Supergrunch

Huh, strange, "love" is definitely dynamic for me. How many of Dowty's tests fail for you? For me they all pass: Forms a progressive: I am loving. Is a complement of "force": She forced me to love her. Occurs in imperatives: Love me! Can be pseudo-clefted: What I did was love her. Although my judgements are going a bit after a day of reading syntax papers.

Same here, as a linguist. There's also no coherent notion of correctness if you're anything other than descriptive, unless you're talking about written language. But what's wrong with "I'm loving it"? It's surely grammatical in your dialect... It's the difference between past (simple) and past continuous/progressive. As jayseven says, that's not terribly surprising. But that doesn't mean it can't be used - open class lexical verbs virtually never exhibit gaps in their paradigms like that, so it would be extremely odd if "meow" as a verb was grammatical but "meowed" wasn't. The only cases which could be exceptions (though I can't think of any) are those where particular forms aren't semantically viable, which isn't the case here.

Well for me at least "mew" is only in my passive vocabulary. Let's say you were asking someone if they're able to impersonate a cat - would you say "can you miaow?" or "can you mew?" I'd only ever use the former, and there "miaow" is obviously a verb rather than a noun. But kudos to you for accepting the possibility of falsification of your ideas about language usage, you'd be amazed how many don't.

Lol, I think it's more just common sense. And jayseven did it too, so I'm not alone!

Utter nonsense, where are you getting this idea from? Native English speakers obviously use both as verbs, especially miaow, so how can you say this isn't the case? It's even in the OED...

Jayseven wins at miaowing and language.

I finally learnt to do a uvular trill (just about, anyway).

Yeah, I just realised the same. I must have referred to him as "Coolness" even in real life.

And replaces it with things that are often more interesting. Dawkins make the case for this very well in Unweaving the Rainbow, before he got obsessed with trying to jump up and down on religion.

You obviously haven't studied enough science.

So I'm the only one who wanted to carry out experiments with different lists of gifts on a control list I gave to my parents and a list I sent up the chimney myself? I can't remember if I actually did this or not though, I remember asking my sister to put the list up the chimney because I was scared of doing it. But yes, I liked to make lists of pros and cons for santa's existence. One of the pros was always that I'd seen his sparkly sleigh flying through the sky like a shooting star - it's amazing what you can make yourself believe. Anyway, I suppose I gradually gave up on the idea of him existing as the list of cons grew...

Merry birthday! Somehow I expect it will be a happy one. :wink:

The main differences are crafting, monsters, tools, mining, the day/night cycle, and the fact that the paid version is incomparably better. Watch some youtube videos if you're unsure of whether you'll like the game - they'll give you a much better idea than playing the free version will. Fixed. Looks like it might end up being called inferno or something.

In all seriousness, a good way to get into classical philology these days is to do linguistics with Latin/Ancient Greek as your special languages, then specialise in historical phonology. It's not just funding cuts that make philology rare, it's that it hasn't been studied much in its traditional form since Saussure. (if you're more interested in the literary aspects of philology, then I guess it's better to go into via literature, but I don't know as much about that)

I'm a bit late to the party, but I remember you, although I was a noob in those days so I doubt you remember me. I had a rubbishy Yoshi sig.

Well, now sent mine off to The Peeps. It was actually slow because I spent quite a while working on it.

So there are two reasons I've hardly been on the server - the first is that I'm crazily busy until Christmas, and the second is that I currently only have my rubbishy laptop to play on, which barely runs the game. So yeah, I might be on a bit in winter if the server's still around then.

Basically yes. And resonant polymorphisms meaning you'll get "problems" emerging anyway. But that's beside the point, it would be wrong even if it did work.

The Sheffield Wheel is hilarious, it's like a dodgy copy of the London Eye. The best bit is when they take a picture of you standing on the ground and try and sell it to you. And did you notice how one of the capsules is made of one-way glass? Mysterious... Norfolk mead? I have half a bottle of that to finish. But whatever the mead, it's good stuff. Anyway, I tried and failed to post this yesterday, when the best thing I'd done was cook and eat a sirloin steak. Today by contrast, I'm not so sure... maybe learning about Plato's Cratylus dialogue?

Okay this is just awful, I'm amazed there's even a debate. Eugenics doesn't even work anyway.

Happy birthday!

It really depends on the place. Generally shops, especially supermarket chains, are a bit more lenient and accept various things, but pubs and clubs tend only to like passports and driving licences. Especially Wetherspoon's, who are ID crazy.

That reminds me, I got IDed this summer buying a disposable barbecue. Not sure I see the logic behind that one... something about not giving kids fire-making equipment? Can they buy matches? Anyway, my wallet and provisional driving licence within got stolen ages ago now, and I haven't been bothered to get a new provisional, so I have to carry my passport around for ID. People get a little surprised when they see it, and one time a barmaid asked me which date was my birthday (all the other dates are 21st Century ).

Did anyone else think Sir Alan* on the TV screen in Heathrow at the start of the last episode was like the Face of Boe? *I won't stand for this Lord Sugar stuff.

Internet transfers shouldn't require any actual conversion per se as the money doesn't really exist in the first place, so they're usually free.