Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 January 25

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January 25

Size for a building

Hi everybody!
Is it possible in English to say "the size of a building is" instead of "the heigth of a building is"?
Thank you for your help!
Calviin 19 (talk) 12:47, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Depends what you're talking about. Height refers specifically to how tall the building is, whereas size refers to its overall area. --Viennese Waltz 13:21, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

(ec) If you mean as a substitute for "the height of a building is...", then probably not. "Size" implies you are about to give more than one dimension (most likely 3), whereas you would only expect one dimension to follow "height is..." "Size" is a 2D or 3D concept. Buildings are not shirts, giving just the height is not useful for conveying the "size" of the building". --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:22, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Sure, by volume, for instance for the purpose of heating or cooling the enclosed space, then it makes sense to say the size of building A is x cubic meters. In addition, a building's square footage is often a proxy to the volume and is usually more useful to realtors for the space's utilization, so one may refer to those figures instead. --Modocc (talk) 13:42, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Size is a vague term; it would depend on the context of the statement to determine what aspect of size one is referring to. Height is specific, and only means size in the vertical dimension. That's the distinction. When you say "The size of the building is..." you can use that statement to refer to height, but not exclusively or unambiguously so. --Jayron32 16:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, because I wanted to say size as substitute of height, but I know thanks you that it isn't possible. So what could I say instead of "the height of a building is"?--Calviin 19 (talk) 19:23, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

The building is X meters tall. Contact Basemetal here 19:24, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

You could say "The building reaches an altitude of...". A bit unusual and poetic, perhaps, but better than the vague "size". StuRat (talk) 21:52, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Especially if we're talking flying buildings. Contact Basemetal here 22:19, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Altitude is a bad idea, as it's more likely to be interpreted as altitude above sea level than above the base of the building. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 17:35, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Questions like this need to be asked in the context of at least a full paragraph, User talk:Calviin 19. I know construction workers and engineers who've worked on projects of great volume and little height to great height and little volume. All that can be said without context is that height is vertical altitude, while size is ambiguous. A one-storey sewage treatment plant can be of far greater volume than a 20-storey mental hospital, and both quite smaller than a nuclear plant. Other than saying "size" is ambiguous the rest is rather unhelpful without your further input. μηδείς (talk) 02:10, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

You paint quite the scenic pic of New Jersey. Who needs amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty when one has construction workers, sewage treatment plants, mental hospitals, and nuclear plants ? :-) StuRat (talk) 02:25, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

The nuke plant (Limerick) was in PA and the Mental Hospital I was thinking of is on the West Side Highway in Manhattan. I'll admit there is a local sewage treatment plant in the town I grew up in; we don't just dump it into the Detroit River like you folk. μηδείς (talk) 02:27, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Okay, here is the sentence, because without it you won't understand what I mean exactly: The top floor is situated at 197.5 meters, so 38.5% of the total size isn’t usable for people, but is only architectural..--Calviin 19 (talk) 15:27, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

The top floor is 197.5 metres up; the remaining 38.5% of the total height is not available for use, being only an architectural feature. is a little contrived but retains your meaning without resorting to a complete rewording. Bazza (talk) 15:39, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually, you misunderstood the sentence so I give you the whole paragraph: The Burj Al Arab is the third tallest hotel of the world with a height of 321 meters with 56 floors. The special thing is that the hotel looks like a sail of a ship. The top floor is situated at 197.5 meters, so 38.5% of the total size isn’t usable for people, but is only architectural. The building is situated on an artificial island. It has been built from 1994 until 1999. You can find eighteen elevators in there. The Burj Al Arab has the highest tennis court of the world and is famous for this..--Calviin 19 (talk) 15:50, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Always helps to have the complete text. I've taken the liberty of recasting some of your text to give a better overall structure. It's not usual to give precise numbers in such narrative, so I have also rounded the figures. With a height of 321 meters, the Burj Al Arab is the third tallest hotel in the world and is designed to look like the sail of a ship. Its 56 floors occupy just over 60% of its height, the topmost being at 198 meters, with remaining 40% being an unusable architectural feature. Construction started in 1994 and was completed in 1999. Situated on an artificial island, the Burj Al Arab is famous for having the highest tennis court in the world. Bazza (talk) 17:02, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much. This improves the quality of the text. I have a question: Is the Burj Al Arab really the third-highest hotel? Because I found a website which says the fourth highest hotel. Here ist the link.--Calviin 19 (talk) 17:48, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

English questions

As English is not my native language, I merely speak it to a good degree after years upon years of studying and use, I have to ask some questions.

In my job, I frequently encounter terms such as "begin"/"start" and "end"/"stop". The alternatives on either side of the slash are used pretty much interchangeably. What is the difference between them? And what about "delete"/"erase"?

And lastly, one of my all-time pet peeves (to get a chance to use the expression). If "prison" and "jail" mean the same thing, why are "prisoner" and "jailer" pretty much opposite concepts? JIP | Talk 19:51, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

For the first part, it helps if you understand English history a little. The Norman Conquest had a profound effect on our language, and often you will find word pairs that mean the same, but which come from two different languages, either Old English/Anglo-Saxon or Norman French. The phrase "let or hindrance" is one such pair, "let" being AS, "hindrance" being NF. --TammyMoet (talk) 20:42, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

As to prisoner vs jailer, that's because they are not derived with the same -er suffix. Also jailer is not derived from the noun but from the verb. There are eleven -er suffixes in English. Furthermore the term prisoner is not even a derived word in English, it was borrowed as such directly from Old French, so from the point of view of English it is not prison + er. Look up wikt:prisoner#English, wikt:prisonier and wikt:-ier#Old French (it's Etymology 2). Contact Basemetal here 20:57, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

For some reason, Wikipedia has a List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 21:40, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

"Begin" is a bit more formal than "start", though I don't sense that distinction between "end" and "stop" ("cease" taking that more hoity toity role for me). Clarityfiend (talk) 21:47, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

• This is terribly context-dependent. I have been editing some .es > .en translations for a while, and have found especially frequently that I run into non-native sounding start-begin oppositions. But I need a wider context. I invite User:JIP to email me a (limited!) number of uses in a wider context, and I will address them. Or post here and ping me. This is something I do professionally, so I will give away a few samples. μηδείς (talk) 22:19, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

"Delete" as a near-synonym of "erase" is really a computer-era usage. The difference there goes back to the fact that when an operating system is ordered to "delete" information, it doesn't actually remove it from the storage medium. It deletes the pointer showing the operating system where to find the information, and makes the disk space (or equivalent) available for reuse. But someone determined, and having timely disk-level access, could go back and find/recover the "deleted" information. Subsequently, capabilities were developed to remove the information outright from the disk—that is what is meant by "erasing". Erasing itself is not a perfect process, any more than erasing pencil with an "eraser" is a perfect process. But it's a more thorough process than "deleting". StevenJ81 (talk) 22:35, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

"Erase" has a more physical tone to it than "delete". Bart Simpson doesn't delete what he writes on the chalkboard. The thing on the end of a pencil isn't a deleter, nor does Mr. Clean hawk "Magic Deleters". Clarityfiend (talk) 05:13, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Or, if Bart were to delete what he wrote on the chalkboard, he could put a line through it. Erasing it would require rubbing it out. MChesterMC (talk) 09:16, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I believe that's if he redacts what he wrote. --Jayron32 17:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

No, I think MChesterMC has it - to me deletion would be something like crossing out, but redaction is blocking out (as is doen, for example, when concealing the names of the guilty parties in documents released under FOI legislation). DuncanHill (talk) 22:34, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know. When I press my delete key against something, it tends to not make me look like a failed comic have the same effect. It doesn't become obfuscated, complicated or illustrated. Just eradicated. Though that link also talks of blotting out and smudging. Maybe technology's just progressed past the point of partial destruction, so it sounds weirder than it did to call an obvious redaction "deleted". Of course, even my delete key isn't perfect. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:13, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

To my mind, "redact" is specifically to block out, "erase" is specifically to remove, "delete" in text could be either removal, striking out, blocking out, or anything else which makes it clear that it's not part of the text (in computing terms, it generally means "remove", though I note that <del></del> cen be used as the strikethrough operator) MChesterMC (talk) 09:38, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Another sort-of synonym for "delete" or "erase" I thought of is "remove". After all, while MS-DOS/Windows and AmigaOS use del to get rid of files/directories, Unix uses rm, short for "remove". But I have come to thought of "delete"/"erase" meaning destroying the object itself, whereas "remove" means unlinking/decoupling/disassembling it from whatever it was accessed through. Is this distinction correct from a grammatical point of view? What about a technical point of view in the context of computer science? JIP | Talk 20:12, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

For most practical purposes, there is no difference between "begin"/"start" and "end"/"stop" respectively. In some cases, one tends to think of "begin" as starting at the very beginning of a timeline, and end only at the very end, while start/stop can be done any time on the timeline. One may come to stop many times during a journey, but only end the journey at the final destination. Star Lord - 星爵 (talk) 20:40, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

There are two BASIC instructions, END and STOP, which both transfer control from the running program back to the operating system (or system in-built IDE in the case of 1980s home computers), and the distinction seems to be that END is final, but STOP is a temporary suspension which can be resumed with CONT. From 1980s introductory computing textbooks, I seem to remember that the Sinclair Spectrum and its predecessor the Sinclair ZX81 lacked END and used STOP for both. Never having owned a non-Commodore home computer before switching to modern PCs, I don't know of personal experience whether this was true. But anyway, this seems to go along what you said in your reply. JIP | Talk 21:46, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

• I start and stop machines quite often, but rarely begin or end one. —Tamfang (talk) 08:45, 28 January 2016 (UTC)