Comments that leave you shaking your head

[AlexFourways]

Yeah. No Academy. We aren’t the French, trying to gussy up their redneck Latin.

It's not just the French, even the Germans and Dutch do it and regularly change spellings or words! Apparently in Holland you can tell roughly when someone went to school by the way they spell certain words. But at the last change the public rebelled!

But as an engineer, you should know that we Anglophones are worse than not free. English is a kludged up legacy communication protocol, largely undocumented, with iron rules that can easily be broken, but nebulous concepts that will make everything crash and burn in oddly colored fire if you deviate from them. It is perilously easy to plug in your own modules which work great for you, but may not be recognized by other users’ builds. Finally, the packet design is a non-standardized nightmare, with regular construction often ignored in the most common of data components, and packets furthermore lack inflective flags, so transmission order becomes weirdly critical.

But we are generally tolerant, except when it comes to less eggs and fewer polution. (I maintain that if someone asked you "Bristol time what come bus?" (or any other random order) most people would give a helpful reply.)
I have been told that English has either 15 tenses or two. The two are present and past and the future tense (and the other 12) are just constructs of the two!

I’ll get back to you with a metaphor for commas, once I figure the fucking things out myself...

On a related note, in a podcast asking about features of the English Language, it explained that we lost gendered nouns because some Germanic languages (Saxon and Angles and Jutes etc.) had (for example) hause (house) as masculine as the man built it, whilst others had it as femine as the woman looked after it. So when they melded the gender got dropped for neuter. Apparently some languages have seven or more genders, such that rocks are different to trees and different to animals!

 

[TheLobster]

I have been told that English has either 15 tenses or two. The two are present and past and the future tense (and the other 12) are just constructs of the two!

Apparently some languages have seven or more genders, such that rocks are different to trees and different to animals!

Both "tense" and "gender" are just names for observed linguistic phenomena.

People who study languages invented the term "tense" because they noticed that verbs may assume different forms based on various properties of the activity they describe. Temporal relation is often the most important one, which is why in quite a few languages "tense" and "time" are referred to by the same word. The claim that English has 15 tenses sounds especially ridiculous in this context; in the temporal sense, it has somewhere between two and four.

Similarly, "gender" denotes the way in which certain grammatical features of noun and (usually) adjective have to agree in a sentence. You say "la camisa negra" in Spanish because shirt is of feminine category and that determines the ending of the adjective "negra". Since the same ending would be used to describe a female human ("la nina negra") and a different one would be used for a male one, linguists identified this feature of a language as gender.
In principle, though, the categories could be anything. AFAIK European languages mostly have 2 or 3 genders; some may have an extra set to use only in the plural.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Both "tense" and "gender" are just names for observed linguistic phenomena.

People who study languages invented the term "tense" because they noticed that verbs may assume different forms based on various properties of the activity they describe. Temporal relation is often the most important one, which is why in quite a few languages "tense" and "time" are referred to by the same word. The claim that English has 15 tenses sounds especially ridiculous in this context; in the temporal sense, it has somewhere between two and four.

Similarly, "gender" denotes the way in which certain grammatical features of noun and (usually) adjective have to agree in a sentence. You say "la camisa negra" in Spanish because shirt is of feminine category and that determines the ending of the adjective "negra". Since the same ending would be used to describe a female human ("la nina negra") and a different one would be used for a male one, linguists identified this feature of a language as gender.
In principle, though, the categories could be anything. AFAIK European languages mostly have 2 or 3 genders; some may have an extra set to use only in the plural.

English, as well as other European languages inflect verbs for time. Other languages inflect differently. Navajo, for example, inflects verbs for the nature of the evidence on which the statement is based: direct observation, hearsay, direct report, regular recurrent event. English marks only three basic times. Bantu languages mark four: past, present, future, and continuative. By way of example with English equivalents: /he was sick/; /he is sick/; /he will be sick/; and /he be sick/, where the last, the continuative, indicates /was/, /is/, and /will be/.

Gender is a grammatical construct only marginally related to the socio-sexual construct. The classic example is the adoption of the loan word /showgirl/, which becomes /das showgirl/ in German, neuter because of the consonants, not the sex of the referent.

 

[TheLobster]

Gender is a grammatical construct only marginally related to the socio-sexual construct. The classic example is the adoption of the loan word /showgirl/, which becomes /das showgirl/ in German, neuter because of the consonants, not the sex of the referent.

Yes, but it runs deeper than that. The socio-sexual construct is intertwined with the shape of the words; this can be observed in the exclusively masculine and exclusively feminine given names that tend to have different consonant and vowel patterns (e.g. female names having certain vowel endings and fewer consonant clusters).

Also, your German example is further conflated by the fact that (1) they usually give the neuter gender to loanwords (c.f. "das Handy"); and (2) "girl" in German is already neuter ("das Mädchen").

 

[AlexFourways]

Both "tense" and "gender" are just names for observed linguistic phenomena.

Don't doubt it.

<SNIP> The claim that English has 15 tenses sounds especially ridiculous in this context; in the temporal sense, it has somewhere between two and four.

Aparently Alfred the Great complained that most scribes couldn't conjugate the fifteen tenses properly anymore.
I went to a Secondary School (for those who failed a test at 11+ to go to Grammer School) but I know there are terms like future perfect, future continuous, future imperfect (and the past and current versions). As in 'Tomorrow I will have edited your file.' 'Tomorrow I will still be editing your file.' 'Tomorrow I hope to be editing your file.' I think those are examples.

Similarly, "gender" denotes the way in which certain grammatical features of noun and (usually) adjective have to agree in a sentence.

I bow to your suprerior knowledge, I was just quoting a BBC podcast on the matter but discussing a language, using another one, is fraught with problems. I note the European languages have 2 or 3 genders, except English has one!

 

[WordsIntheWyld]

I've seen quite a few lately that I shake my head so much that I might get a strain or something. For my sanity and to prevent neck injury, I might stop reading the comments.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

On Living up to the Legacy
Definitely shaking my head, but not necessarily in a bad way. I mean, come on, me for President...
---
Such a good feeling story, and verrrry erotic.

Thank you so much for sharing.

BTW, you wouldn't want to run for President, would you? I like your vision.

 

[WittyUserName]

Can I please ask how long it took from list adding to review posting? Stancash declared me the absolute worst author on lit about 70 hours ago and I assumed she'd posted the review at the same time but as of yet I'm still left waiting for it.


Especially given that stacnash ranks authors in her lists, her choice of which stories she chooses to review are unusual. Putting aside questions re the accuracy of ranking an entire author's ability based on one piece of free smut you find on the internet, the idea that you'd choose a year old story to rank an author's ability rather than a more recent story (especially when there are so may others to choose from) is extremely questionable

That she's saying that you are (one of) the absolute worse authors on Literotica because of a story that doesn't even demonstrate your current writing skills or abilities doesn't encourage me to suspect good intention in the reviews.

Imagine if there's a person who wants to be a beauty adviser. You know, women come to her and she advises them on their make-up and hair etc. But, this person puts themselves on a street corner and yells tirades at the people walking past. She sees a woman who's just walked out of a salon and waxes lyrical on how beautiful she is. She sees a woman walking out of a funeral with puffy eyes and smudged eyeliner and yells that she's the ugliest woman in the world because of the puffy eyes and smudged eyeliner.

Is this woman correct? Well, the smudged eyeliner and puffy eyes sure are ugly. But it's really not an appropriate moment to judge someone's appearance, and it doesn't say anything about the person's actual abilities in applying make-up etc.

To me, I see stacnash like the woman screaming on the street corner. Sometimes some of the stuff she says is correct (and sometimes it’s incorrect (factually wrong) or a statement of opinion misrepresented as a fact) but it’s not always appropriate which reduces any helpfulness it might otherwise have.

I really wanna send private feedback to Stacnash and ask them to rate me. They remind me of what Mark Twain said when his local library banned Huckleberry Finn and that it would just get him more readers.

 

[AlexFourways]

I really wanna send private feedback to Stacnash and ask them to rate me. They remind me of what Mark Twain said when his local library banned Huckleberry Finn and that it would just get him more readers.

I sent a 'Contact Author' email to Stacnash (From their Author Page) and got a reply, but with no return email address (fair enough). But in it they commented on my perception of the % accuracy of their comments. I only put that here*, thus indicating that she reads this thread. So she may take up your 'request', or not.
*OK as you don't get a copy of your message I could be mistaken, but if I am wrong, Stacnash won't see it and won't contradict me!

 

[WittyUserName]

I sent a 'Contact Author' email to Stacnash (From their Author Page) and got a reply, but with no return email address (fair enough). But in it they commented on my perception of the % accuracy of their comments. I only put that here*, thus indicating that she reads this thread. So she may take up your 'request', or not.
*OK as you don't get a copy of your message I could be mistaken, but if I am wrong, Stacnash won't see it and won't contradict me!

I guess we'll find out if I join the ranks of the worst authors on here!