Posts by Jen Hay
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.. talking about the incompatibility of formal linguistics and writing poetry. (though yes of course each informs the others etc, i mean being in the right wordspace to practice each)
on the contrary, I'd wager that a disproportionately high number of linguists are also poets. See, e.g. this book
There's no incompatibility here, because - contrary to appearance - linguists don't actually spend much of their time worrying about whether words are nouns or verbs!
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Sorry to have diverted the thread down an agonizingly boring (to me too!) grammar path. I hereby bow out of the 'theatre' discussion, in proud possession of a slightly more respectable post count (cheers, Che!).
Have fun.
(But be careful what y'all say about my inner machinations - or it looks like my husband might come over and beat you up...) -
Jen:
since you can't really use a verb after 'call'Rob:
why not? Before anyone explains- I hereby call "retreat" and "surrender!"Yeah, sorry - perhaps I wasn't being very clear, there.
I guess we can distinguish two uses of call:
(1) something that means basically 'shout' - in which case you can shout any old thing - putting the thing in quotation marks as you do above makes it clear that it's that use. You're just quoting what was shouted, and so you can quote any part of speech.
(2) something that means 'declare' as in: call leg before wicket, call time out, call a stop, call one's bluff, call closure, etc.
Since the wiki said 'I call theatre on this thread', I was assuming use (2), since completing the phrase with 'on this thread' works well for use (2), but not for use (1).
And in use (2), what comes after 'call' is a noun.
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Jen wrote:
"It could be a verb if it was serving as a request (stop! shut up!), as in "please can you theatre now".Che wrote:
I'll run with that explanation. seems to be the most common usage, after all.okay, it's your word! When used in isolation, I guess you can't really tell whether the user is actually telling the person to 'theatre', or declaring the thread to be 'theatre'.
But you better edit the wiki to have a better example (since you can't really use a verb after 'call' - e.g. 'call stop on this thread' and 'call shut up on this thread' are bad.)
You should also perhaps consider censuring those people who use it unambiguously as a noun:
merc:
Ditto, this is GREAT THEATRE, my hearts racing!
Che:
for the benefit of all involved, i am calling a final theatre
merc:
Dude, you are all powerful and I accede to the Final Theatre!
as well as the several egs of 'I call theatre'.
While there are examples like this (where it's clearly used as a noun), I haven't actually seen anywhere in context where it's used unambiguously as a verb....
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Che wrote:
i am demanding that assoc prof hay amend that wiki, immediately!
But I daren't assert such bold authority - especially since not everyone seems persuaded by my point of view, and since there seems to be some dissension about it's actual use...
Merc wrote:
Comment: I want to say notwitstanding, that I was joking when I called you are complete witless moron.
Response: THEATRE!
It's like an LBW appeal, sort of.thanks for the clarification. This is different from what I understood from the wiki (and different from what you were arguing in your previous 'make a call' description). I'm afraid it still doesn't make it a verb though...
It seems like a comment on the status of what the previous person said (like: rubbish! farce! own goal! leg before wicket! - all of which are nouns). In your own description, you say it's because they are being theatrical - so 'theatre' is a description of what the previous comment was.
It could be a verb if it was serving as a request (stop! shut up!), as in "please can you theatre now". But then this seem quite a strange semantic extension of the word, because you are using a description of the current state rather than the desired state to issue the request.
Sheesh. What DO they teach in schools these days....
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Well I certainly admit to not fully understanding the full nuances of use of 'theatre', but here's my opinion, for what its worth:
Rob Stowell wrote:
In context, "theatre" may be best described as neither noun nor verb but simply as an ejaculation
I also don't really buy that it's an ejaculation. If the use was something like:
"THEATRE, this is a strange thread", or "by theatre, I can't believe I'm having this conversation" or "oh theatre, that hurt", then sure.
But when you yell out 'theatre" in a crowded theatre, it still remains a noun you are yelling out, just like if you yelled out "fire" you'd be yelling a noun, and if you yelled out "run!" you'd be yelling a verb.
merc wrote:
Is it a verb to "make a call" in the context of say,
She made the call, the ball was out?Things like 'make a call', 'call down', 'call up', or 'call one's bluff' could be argued to be phrasal verbs - though that doesn't stop the 'call' inside 'call one's bluff' being a verb, and the 'bluff' from being a noun.
In order for something to be a good candidate for a phrasal verb, it should probably have sufficently semantically opaque semantics that it is hard to split it up.
A: "What exactly did he call?"
B: "me up"or:
A: "What exactly did he call"
B: "my bluff"are both weird. But, from my admittedly limited understanding of what it actually means, 'call theatre' is semantically transparent, so that this makes okay sense:
A: "what exactly did he call?"
B: "theatre"like:
A: "what exactly did he call?"
B: "fire!:It's possible you could make a case that "call theatre" is a phrasal verb (though I'm not persuaded of that), but there is no way you can make a case that 'theatre' itself is a verb (which is what the wiki claimed).
I'm therefore standing my ground!
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Genuine New Zealand English was certainly stigmatized, and seldom heard in the media up through the 70s. And yep - there was accent training, at least for the NZBC announcers - aiming toward RP as a model.
But we're over it now, happily - and lots of our media personalities, politicians, etc, have fabulous NZ accents.
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Wow.
This is the most sophisticated and insightful economic analysis that I have seen in a long time, and I think it could represent a true international breakthrough.
It's crystal-clear except for one minor point. I don't really understand what 'Dasein' is?
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Well if we really want to be anally retentive:
OED says anal-retentive gets a hyphen when used as an adjective ("The anal-retentive blogger", "The blogger is anal retentive"
Both these examples are actually adjectives, but only the first needs a hyphen. The difference is whether the adjective is acting as a modifier of a following noun or not. If the words precede the noun, you use a hyphen.
the anal-retentive blogger
the high-profile artist
the well-deserved promotionbut not if they follow them:
the blogger is anal retentive
the artist is high profile
the promotion is well deservedfun fun fun...
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I guess it doesn't really count for 2006, but one word that's acquired impressive new meaning over the last couple of years is 'orewa'.