meta user
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| bio | website | careers.stackoverflow.com/… |
|---|---|---|
| location | Helsinki, Finland | |
| age | 34 | |
| visits | member for | 2 years, 10 months |
| seen | May 23 at 6:37 | |
| stats | profile views | 161 |
I'm a second-language speaker of what I believe is a fairly "neutral" flavour of English (if such a thing exists), mainly influenced by British and American varieties. I tend to prefer British spellings but I'm afraid I sound more American when I talk. :-)
I take an interest in languages, their evolution and history, and all those subtle variations between different dialects and registers. After secondary school I was actually close to going to study English Philology at university, but ended up taking Computer Science instead. Now I am a software developer by profession, and languages remain mainly a hobby for me. (Not only a hobby, as I think good prose writing skills are important in my field. For the last 7 years or so English has been the main written language I've used at work.)
Besides English and my native Finnish, I'm nowadays quite adept at Spanish too (it's my favourite language in a way, especially if spoken with a Cuban accent and when drunk). My Swedish and German are rusty, but re-learnable if need arises.
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Aug 24 |
comment |
Is it correct to speak of New York dialect? Because I first meant it as cheap quip w/ Wikipedia link and didn't consider it worthy of that. (Only later I edited in the 2nd sentence about NY accent.) But it's an answer now; let's see how it'll do. :-P |
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Aug 24 |
answered | Is it correct to speak of New York dialect? |
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Aug 24 |
revised |
Is there a 1950's American accent? edited tags |
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Aug 24 |
revised |
Is it correct to speak of New York dialect? edited tags |
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Aug 24 |
revised |
What does “a couple” mean to you, and what does “a few” mean to you? edited tags |
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Aug 24 |
comment |
Is the phrase “please kindly” redundant? Out of those options the first one, obviously, but is there really any difference between Please kindly pass me the magazine and Please pass me the magazine (which I think is the point of this question) |
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Aug 24 |
comment |
“Firstly” or “first”? In fact this is a great question! I remember having wondered about this too. |
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Aug 24 |
comment |
“Firstly” or “first”? This is not a duplicate of that; you can't really deduct from a discussion on "fast" as an adverb whether to prefer "first" or "firstly". |
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Aug 24 |
comment |
When is it OK to use OK? There's a separate question here on the etymology of "OK": english.stackexchange.com/questions/17/… |
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Aug 23 |
revised |
Formal way to wish good morning edited tags |
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Aug 22 |
comment |
Which is more correct: “Plug-in” or “plugin”? Yes. I think it's a common phenomenon that hyphens eventually get dropped when a word becomes more commonplace. Compare with electronic mail -> e-mail -> email (nowadays perfectly acceptable form). |
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Aug 22 |
revised |
“To call” vs. “to ring” edited tags |
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Aug 22 |
comment |
Are there any differences between “I believe” vs “I think” vs “I reckon”? I reckon the phrase is quite common in Australian usage (at least my Australian gf used to use it commonly), whereas in America it may sound somewhat "hillbilly". :) |
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Aug 22 |
revised |
Is it correct to use “their” instead of “his or her”? edited tags |
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Aug 20 |
comment |
“just because… doesn't mean…” I tend to agree with Steve. Another nice way would be to replace "just because" with "the fact that": "The fact that I'm inexperienced doesn't mean that I lack perception" |
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Aug 20 |
revised |
How should one answer a business phone? edited tags |
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Aug 19 |
comment |
Should “Project Manager” be capitalized? Yes. And of course there are other contexts where a title like "Project Manager" would typically be capitalised, such as one's business card, CV, or LinkedIn profile. |
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Aug 19 |
revised |
'to check' versus 'to verify' edited tags |
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Aug 19 |
revised |
When is the present perfect tense used instead of the past tense? edited tags |
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Aug 19 |
revised |
When should one use the comma versus the semicolon, and vice versa? edited tags |
