I have come across something like this before as, for example, abbreviated, a long word meaning short or brief, a short word meaning prolonged. I feel there are better examples but I’m not sure — where words are, so to speak, internally contradictory? Can’t think of better examples.
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Post by Twoddle on Sept 18, 2020 21:26:43 GMT
Loved those - especially the last one. (Look again, Twod, for what “irony” may refer to.) Got it ... at last!
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