Jay

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bio	website	johansens.us
	location	Michigan
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visits	member for	1 year, 8 months
	seen	3 hours ago
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	19,347 reputation	bio	website	johansens.us	visits	member for	1 year, 8 months
1344 badges		location	Michigan		seen	3 hours ago

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May 15	comment	If , as John Lawler says, orthography is not part of language, how can these commas interfere with today's discussion about gun control? I'll go out on a limb and make one political comment: I agree with FumbleFingers that the reality of present US politics is that the Constitution means whatever the courts decide that it means, and if they declare that "keep and bear arms" means that Americans have the right to wear short sleeve shirts, that's what the police will enforce. But that reality means that for all practical purposes we no longer have a written Constitution. If the Constitution can be "re-interpreted" to mean whatever the courts want it to mean, why even have a Constitution?
May 15	answered	If , as John Lawler says, orthography is not part of language, how can these commas interfere with today's discussion about gun control?
Feb 22	answered	Is “stepmother treatment” Indian English?
Feb 22	answered	“manieth”, is it acknowledged?
Feb 22	comment	Is 'Safari' really an English word, and what are its origins? If the fact that a word is borrowed from another language makes it not "true English", then I think there are very few true English words. We could probably write all the true English words by that definition on a matchbook cover.
Feb 13	awarded	Nice Answer
Feb 12	comment	A number of questions “has been” or “have been” asked? While omitting modifiers can be helpful in analyzing a sentence, I don't think you can just drop any words you like and expect the remainder to have the same function as in the original sentence. Suppose someone wrote, "The dog next to the bushes are brown." If you drop out "the dog next to" leaving "The bushes are brown", then "are" is clearly correct, but that doesn't make the original sentence right!
Feb 12	comment	Expressing infinite amounts @J.R. I wasn't disagreeing with you. I think we're pretty much in agreement on this point, actually.
Feb 11	comment	To what extent do English words sound like what they describe? Another interesting experiment would be to compare the words for the same thing from languages with very different histories, like compare the English word for various objects with the Japanese word and the Swahili word and the Navajo word, etc. If, say, you found that words for, say, "dirt" in every language all had "d" and "r" sounds in them, but were otherwise different enough to make common origin unlikely, that would be interesting.
Feb 11	answered	Name for a word whose sound is contrary to its meaning
Feb 11	comment	Expressing infinite amounts ... mental effort. Even as a kid I realized that was silly: I'm sure even professional physicists say they "did a lot of work on this research", meaning mental effort, not Joules expended. As to your specific point: if you say so -- when it comes to mathematics I'm an interested amateur.
Feb 11	comment	Expressing infinite amounts Well, in general there are often differences between the technical language used by professionals and the language used by people in ordinary conversations. Indeed the professionals often speak differently in conversation outside the job than they do in conversation with other professionals. One of my pet peeves is when people say that the ordinary use of a word is "wrong" because it doesn't match some technical definition -- like when I was in school a teacher said that it was wrong to say that study was a lot of work because "work" is a measure of force expressed over distance, not ...
Feb 6	answered	Expressing infinite amounts
Feb 6	comment	Expressing infinite amounts Yes, yes, some people are fond of saying "infinity is not a number". That depends on your definition of "number". I'm not sure how such a discusion enhances our understanding of mathematics. I recall a math book I read years ago that insisted that fractions are not numbers, but rather just "the solution to a division problem". Apparently the writer's position was that only integers are "true" numbers, as far as I could figure out.
Feb 6	comment	Expressing infinite amounts Hmm, but exactly what is the point of your first statement in context? It is perfectly correct to say that there are an infinite number of primes. Yes, it is true that some infinite sets are larger than others (like their are more real than integers, but there are no more integers than there are primes) but that doesn't make the first statement false. It's like someone saying, "Bob is from Europe" and you reply, "No he's not, he's from France."
Feb 5	comment	How are these plurals derived? I'd intended to add that there were likely to be exceptions though I couldn't think of any at the moment. Yup, that's one.
Feb 4	comment	Using “the” with name of research center I'd go with whatever the boss says, unless the next case you want to be wondering about is whether "the Unemployment Office" is properly abbreviated "UO" or "the UO".
Feb 4	comment	Can we call something a “word” if it doesn't have a vowel? Well, I think "y" would be called a vowel in your first three examples, so the words do have a vowel.
Feb 4	comment	Can we call something a “word” if it doesn't have a vowel? When I was in school, we were taught that the vowels are a, e, i, o, u and "sometimes y and w".
Feb 4	answered	How are these plurals derived?