nohat

35,761 reputation

390176

bio	website	nohat.net
	location	San Jose, CA
	age	33
visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
	seen	yesterday
stats	profile views	3,089

Full disclosure: I have a degree in linguistics, and so I am partial to descriptivist approaches to questions of usage. For me, assertions of correctness or incorrectness that are not reflective of actual usage are highly questionable.

I am a native speaker of American English.

My real name is David Friedland and my e-mail address is david.friedland@gmail.com. Feel free to contact me directly.

	35,761 reputation	bio	website	nohat.net	visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
390176 badges		location	San Jose, CA		seen	yesterday

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May 7	awarded	Nice Answer
Apr 10	awarded	Good Answer
Apr 8	answered	“nt” pronounced as “n” in American English (as in “Internet”): what is it called?
Apr 3	comment	What is the difference between “Gay” and “Homosexual"? Is it only by gender? Without getting into the politics of LGBT terminology, when the quote uses the word "instead" in "'gay' now instead of 'homosexual'", the author means "using the word 'gay' instead of the word 'homosexual'", because obviously the word "gay" and the word "homosexual" are in fact different things, even if they share a meaning.
Mar 27	comment	What is the opposite of “idiomatic”, as in idiomatic code? not sure you need non-idiomatic when unidiomatic will do.
Mar 26	comment	What is the opposite of “idiomatic”, as in idiomatic code? If something is not idiomatic, then it's unidiomatic.
Mar 12	awarded	Enlightened
Mar 12	awarded	Nice Answer
Mar 8	awarded	Nice Answer
Feb 15	comment	What is the source of “Long time no see,” and when did it enter U.S. English? With this excellent research, you have, mostly, answered your own question!
Feb 15	revised	What is the source of “Long time no see,” and when did it enter U.S. English? use blockquote formatting
Feb 14	awarded	Good Answer
Feb 14	answered	“Roll” vs. “roll up”
Feb 11	comment	Is “outstaffing” a real word? Interestingly but unrelatedly, you can add out- to just about any verb, but it means "in a manner that exceeds or surpasses and sometimes overpowers or defeats". Without having seen the rest of the question, I would have assumed "outstaff" simply means to staff more than anyone else. As in "I thought our department had more employees than any other, but when I checked the records in HR, I discovered we'd been outstaffed by the customer service department"
Feb 11	comment	“On the lake” vs. “in the lake” FWIW, "since" is sometimes criticized when used for non-temporal reference. (Those critics are, of course, wrong, but it's useful to know)
Feb 11	comment	If I Were You and You Were I @Kaz I suppose I am a bit biased, but if anyone actually extemporaneously said out loud "it was I who got the promotion" or answered "who’s there?" with "it is I", you can be certain that any smiles induced would be accompanied by copious eye rolling, at least in any circles I run in. I stand by my claim that speaking that way is stilted and hyperformal.
Feb 11	comment	If I Were You and You Were I @Loren logic has never underpinned grammaticality. That it might be so was hypothesized a couple hundred years ago by grammarians, and though the appeal of the idea has given it legs, it was never actually the case. People have posited various theories to capture a "logical" explanation of language, but it always falls apart when you stray from made-up examples into actual language as used by real people.
Feb 9	comment	If I Were You and You Were I I upvoted this answer because I didn't think it was wrong on its face and makes some good points about how accusative forms are obligatory in many cases. However, I think it bears comment that the examples with nominative complements (the first set of examples) are all in a stilted, hyperformal register that you find in written English, but in spoken form would only be encountered in historical dramas and very occasionally in real life from pretentious (or sarcastic) people.
Jan 31	awarded	Good Answer
Jan 31	awarded	Nice Answer