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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I think there are a number of word phrases in English that would be, what are called, Trennbare Verben in German. To give English speakers the idea, when somebody says they “work out”, it’s not like just “work” - it has a specific fitness idea because of the additional word “out”.

    In German, the equivalent verb would be “outworking”. In common English grammar, the “out” is always separated. In German, many words can be inserted between working and out - so like “working on the elliptical machine out”. That need not be the case in English, but it often is.

    In English I would like to say “I outbuffed the scratch in my car with a chamoisé.”, or “I uppicked a record from the flea market.” or “I uppumped my tires last week.” or “I downfell and broke my ulna while skiing.”

    Which is more correct: “I pumped up my tires last week.” or “I pumped my tires up last week.”?

    In German it could be “I buffed the scratch in my car with a chamoisé out.”, “I picked a record from the flea market up.”, “I pumped my tires last week up.”, and “I fell and broke my ulna while skiing down.”

    I’m just saying we should normalize these two-word combinations as a “standalone verb” concept so the trailing qualifier is not so difficult to parse and locate correctly in a sentence - since each of the meanings absolutely requires both parts of the verb.


  • It has been my experience, anecdotal as that may be, that a considerable portion of Wikipedia editors are fervent deletionists about anything not found in a paper encyclopedia, Molly White’s impression notwithstanding. The mind-set is, that at some point in the future, Wikipedia will actually be printed out somehow, and any extraneous pages just add more cost with no redeeming value. My own vision is more along the Encyclopedia Galactica line - the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind - where notability is a very low bar, as opposed to the current policy. Should there even be a deletion policy? Why? Maybe a better system would rank the topics by page views and surface the better ones. Why are some editors gatekeepers about public knowledge with their speedy deletion trigger happiness? That’s not the way it works in science publications - ooooh, I guess we need more that one Wikipedia to make that work.