Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 September 20

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September 20

What’s the difference between ‘se le dio’ and ‘se lo dio?

What’s the difference between ‘se le dio’ and ‘se lo dio?’ --66.190.99.112 (talk) 06:34, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

The difference between an indirect object and a direct object, I believe; possible meanings include, respectively, "he gave himself to her" and "she gave him to herself" (if we can trust my very limited Spanish). —Tamfang (talk) 08:37, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

The proper phrase for "He/she/it gave it/him to him/her/it." is se lo dio which replaces the expected le lo dio. The sequence le lo, indirect 3rd person followed by direct third person object is not allowed in that form, the le is replaced by se which is not a reflexive pronoun, but an alternate of le in this case. Hence, "I gave it to him" would be Yo se lo di, not Yo le lo di.

"Se le dio" differs in meaning. Here, se is indeed a reflexive pronoun from the infinitive darse. "Se dio" by itself would mean "it was given", adding le ("to him/her") gives is "it was given to him/her. "Darse cuenta" means to realize, and takes a "subject" in the direct object form. So se me dio cuenta is "I realized" and "se le dio cuenta" is "he/she/it realized". "He gave himself to her" would more normally be rendered as Él se dio a ella, or, better Él se entregó a ella where entregar is the same word used for to hand in a homework assignement. μηδείς (talk) 18:10, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Clutching genitals at night

Is there an English term, either technical or non-, for the phenomenon of a man clutching his genitals in bed as he's drifting off to sleep? Khemehekis (talk) 06:55, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Bobbitt-phobia? Clarityfiend (talk) 07:38, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Masturbation? —Tamfang (talk) 08:41, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Comfort?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:43, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Protecting the family jewels. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:09, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I like "protecting the family jewels" the best! I'm going to use it! Khemehekis (talk) 08:26, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

"Clutching"? Is that what you really mean? That implies a grasp of almost painful strength. μηδείς (talk) 16:54, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

That would be a clutch cargo. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:06, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Old schoolboy joke - Q: "Why do women rub their eyes in the morning? A: "Because they don't have testicles!" Alansplodge (talk) 22:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I'd go with either camel clutch or cobra clutch. They're sometimes used as euphemisms for masturbation, since at least Beavis and Butthead's day, but I think they'd apply more firmly to this. No movement here, like a piledriver or Frankensteiner. More a submission than an attack, probably based on a time when humans were wise to guard the jewels at night, like Bugs says. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:33, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Help with some slightly vulgar German please.

I am trying to find the common German verb for 'to cum'. I have found spritzen and also ejakulieren, but they both seem to be specifically about ejaculation - and a female does not ejaculate. Is there a verb that refers, generally to orgasm without being specifically about ejaculation so that it could apply to a female? I am not looking for a term that belongs in a medical textbook but rather one that a male lover might use to his female lover. It is, therefore, likely to be a vulgar term as 'cum' is in English. Can someone help me please? Gurumaister (talk) 11:13, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

The most colloquial one I can come up with is "kommen" (I mean meaning #5. The verb does also simply mean "to come"). It's certainly not medical or scientific, but there's nothing graphic or "dirty" about it either. It's what most people would use to describe that moment, particularly when it's about how soon or late it happens. --Sluzzelin talk 12:11, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Sluzzelin. So the Germans use the same verb (to come) as we do when they are speaking colloquially? So, "Ich komme" would be a normal way for a woman to tell her lover that she is in the middle of an orgasm? If so then that is really helpful. Thank you. Gurumaister (talk) 12:20, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it's comparable to English use, and yes it would be a normal way to tell one's lover. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:24, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

You are a star! - and we might ask you to the wedding if we get that far  :-) Gurumaister (talk) 12:32, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

There is such a thing as female ejaculation, by the way. Adam Bishop (talk) 17:08, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Men at least can also use it impersonally with the dative: "Mir kommt's". I don't know if a woman can say it that way too, though. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:53, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I am aware of the existence of female ejaculation but it is still a disputed subject and my point was that females do not ejaculate as an essential part of their orgasm - basically is wasn't relevant to my query. Gurumaister (talk) 16:04, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Bavarians would rurally say "i kimm" (ee kim) which other germans would consider funny. "Oh my God!" (Oh mein Gott) is a term germans wouldnt use, too pious. Turkish men in germany say "Boşaliyorum" when they come [1] -- Cherubino (talk) 06:40, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Big country/big city

When we say "a country is big", we usually mean the area. However, when we say "a city is big", we usually mean the population. Why is it like that? --2.246.24.240 (talk) 14:09, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Big is an ambiguous word. In any context (country, state, province, city, neighborhood, family, whatever) it can mean both area or population. That's why one must be more specific in writing or speaking. --Jayron32 17:52, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

But the most common meaning is what I mentioned. Do people just don't care about the area of a city? --2.246.24.240 (talk) 18:30, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Higher population centers do tend to take up more space, though. And whether either a city or a country is "big" depends on what you're comparing it to. Folks from the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area tend to think of Chicagoland as a big city. Folks from St. Cloud tend to think of Minneapolis-St. Paul as a big city (or cities). Folks from rural towns tend to think of St. Cloud as a big city. And so on. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:05, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

City/municipal/political/local government boundaries create confusion about the number of people in population centres. There is no uniform global definition of a city. Most of the world thinks of a city as a place with a lot of people, but the US, at least, doesn't. See Soldier, Kansas. My city, Melbourne, Australia has 4.5 million people in it, but is made up of many local government areas. An arbitrary boundary is accepted for coming up with the 4.5 million people. In Australia, Brisbane is the biggest city geographically, but it only has half the population of Melbourne. HiLo48 (talk) 19:20, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Whoa! The City of Brisbane is certainly Australia's largest capital city by area, at 1,367 km2. But there's more to Australia than the metropoles. Take the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, for instance: In terms of area, Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the largest city in Australia, and the third-largest city in the world, with a total area of 95,575 km2. That would comfortably accommodate 69 Brisbanes. I had to dig around to find this, since we don't seem to have any lists of Aussie LGAs by area, to match List of cities in Australia by population. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:28, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I suggest that the answer is simply that the area of a city has no importance except to people within the scope of its local government, whereas its population is important in other contexts. So we use "big" to refer to that virtual measurement. With countries, on the other hand, area and population are both important, so we use "big" with its natural meaning of physical size (i.e. area) and use other terms to refer to population. --65.94.51.64 (talk) 22:05, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I think it's because the very function of a city is as a population center. A city forms essentially at a point, where some people live, and then more people move to it. The boundaries extend as necessary to fit the growing population. People go to the city because of the concentration of people in it, so its very character is defined by those people. Hence, the more people there are, the more city there is. Countries form for other purposes. The territories of countries are set up to exhaust the land available and everything else about the country follows from those territorial boundaries. In the same way, "big" when referring to a school usually refers to the number of students rather than the size of its campus, and with reference to a bank, it's most likely to refer to the amount of its assets. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 23:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Big Country? Loved 'em. And not just because I live in one. Mostly remembered for the "In a Big Country" single, but Steeltown was their strongest album, IMHO. --Shirt58 (talk) 01:22, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I watched the music video to "In a Big Country" several times, and I still have no idea whatsoever what the song is about (though I will admit that it has "melodic urgency" ). AnonMoos (talk) 21:12, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Roy "Big Country" Nelson is big in the states, but Super Samoan Mark Hunt is big in the prefectures. It's all relative. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:54, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

You're right, Inedible, it is all relative. At the time Big Country were relatively big (but small compared to, let's say say Duran Duran) I lived on a relatively small or relatively big island, depending on how you look at it.

(When I saw The Return of the King movie I couldn't work out why the scene where Frodo and Co came back to The Shire at the end of the film seemed so familiar to me. There were these rustic, somewhat insular but fundamentally decent people with bad haircuts who reacted in a mixture of awe and slight mistrust to ones of their own who had gone out into the wider world and had adventures beyond their understanding. Then I realised: it was rather like going back to Tasmania.)

Peter from (sort of) a number of parts of Australia aka --Shirt58 (talk) 11:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

“None will level on the line” meaning

In the song All along the watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, there's a verse:

"Businessmen, they, they drink my wine, Plowmen dig my earth, None will level on the line, Nobody of it is worth"

Can some tell me what does "None will level on the line" mean? Thanks 2.179.237.208 (talk) 14:33, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Also please tell me what does "All along" mean in the title. Does it mean "in the way of watchtower"? -- 2.179.237.208 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 14:35, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Bob Dylan wrote the song, and according to his official site, the lyrics are "None of them along the line know what any of it is worth". "Along the line" seems to be a bit of a filler phrase, but the meaning seems to be that the narrator is looking at the businessmen and ploughmen from one to another and judging them to be ignorant and complacent.

"Along" is an unusual preposition to go with "the watchtower", but the next line is "princes kept the view", so it seems Dylan is thinking of the watchtower as a castle, and the princes are lined up along the rampart of the castle. That's my impression, anyway. --Nicknack009 (talk) 14:52, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

See prosody (music). Words are often chosen to fit the music of the song, and not necessarily because they make "sense" It's one of the distinctions between lyrical writing versus prose writing: consideration in lyrical writing (poetry and song lyrics) to the sounds of the word and how they fit into rhythm, meter, and "feel" of the song. Actually making sense is can be of secondary concern. Also worth noting here is a few things. 1) Hendrix recorded his version after only a few listens to Dylan's original. It's quite likely he misremembered a lyric or two. Indeed, Dylan liked Hendrix's changes (both lyrically and sonically) that he started playing it Hendrix's way. 2) Tower doesn't just mean a tall skinny building. As an older meaning, tower meant merely a fortress or castle. That's the sense used in the Tower of London. But all of this doesn't matter. It's still music, and not documentary. It isn't always trying to make sense. It's just trying to sound interesting and entertaining. --Jayron32 17:50, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I would interpret (within lyrical context) "None will level on the line" as meaning something like "none of them will speak the truth" or "...explain what's going one", combined with the next line, something like "nothing that they say is worthwhile". I haven't read it but a rather lengthy 2-part analysis of the lyrics can be found here:[2]   —71.20.250.51 (talk) 00:23, 21 September 2014 (UTC)