Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 March 18

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March 18

Sentence improvement at Nicke Lignell

The article Nicke Lignell contains this sentence (copy-pasted verbatim):

On 30 December 2006, the car Lignell and his mother were travelling in was hit in Ekenäs by a drunk driver who blew 2.41‰ on a breathalyzer test.

"Who blew" means that the drunk driver literally blew into the breathalyzer and the device then showed the driver had a blood alcohol concentration of 2.41‰, which is well above the limit for drunk driving in Finland. "To blow" (Finnish: puhaltaa) is a common expression for this in Finnish, but is it in English? If not, what could be a better one? And is it better to write "2.41‰" or "0.241%" in English? JIP | Talk 01:34, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

To answer the third question directly, as experience may have shown you here, definitely write 0.241% rather than 2.41‰. As our per mil article notes, [t]he term occurs so rarely in English that major dictionaries do not agree on the spelling and some major dictionaries such as Macmillan do not even contain an entry. --Trovatore (talk) 19:45, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

"Blew" is a common colloquialism for that test in American English, at least. But there might be a more formal way of saying it. As to 2.41 vs. .241, that's a major difference. Which one is right? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:22, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Both are right. 2.41‰ and 0.241% are the same thing. Note that the first one has a per mille sign and the second has a per cent sign. It's a question of style. JIP | Talk 08:52, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I didn't see the extra 0. That's not something they used in my schools. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:31, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

You can tell it's not 2.41% by the fact that the article didn't mention the driver being dead. --Trovatore (talk) 19:30, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

JIP -- I think "blew" would be understood in English, but if you don't want to focus on the physical action of taking a breathalyzer test, then "he recorded a blood-alcohol level of 0.0241%" would be more neutral. (I assume you don't mean 2.41%, which would apparently be extreme.) AnonMoos (talk) 02:27, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

2.41‰ is 0.241%, not 0.0241%, which is below the legal limit in Finland. I suggest "registered" instead of "recorded" as being more common.  --Lambiam 10:31, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

'Blew' is fine in English and will be widely understood. The other responses here confirm my suspicion that most people are not familiar with the '‰' symbol meaning 'per thousand' and so you should use '%' or 'percent' instead.-gadfium 03:58, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

If they failed the test, they blew it.  --Lambiam 10:33, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

"Blew" is rather slangy IMO; "registered" is better. Clarityfiend (talk) 11:22, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Both "registered" and "recorded" seem to be coming at it the wrong way 'round. The device registered a reading which may have been recorded by the device or by the administering officer, but Lignell didn't do either of those things. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:44, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Making the driver the grammatical subject arguably requires using an unaccusative verb here. While the driver did perform an action, he was not the true agent — the test was performed on him, presumably under duress. "Recorded" and "registered" both seem a little wrong. Clean passive voice might be best; something like "was determined to have a BAC of".-Trovatore (talk) 21:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Nor should he have, as he was not t he one who was driving drunk. Lignell was the victim of the car crash, not the perpetrator. JIP | Talk 15:38, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

"Blew" seems to be in common use in British news sources - Police say a driver blew an alcohol reading so high that the breathalyser couldn't measure it for example, but I agree it's colloquial. In the UK, the result would be expressed in "Micrograms per 100 millilitres of breath" (BTW, 2.4 would be legal in England and Wales, but not Scotland). [1] Alansplodge (talk) 18:30, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

According to this [2] (UK-based drinkdriving.org), someone can "provide an evidential specimen of breath" which is then analysed by a device of an approved type, which will provide a result in microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath. Probably the correct legal wording, but scarcely colloquial. --Verbarson ^talk_edits 12:07, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Pinky to the moon

What does it mean to put your pinky finger to the moon? And does this have anything to do with kissing the Pope's ring? Thank you. 86.181.187.117 (talk) -- Preceding undated comment added 14:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Explained at [3] with a video at [4].2.30.130.69 (talk) 16:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh I see thank you. Bruno Mars version slightly differs it as "put your pinky rings up to the moon." Is origin of this? But no kissing or Popes looks like. Looks like doing shots, must be only at night time. 86.181.187.117 (talk) 17:02, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

The only thing I could think of was the practice of extending one's "little finger when drinking from a teacup", which was kind of considered effeminate for a man in the mid-20th century U.S., and isn't even good etiquette according to Little finger#Gestures... AnonMoos (talk) 00:56, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Indeed. It's a veritable minefield. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Etymology of the Russian word "Квашеная"

What is the etymology of "Квашеная"? Gil_mo (talk) 16:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Does it mean "pickled"? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:27, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Wikt:квашеный says "fermented, sour". ru:Квашеная капуста is Sauerkraut. No luck with an etymology. Alansplodge (talk) 20:19, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

The word is very similar to квашенный, which is the past passive participle of the verb квасить, "to make sour". According to Wiktionary the verb is inherited from Proto-Slavic, but allows a surface analysis as квас +‎ -ить, where квас is the drink known in English as kvass, and -ить is a suffix forming verbs from nouns, meaning as much as "to make". According to our article Kvass, the word kvass is ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European base *kwat- ("sour"). Like the English Wiktionary, the Russian Wiktionary treats квашеный and квашенный as separate words, but in any case the relationship to квас is obvious.  --Lambiam 22:20, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a great answer! Gil_mo (talk) 23:40, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

@Lambiam BTW I asked this because the Hebrew word for "he pickeld" is "Kavash" (כבש), and was wondering if there was a relation. Gil_mo (talk) 08:38, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

The Hebrew word wikt:כבש in sense 3 doesn't give an etymology. It would be useful to know whether this meaning exists in ancient Hebrew or is a modern usage. If Google Translate has not led me astray, this article from Hebrew Wikipedia he:כבוש כמבושל describes aspects of pickling in Jewish dietary law, based on text in the Babylonian Talmud that uses the same Hebrew root word: see the passage at Wikisource. In that case, the Hebrew word comes from antiquity. The Russian word is also from an old root and has close relatives in many other Slavic languages. Taken together, that would make it unlikely that there's any etymological connection between the Hebrew and Slavic words. --Amble (talk) 18:17, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Gil_mo (talk) 10:52, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

None was

Is insisting on "none was" as in (here) "The Colony of South Australia was also asked to accept Parkhurst Boys, but resisted, and none was sent there." being excessively pedantic? Doug butler (talk) 20:35, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Would you say "none of the Parkhurst boys were sent there", or "none of the Parkhurst boys was sent there"? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:04, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure I would say "were sent there", because it's so close to a plural, but in my inner ear Miss Charlton, who was always right, would be saying "none means 'not one' so it's singular".Doug butler (talk) 00:52, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

As is often the case, the prescriptionists deployed a specious argument - in this case, the etymological fallacy - to claim that their preference was necessarily "correct". --ColinFine (talk) 18:14, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

According to the usage notes at Wiktionary, either is acceptable. I suppose the preference may be speaker-dependent. In the Parkhurst Boys sentence, I prefer "none were", but others may have a different preference. I don't think there is a valid argument why it should be "none was".  --Lambiam 23:21, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I feel chastened. Doug butler (talk) 00:52, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Resolved

Maybe resolved - however the notion that none were is not the correct usage is intriguing... JarrahTree 11:31, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

[5] supports the take-your-pick approach. Bazza (talk) 16:04, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that the use of a singular verb for none-of-a-plurality came in vogue only after 1860.  --Lambiam 18:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Open it up a bit with a less restrictive search and things look a bit different. Bazza (talk) 21:28, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

That is not a good comparison. It includes cases where none is applied to an uncountable noun, such as milk. One cannot say, *"None of the milk were spilt". One then has no choice but to use a singular verb form. This is another search that forces none to refer to a plurality.  --Lambiam 06:51, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

And this morning I (unintentionally) created a counter-example in Wikipedia:Teahouse#Invisible Ink where "none were" would have grated. Doug butler (talk) 21:40, 19 March 2022 (UTC)