Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 December 27

= December 27 =

Noun for "serious"
"Humo(u)r" is the noun for "humorous"; what is the noun for "serious"? 60.230.124.64 (talk) 00:48, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * seriousness ? --203.111.234.88 (talk) 01:36, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * If you prefer to speak in Bushism, go for something like seriosity. flaminglawyerc 06:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * How about 'sincerity'? 212.183.134.209 (talk) 15:39, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * That corresponds to 'sincere', an entirely different word. Algebraist 15:41, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * "serious" comes from the Latin "serius", an adjective meaning weighty, important; "humor(ous)" comes from the Latin noun "humor" meaning fluid, later taken to mean specifically bodily fluid, and the sense of "comical" is much more recent meaning of the word. So although they appear similar words, they're not of identical origin. --Maltelauridsbrigge (talk) 18:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * serius is also a noun. -lysdexia 12:34, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

"Nuit blanche" = sleepless vs. night-for-day?
In the the discussion above, as an example of language "almost impossible to translate without losing some of the original meaning," doktorb asks, Isn't "sleepless night" in French "nuit blanche"? Is that indeed the meaning of that French phrase (if an idiom and not merely the literal "white night")? Hebrew has an idiom for that expression, leilot levanim (literally "white nights"), that doesn't mean "[unwanted] sleeplessness" (i.e. insomnia) but deliberately staying awake till the wee hours, for business (e.g. finishing a rush job due at start of next business day) or pleasure (cultural events scheduled to rock till dawn). So which of these is the meaning of the French nuit blanche? -- Deborahjay (talk) 07:53, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * The wiki projects have several pages. I can't answer your question with certainty, but the French definition says "Une nuit blanche est une nuit complète sans sommeil sans dormir la journée suivante." (A white night is a whole night spent without sleep without sleeping the following day.)  The phenomenon of White Nights, the museum and arts festivals that last sundown to sun-up, strongly suggests that the night is one of pleasure, of voluntary wakefulness.  However, IIRC, American writer Dorothy Parker used the phrase to describe insomnia, so perhaps the meaning has shifted from French to English. I don't have access to the OED at the moment. An alternate definition is of the polar day, e.g. in St Petersburg, when at summer solstice the sun hardly sets.  BrainyBabe (talk) 11:10, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I think this "white night" idiom in any language is definitely taken from Hebrew, as Deborahjay mentions, in the sense of a whole night voluntarily spent without sleeping. Dostoevsky has a short story under this title about the nightly experiences of a man in the streets of St Petersburg. But then I have to prove that Russians as well have borrowed it from Hebrew -- that I can't. They have always had those dusky nights of St Petersburg before their eyes, so why shouldn't they have themselves made that idiom? --Omidinist (talk) 13:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I can't but help noticing the similarity between "nuit blanche" and Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, a song which describes a sleepless night.

--TammyMoet (talk) 14:25, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * You learn something every day; I always thought the song was "Knights in White Satin". As for Hebrew leilot levanim, isn't that just what's called "pulling an all-nighter" in English? —Angr 14:51, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

To answer the original question, "passer une nuit blanche" in French is usually the result of insomnia. If someone doesn't go to sleep to complete a work project or to go partying, he or she would more likely say: "je suis resté debout toute la nuit" or "je ne me suis pas couché de la nuit". --Xuxl (talk) 21:16, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

What does it mean if someone (not me) is accused of having a 'bovine' attitude?
I know that 'bovine' means 'related to cows/cattle' - but how does it relate to a person's attitude towards other people? I don't really know what sort of 'attitude' a cow is suppose to have. --84.68.206.133 (talk) 08:22, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Cows generally hang around together but don't say much. Maybe that's it. Without a context it's really impossible to guess with 100% accuracy.--KageTora (talk) 09:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * It was just something I heard on the radio the other day. They were talking about a football (soccer) player on a phone-in and someone said that he had a 'bovine attitude'. --84.68.206.133 (talk) 10:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, maybe it was meant that he was acting like a bull in a china shop, i.e. violent tackles, and so on.--KageTora (talk) 10:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * "Bovine" is always used to express the supposed characteristics of a cow, not a bull. "Bovine" has connotations of passivity, slowness, stupidity. Just standing around, chewing one's cud. BrainyBabe (talk) 11:00, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Webster's has "sluggish and patient; dull; as, a bovine temperament" and a quote "The bovine gaze of gaping rustics. --W. Black." . —Preceding unsigned comment added by Maltelauridsbrigge (talk • contribs) 18:11, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

SPIN or SPA questioning techniques
a recent job description for a newspaper requires the potential candidate to be familiar with SPA and SPIN questioning techniques when working with real estate agents...can anyone enlighten me as to what SPA and SPIN questioning techniques are?Veltri (talk) 14:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * SPIN may refer to a widely-used model for selling to large clients, developed by Neil Rackham, who wrote "SPIN Selling." The acronym refers to four kinds of questions used in the investigation phase of Rackham's model:
 * Situation questions (to understand the prospect's company and its current state)
 * Problem questions (to explore the challenges the prospect currently sees)
 * Implication questions (to understand how the prospect is affected by the problems)
 * Needs-Payoff questions (to clarify needs and potential value)
 * --- OtherDave (talk) 16:57, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

English in Indian daily life
I had lunch in a small shop where a Hindi movie was playing. The protagonist is a cubicle worker. I was shocked that in almost every conversation – with a car dealer, a guitar teacher, his boss, his childhood crush (but not with his mother or his ghostly alter-ego from the future) – one sentence in three was entirely in English. Is this realistic? —Tamfang (talk) 20:49, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Hinglish is a fairly common phenomenon in India, especially if you're from the city and are well-educated. Although Hinglish is usually used to connote the mixing of Hindi and English words in a sentence using Hindi grammatical structures, when used in the context of a group of sentences, it connotes to code-switching. --Sky Harbor (talk) 06:36, 28 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Because India was formed by the British Empire, and effectively rounded up several different cultures (then including modern day Pakistan) which spoke various languages the country in it's infancy used English as its official language so it was used for conducting business and anything bureaucratic etc. Since then English has remained one of the countries national languages really.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.8.100.245 (talk) 14:50, 29 December 2008 (UTC)


 * If your question is about English usage in Indian cinema, then I would say this is a recent phenomenon, perhaps that started this millenium, with the arrival of a new wave of "realistic" directors and film writers. Before that, commercial films rarely mirrored "real" life, where English and Hindi co-existed in urban life. Jay (talk) 09:51, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Comma or semicolon. Which is more correct...
750,000 Imperial gallons (3,400,000 L; 900,000 US gal)

or

750,000 Imperial gallons (3,400,000 L, 900,000 US gal)

In the example above, is it more correct to separate the "L" value from the "US gal" value with a comma or a semicolon?

&mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 21:04, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * When there is risk of confusion between commas in different roles within a sentence, the semicolon can be demoted to comma for the occasion, as in a list of items some of which contain commas. I think the same principle can be applied here, and should be. Be aware that there is no "correct" anything in English, though; there is only convention, idiom, and what works. --Milkbreath (talk) 21:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * According to my dictionary, one of the uses of semicolons is to "separate phrases that contain commas." It gives a couple of examples:


 * The country's resources consist of large ore deposits; lumber, water power and fertile soils; and a strong, rugged people.


 * Send copies to our offices in Portland, Maine; Springfield, Illinois; and Savannah, Georgia.


 * So I would say it's perfectly correct to use a semicolon in your example. I don't know if it's incorrect to use a comma there, but I certainly like the version with a semicolon better. Joeldl (talk) 21:18, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * MB, didn't you intend this, rather: "a comma can be promoted to semicolon for the occasion"? I struggle to make sense of your suggestion in its present form.
 * I would certainly prefer the semicolon in the example given, unless some other stylistic choice had been made in the piece as a whole, making the comma "obligatory".
 * – ⊥ ¡ɐɔıʇǝo  N  oetica! T– 21:48, 27 December 2008 (UTC)


 * You're scaring me, now. I do tend to blow it whenever I have a 50-50 chance, but I'm pretty sure I got it right this time. Take the sentence "The inner planets are Mercury, after the messenger of the gods; Venus, after the goddess of love; Earth; and Mars, after the god of war." The semicolons are acting just like commas would have had the sentence been, "The inner planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars." The semicolons are commas for the purposes of the first sentence. --Milkbreath (talk) 22:45, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the second sentence is the "default case" and in the first, the commas have been promoted to semicolons. I wouldn't say the first sentence is the default case and the semicolons have been demoted to commas in the second sentence. Going back to the original question, I think a comma is acceptable if we follow the SI standard of separating thousands with a thin space rather than a comma and write "750&thinsp;000 Imperial gallons (3&thinsp;400&thinsp;000 L, 900&thinsp;000 US gal)". —Angr 23:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * No, we've trucked in semicolons to stand in for commas. It's like a National Guardsman directing traffic in a disaster area, standing in for a mere traffic cop. (I can do this all day.) --Milkbreath (talk) 23:36, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
 * But MB, to use your analogy: the National Guardsman directing traffic is not doing so in the absence of ordinary cops. He is supplementing the work they are doing at the very same scene, and it is an ordinary part of his job to do so. So with the semicolon: the commas in the vicinity are busy doing their thing marking groups of three digits, which is part of their ordinary work. An important part of a semicolon's ordinary work is to step in and mark divisions more trenchantly and saliently when commas are serving to mark lesser divisions. In doing so, it doesn't take on the role of comma, or get demoted to a (mere) comma. It is no part of a comma's role to mark divisions that a comma can't mark well!
 * Interesting to see how you have conceptualised this, and to compare it with the way that Angr and I appear to agree on. I don't, in the end, say that one way is right and the other wrong; but I would argue that your way is less usual. From what Angr says about the first and second examples, and about demotion, I am not certain that he and I agree on how to analyse your account. More could be said!
 * So let's stick to the case in hand with the numbers. The semicolon isn't working any harder than a comma would. The division between 3,400,000 L and 900,000 US gallons is no more trenchant or salient than that between three million four hundred thousand liters and nine hundred thousand US gallons. It is the presence of the obligatory, non-textual commas within the numbers that makes the use of some other symbol between them seem good. We cast about for a symbol not a comma, and we light upon its near cousin the semicolon, there not being anything else close. The typographers might have gone with a double comma in such cases, or invented a new symbol, but they didn't, so we're stuck shoehorning in a semicolon where a comma rightfully belongs. It's not really a semicolon, it's a dotcomma. --Milkbreath (talk) 23:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Dotcomma? Oy. Double comma?? Sheesh. Look, this is really only about one's choice of analogy, or of conceptual model, for thinking about which punctuation marks to use. Yes, I could go on about such matters interminably also, as Wikipedia's very own akashic record will amply testify. But I'm not going to, because I am away from my usual location and on a system that is not comfortable for purposes of protracted debate. We agree that semicolons can be used to mark divisions when commas are not up to the task, for whatever global or local reason, right? In the present example, commas are already used to mark divisions within the representation of some long numbers, right? So using semicolons seems like a good idea. Whether this is an ordinary, "native" application of semicolons (as I insist: since that's how we normally use semicolons, anyway) or a nonce-usurpation of the role of commas (as you seem to insist, since if there weren't commas already in the vicinity, commas would do quite nicely) I don't really care. If I could see that it made any practical difference, so that we would choose differently which marks to use depending on whether we chose your theoretical scheme or mine, then I might care. Right now, I don't. And while I disagree with other assertions above, MB, I have not the patience to argue salience and trenchancy with you right now either.
 * – ⊥ ¡ɐɔıʇǝo  N  oetica! T– 07:49, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Ah. Cool. Happy New Year, Mrs. Calabash. --Milkbreath (talk) 20:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * As for marking divisions in decimal expansions with thin spaces rather than commas, that is another matter that could get tricky. Such things are disputed bitterly and at length at WT:MOSNUM. Myself, I am against the use of unusual space characters at Wikipedia, since they are hard for non-specialists to grasp and therefore for WP to implement consistently; and they can't be searched for in the browser. Try searching the present page for Angr's example number 3&thinsp;400&thinsp;000 using your browser's search facility. See?
 * I make an exception for the hard space (usually implemented as &amp;nbsp;). It is essential to good editing and display of HTML text; see a developed proposal for using ,, (two ordinary commas) as markup for the hard space at Wikipedia, as a workable alternative to &amp;nbsp;. Unlike a thin space, a hard space can be retrieved in a browser search just as if it were an ordinary space.
 * – ⊥ ¡ɐɔıʇǝo  N  oetica! T– 06:33, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

So, in the examples that I gave above, there is a slight preference for the semicolon example? &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 15:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd lean that way. I'd also give the U.S. gallon measure immediately after the imperial one (keeping gallons near gallons):
 * 750,000 Imperial gallons (900,000 US gallons; 3,400,000 liters)
 * This advice is of course worth what you paid for it. --- OtherDave (talk) 20:58, 28 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Just a side question: I note you distinguish between "U.S. gallon" and "US gallons", OtherDave. Is there a difference?  The latter looks neater and cleaner, hence it works for me, but you went to the trouble of including the full stops in the 1st version, which I assume is because that's the version Americans themselves seem to prefer (and sometimes insist on).  Do they permit "US" in things like "US gallons", or was this an unimportant detail in the context of this question (one, therefore, up on which I should not have picked)?  --  JackofOz (talk) 19:45, 29 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Jack: that was just my own inconsistency; I don't usually write "US" (without periods / full stops) as an abbreviation for "United States." Maybe I was copying the original query?  In this specific case, I'd guess that the vast majority of Americans are unaware that there's such a thing as an imperial gallon, especially since Canada is mostly on the metric system, so to them "gallon" means "U.S. gallon."  Not a good principle for Wikipedia, obviously. --- OtherDave (talk) 13:40, 30 December 2008 (UTC)