Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 July 30

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July 30

Tahitians

Is there any user out there that knows Tahitian? — Preceding unsigned comment added by KAVEBEAR (talk • contribs)

'Vitipetia'

In attempting unsuccessfully to find an answer for the above (unsigned) user's question, I popped over to the Tahitian Wikipedia and was bemused to find that 'Wikipedia' is transcribed as 'Vitipetia'. I am primarily interested with the 'k' becoming a 't' - I assume this is because of the absence of an indigenous 'k', but can anyone confirm this? Also, are there any other loanwords which receive this treatment (e.g. 'car', 'Caribbean', 'Korea', etc.)? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:46, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

This presumably the same as the [t]-[k] variation in the related Hawaiian language (see Hawaiian phonology). Whereas Hawaiian comes down in favour of [k] (the Hawaiian language wikipedia is called wikipikia; there was some confusion in early transcriptions of the language, with e.g. king Kamehamea being spelled Tamehameha), Tahitian seems to have opted for [t]. --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:07, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Oh, unexpected twist, there. Cheers! --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:30, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

The same thing happened in Tahiti, where they called Captain Cook "Toot", and Tupaia, the Tahitian who travelled with Cook, was sometimes identified as "Tutaha". Adam Bishop (talk) 20:54, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

That's interesting - and despite Tahitian having a 'p', a 't' was still used? Or could this just be a simple case of reduplication? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 01:20, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure, I guess Tahitian "t" and "p" don't sound quite the same as they do in English, probably something to do with aspiration. Adam Bishop (talk) 08:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Phrasing

I am not a native English speaking person. I have a question about phrasing. Is this a correct phrasing or not? If it is not correct or there is a better way of saying it, please write it. Thank you. The phrase is this one (I have removed the references here for convenience):
"Steinway is a prominent piano company and has been appointed 17 royal warrants, including one from HM Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom."
--Peoplefromarizona (talk) 13:49, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

(A non-native speaker as well). Grammatically, it is quite OK. On the style level, I find that the "being a prominent piano company" and "have been appointed royal warrants" are too weakly linked to be in the same sentence. Actually, I think that "is a prominent piano company" is just a piece of puffery that can be safely removed: let the reader judge for themselves how prominent the company is. I don't know the context, though. No such user (talk) 14:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Nearly, but "appoint" can only take the post as its complement, whereas the warrant is not the post but a confirmation or publication of the appointment. There's no immediately obvious way to get "warrant" into the sentence: I would pipe the wikilink differently and say "and has been granted seventeen Royal Appointments, including by... ". An advantage of this wording is that the way the phrase appears on the emblem is "By Appointment", so I think the word "appointment" is more familiar for the idea than the word "warrant". (In fact, informally I would say that the company has had seventeen 'by Appointments'; but I'm not suggesting that wording for a Wikipedia article).

If you really want to get the word "warrant" into it, you would need to say something like "has been appointed a Supplier under seventeen Royal Warrants. --ColinFine (talk) 14:34, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I just saw the introductions of the articles Jacksons of Piccadilly and Prestat. What about saying:

"Steinway is a prominent piano company and has been granted/awarded 17 Royal Warrant of Appointments, including by/from..."

--Peoplefromarizona (talk) 18:23, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

If you're going to use the full phrase, the plural is "Royal warrants of appointment". But I don't think it is necessary. --ColinFine (talk) 20:10, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I have added this sentence, that I hope is correct (I have removed the references here for convenience):

"Steinway is a prominent piano company and has been granted 17 royal warrants, including by HM Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom."

--Peoplefromarizona (talk) 23:08, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Pre-heat the oven

In an episode of Will and Grace, Karen says "Oh, how sweet, a gay man living with his mother. Would you like me to pre-heat the oven or do you want to just jump right in?" I don't really understand the oven reference. Is it a reference to something or simply a joke about killing yourself? Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Thanks, 86.148.25.226 (talk) 20:08, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm completely unfamiliar with the show, but the general joke is likely to revolve around the notion that "real" (i.e. heterosexual, independently living, "macho") men are presumed not to be familiar with the minutiae of cooking, that a gay man living with his mother is thought likely to be so familiar with a conventionally feminine subject, and the prosaic fact that many recipes depend on (and instruct that) the oven be raised to the appropriate cooking temperature ("pre-heated") before the food in question is placed in the oven. Viewers of the show may well be able to add contextual detail. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.66.169 (talk) 20:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I suspect it's about sex, with a subtext of foreplay. (But that might just be me.) HiLo48 (talk) 20:37, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I have no idea either but I can't imagine Karen making a joke about cooking; does she even know how to cook? Or do anything else for herself? If it was about cooking, then the joke isn't viciously sarcastic, and doesn't sound like something she would say (or something that any other character on that show would say). I also suspect it's about sex (with Will and Grace, it's a good bet), but I can't explain it. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:44, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

The reference to the oven is surely a consequence of the first sentence. Single gay men are conventionally assumed, and certainly for TV purposes, to be highly sexually active and highly promiscuous. Bringing back a series of different men to one's apartment for sex could be a tough call if one's mother was also there, and it would tend to severely inhibit one's natural "lifestyle". So much so that one may as well kill oneself, or so the story goes. Gay men are not known for being conventional about anything much, so roasting oneself in an oven is a pretty flamboyant way of bidding adieu. Bringing back a series of opposite-sex people for sex would still be uncomfortable if Mum was there, but at least there wouldn't be the double disapproval factor there. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:27, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I can think of at least two comedians, decades apart from each other, who made joking references to someone getting into an oven for the purpose of committing suicide: Woody Allen and Fran Drescher. I don't recall the specific Will & Grace episode, but Karen's comment sounds like another suicide reference. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:28, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Those are supposed to be humorous comments? Yeah, 'cause suicide's a laugh a minute. LadyofShalott 02:15, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Actual suicide is generally not funny. Woody Allen's mother and Fran Fine's mother did not actually commit suicide. The idea of them committing suicide over something relatively trivial (in Fran's case, the fact that Fran had gotten a tattoo) is what's funny. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:31, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Maybe if I heard it in context... LadyofShalott 02:34, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

A quote attributed to Mel Brooks: "Tragedy is if I have a hangnail. Comedy is if someone else gets killed." It's worth pointing out that, generally speaking, people react quite differently to fictional death vs. actual death. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:22, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Here's a literal transcription of Woody Allen's early standup recording, complete with uhs and you knows and so on.[1] Go to the section labeled N.Y.U. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:27, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

That seems particularly not funny. I think Woody Allen was not trying to be funny, there. It is the end of a joke, a monologue, but I still don't think the intention is humor. I am referencing the line:

"And I'd said that I would have to get a divorce, my mother put down her knitting, and she got up, and she went over to the furnace, and she opened the door, and she got in."

I would interpret it just as an attempt to graphically depict suicide using the most basic terms. It is almost prosaic that he mentions, "opened the door". The attempt is to make the imagery real for the audience and to orchestrate emotions. I don't think it is to elicit a laugh. If anything, people would laugh out of uneasiness. Bus stop (talk) 17:29, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

I have the record album somewhere, and the audience did laugh. Keep in mind it was part of a continuum in his monologue. And that it was around 1960, long before PC had been invented. In the case of Fran Fine, she got a tattoo, which violates Jewish law (or at least Jewish standards) and her mother got on her knees and stuck her head in Fran's oven (Fran soon talked her out of it). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:45, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to the wonders of youtube, here's the NYU bit:[2] You can decide for yourself if the laughter is all genuine or if there's a laugh track overlaid on it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:52, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Suicide by putting ones head into an oven generally doesn't refer to cooking it, but instead refers to the practice of poisoning oneself by using an unlit gas oven. This was a particularly effective means of killing oneself back when coal gas was used, as it typically contained a large amount of carbon monoxide. Modern gas ovens using natural gas or propane are less toxic, although sticking your head into them is still not recommended. Of course, awareness of the connection between putting ones head in an oven and the toxicity of coal gas has diminished over the years, so it's not unknown for people to think that "committing suicide by sticking your head in an oven" somehow involved heating the oven first. -- 174.24.213.112 (talk) 18:28, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Baseball Bugs—the last actually funny thing that is said in that monologue, in my opinion, is that his mother was knitting a chicken, and that followed on the heels of the report that his father was watching on the Ed Sullivan Show the "Indiana Home for the Criminally Insane Glee Club". Those are jokes. That his mother got in the furnace is anticlimactic. It is actually lame. But he is winding down his dialogue. It was funny up until that point and the audience is willing to forgive the fact that the last image is a dud. Thanks for that YouTube clip. It is really interesting. Bus stop (talk) 04:12, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Humor is in the ear of the beholder. :) All of the jokes in that piece are satirical exaggerations. His mother wailing and lamenting over her son getting divorced might be funny. Her not saying a word, but then stepping into the furnace because she's so ashamed of her divorced son, is just another wild exaggeration - as with Sylvia Fine sticking her head in an oven because of the shame of Fran having gotten a tattoo. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:37, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I think the funniest "real" joke in that monologue is "their values in life are God and carpeting." Another funny joke is "we were married by a reformed rabbi in Long Island, a very reformed rabbi, a nazi." Bus stop (talk) 04:57, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Woody was honing his "neurotic Jew" persona that he would use for many of his films. You can link to some of the other segmens of his standup. One item was his joke about thinking of baseball while making love - a joke that he re-used, in an abbreviated form, in Play It Again, Sam. Then there's the joke about how his first wife was sexually assaulted. If you don't find suicide jokes funny, you probably won't find that story funny either, but PC was years in the future. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:09, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

The furnace thing is also funny (I'm changing my mind) because he dared to broach the subject of Jews and ovens. In a time of post Holocaust Europe (right up until the present day) there is a high level of sensitivity in bringing those two subjects together. Maybe that is why I'm thinking it is not so much funny, but that he is using the opportunity to neutralize powerful imagery by using it in a semi-normal context. I think that the joke is not that funny. It is a little bit funny. In other words "funny" is just an excuse to expose dangerous language to the disinfecting properties of exposure to normal light. This is definitely original research. Bus stop (talk) 05:15, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

You may well be right. The standups of that era were all exploring new ground, getting away from the traditional mother-in-law jokes and such stuff as that. You should listen to as many segments of that album as you can find there, to get a broader context of his subject matter. For one thing, he spoke openly and casually about sexual subjects, while seldom if ever resorting to vulgarity the way many other comics did, often leaving the details to the readers' imagination. In Annie Hall, he reprises a standup at some point and says something like, "I was campaigning for Stevenson, and it occurred to me that what I was trying to do with the girl I was dating, was what Eisenhower was doing to the country." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:28, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree that PC levels run high. I of course could be wrong in my interpretation of one minuscule joke at the end of a short comedy skit. But if there is relevance to the Holocaust in that last joke, I find it interesting that the politically correct climate we are in has probably stifled a lot of further use of that terminology. Bus stop (talk) 05:30, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

It would be reasonable to say that only a Jew could likely get away with that joke. In a twist on the idea, in the film Torn Curtain, Hitchcock (who had a macabre sense of humor) has the Jewish actor Paul Newman pushing an East German character into an oven and fatally gassing him. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:34, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Oh no. You've got to provide me with the YouTube clip of that one. Bus stop (talk) 15:37, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I think I have found it. Bus stop (talk) 15:47, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Yep, that's the one. Very intense scene, nothing funny about it, even if Hitch was trying to be ironic. Regarding Woody Allen, jokes about suicide have turned up from time to time. In Love and Death he was contemplating killing himself "by inhaling next to an Armenian". And then there's this gem from Play It Again, Sam.[3] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:54, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

If you've not seen Love and Death for a long time, or ever, this montage includes a couple of suicide references.[4] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:05, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

The Jewish film maker Mel Brooks is on record as saying there is no subject whatsoever - including the Holocaust - that is immune from humour, nor should there be. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:20, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

One

Is the little line at the top of the number 1 still called a serif? Dismas|^(talk) 23:43, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Certainly. Fonts with serifs include numerals as well as letters with serifs. --Orange Mike | Talk 23:57, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. For some reason I was thinking it had another name. Dismas|^(talk) 00:34, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that is a correct answer. That little line is there in most sans-serif fonts that I have seen; I haven't been able to find an explicit statement about the question though. Looie496 (talk) 00:53, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

It may be a serif in English; it is certainly optional when writing a handwritten one in English, so it may be "decorative" as serifs are. In French, however, it is NOT decorative; indeed in French the flag at the top of the one is a large, distinctive part of the numeral when handwritten; for that reason (since it avoids creating two characters when one will do) sans serif fonts may include it, even if English may treat it as an adornment. See this image where you can see the "french" numeral 1 in the 10€ written in the middle. --Jayron32 02:03, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

The little line appears (either horizontal or sloping) in English "sans-serif" fonts, so I don't think we can call it a serif. Dbfirs 07:21, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

You can see here the figure "1" with the little line in Arial and Helvetica which are both sans-serif fonts. According to this typeface anatomy we could call it a "straight diagonal in stroke" (Arial font) or a "straight horizontal in stroke" (Helvetica font). Difficult to find a reference to a typeface number anatomy… — AldoSyrt (talk) 08:04, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

I would call it a tick if I had to call it anything. It is definitely not a serif. It's really a remnant of a stroke that was formerly much longer.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:42, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

It may be called a tittle. Our article refers only to the least uncommon meaning of this, the dot over an 'i'; but the OED says of "tittle": "A small stroke or point in writing or printing.", and further "Orig. rendering Latin apex ‘point, tip’, applied in classical Latin to any minute point or part of a letter, also to the mark over a long vowel, as á, later also to a line indicating an abbreviation. More recently applied also to the Spanish tilde or circumflex over ñ, formerly to the cedilla under ç. By extension, any stroke or tick with a pen." --ColinFine (talk) 09:44, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

In the source files for Computer Modern, Donald Knuth calls it a "point". —Bkell (talk) 10:29, 31 July 2011 (UTC)