Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 March 14

= March 14 =

Marked Features?
While reading The King and the God article, I came across these words, The EIEC spelling is a more direct result of the reconstruction process, while having typologically too many marked features to be a language really spoken some time in that form, whereas Lehmann represents the position to attain the most probable natural language to show up in reconstruction the way PIE is. What does this mean? It intrigues me mainly because I am in the process of developing a phonetic reconstruction of Early Proto Indo European. But what does marked features mean? Does this have any thing to do with typology or some type of naturalistic reconstruction of PIE? Idielive (talk) 00:23, 27 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Does Markedness help? Loraof (talk) 17:30, 14 March 2017 (UTC)


 * The king and the god. —Stephen (talk) 00:16, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Idielive -- I don't know what somebody (who?) was complaining is too marked about Hamp's constructed text in that article, but for a much better-known example, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's so-called Glottalic theory, where it's claimed that a conventional reconstruction of IE with voiced aspirated stops (bʰ, dʰ, gʰ) but no voiceless, and plain voiced [b] being quite rare -- is rather unusual or unnatural (or as linguists would say, "highly marked") with respect to attested sound systems of living natural languages... AnonMoos (talk) 01:08, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

"At the end of the day"
Is the expression "at the end of the day" typically lower class? Is it just a bad or informal style?--Llaanngg (talk) 23:13, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
 * As with "When all's said and done" (which has the same sense), it's informal, but not bad. You wouldn't expect to find these expressions in a formal report, unless it was quoting someone's remark. Akld guy (talk) 23:34, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The OED labels the expression "hackneyed", so I think it would be fair to say that good writers avoid using it excessively as a metaphor. Are bad writers found only in the lower classes?  D b f i r s   23:37, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen it written, but it pops up a lot in the The Jeremy Kyle Show--Llaanngg (talk) 23:45, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I thought "hackneyed" meant "old and trite"? I think it's a relatively new expression.  I first remember noticing it sometime around the 90s.  Late 80s at the earliest. --Trovatore (talk) 03:44, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks to the internet, expressions can get old and trite in record time. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:55, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks to the internet, expressions can get old and trite in record time. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:55, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * (US) Seems fine to me, say for a TV interviewers, like Charlie Rose. StuRat (talk) 01:56, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I've been hearing that cliché since at least the early 2000s, and it was annoying from the get-go. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:00, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Other formulations are "when all is said and done" and "in the final analysis", but they seem no better. The long way would be something like "Ignoring the current situation, the long-lasting consequences will be..." StuRat (talk) 02:11, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * As to whether it's "lower class" I'd have to say not. I hear management types saying it. In fact, it seems to be mostly management types who say it. They must have picked it up from some management training program, or possibly an airline magazine. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:13, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * @Baseball_Bugs, indeed: http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-09-26 --Hofhof (talk) 04:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * "At the end of the day you're another day older,..." Seriously I expected a question about Les Misérables. Rmhermen (talk) 03:38, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * "The last thing that it would be proper for me to do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say at the end of the day whether I think I have earned my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men are.” Thomas Huxley - 1889. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/11/at-the-end-of-the-day.html Wymspen (talk) 10:05, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * That's a literal use ('wages' is a clue -- they are paid daily or weekly, unlike salaries). Huxley was not a cliche-meister. HenryFlower 16:35, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * (Perhaps better to say pseudo-literal: he's explicitly drawing an analogy, rather than relying on an existing cliche.) HenryFlower 16:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I am not convinced of that - as I read the quote, he does appear to be looking back on his life and reflecting on his achievements. Wymspen (talk) 19:13, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
 * That's how I read it. Maybe when he said it, it wasn't a cliché yet. Maybe he even started the cliché. Like the story about kids who don't like reading Shakespeare because "it's full of clichés". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:53, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * It already had a tired history by the 1980s, when the BBC sitcom Yes, Minister put it into the mouth of Sir Humphrey (along with a whole train wreck of similar expressions) to represent bureaucratic baffle-gab. -- Elphion (talk) 16:46, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * The first cite in the OED is from 1974, followed by 1976, then 1978.   D b f i r s   21:39, 15 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I used to work for a London insurance company, whose head underwriter would habitually preface any statement with "at the end of the day". We used to play "end-of-the-day-bingo" in which we would count the number of ends-of-the-days in any one meeting or presentation. My record was something like 26 in an otherwise dull staff meeting. Defining social class is a particularly tricky conundrum in Britain, but I can say that he had a university education, spoke received pronunciation and was fabulously well paid. Alansplodge (talk) 19:50, 16 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I think the idea of it as lower-class is fairly recent - the rather classist ""not being funny but at the end of the day" starter pack" meme that went around in 2014 was the first I saw of it as a working class thing. Smurrayinchester 16:00, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Bear in mind that even wealthy middle-to-upper-management types can be low-class individuals. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:10, 20 March 2017 (UTC)