this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
43 points (95.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

37441 readers
1156 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

One of the tricky things with English is that we often have words that can be combined to form different words.

Like greenhouse. It's a combination of green + house. But a greenhouse is something very different from a green house. Autocorrect may cause some people to make this mistake, but generally, the concepts are understood to be different.

On the other side of things, there's things like "alot" which is mistakenly used so commonly that my autocorrect didn't even care that I typed that (and it's not just because of the quotes!).

Then there are words like login, which as a noun is definitely one word, but as a verb, should almost definitely be two words ("log in to this website", but "this is my login for the website")...but "login" seems to be universally recognized as standard for a verb, even though we don't say loginned for the past tense (we still say "logged in").

And of course, there are other words that are commonly paired together that we don't often see with the space removed, like "Takecare", "Noway", or "Ofcourse". These could all be potential candidates for the "alot" treatment. What makes "alot" special?

So what causes "Please login to the website" to be "correct", but "I workout everyday" to be incorrect? (And maybe everyone is "wrong" about login, or everyone is right about "workout" and "everyday", and the compound word is an acceptable alternative to the versions with the space)

I feel like this would be better in an AskLinguists community here... maybe there's an active one that someone could point me to? But I'm still curious to see what people think

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LaminatedDenim@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

As a Dutchman, I agree. In fact, I'm pretty sure that ever since we've been increasing our exposure to the written English language, many Dutch people have been adding nonsensical spaces to words that used to be written as compounds. We even call it 'English disease' (along with other anglicisms)