Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 June 19

= June 19 =

Cat burglar
Where does the "cat" in the term "cat burglar" come from? Dismas |(talk) 04:51, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Here you go:, & .--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:56, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Dismas |(talk) 06:00, 20 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There goes a pet hypothesis of mine. In To Catch a Thief (film) (1955) Cary Grant plays a retired burglar known as "The Cat" but the phrase cat burglar is never uttered, so I thought maybe it arose later, perhaps even inspired by the film; one of these citations shows it's much older. —Tamfang (talk) 03:39, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Relative pronoun "that"
I've always been interested in the "optionality" of "that" as a relative pronoun. The linked article gives the example: "This is the house that Jack built". There is something about each sentence structure, in written or spoken word, that makes it more or less likely [that] "that" will be omitted. I might speak "this is the house Jack built", but I wouldn't write it formally. Yet even in formal writing, "that" is often implied, and indeed, writing that always uses "that" where it is strictly required can come off as a bit artificial. When I see a sentence like "Marcy suggested Soulé confer with Buchanan ... on how best to acquire Cuba from Spain" in Ostend Manifesto, my intuitive-grammatical guts churn and I want to add "that". Depending on the sentence, it is an important cue or disambiguation device: here we might otherwise expect a structure like "Marcy suggested Soulé to Buchanan", because "that" is omitted. So my questions are: where can I find a treatment of this topic? Is it always better writing to explicitly use "that"? (The post ["that"--exclusion fairly natural] you've been reading has been posted to a reference desk ["that"--exclusion ugly] this user has had watchlisted for some time.) Thanks, Outriggr (talk) 08:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I notice "Marcy suggested that..." isn't a relative pronoun use of the word, because it doesn't refer to a noun. (In the other examples, the nouns are "house", "post", and "reference desk".) This doesn't seem to matter to your question, I'm just mentioning it because I had a look in a book I've got called The Loom of Language and this distinction (conjunction rather than relative pronoun) was all I could come up with. I thought it might be a fruitful search because the book is generally about the value or otherwise of terseness, but no. 213.122.8.253 (talk) 23:16, 19 June 2009 (UTC)


 * This appears to be a bibliography on the subject. I haven't investigated whether any of the references are available online. --ColinFine (talk) 23:16, 19 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the bibliography. To the IP, thanks for clarifying that that "that" distinction exists. ;) I was hoping that this question would generate more discussion... Outriggr (talk) 02:53, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Help with Korean-to-English translation
I'm hoping that somebody who can read Korean can perform the following for me: Go to this main page for the Korean Central News Agency, then change the date at the top so you can access headlines from May 8, 2009, and let me know if any of those stories refer to the men's lifestyle website AskMen.com, and, if so, which one and in a nutshell, what it says. I've tried running the headlines through a translator with little luck. Any help is appreciated. Wolfgangus (talk) 08:32, 19 June 2009 (UTC)