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November 15

Using the term "postwar"

Let's say it was late 1945 and the WW2 was over. Some military units were on the battlefields collecting defeated countries' weapons. Can we use "postwar" to describe such efforts?

I think the immediate takeover was still a part of the war. It's stupid to call it "postwar". -- Toytoy (talk) 03:18, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

More in general, I think it is unusual to use the term postwar for something that is directly related to a war that is over. It is more an indication of a time period on which the past war still had strong effects ("the postwar reconstruction of the Japanese economy"; "the priority of American postwar diplomacy"). --Lambiam 11:01, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

wikt:post-war and [1] both suggest the period starts immediately after a war, but can continue for decades. So if you're talking about, say, October 1945, then "post-war" could be used. Bazza (talk) 12:11, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If by weapons you mean landmines, then yes. If not, it would surely be a confusing choice of words. It sounds strange to me to apply "post-war" to something that is done relatively quickly after the war ends, such as burying dead combatant, as opposed to e.g. de-mining which takes years or decades. 93.136.22.169 (talk) 19:13, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Anything that occurred in the European theater after 8 May 1945 is postwar. Barring only events in those powers still at war in the Pacific. Anything that occurred after 2 September 1945 is postwar everywhere. Now, I do see a difference between "immediate postwar" things and "extended postwar" things, but they are all postwar. --Khajidha (talk) 12:38, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How to pronounce "Monstercat" in American English?

Is the correct answer to pronounce it separately exactly as two words "monster cat"? - Justin545 (talk) 03:46, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The spelling as one word implies that it's intended to be a compound with greater stress on the first element (such as "blackboard" etc), but such a closely-joined compound does not seem very natural with these two particular elements... AnonMoos (talk) 08:11, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Natural or not, given that the name exists, people working there pronounce it some way or another. The pronunciation to be expected is the catenation of that of monster with that of cat, with secondary stress on the last component. Together, this gives /ˈmɑnstɚˌkæt/. --Lambiam 10:32, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's hard to tell how it should be pronounced until you know what it's supposed to mean. The one-word spelling suggests a closely-joined compound of the type "blackboard", "lighthouse" etc, but the intended meaning of such a compound is far from intuitive or obvious, so that the whole thing is kind of left hanging in the air in an unsatisfying manner... AnonMoos (talk) 13:42, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's a company name. Many company names are stylised for promotional purposes, and names in general are routinely formed without regard for pronunciation, which sometimes causes names to be changed later when the pronunciation is awkward, e.g. CINCUS, a former US Navy position, which was ironically pronounced "sink us". Nyttend backup (talk) 14:25, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The community college I work at is a member of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. SACSCOC. Which the organization insists is pronounced "sacks see oh see". --Khajidha (talk) 17:43, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Khajidha Luckily it's not the "Southern Union of..." Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:22, 16 November 2020 (UTC) [reply]

Yeah. But vowels in English (and especially Southern US English) are notoriously variable... --Khajidha (talk) 16:06, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

PS - "Martinique, that Monstercat mystique" --Khajidha (talk) 18:16, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As some of the above users have hinted, your best bet is to contact the organization and find out how they pronounce it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It's pronounced the same as Raymond Luxury Yacht.--Khajidha (talk) 17:37, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a fun fact: Cheops and Khufu are pronounced the same way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:07, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The company logo shows what could be considered a monster cat, as does much of the cover art of their albums. --Lambiam 21:03, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It all seems rather obvious, but if the OP is still uncertain, he could contact them and find out for sure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

November 16

Why is the subject of an imperative sentence that mentions someone's name the implied you?

For instance, I was taught that the subject of "Samuel, drive your sister home from school today." is the "implied you" instead of "Samuel" (even though they represent the same person), but why is that the case? JJP...MASTER!...MASTER!!! master of puppets, i'm pulling your strings (0-3-5)_{[talk about or to] JJP... master? master? where's the dreams that i've been after (0-3-6-5)} 15:02, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Because the use of the name is designed to get the attention of the person who the sentence is directed at. No one speaks commas, so ignore any written convention surrounding those. The sentence really is "Drive your sister home from school today", and the "Samuel" at the front is just the speaker saying his name to get his attention. --Jayron 32 17:58, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You wouldn't necessarily use the person's name. If you were talking to Samuel and said to him "Please drive your sister home from school today", then the command is directed at Samuel, and as "drive" by itself is only a verb-fragment, it needs at least an implied subject to make it grammatically efficacious, and that can only be "you". In other words, "Please (will) you drive your sister home from school today". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:59, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The vocative "Samuel" is not necessarily "designed to get attention" of Samuel; primarily, it's to clarify who the sentence is addressed to. If Samuel's already paying attention, it could equally well be at the end of the sentence, or in some cases, in the middle. But still, it's true that it could just as well be omitted. I don't think it's very useful to say that there is an "implied subject", but if you believe there must be one, then clearly it is "you". --174.95.161.129 (talk) 03:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

JJPMaster -- In that sentence, the word Samuel plays a role which traditionally is known as the "Vocative", which means that it stands outside the ordinary syntactic relations within a sentence. Some languages (such as Latin) have a vocative case inflection which is often very distinct from the case inflection which indicates a verb subject (the nominative). Also, English bare imperatives are basically 2nd-person only (1st-person plural imperatives are introduced by "Let's", and there's not much in modern English that could usefully be called a 3rd person imperative). AnonMoos (talk) 19:07, 16 November 2020

Some fixed phrases, like "God bless you", are third-person imperatives. --Trovatore (talk) 19:27, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

God does not take orders. It's really short for "May God bless you." <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 21:14, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No. "Bless" here is in the subjunctive mood. The present subjunctive is used for third-person imperatives, among other things. It's not "short for" anything.

Imperatives are not necessarily "orders" in the aggressive sense of that word. Prayers are also imperatives directed to God, though in the second person.

I know AnonMoos doesn't believe in the subjunctive. Oh well. --Trovatore (talk) 21:26, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe in a unified subjunctive in modern English -- there are various somewhat isolated remnants and relics and archaisms, and it's very doubtful whether it's useful (when describing modern English only) to try to assemble them all together into a unified verb conjugation or paradigm... AnonMoos (talk) 14:14, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Mmm, that is probably true. The thing is that I think the phrase "when describing modern English only" is doing a lot of work there. Why would we want to describe modern English only? A lot of things about modern English become clearer when you compare it to closely related languages, such as other Western European languages. And then these "remnants and relics and archaisms" find fairly neat spots in overarching paradigms. --Trovatore (talk) 18:32, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Linguists call it "synchronic description" (the Wikipedia article is apparently the stub Synchrony and diachrony). A historically-oriented description of a language can be interesting, but it can result in a tendency to pursue remote etymological byways, and indulge in comparisons with languages that are quite distant from the language you started with. Confining yourself to the current language only, and what could be reasonably deduced from it by a speaker without any historical knowledge, can be equally valid (depending on which goals you want to achieve). For example, children have no special historical or etymological knowledge when they start to learn their first language... AnonMoos (talk) 18:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen". Yes, if you want to specifically study language acquisition, I can see that there is something to be said for following this synchronic method. It strikes me as really limiting for language description, though, particularly in the context of speakers who can be assumed to have learned something of other languages, and to be able to leverage their tools to make sense of otherwise-disjointed-seeming aspects of their own language. --Trovatore (talk) 19:03, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I own a book that you'd hate then: "A Grammar of Spoken English On a Strictly Phonetic Basis" by Harold Palmer (1924). I never saw it, but a grammar of spoken French also came out in the early 20th century, and apparently blew people's minds by ignoring all silent letters, treating definite articles, clitic pronouns, "ne" etc. as prefixes, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I'd hate it; it sounds interesting. But the thing is that it seems to me that this synchronic/syntopic/descriptivist approach is almost by design limiting attention to the "surface grammar", whereas with a more diachronic and diatopic approach, you may have a better chance of seeing the deep grammar underlying it. --Trovatore (talk) 05:46, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If I had the choice to characterize the vowels in Modern English sing – sang – sung and write – wrote – written either as perfectly regular reflexes of IE ablaut (e-grade – o-grade – zero-grade) or just as irregular debris, I'd opt for the latter. –Austronesier (talk) 10:52, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In English, a third-person construction implies the subject and the listener are distinct people. Using a third-person verb for a second-person context comes across as childish or stilted. Instead, we use the name or title as a vocative and keep the second-person pronoun. In the case of an imperative, the pronoun "you" is not stated, and the lack of an explicit subject marks the imperative form. Therefore, analyzing the sentence to have the subject "Samuel" would awkwardly (for English) use a third-person form for a second-person context, and also break the rule that the imperative is marked by lack of an explicit subject. If we instead analyze it as a vocative plus implied "you", that follows both rules and is natural for English. (In some other languages such as Korean, it's a completely different story.) --Amble (talk) 19:10, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Another way of saying basically the same: you can replace the sentence "Samuel, drive your sister home from school today" by "Samuel, you have to drive your sister home from school today". If the subject of the command "drive" was third-person, that replacement would have been "Samuel, he has to drive your sister home from school today", something nobody would say if the designated driver ("he") is the same as the person being addressed ("Samuel"). --Lambiam 23:49, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note that any sentence can have a vocative prefixed to it; it doesn't have to be an imperative sentence. But in no case does the vocative become part of the grammar of the sentence. A teacher might say "Samuel, the derivative of x squared is 2x" or "Samuel, Mark Twain was the author of Tom Sawyer". It's obvious in these cases that "Samuel" is not a subject, object or any other grammatical component of the sentence. CodeTalker (talk) 18:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

November 18

There is a variety of..., or there are?

I recently undid my own undo on an article as it's unclear if there's a definite prescription for the construction "there is/are a variety of something". Lexico (from Oxford Dictionaries, British English) states "1.1 a variety of': A number or range of things of the same general class that are distinct in character or quality.", and gives `Instead, there are a variety of different genes which appear to be linked to the disease. as an example. It appears, at first glance, that the construction "a variety of" is being treated the same way as "many", or a specific number such as "seven". Both Denisarona and I have discussed this and I have brought the issue here for some wider discussion or enlightenment. Bazza (talk) 11:52, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Advanced Learners Dictionary published by Oxford University Press, the correct use is There is a variety of ***. The example given in the dictionary is: There is a wide variety of patterns to choose from. As a teacher of English, I have always used this style: There are varieties of *** OR There is a variety of ***. Regards Denisarona (talk) 12:13, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are several phrases in English (most notoriously "a number of", as in "A number of people were dancing") where the plurality of the object of the preposition seems to influence the plurality of the whole phrase, as far as verb agreement etc. It's perhaps not strictly "logical", but that's the way English is... AnonMoos (talk) 12:18, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Once a phrase like "a XXX of" is perceived as a modifier, it is not "a XXX" that triggers subject agreement, but the following noun. That's the case for "a lot of" and "a number of" which essentially mean "many" and "numerous". If "a variety of" is used to mean "various", plural subject agreement trigger is natural, but not necessarily preferred. –Austronesier (talk) 12:26, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Variety has two different meanings though. It can mean "a specific exemplar" or "a group of exemplars", and depending on the sense meant can affect which conjugation is appropriate. "There is a variety of potatoes in the garden" means "there is one specific exemplar of potatoes in the garden". "There are a variety of potatoes in the garden" means "there are many different exemplars of potatoes in the garden". They are both perfectly grammatical, they just mean different things. It depends on what the speaker is trying to say as to which they should use.--Jayron 32 13:52, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I found the Google Ngrams comparison informative and a little surprising: [2] --Amble (talk) 15:51, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A relevant WP article is Synesis. If "There are a variety of theories ..." (which seems to me preferable) really bothers you, why not just change it to "There are various theories .." and walk away unvexed? Deor (talk) 17:11, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Deor: Thanks. That may well end up as the solution in this case. Interested, challenged, but never vexed! Bazza (talk) 17:50, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know about Bazza, but that construction makes me think about doing a variety of rather violent things to anyone who writes it. --Khajidha (talk) 19:01, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Khajidha: What's wrong with "There are various theories..."? Seems ok to me and avoids the is/are conundrum. Bazza (talk) 19:08, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not that construction. The other one. "There are a variety of theories..."--Khajidha (talk) 19:23, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

These type/sort/kind [sic] of things really annoy me. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The spice of life. Doug butler (talk) 20:49, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Language is (in general) not logical, and in the end usage determines what is "correct", not grammarians. Otherwise, we should mark a sentence such as "The lady does protest too much, I think" as severely flawed, a corrected version being "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Or no, wait, that is also wrong, it should be "The Lady protests to much me thinkes."^[3] (And so on; obviously "the Lady" is a strangely misspelled form of "seo Hlæfdige".) What is asserted to exist in "there is/are a wide variety of patterns to choose from" are the patterns available for choice rather than the variety. The sentence is like a portmanteau: it packs the message "there are many patterns to choose from" with "and their variety is wide" (they are not all tartan). The plural verb form in "there are a wide variety", bypassing the formal subject-verb agreement, is an instance of notional agreement seen more commonly in British English than in American English. --Lambiam 13:11, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Language certainly isn't logical, but it's handy when it is, and when one has a choice, such as with the OP's question here, it's always good to lean in the logical direction. HiLo48 (talk) 23:52, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

One has a choice forsooth, between formal (syntactic) and notional (semantic), but pray, reveal by what logic one type of agreement is to be preferred over the other. --Lambiam 10:24, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It should also be noted that grammarians (in the sense of linguistic academicians) follow usage as well; the misconception that English language rules are inviolate and there has been, is, and always will be only exactly one correct way to do English and the rules are never to be broken under penalty of death is mostly the fault of school teachers, and in particular a rather outdated and thankfully dying style of pedagogy, rather than people who study language. --Jayron 32 13:52, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I wrote the statement that usage determines what is "correct" because the first reply given above alleges that the Advanced Learners Dictionary states that "the correct use" is There is a variety of ***. In the current online version of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary I read something else, though: "You can use a singular or a plural verb before it: There is/are a wide variety of patterns to choose from."^[4] --Lambiam 10:40, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

November 19

Pirate speech

Where, and when, did modern fictional "pirate speech" originate? I mean expressions such as "Argh! hang them from the yardarm" "Pieces of eight!", "Ahoy mates" etc. delivered in a typically gruff semi-drunken tone, (as opposed to Jack Sparrow's florid rather camp delivery) My guess is J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, or film adaptations of the story, but might it be earlier? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:39, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels such as Treasure Island? — SGconlaw (talk) 12:51, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Some information at International Talk Like a Pirate Day#Linguistic background, and see also Piracy in the Atlantic World#Pirate speech. DuncanHill (talk) 12:59, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Treasure Island of course has Long John Silver's parrot, with its cry of '"Pieces of Eight". Silver himself says things like "Avast, there! Who are you, Tom Morgan? Maybe you thought you was cap’n here, perhaps. By the powers, but I’ll teach you better! Cross me, and you’ll go where many a good man’s gone before you, first and last, these thirty year back—some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terwards, Tom Morgan, you may lay to that." DuncanHill (talk) 13:13, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

See also Shiver my timbers and the works of Captain Marryat. DuncanHill (talk) 13:15, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

More links here, here and here. There is wide agreement that Robert Newton has a lot to answer for. --Antiquary (talk) 13:16, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The parrot-on-the-shoulder as a pirate fixture is from the novel Treasure Island (Long John Silver's Captain Flint), but the affirmative interjection used by the pirates in that novel, including Long John Silver, is "Aye", not "Arrr". But the pirates use a lot of terms that are not usually found in the speech of landlubbers, such as "Avast!" or "Shiver my timbers!" --Lambiam 13:31, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wiktionary has several relevant articles. --Antiquary (talk) 13:36, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To err is human. To arr is piratic. --Lambiam 10:15, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It strikes me that Stevenson would have used language for his pirates that was recognisable as pirate-speak to his audience. "Shiver my timbers" and walking the plank ("some by the board" quoted above) and so on would surely have been used as they already meant something to those for whom he was writing. He was not a writer to throw unnecessary barriers in front of his readers. DuncanHill (talk) 13:41, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but the Robert Newton's portrayal, using a highly exaggerated West Country dialect, which really locked in the "how Pirates talk" thing. There was not a specific "pirate speech" meme before Newton's portrayal in the film, no one thought pirates talked specifically like that (if they thought about it at all, it's likely no one had any specific expectation for how a Pirate would speak). His performance in Treasure Island (1950 film) basically invented the concept (see the references already cited above by Antiquary). You can contrast Long John Silver with the other famous pirate character of the same time period, Captain Hook is described by his creator JM Barrie as having a rather posh appearance and manner of speech, he's almost always portrayed as a sort of Restoration-era fashion, with a big black wig and fancy cravat ala Charles II. The first significant film portrayal of Hook was the animated Peter Pan (1953 film), and he talks nothing like Newton's West Country pirate. --Jayron 32 16:42, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But as we have seen, the expressions used long predate Newton's performance of the scripts he was given. The accent is his, the words came before (and of course Barrymore got in first with the "arrh"). The modern fictional Pirate speech clearly is present in Stevenson, and Stevenson was quite deliberately (as he himself said) writing a book for boys, so it seems clear that he would have been drawing on an established tradition and idiom with which those boys would have been familiar. DuncanHill (talk) 16:51, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There was an established dialect used by British seafarers, "ahoy" being drawn from that. See Ship English: Sailors’ speech in the early colonial Caribbean by Sally Delgado. Alansplodge (talk) 09:59, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) The terms were not used specifically by pirates, though, but by seamen in general. In the oldest known published use of "shiver my timbers", the phrase is used by a character in a play designated as "an Old Sailor". The term "avast" was still in use in the US Navy in the 20th century. --Lambiam 10:01, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Delgado work above notes that "Practical difficulties for the researcher are compounded by the recognition that most seventeenth and eighteenth century seamen were illiterate (Kelly 2006: 167) and therefore were unlikely to have left any written evidence of the features common to their everyday speech". Alansplodge (talk) 10:32, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We're conflating several things here, though. There's the jargon of the British Navy (or of naval work in general), which neither Stevenson nor Newton invented and was not unique to piracy. There's the speech patterns of the underclasses, which prior to fairly recently, were not habitually recorded in details that allow us to recreate them reliably, and then there's the heavily rhotic, "arrrrgh" accent which has become uniquely associated with the romantic, cartoonish, "pirate" concept in modern thought, which is uniquely Newton, based on the West Country dialect (and also not particularly associated with Pirates before the 1950 film...) --Jayron 32 15:11, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There was also the 19th-century lingo of seafarers in general, independent of any navy, such as used on merchant and passenger ships. It is not as if nothing of this has been recorded, just like we can learn some "language of the street" from Dickens. Stevenson sailed to the US in 1879 and back to Britain again a year later, where he wrote Treasure Island. Quite possibly, he picked up some expressions en route, aware that one day they might find use in his writings. --Lambiam 17:56, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The OP asked about expressions. He also mentioned delivery. You don't seem to want to address the expressions, only the delivery. And the question really isn't about how real pirates talked, it's about how representations of pirates in popular culture speak. So, we have the "typical" pirate expressions being used by Stevenson, and my point that Stevenson must have been drawing on established representations of pirate-speak in his book for boys stands. To say that Newton originated the "Bristo-Cornish" accent used (or attempted) today says nothing at all about the actual language and expressions. DuncanHill (talk) 15:37, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I thought others had covered that adequately, so I felt no need to repeat what they had said. But you are correct, I did not repeat the correct things already noted by others. Not sure why you felt the need to point that out, but thanks? --Jayron 32 17:56, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A comment on the vocabulary question. Per our article Treasure Island, Stevenson was inspired most specifically by the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates which you can read online. It contains quite a lot of quoted or reported speech, none of which matches the nautical slang considered pirate speak today. (Example: “I am captain of this ship now, therefore you must walk out.” Or “Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarter.”') But the Long John Silver words mentioned earlier in this thread are well attested in the OED as sailor vocabulary. They have ahoy showing up in print in 1748, matey in 1794, avast in 1681, pieces of eight in 1606 and “lay to” used Long John Silver’s way in 1583. This rather looks like Stevenson was drawing on established representations of sailor speak rather than pirates-in-particular speak. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

International Talk Like a Pirate Day was last month, but anyhoo...

Q: What is a pirate's favourite element?

A: Gold, of course. What use is argon to a pirate?

Dread Pirate O'Realname aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:12, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As a late sidebar, note that "Pieces of eight" (in Spanish Reales de a ocho) was not particularly a piratical or even nautical expression, merely a common name for the Spanish dollar coins, each worth eight Spanish reales, that were widely used as an international currency for more than 300 years. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.26.5 (talk) 11:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

November 20

Starting an e-mail in Danish

Hello. What would be the best way to start an e-mail to a Danish person who is a good acquaintance, but not a friend? On the one hand, I've heard that Danes don't like "Dear X..." if they're not your friends, but on the other hand I've also heard they don't like excessively polite or humble formulas. What would be a good way of saying "Dear X, I hope you are well"? Tak. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.48.118.6 (talk) 13:04, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Kære X, the literal equivalent of Dear X, is called here a formal way of opening a letter, so this will probably be found acceptable. Wiktionary also writes that this is used in the beginning of addresses, e.g. Kære Jacob... "Dear Jacob..." --Lambiam 18:12, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A less formal start is Hej (Hej Jacob, ... = "Hello Jacob", ...) --Lambiam

November 21

Namesake

When two persons have both first and last names identical, is there a more specific word or phrase than namesake? Russian does have, полный тёзка (literally "full namesake"), but "full namesake" in English doesn't show any meaningful results for me. Thanks. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 09:23, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the word is used where only the first names, or only the surnames, of two people are the same. Bill Jones and Bob Jones are not namesakes of each other. Neither are Bill Jones and Bill Smith. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:29, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; in colloquial use the term implies both names are the same, although in the case of women the last name may have been acquired by marriage, and any middle names do not need to match. For example, here Mary L. Trump is called the namesake of her grandmother Mary Anne Trump (née MacLeod). However, if (as in this case) a grandchild is named after their grandparent, it is also common to call them the namesake of the grandparent, even if the surnames do not match. For example, here one Daniel Merritt Mead is called "the namesake of his maternal grandfather", Captain Daniel Merritt. But for unrelated people who accidentally have matching names, both parts need to match; so the American Fiona Hill and the British Fiona Hill are each other's namesake, but do not have Fiona Bruce or Faith Hill as namesakes. For the Russian term, I think also the patronymic has to match, as with the two Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarins in this story. --Lambiam 11:01, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

November 22

Google Books

When I click on a title in Google Books, the book shows up prominently, but the background becomes dark gray and I can't access menu items like "Overview", "Get the Book", etc. Indexguy (talk) 02:13, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a browser problem; clearing browser cache is the 1st thing to try. If you need assistance (it depends on which browser), inquire over at the computing desk. 107.15.157.44 (talk) 05:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC) . . .[edit:06:44, 22 November 2020 (UTC)] I just noticed that Google Books has "new" and "classic" versions -- try the other one.[reply]

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 :A: Gold, of course. What use is argon to a pirate?
 :Dread Pirate O'Realname aka --[[User:Shirt58|Shirt58]] ([[User talk:Shirt58|talk]]) 10:12, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
+:As a late sidebar, note that "[[Pieces of eight]]" (in Spanish ''Reales de a ocho'') was not particularly a piratical or even nautical expression, merely a common name for the Spanish dollar coins, each worth eight [[Spanish reales]], that were widely used as an international currency for more than 300 years. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} [[Special:Contributions/90.197.26.5|90.197.26.5]] ([[User talk:90.197.26.5|talk]]) 11:27, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
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