So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

GHT said:

We have some articulated and talented wordsmiths here on The Lounge. Anyone want to hazard a guess at what, 'fronted non-finite clause' means?
A BBC presenter and professor who revealed she was left stumped by her nine-year-old's homework has since left fellow academics baffled after posting the impossible question online. Alice Roberts, who hosts documentary series Coast, took to her Twitter and shared a picture of the challenging task, which reads: 'There's a lovely example of a fronted non-finite clause on the bottom half of page 45. Can you find and copy it?'

The Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, wrote: 'Oh dear. Trying to help the nine-year-old with homework again....' After turning to Twitter, it turns out she wasn't the only one who struggled to find the answer.
'I'm a professional writer and editor of linguistics materials with a Masters in Applied Linguistics, and I have absolutely never needed to know what a "fronted non-finite clause" is,' wrote one, while a second penned: 'I'm also a writer, and I've coached students in academic writing too, and I haven't needed to know what that is either.' Professor Colin Talbot added: 'This grammar zealotry defeated me. Absurd. No-one except linguists needs to know this stuff.'

Happily one tweet did come up with the explanation, Michael Rosen wrote: 'Fronted adverbials are adverbs, adverbial phrases or adverbial clauses that are placed before the main clause eg "Happily, it's over." "In the end, it was over." "When the sun set, it was over,'
In response to Rosen's post, which has since been liked 1.3k times, many who have spent a lifetime working in the industry told how they were left stumped.

There's a slew of Twitter responses, which I won't bore you with, if you tweet you can see for yourself: @theAliceRoberts
Has anyone come across fronted non-finite clause?

Click to expand...

I have done a lot of writing, but it was almost all in the engineering and science fields, so I haven't used many "fronted non-finite clauses" and if I ever did I certainly didn't know what they were called.

This reminds me of when mathematicians were allowed to write math textbooks for sixth-graders who were stuck with studying useless things like set theory and using other numerical bases.
The best commentary on that huge mistake came in a "Simpson's" episode in which they found oil on the property of Springfield Elementary. As Principal Skinner said, "Now we can afford to get some math textbooks without that base-6 crap in them."

(It's slightly useful to be aware of binary/base-2, since computers use it, but people don't...)

Old engineering joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those that understand the binary system and those who don't.

OK, here's a fashion matter than increasingly irks me. Shredded blue jeans. Several times a week I see women below a certain age in blue jeans that have shredded or cut-out sections on the knees or thighs, always on the front. Oddly, you never see the shredding or artificial wear on their derrieres, where you might expect to see some wear.

I eagerly anticipate the day when this stylisitc abomination too, shall pass.

Just heard the local news report that the "Nobel Peace Prize for Literature" went to two "arthurs".

KILO NOVEMBER said:

Several times a week I see women below a certain age.

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I'm not sure what that age would be. As ridiculous as I find the whole thing to be at any age, I regularly see women who, being charitable, are in the 9th inning of middle age attired in the holey pants.
I just can't fathom looking in the mirror and thinking that it's a good idea to leave the house that way, let alone to pay a premium to look like you need new pants.

Whenever I see someone wearing purposely slashed clothing, the words to a not-so-old song run through my head. 'Hey Landsknecht, hey Landsknecht. Leben ist nicht aber Krieg und Schreck.'

Haversack said:

Whenever I see someone wearing purposely slashed clothing, '

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Welcome, (early) 90s!

I wouldn't wonder, if acid-wash Denim will come back, soon.

Well. Jeans with rips in them were in style for a time in the late 1970s or early 8os and now they are back. Admittedly not my favorite style, but that is life. If ripped jeans can come back into style, why can't bell bottom jeans? I've been waiting all my life for bell bottoms to come back into style.

Tiki Tom said:

I've been waiting all my life for bell bottoms to come back into style.

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We're halfway there (although I think that one leg is technically a "flare").

Haversack said:

George Bernard Shaw had an answer for intrusive telephone calls. He had a writing hut built at the back of his garden in England. It was 8' x 8' with a windowed door flanked by a pair of windows on one face of the building. The building itself was mounted on a pintle so Shaw could rotate the entire structure to follow the course of the sun. The building contained his writing desk, two bookshelves, and a telephone. The telephone was wired so that it could only call out.

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In my undergraduate days, the standard in Belfast student housing was an 'incoming calls only' landline provided by the landlord (and included in rent charges). If you phoned your pals, they could answer in the comfrot of home, but if they wanted to make an outgoing call, it was a case of heading down the road to the call box. Nobody had a mobile in those days, we could afford the £15 / month line rental, let alone the cost of calls!

Nowadays, of course, GBS would just take a mobile to the shed and only switch it on when he wanted to make a call...

LizzieMaine said:

I can't stand the whole "Sexy Halloween" trope as it is, but this is beyond the pale:

https://nypost.com/2019/09/18/sexy-mr-rogers-costume-drops-just-in-time-for-halloween-2019/

I hope the phalanx of lawyers who currently control the "Mister Rogers" brand sue these people all the way to Someplace Else.

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I've never really gotten the 'free for all' nature of Halloween in the US; over here, it has mostly stayed truer to its roots as a 'horror' type genre thing, though England (which didn't really have the Samhain tradition, and os is embracing Halloween more as a US-commercialised version) can be variable. Thw whole fun of it is the horro aspect to me, not generic 'fancy dress'.

LizzieMaine said:

The same thing is happening at our stupormarket -- bit by bit the cheap store-brand stuff is being phased out in favor of "upscale" more expensive store-brand stuff.

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Same here, mostly tied to the crashing pound, I think.

LizzieMaine said:

There used to be a walk-up stand at the end of my street that served fresh-caught fish and chips, perfectly done in every way, with malt vinegar, for $8. I've never had anything so good, with the exception of a Katz's pastrami sandwich, in my life.

The stand closed three years ago, and I'm still grieving. There are places in town here that can do passable fish and chips when I'm in the mood, but nothing anywhere near as good as I got from the late and lamented "Duo's Take Out." It makes me want to cry just to think of it.

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OUr favourite local chippy closed a year or twgo ago without warning; we still don't know what happened. I'm guesing the elderly couple who ran it just decided to call it a day, but we were regulars and they were very sweet, and I'd have loved to have the chance to say goodbye to the place. I hope one of them didn't take ill, or worse. As is the way of things, it has been replaced by a perfectly nice carry-out place, but just like all the others in the area it's selling American style fries, burgers.... not the traditional Brit stuff. I especially loved their battered burgers.

Tiki Tom said:

Many many moons ago I had a girlfriend in Hereford who swore that the only proper way to get Fish & Chips was if they were wrapped in genuine newspaper. There was a small shop up the road that sold them in exactly that manner where we would frequently get them. Has that now been legislated out of existence in England? Or do some shops still sell them that way? Fond memories.

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Lean'n'mean said:

I believe it has been banned since newspaper ink is toxic.

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Banned since 1985, though a lot of places were dropping it before that because people hated getting the ink all over themselves and their food. (It was also potentially carcinogenic when consumed, so.) I remember a small number of places only using newsprint as the outer layer and plain paper as an inner - always the fancier places, and typically it was specially printed, not 'real' newsprint; My memory goes back to about 1977, and while I recall plenty of folks in my parents' generation talking about it, I don't recall ever actually *seeing* real newspaper used even before 1985. I have a suspicion that it's one of those things that was always technically illegal but never clear or enforced prior to the tidying up of food hygiene laws in 1985.

GHT said:

We have some articulated and talented wordsmiths here on The Lounge. Anyone want to hazard a guess at what, 'fronted non-finite clause' means?
A BBC presenter and professor who revealed she was left stumped by her nine-year-old's homework has since left fellow academics baffled after posting the impossible question online. Alice Roberts, who hosts documentary series Coast, took to her Twitter and shared a picture of the challenging task, which reads: 'There's a lovely example of a fronted non-finite clause on the bottom half of page 45. Can you find and copy it?'

The Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, wrote: 'Oh dear. Trying to help the nine-year-old with homework again....' After turning to Twitter, it turns out she wasn't the only one who struggled to find the answer.
'I'm a professional writer and editor of linguistics materials with a Masters in Applied Linguistics, and I have absolutely never needed to know what a "fronted non-finite clause" is,' wrote one, while a second penned: 'I'm also a writer, and I've coached students in academic writing too, and I haven't needed to know what that is either.' Professor Colin Talbot added: 'This grammar zealotry defeated me. Absurd. No-one except linguists needs to know this stuff.'

Happily one tweet did come up with the explanation, Michael Rosen wrote: 'Fronted adverbials are adverbs, adverbial phrases or adverbial clauses that are placed before the main clause eg "Happily, it's over." "In the end, it was over." "When the sun set, it was over,'
In response to Rosen's post, which has since been liked 1.3k times, many who have spent a lifetime working in the industry told how they were left stumped.

There's a slew of Twitter responses, which I won't bore you with, if you tweet you can see for yourself: @theAliceRoberts
Has anyone come across fronted non-finite clause?

Click to expand...

Not me... By the tiem I was at secondary level in the mid eighties, teaching grammar was long out of fashion. We did have an old school teacher who gave us some basics (main clause and subordinate clause, definitive article.....) much of which I have forgotten, but even English language teachers were'nt supposed to teach us that level of grammar by 1989. Which used to drive our language teachers mad, as they had to teach us grammar basics as well as whichever language.

I have a colleague in his eighties who is very knowledgeable on that sort of stuff; I wish I knew the half of what he does.

Tiki Tom said:

Well. Jeans with rips in them were in style for a time in the late 1970s or early 8os and now they are back. Admittedly not my favorite style, but that is life. If ripped jeans can come back into style, why can't bell bottom jeans? I've been waiting all my life for bell bottoms to come back into style.

Click to expand...

I remember ripped denim being big in the late eighties, and again (briefly) in the mid nineties with grunge, though the mid nineties also saw denim drop back in fashion stakes rather a lot too. Even when I was thirteen in 1988 I didn't get it, never liked the look. I could never understand why anyone would pay for jeans distressed far beyond the point where I'd have binned them. I don't even like the 'fades' that so many denim heads go out of their way to cause.

Flares / Bellbottoms are an odd one. I've always hated them. Intriguingly, though, no matter how hard the fashion industry tries - and it regularly does - to bring flares back, it never succeeds. Yes, bootleg jeans (stealth flares) have been a thing, but proper, full on seventies-style flares have never come back. Which probably says a lot about how truly hideous they are in a world where even the worst abominations of eighties fashions have all come round again among folks too young to know what a stupid idea they were the first time....

Fans of flares need only join the Navy, where they remain very much a fashion must.

"Bell bot-tom trousers,
Coat of Navy blue..
Let him climb the rig-ging
Like his daddy used to do..."

Helloooo, 70s!

But Paisley is of course a timeless classic. Love it!!

KILO NOVEMBER said:

OK, here's a fashion matter than increasingly irks me. Shredded blue jeans. Several times a week I see women below a certain age in blue jeans that have shredded or cut-out sections on the knees or thighs, always on the front. Oddly, you never see the shredding or artificial wear on their derrieres, where you might expect to see some wear.

I eagerly anticipate the day when this stylistic abomination too, shall pass.

Click to expand...

Pass? Pass? Are mad? Look up: "Designer Distressed Jeans." There you will find Dolce & Gabbana ripped and shredded jeans for a mere £485. A tad out of your pocket? Harrods will sell you a similar pair for £450. Still a bit pricey? Amiri do a leather trimmed distressed pair of jeans, a snip, (snip, geddit?) for £396. But if you want the budget end you can always slum it in a slashed pair of Versace's, a bargain at £198.

Tiki Tom said:

Well. Jeans with rips in them were in style for a time in the late 1970s or early 8os and now they are back. Admittedly not my favorite style, but that is life. If ripped jeans can come back into style, why can't bell bottom jeans? I've been waiting all my life for bell bottoms to come back into style.

Click to expand...

Try looking up Victoria Becham's website. If you have to ask the price, you can't afford them.
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...lAhUkyYUKHUbNDREQ4dUDCAc#imgrc=0xuGCTDl0V61qM:

Was Kelly Bundy real 80s fashion or was it just satirical overstatement?

Trenchfriend said:

Was Kelly Bundy real 80s fashion or was it just satirical overstatement?

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There must surely have been some young-ish girls who attempted to emulate the "Kelly Bundy" fashion style, but on the show they took fashion trends to a bit of an extreme for comedic effect.

^^^^
Yup. Caricature, largely.

Perhaps I should put this in the: "You Know That You Are Getting Old," thread. I had to Google Kelly Bundy, absolutely no idea!

I think, jeans-manufacturer want to diss us all?

There are many regular-fit jeans in the stores, which are nearly slim-fit and there are many slim-fit jeans, which are nearly regular-fit.

Brainsick...

Trenchfriend said:

I think, jeans-manufacturer want to diss us all?

There are many regular-fit jeans in the stores, which are nearly slim-fit and there are many slim-fit jeans, which are nearly regular fit.

Brainsick...

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A lot of clothing, in this country anyway, is vanity sized. You want to wear a 34 but they don't want to button? No problem. No need to admit you've put on a few pounds, just buy the 34 relaxed fit! Even better, look for the 34 baggy fit.
My boss actually is a smaller sized man. He has trouble finding properly sized clothing. The standard size he has worn for years is now too large.

GHT said:

Perhaps I should put this in the: "You Know That You Are Getting Old," thread. I had to Google Kelly Bundy, absolutely no idea!

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Rest assured, you have missed nothing.

That show really bugged me -- it's all well and good to parody the cliches of the family sitcom, but it should have parodied the clean-cut upper-middle-class cliches of the genre (the 90s animated sitcom "Daria" was a perfect example of how to do this well) without all the dumb working-class caricatures. Satire is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If it goes the other way, it's not satire, it's mean-spirited ridicule. Ridicule isn't funny.

This is my biggest beef with too much comedy of the last thirty years. It points downward from a position of privilege toward the less privileged, and that misses the whole point of comedy. Knocking a king off his throne is funny. Pulling the chair out from under the guy who cleans the king's slopjar isn't.