Trump-haters making democracy impossible

[cnelsen]

Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Sure they do: An early meeting.

• Adjectives and Adverbs

In the sentence, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow." do you claim the word "early" is not an adjective? that it has the same function as the word "early" in this sentence, "They decided early in the meeting."

I don't know what "they" say about that particular sentence. Are the authors/editors of the site I linked in the above quoted post they" to whom you refer? If so, is that sentence on their site?

"Early" can function as either an adjective or an adverb. It has a slightly different meaning in each case, and, of course, it modifies a different part of speech in each case.

In post 321, I wrote:

Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, all the ways one might reasonably construe the sentence amount to essentially the same things.

That remark was my way of alluding to an important distinction between written and spoke communication. When we speak with others, there is almost always context that is understood by the parties to a discussion. Among other things, that context allows listeners to know whether one means, for example, early as an adjective or as an adverb, regardless of the speaker's construction. In writing, context plays the same role; however, writers must establish that context at or near their earliest opportunity because readers can't instantaneously make and confirm their denotational conclusions they draw from the written word. Readers can only apply the standard denotations and rules of grammar construe accordingly what they read.

Sometimes, it doesn't matter much whether there is a slight misinterpretation or usage of a word or phrase. For instance, if one's boss says, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow," barring something preventing one from doing so, whether one's bose meant "early relative to the typical meeting time" or "early in the morning, perhaps because the meeting is being coordinated right there on the fly" is of little or no importance. The natural response to that exhortation is, "Okay. What time?" The answer to that question provides the contextual one needs to know (1) at what time to appear for the meeting, and (2) whether the meeting is indeed earlier than normal or merely early in the morning, or both.

Another important difference between written and spoke communication is that some people will say somewhat vague and/or ambiguous things as a means of putting out feelers. I believe they do so because they think the tentativeness/weakness intrinsic to ambiguous/vague statements/inquiries is polite or something. (I realize that whether it is or not is out of scope here.) Whatever the reason, when people converse in person, their elocutionary uncertainty doesn't cause much of a comprehension problem. In writing and one-way speech, it does; moreover, it infuses inefficiency into their discourse with others.

To wit, in writing, I'd write "Let's meet tomorrow morning at seven o'clock." If I were asking if doing so is amenable to the other party, I'd put a question mark at the end of the sentence. If it's an instruction, I end it with a period, whereafter the only things I expect to read in reply are either (1) "okay," or (2) "I can't. Will 'such and such' a time work?" Were I having a face-to-face chat with the other party(s), I might very well say, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow." (I'd still, as befits my intent, put a period or question mark at the end of or in the middle of the sentence.)

Having gone down this road of discussing adjectives and adverbs, why are we discussing it? I realize the high-level reason accrues from the "[sic]"/hyphenation thing. What I don't understand is why we are talking about parts of speech when my core reason for using "[sic]" is that "out of the box" is an accepted idiom having meaning, precisely the one you intend, rather than a user-constructed phrase. Whether the phrase is intended/though to be an adjectival or adverbial phrase has nothing to do with whether it needs to be hyphenated; the fact that it's an accepted idiom is what determines that.

FWIW, there is one situation wherein hyphenating "out of the box" is correct. That instance is when the very next word is a noun. The reason for that rule is that adjectives (and adjectival phrases), unlike adverbs precede the word they modify, whereas adverbs (and adverbial phrases) can be correctly placed before and after the words they modify. Thus by writing, say, "out-of-the-box attempt," the writer informs the reader that the idiom modifies "attempt." That's not the construction you used; you put "naked" between "out of the box" and "attempt," thereby making the hyphenation a grammatical/spelling mistake.
.

OK, cowboy, now you've gone too far. Nobody impugns my modifiers with impunity. Ten paces.

 

[cnelsen]

"[Sic]" is not used to expressly correct someone. It's used to indicate that the writer quoting another's remarks is aware that there is something errant in the way the original author presented the remark and that the error is not the current writer's. I used it because I quoted your writing in my sentence rather than outside of it, such as by using a "quote box."

But for your challenging my use of "[sic]," I'd not have expounded upon my having used [sic], and I certainly wouldn't have bothered to explicitly note what was amiss that led me to use it. Had your point of contention been justified/accurate, I'd have simply "owned" my mistake and moved on, perhaps also offering a clarification of my meaning if such were warranted. (I've done so on more than one occasion. I'm well aware that my USMB posts often contain typos, sometimes a lot of them. Some I discover in time to correct them. Some I do not timely find. Of others, indeed many, I just don't give a damn because nothing I write for USMB has a bearing on how I'm judged by people whose opinion of me I value.)

I really didn't think you'd genuinely want to go down that road; apparently, however, you do...

You'd be correct about the hyphenation but for "out of the gate" existing in English as an idiom. Were it not idiomatically understood to and accepted as having the temporal denotation you note you intended, I would agree with you. (In which case I'd also not have used "[sic].") I provided the first reference link in post 298 to illustrate the phrase's acceptance as an idiom unto itself.

BTW, "out of the gate" is strictly speaking an adverbial prepositional phrase, although some might call it an adverbial phrase. The "adverbial" aspect accrues from the phrase's temporal quality, "when" being a piece of meaning adverbs convey. "Out of the gate" identifies when an action took place, which not a function of adjectives. Thus, though you think you used the phrase as an adjective, you did not because adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. Adverbs, thus adverbial phrases, can modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.



Note:

• Why am I indulging this discussion line? Because I suspect that 300+ posts in, there's little or nothing of note to add to the substance of the thread topic, so I'm willing to engage on this marginally amusing line. If you think there is, however, thematically relevant ground left uncovered with regard to your thread topic, I'll drop this line of chit chat.

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

By reporting the news? How much "fake news" was actually reported and not retracted; where is wikileaks now?

where is wikileaks now?

I don't know, but I know nobody's imploring Assange to find stuff on Trump and his cronies. I don't know that it'd do any good were they to do so, but the point is that nobody's asking, not whether asking would yield results.

Should we wait for the "paid campaigning season" to start?

You should probably ask someone who's campaigning. I do not believe any time is a good time to solicit and, in turn, expect to receive credible input from Assange/Wikileaks or the Russians.

Yes, because the very least credible input is the actual raw emails themselves. That's all fake news. Much safer to stick with the thousands of unnamed sources watching porn in the Washington Post's parking lot. You can trust that.

 

[Reasonable]

Trump haters are doing their patriotic duty to resist this incompetent, insecure, mentally imbalanced poor excuse for a president.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Adjectives don't provide the when aspect of meaning.

Sure they do: An early meeting.

• Adjectives and Adverbs

In the sentence, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow." do you claim the word "early" is not an adjective? that it has the same function as the word "early" in this sentence, "They decided early in the meeting."

I don't know what "they" say about that particular sentence. Are the authors/editors of the site I linked in the above quoted post they" to whom you refer? If so, is that sentence on their site?

"Early" can function as either an adjective or an adverb. It has a slightly different meaning in each case, and, of course, it modifies a different part of speech in each case.

In post 321, I wrote:

Regardless of how one chooses to interpret it, all the ways one might reasonably construe the sentence amount to essentially the same things.

That remark was my way of alluding to an important distinction between written and spoke communication. When we speak with others, there is almost always context that is understood by the parties to a discussion. Among other things, that context allows listeners to know whether one means, for example, early as an adjective or as an adverb, regardless of the speaker's construction. In writing, context plays the same role; however, writers must establish that context at or near their earliest opportunity because readers can't instantaneously make and confirm their denotational conclusions they draw from the written word. Readers can only apply the standard denotations and rules of grammar construe accordingly what they read.

Sometimes, it doesn't matter much whether there is a slight misinterpretation or usage of a word or phrase. For instance, if one's boss says, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow," barring something preventing one from doing so, whether one's bose meant "early relative to the typical meeting time" or "early in the morning, perhaps because the meeting is being coordinated right there on the fly" is of little or no importance. The natural response to that exhortation is, "Okay. What time?" The answer to that question provides the contextual one needs to know (1) at what time to appear for the meeting, and (2) whether the meeting is indeed earlier than normal or merely early in the morning, or both.

Another important difference between written and spoke communication is that some people will say somewhat vague and/or ambiguous things as a means of putting out feelers. I believe they do so because they think the tentativeness/weakness intrinsic to ambiguous/vague statements/inquiries is polite or something. (I realize that whether it is or not is out of scope here.) Whatever the reason, when people converse in person, their elocutionary uncertainty doesn't cause much of a comprehension problem. In writing and one-way speech, it does; moreover, it infuses inefficiency into their discourse with others.

To wit, in writing, I'd write "Let's meet tomorrow morning at seven o'clock." If I were asking if doing so is amenable to the other party, I'd put a question mark at the end of the sentence. If it's an instruction, I end it with a period, whereafter the only things I expect to read in reply are either (1) "okay," or (2) "I can't. Will 'such and such' a time work?" Were I having a face-to-face chat with the other party(s), I might very well say, "Let's have an early meeting tomorrow." (I'd still, as befits my intent, put a period or question mark at the end of or in the middle of the sentence.)

Having gone down this road of discussing adjectives and adverbs, why are we discussing it? I realize the high-level reason accrues from the "[sic]"/hyphenation thing. What I don't understand is why we are talking about parts of speech when my core reason for using "[sic]" is that "out of the box" is an accepted idiom having meaning, precisely the one you intend, rather than a user-constructed phrase. Whether the phrase is intended/though to be an adjectival or adverbial phrase has nothing to do with whether it needs to be hyphenated; the fact that it's an accepted idiom is what determines that.

FWIW, there is one situation wherein hyphenating "out of the box" is correct. That instance is when the very next word is a noun. The reason for that rule is that adjectives (and adjectival phrases), unlike adverbs precede the word they modify, whereas adverbs (and adverbial phrases) can be correctly placed before and after the words they modify. Thus by writing, say, "out-of-the-box attempt," the writer informs the reader that the idiom modifies "attempt." That's not the construction you used; you put "naked" between "out of the box" and "attempt," thereby making the hyphenation a grammatical/spelling mistake.
.

OK, cowboy, now you've gone too far. Nobody impugns my modifiers with impunity. Ten paces.

Cool. We'll see what happens.

Let me ask you something. Do you truly care what the folks there say or whether hyphenating or not hyphenating the phrase is correct? I just want to make sure I know whether you take this as an academic pursuit because I most certainly didn't write "[sic]" as an attack. The exact opposite, as a preemptive defense, is why I wrote it.

 

[Reasonable]

Quick name all the presidents that have impugned their own AG's integrity on a daily basis.

 

[Reasonable]

 

[usmbguest5318]

Your error, I believe, comes from your misunderstanding of what was modified. You thought it was referring to Trump. It was not. It was describing the attempt by the press to bring Trump down, i.e., a noun, though, of course, Trump is a noun as well. There was no verb modified and thus no action about which to convey temporal information.

What was the press' attempt like? It was full-throttle, it was out-of-the-gate (meaning immediately on day one), it was naked.

By reporting the news? How much "fake news" was actually reported and not retracted; where is wikileaks now?

where is wikileaks now?

I don't know, but I know nobody's imploring Assange to find stuff on Trump and his cronies. I don't know that it'd do any good were they to do so, but the point is that nobody's asking, not whether asking would yield results.

Should we wait for the "paid campaigning season" to start?

You should probably ask someone who's campaigning. I do not believe any time is a good time to solicit and, in turn, expect to receive credible input from Assange/Wikileaks or the Russians.

Yes, because the very least credible input is the actual raw emails themselves. That's all fake news. Much safer to stick with the thousands of unnamed sources watching porn in the Washington Post's parking lot. You can trust that.

Actually, I wrote what I did because the question (red text in the quote above) posed is a political strategy question, and I'm neither a political strategist nor politician.

 

[Lewdog]

Quick name all the presidents that have impugned their own AG's integrity on a daily basis.

...and in one hand says that his AG needs to enforce all the laws, while talking out the other side of his mouth how he wants to make the ACA law fail.

 

[Reasonable]

Quick name all the presidents that have impugned their own AG's integrity on a daily basis.

...and in one hand says that his AG needs to enforce all the laws, while talking out the other side of his mouth how he wants to make the ACA law fail.

And he thinks the AG's job is to attack and prosecute people he desires is unfit.
DT knows NOTHING about government and it's now a little more than embarrassing.

 

[WaitingFor2020]

Making Democracy impossible? The GOP controls everything. The federal government, the Supreme Court, most state legislatures, most governorships..... but everything is the Democrat's fault? LOL

They're turning into snowflakes, aren't they? Whiners. Big fucking babies.

 

[MarkClaude]

Trump supporter- anti-semite- white supremacist- and wants to piss on the Constitution.

So?

why do you want to piss on the Constitution?

 

[MarkClaude]

The majority GoP who can't do anything, although the own the WH and Congress, call Dems 'snowflakes' because they laugh at the impotent GOP.

 

[Syriusly]

Trump supporters do not know what makes up a democracy

Let's see. I know that whether a candidate ever called a Miss Universe "fat" deserves 12 stories in the Washington Post, and whether a multi-billionaire with dual citizenship who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an enormous effort to achieve the unprecedented and radical and dangerous step of eliminating the nation's borders is a candidate's primary donor to the tune of $25 million dollars deserves 0 stories in the Washington Post. Did I pass, pussy?

Nope.

Frankly you failed from the OP when you advocated for pissing on the Constitution of the United States.

 

[Norman]

Donald Trump was elected by the people of the United States to a four year term. He is the person we chose to execute the laws of our Republic. We chose him according to the method as provided in our Constitution--the supreme law of the land. You Trump-haters have opposed him from his first day in office--not his policies, but him. You have attacked him like a pack of vicious dogs every minute of every day of his administration--not his policies, but him. In other words, you have spent every day since he took office attacking our democracy itself.

You seek to bring him down. That means you seek to overturn the election. That means you seek to bring down our system of government. That means you and your thug allies think you should replace the democratic will of the people as the supreme power in this land. That means you seek to overturn the Constitution; you seek to subvert the rule of law. That means you are dangerous traitors.

Consider this from today's Washington Post: Sessions discussed Trump campaign with Russian ambassador, per intel intercepts. Do you know what that is? That is a big fat nothing. So what if Sessions discussed the campaign with the Russian ambassador. So fucking what? Jeff Sessions could have made it his mission to discuss the campaign with every leader on earth plus Satan every single day from Iowa through November 8 and no laws would have been broken.

Trump should have federal agents raid the Washington Post on Monday morning and have every person there arrested on charges of treason. He should keep them in jail until the end of his term.

When Trump won they all the sudden turned out to be anti-democratic. Democracy is only nice if it works for them it seems.

 

[Syriusly]

Donald Trump was elected by the people of the United States to a four year term. He is the person we chose to execute the laws of our Republic. We chose him according to the method as provided in our Constitution--the supreme law of the land. You Trump-haters have opposed him from his first day in office--not his policies, but him. You have attacked him like a pack of vicious dogs every minute of every day of his administration--not his policies, but him. In other words, you have spent every day since he took office attacking our democracy itself.

You seek to bring him down. That means you seek to overturn the election. That means you seek to bring down our system of government. That means you and your thug allies think you should replace the democratic will of the people as the supreme power in this land. That means you seek to overturn the Constitution; you seek to subvert the rule of law. That means you are dangerous traitors.

Consider this from today's Washington Post: Sessions discussed Trump campaign with Russian ambassador, per intel intercepts. Do you know what that is? That is a big fat nothing. So what if Sessions discussed the campaign with the Russian ambassador. So fucking what? Jeff Sessions could have made it his mission to discuss the campaign with every leader on earth plus Satan every single day from Iowa through November 8 and no laws would have been broken.

Trump should have federal agents raid the Washington Post on Monday morning and have every person there arrested on charges of treason. He should keep them in jail until the end of his term.

When Trump won they all the sudden turned out to be anti-democratic. Democracy is only nice if it works for them it seems.

When Trump won you Trumpsters seem to have forgotten about the Constitution. To you the Constitution is only applicable when it protects Trump.

 

[cnelsen]

Trump won and he is doing an excellent job. We have obstructionist democrats and a lying media unwilling to report what a good job he is doing.

Thankfully, the media is starting to die.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Writer Is Found Dead

NBC Washington anchor Jim Vance dies at 75

They just need to do it faster.

Wow you should move to Russia where people are more accepting to killing people just because they disagree with your political opinions. Here in the U.S. however it is considered classless.

Killing people for political reasons? You mean like Seth Rich?

Every time I see a retard on this forum bring him up, all I can hear in my ears is the same repubs complaining about the Russian investigation and how much of a waste it is... Seth Rich got shot in Washington D.C. Surprised? A white preppy guy walking in the bad part of Washington D.C. super late at night by himself got shot in a robbery attempt? Wow... what are the odds of that??? Man... no way...

Why are libtards such liars? It was not a robbery attempt. It was a few blocks from where I live--not "the" bad part of DC.

 

[cnelsen]

a preemptive defense

Against me?

 

[cnelsen]

View attachment 140687

Because as any high school student can tell you, a great leader is known by the number of times Snoop Dogg comes over to chill and watch Netflix.

 

[Lewdog]

Trump won and he is doing an excellent job. We have obstructionist democrats and a lying media unwilling to report what a good job he is doing.

Thankfully, the media is starting to die.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Writer Is Found Dead

NBC Washington anchor Jim Vance dies at 75

They just need to do it faster.

Wow you should move to Russia where people are more accepting to killing people just because they disagree with your political opinions. Here in the U.S. however it is considered classless.

Killing people for political reasons? You mean like Seth Rich?

Every time I see a retard on this forum bring him up, all I can hear in my ears is the same repubs complaining about the Russian investigation and how much of a waste it is... Seth Rich got shot in Washington D.C. Surprised? A white preppy guy walking in the bad part of Washington D.C. super late at night by himself got shot in a robbery attempt? Wow... what are the odds of that??? Man... no way...

Why are libtards such liars? It was not a robbery attempt. It was a few blocks from where I live--not "the" bad part of DC.

Wrong. Do you ever get tired of being wrong?

It's becoming a popular area for people to move into, but the crime rates have actually increased there.

 

[cnelsen]

Trump supporter- anti-semite- white supremacist- and wants to piss on the Constitution.

So?

why do you want to piss on the Constitution?

I'm for incarcerating the scumwhores who are pissing on the Constitution.