Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 May 6

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 6

Time allowed for dialogue during episodes/movies

While watching an episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation ("Skin of Evil" specifically), I wondered about a scene and further wondered if there was a word for something. During a scene, Riker is pulled off his feet by an unseen force and dragged towards the antagonist, Armus. Data, Geordi, and Dr. Crusher were standing with him. None of them reacted to him falling and being pulled away until after he starts yelling for help. And their reactions are slow even then which gives Armus time to tell the group that if they try to help Riker, that Riker will die. Is there a term for this pregnant pause of sorts? Other than just bad writing/direction/etc.?

This is a legitimate question which is not of a medical or financial nature. Please don't hat or delete this section, thanks. Dismas|^(talk) 00:36, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

In theatre, film, and television, a pause is counted out as a "beat" (see Beat (filmmaking)). The pause may be prolonged and include more than one "beat", so a director may give a cast member instructions along the lines of "count beat, two, three, then deliver your next line", for example. In the scene you describe above, it just sounds like poor pacing in the directing. OttawaAC (talk) 00:50, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Sitcoms are the worst offenders, waiting for their canned reactions. If you mask/mute/ignore that track, things get uncomfortably weird. It's like listening to half of a cell phone chat. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:59, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Maybe, but if you tried watching that (mercifully now cancelled) Robin Williams show this year, there was no laugh track, hence no pause, and hence they crammed in as many attempts at jokes as they could, and the dialogue could be very difficult to follow. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:07, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I've tried to appreciate Robin Williams' brand of humour for years. It certainly wasn't easy. But it sure was plentiful. Probably still is, but I don't have TV anymore. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:31, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Even more awkward are the shows with live studio audiences. The laughter isn't canned, it's real, but the poor actors have no idea how long it's going to last and have to sit there frozen waiting for the room to quiet down so they can go on. Sometimes they even start to say the next line and then stop because they realize the laughter hasn't stopped after all. See old episodes of All in the Family or The Jeffersons or, more recently, The Big Bang Theory for plenty of examples. Angr (talk) 19:13, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, absolutely. The Big Bang Theory (and How I Met Your Mother) were two reasons I finally tuned out. But it was mostly because they really started scripting wrestling the same "viewer-friendly" way that year. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:31, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Or you have something like Mrs Brown's Boys which properly interacts with and plays with the studio audience's reaction, like a stage show would. Like stage actors, they don't expect to just be able to deliver everything at the rehearsed pace. 86.146.28.229 (talk) 20:48, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

(e/c) But that is the way it has always been in live theatre. If you have an actual audience, you have a factor you cannot control, nor should there be any expectation of doing so, and nobody ever calls that "awkward". The players never know what to expect from night to night, which is why they love doing it over and over and over again and never tire of it, and why many of the audience come back often because they, too, never know what to expect from night to night, except that it's always a different performance. The once-only, frozen, set-in-stone, performances we now see on TV and film are what's really unnatural, if you think about it. Same with studio recordings of music, cf. live recordings, cf. attending live performances. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:58, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Long before laugh-tracks, film comedians such as the Marx Brothers would try their various jokes and schticks in theaters, to get a sense of how much time to leave after a given bit. Groucho, of course, also talked directly to the film audience. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:05, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Correct or incorrect "if you want a garden waste bin delivering" - and which is right ?

We had a letter from the council asking us whether we wanted a garden waste bin for their new collection service. (The council area has a mix of town houses houses with no gardens and suburban houses with gardens to it is reasonable of them to ask). The letter said "If you want a garden waste bin delivering, please phone us on XXX".... and to my wife this sounded wrong. I thought it sounded awkward but not wrong.

Then my wife said "it should say "If you want a garden waste bin delivered, please phone us on XXX", but I thought it should say "If you want a garden waste bin to be delivered, please phone us on XXX". To me "If you want a garden waste bin delivered" sounds as though it implies the present, for example saying to a delivery guy "I want a garden waste bin delivered, this is a plastic replica of Venus de Milo".

Basically which of all of these are right:

• If you want a garden waste bin delivering, please phone us on XXX
• If you want a garden waste bin delivered, please phone us on XXX
• If you want a garden waste bin to be delivered, please phone us on XXX

Are there any subtle differences in meaning? -- Q Chris (talk) 07:56, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Personally I think they're all acceptable but the third one is more formal English. The second one sounds more North country to me but still acceptable. --TammyMoet (talk) 09:37, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

To me, they all look correct, but the first one looks distinctively northern - the north of England in particular. The third one looks more formal, but the meaning seems equivalent. As an aside - a usage that would seem distinctively Scottish to me would be the use of the past participle in a sentence where the sense is future passive: 'The windows need cleaned' as opposed to 'The windows need to be cleaned' or 'the windows need cleaning', either of which would be more English/southern. I'd be interested in getting to the bottom of how these two very similar constructions differ and vary. AlexTiefling (talk) 10:21, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

(ec)::I find the first to be colloquial, and the other two quite normal. I don't find the second to be particularly Northern (I am a Southerner who has lived in the North for more than twenty years). On the other hand "the bin wants moved" sounds very Northern to me, as opposed to "the bin wants moving". --ColinFine (talk) 10:24, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

In American English, the first sounds wrong, the others ok. You could have "If you want a garden waste bin delivery, please phone us at XXX. 75.41.109.190 (talk) 15:27, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

They're all "right" insofar as they all are comprehensible and convey the meaning that you need to call the given number in order to obtain a garden waste bin. Why didn't they just say "If you want us to deliver a garden waste bin, please phone us on XXX"? Tonywalton ^Talk 00:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Last time I had to order a new bin from the council, it was delivered by a private contractor whose HQ is at the other end of the country. The passive may be used here to conceal this kind of arrangement. AlexTiefling (talk) 00:26, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

• The only time I have heard something like this cosntruction in America was from Scottish immigrants. Specifically, the question was, "Want spanked?" μηδείς (talk) 03:46, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

• @Medeis:, @AlexTiefling: et al., I think this issue is a close relative of the "needs washed" issue in USA. See here [1] for a pretty thorough description with additional refs. In the variety of AmEng I grew up with, "the car needs washed" is perfectly cromulent, with the verb "to be" easily implied/elided. Agreeing with above comments, All the OP forms are grammatical insofar as they are communicative and intelligible, but the flame wars between linguistic descriptivism and linguistic prescriptivism will never die. (I know because I fight for both sides ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 20:35, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Me too (descriptively speaking; or, if you prefer prescriptive, "I, too"). We soldiers of linguistic fortune should form our own army, or something. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:08, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I actually think I heard the same woman say "needs washed" and I have since noticed it I think from New Englanders but it's rare to non-existent in my dialect. What gets my gall is the Midwestern/Western converse, "looks to be green". μηδείς (talk) 18:08, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Latin word

Hi, I'm reading a Latin text on the Trojan War, and am wondering what the word 'flagaret' means in this sentence:

Decimo belli anno ab Agamemnone Achilles et verbis et facto violatus est, ut ira flagaret.

I searched for it on Wiktionary, but found nothing. Could it be an archaic conjugation of flagitare? Thanks in advance, --Eisfbnore ^(会話) 11:28, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Is it perhaps a slight mistake for a part of flagrare, 'to burn'? "So that anger might blaze up", perhaps? AlexTiefling (talk) 11:45, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

That would seem to make a lot more sense than flagitare. Can you tell us the text? IBE (talk) 12:09, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Agree. Many thanks. :) The text is simply a small preparation for our exam, written by our teacher. --Eisfbnore ^(会話) 12:18, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Cool, that's exactly why I was asking - that makes the typo thing a lot more likely. Typos seem to be very rare in more venerable manuscripts. IBE (talk) 13:06, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

There are some check-out-worthy hits in this search. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:55, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

What does "sujeño" mean?

I think it's Spanish, but Google doesn't know. 98.176.56.95 (talk) 20:44, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Where did you see it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:02, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

It pops up in occasional conversations online when you google it, a couple Facebooks and Twitters. 98.176.56.95 (talk) 00:14, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Could it be a misprint for sueño, dream? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:04, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Just by looking at this first page of google hits, it appears to be a misspelling of "sueño" in every case.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 00:25, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

My first thought was Sureños. 75.41.109.190 (talk) 15:21, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

As a native Spanish speaker I can guarantee you that is not a Spanish word. The RAE backs me up on this. For what I could find in google, it seems to pop up in conversation between highly ignorant people, or teenagers, which is the same thing really, as a way to sounds "cutesy" when typing. I found this example "si ke me dio muxo sujeño", it almost makes my eyes bleed just eyeing those words. Another more hopeful explanation could be that it's simply a typo, the letters U and J are close together in the keyboard, some fat-fingered typer probably pressed two letters instead of one when typing sueño.... either way, that's all I have. mijotoba (talk) 04:14, 11 May 2014 (UTC)