Hot answers tagged

44

Totally not a regular on English Language & Usage, but I find the idea of embedding campaign statements in questions on the main site patently offensive. The main site is not the place for campaigning (we have an elections page for that, plus town hall chats, plus your site's regular chat room...), and there are obviously numerous neutral phrases you ...


24

It's perfectly reasonable for reviewers to assume that a common expression can be explained by consulting ordinary reference works. They shouldn't have to do that search. If it can't be, it's up to the asker to demonstrate that it can't be. Something like "I researched but maybe I missed it" isn't particularly helpful in this case: if you researched and didn'...


21

I hope this helps. Some things I've learned: IRL, you can only control your own behavior; the same is true here. If you believe framing a comment in a certain way will guarantee that you won't be met with defensiveness or worse, your expectations are unrealistic. Be direct and polite. Remember that people can't read tone from a short sequence of written ...


20

Grammar McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English. It turns out that the first three chapters of this classic 1998 grammar are available free on Google Books. The rest of the book is not. This seems to be very good marketing for University of Chicago Press, or whoever made this decision, because it gives a good and useful sample of what's in the book. ...


19

I'd venture to guess that 90% of the time when a question is tagged single-word-request, the only reason the phrase-request tag isn't added as well is because the questioner doesn't know that such a tag exists. So no, don't downvote a multi-word answer to a single-word-request question just for being multi-word.


18

As @sumelic notes in comments and via the offered link, there is no way to edit any post without bumping it to the active questions feed. I understand SE's philosophy on the matter to be that improvements to posts are encouraged because the site is intended to be a repository of expertly answered questions. The community goes to great lengths to review, ...


17

Translation Dictionaries and Lexica Linguee - a search engine rather than an automatic translator, Linguee allows the user to find words and phrases in context in human-translated works, in addition to an editorial dictionary. bab.la - a language project by Andreas Schroeter and Patrick Uecker and sponsored by Langenscheidt providing 39 bilingual ...


17

I noticed this user yesterday and I will be keeping an eye on them. With regard to profiles, self promotion is acceptable there. Profile links are "nofollow"ed, so shouldn't be indexed by search engines, so the only people who see it are people who visit it deliberately. I have been in two minds about the user name, as that is clearly advertising, but, at ...


16

Black Saturday on ELU: when the reputation stock market experienced a seismic shock, and every user felt the impact! I shall never forget the member who contributed nearly 3500 answers here, almost 750 more than any other member. And I just do not understand the reason to delete the points from votes cast by someone, when their account is deleted. The ...


15

Historical Resources These are books of possible interest to people who are investigating word and phrase origins and want to know what meanings those words or phrase were said to have at various times in the past. Several of them do not show up in a direct Google Books search for them by title; I've run into the hidden ones by chance, while searching for a ...


15

In this post, the ELU moderators attempt to consolidate all the advice in order that: it’s relevant for the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange site; it’s all in one place; it’s easily assimilated; and it provides a starting-point for future moderators as well. Because this site actually discusses language, there are some quirks and edge cases ...


15

We already have phrase-requests for users searching for multi-word expressions, so a rename is not in order. The tag single-word-requests really is (supposed to be) about single words, and that should be taken into account when writing an answer to a question with this tag. (Questions may be tagged with both to emphasize that either a single word or a multi-...


15

Of your 67 answers (plus the others now removed), three have been edited by others: Word for "term for inhabitant of" — removed "Go and Google it" and added a real reference instead What word describes the relationship between words like "art" and "artist?" — spelling correction https://english.stackexchange.com/...


15

NOTE: I am not a moderator on ELU, but I do moderate on another Stack Exchange site. Your question about harshness might be better asked on the overall Stack Exchange meta site. Seven days might seem overly harsh, but it's actually the recommend suspension length for first-time offenders. As for the reason you got suspended, that's one of the standard ...


15

The faq on Meta states "The bottom line is that you should accept the answer that you found to be the most helpful to you, personally." Stack Exchange isn't a quiz show, so it doesn't matter which answer is first (as long as the later one isn't plagiarizing the earlier ones), it matters which answer is the most helpful to you.


14

Meme: _________ hits on Google Origin: Possibly Janus Bahs Jacquet Cultural Height: 23,460,000 hits on Google Background: Often used to justify a single-word-request answer, no suggestion can possibly be considered complete without stating just how easy it was to search for on Google. Seen here, here, here, and partially debunked here.


14

Meme: Thank you for visiting ELU. Your question is off-topic. Please visit English Language Learners. Origin: ? Cultural Height: Still yet to come. Background: Because 95% of questions asked on this site are borderline off-topic, you have a very high chance of seeing this in most questions. It doesn't seem possible to prevent the questions from being ...


14

Questions about the etymology of English words are welcome on the site, even for borrowed words. Your questions were not rejected by "that is beyond the scope of English" or by "we do not discuss Latin". In fact, your questions lacked references or any evidence of research. Nov 3 '15 On the right track -> to distract [open; you added the requested ...


14

The length of suspension is determined by guidelines, as J.R. kindly elaborated on in his answer. We sometimes make suspensions longer than the initial 7 days, but did not feel that your case warranted a longer suspension. Suspensions shorter than 7 days are non-disciplinary (e.g., user suspects their account is hacked and needs time to regain control). ...


14

In most cases, it is perfectly reasonable for many users to have the same name, so it doesn't make sense to force them to be unique. For example, I made a query to find users with the same display name, and there are 224 Alexes on the site. (I for one don't like having to add numbers to my display name; others probably feel the same way.) However, it is not ...


13

Because you haven't earned over 10 rep on this site. You have been given the site association bonus, but that is not counted.


13

The reason you don't get good results using the Stack Exchange internal search facility is because a single general-purpose search engine is common to all SE sites. Some of the things it does (ignoring short words and punctuation marks, etc.) are a net benefit on most other sites, but not on ELU. So I don't usually bother with them. Google's "site-specific" ...


13

Yes, you need at least 250 reputation to see and cast close/reopen votes on your own questions and at least 3000 reputation to do so on any question. This is a screenshot I took of one of my questions on a site where I have less than 250 reputation: New users can still cause their own questions to be sent to the reopen queue by making a good edit to ...


13

This is the Association Bonus, which is given to all your associated accounts when you reach 200 points on one of them. You can get to your reputation changes from your user profile page: click on your username in the header bar, and then on Reputation in the line under the two panels, where Summary is highlighted on the left.


12

You can view your history of suggesting edits here: https://english.stackexchange.com/users/37324/persian-cat?tab=activity&sort=suggestions The ban only looks at recent suggested edits - this is to prevent someone from building up a history of good edits and then spamming the queue with a large number of bad ones. Here are your most recent suggested ...


12

I generally agree, and here's some suggestions, but I don't feel so strongly either way. Merge and rename and syn technical and tech-writing into technical-language. I think technical-writing would be better than technical-language and it's more common. Change the name of archaic to the canonical archaicisms and make the former a tag synonym ...


12

It doesn't really matter. Suspension is mainly a tool for moderators and Stack Exchange employees, which allows them to control the ability of a user to make posts and take other actions on a site. Suspensions are temporary, but that doesn't mean they aren't serious. However, suspension isn't designed to be a public sign of how "trustworthy" a user is, so I ...


12

We don't have any statistics on whether members of the ELU community are native speakers or not, and that's deliberate. There have been a number of Meta questions asking whether that sort of identification would be useful, but they have always been voted down. The reason is that, while there are a large number of native speakers here, not everyone is; and ...


12

From my perspective, moderation is only indirectly about teaching people to become good citizens. The goal should be to foster an environment where folks feel free to participate and can enjoy the site. Publicly reprimanding someone is rarely a good way to accomplish that (sometimes it is called for, but not often). If someone just had a bad day or chose ...


12

You should flag the post for moderator attention, and specify why you think the username is inappropriate.


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