Assume v. Presume

[Black Hole]

Principle?

I've been using that smilie a lot lately!

 

[prpr]

Smilie or smiley?

 

[Trev]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or is it Taylor?

 

[EEPhil]

Smilie or smiley?

Probably smiley, but I bet I've put smilie before now.

Tailor ... or is it Taylor?

Smith or Smyth (the toy shop)? Fuchs, Fooks, Fewkes, Foulkes or ffoullkes?

 

[Black Hole]

I could have buzzed on that - there ain't no accents in English words! But what the heck...

Please can anybody explain why Citroën, presumably a French name, has an umlaut (a German accent)? I know I wasn't very good at it, but I did French at school and the only accents I recall were acute, grave, circumflex, and cedilla.

 

[MikeSh]

presumably a French name

Nope.
Apparently Dutch:
André Citroën was born in Paris on 5th February 1878 to Levie Citroën, a diamond merchant of Dutch Jewish origin and Amalie Kleimmann, a Jewess of Polish origin. André Citroën's father died when he was six. The name Citroën derives from "Limoenman" which in Dutch means "small lemons man".

 

[prpr]

Good job it's lemons and not plums...

 

[Trev]

Probably the same thing, but something, (size), has got lost in the translation.

 

[Black Hole]

This is good:

CITROEN. : languagehat.com

languagehat.com

As explained by marie-lucie in the thread, French basically can’t deal with consecutive vowels of this type, so the diaeresis was needed to enable the French to pronounce the name, even if not the way it was pronounced by the Dutch.

 

[Black Hole]

I am not inferring that this IS your problem, but poorly screened HDMI cables can radiate RF in the same band as the TV signals which can be picked up by badly screened aerial patch leads.
Air spaced coax is often badly screened. A good screened coax is, starting from the middle: copper centre core, foam dielectric (insulation), copper foil, copper braid, outer insulation.

Implying, not inferring.

 

[Trev]

infer
/ɪnˈfəː/

verb
gerund or present participle: inferring

1. deduce or conclude (something) from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.
   "from these facts we can infer that crime has been increasing"
   

   synonyms:

   deduce, reason, work out, conclude, come to the conclusion, draw the inference,

So what's wrong with that in my context?

 

[Black Hole]

Well, if that's what you really meant that's fine... but it seems inappropriate in a negative sense, and the context seems transitive rather than intransitive. If you did mean that, "have not inferred" is better than "am not inferring", because you have already done (or not done) it.

But really, I think you are just trying to dig yourself out of a hole

 

[Trev]

OK. I'll stop digging then BH.

 

[EEPhil]

Cue Jack Dee introducing the Uxbridge English Dictionary. "Some people don't know the difference between infer and imply. Infer means deduce from evidence, whereas imply is an untruth from a little demon."

 

[Trev]

whereas imply is an untruth from a little demon."

That seems to sum up the disputed usage nicely

 

[EEPhil]

Oops. I've just realised that UED comment could be taken the wrong way. I was not trying to imply/infer that BH was a little demon telling porkies. I just couldn't readily find the definition of imply so that I could put "...whereas infer is wearing a mink coat".

 

[Trev]

I was implying that it was me Phil, except I didn't say infer.

 

[EEPhil]

I was not trying to imply/infer that BH [or Trev] was a little demon telling porkies

 

[Black Hole]

There are frequent examples of "can" being used when it should be "may" (eg: "only food purchased here can be consumed here" - really, I'll demonstrate), but today I've heard the opposite:

On an advert for a gold coin commemorating the Apollo 11 mission, they say there have been only 1,969 of them minted so (apparently) "fewer than one in every 13½ thousand UK households may own one".

CAN!

The unwashed need to understand that "may" means "permitted to".

 

[Trev]

Can I get one? Or. Please may I have one? How much are they?