Spinney is a nice word for a smallish gathering of trees, alongside copse, coppice, etc. I’m not aware of a term for one specifically in an open field, though.

Apart from the hole, that could be chicken on a raft, an old Royal Navy dish.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

(Samuel Beckett)

I think it’s a very good idea, and I can’t see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.

Maybe also consider merging !foodporn@lemmy.world ? That one seems to be quite general too, and posts often become discussions of how to cook the showcased dish (plus I really dislike the name of the community).

I don’t think I’ve come across that before, but I’d say it depends on what is meant:

• I don’t know what that thing is.
• There is a thing, but I don’t know what it is.
• There is a thing such that I don’t know what it is. I.e., I do not know what all things are.

There may well be some other ones, but I don’t know what they might be.

Yes, it is a famously polarizing taste, but a small amount in something hefty like a ragout adds umami without adding too much of the marmite flavour. I’m vegetarian, and find it’s really handy for adding meatiness to such things.

If you try it and like it, do try marmite spaghetti.

Miso, Marmite, MSG, and Maggi are all good.

Not all at once, though.

I have a Xerox colour laser printer that I’m very happy with: accepts off-brand toner, speaks postscript, good quality printing, no problems at all. I’ve also been very happy with Brother laser printers in the past.

Swot is a venerable and frequently used word, derived from the word sweat. Neek is what’s current with my children’s generation (South London): it’s a portmanteau of nerd and geek, apparently. Spod may well be regionally and temporally specific, as it’s what I used to be called in SW England in the 1980s.

These kinds of insults definitely exist here in the UK too, e.g., swot, spod, as well as geek, neek, nerd, etc. I don’t think these are imported from the US, as they’ve been around for a long time. Perhaps a manifestation of anglo-saxon anti-intellectualism?

It reminds me of Vermeer’s Milkmaid. Not Renaissance either, but a beautiful photograph never the less. Accidental Baroque?

A red Majohn A1 with a Pilot VP stub nib in place of the standard EF nib, Lamy Peridot ink.

Yes, that seems about right to me.

I can’t quite put my finger on the rule for when you can use “for me”; perhaps there isn’t one.

I do think, however, that you can safely put “For me,” at the beginning of the sentence instead of using “to me” later: “For me, it seems…”, “For me, it looks like…”, etc.

For me, “for me” is more subjective than “to me”, suggesting there may be other equally valid points of view.

But I would never say “It seems for me”, or the other items in your list except for “…makes more sense for me…”.

Ah yes, that too.

I’m British, so, yes, I’m continentally challenged.

There’s no better subject than semi-colons to get a discussion started in an English usage community!

Thank you for this interesting post in praise of the em dash.

When I need it, I myself prefer using an en dash separated with spaces to an em dash without, as I find it more visually appealing – the em dash looks odd to me stuck on the end of a word, and provides fewer options for good word spacing. Does that make me a “continentally-challenged user of English”? If so, which continent?

Also, in this sentence

So, they weren’t wrong, but they could have just said that they link two sentences to show a stronger connection–other specific syntactic units have nothing to do with it.

I’d use a semi colon there:

So, they weren’t wrong, but they could have just said that they link two sentences to show a stronger connection; other specific syntactic units have nothing to do with it.

What’s the motivation for replacing semi colons and ellipses with em dashes? For me, having access to different punctuations, used correctly of course, adds variety to language.

Thank you for this brilliant transcription. It’s as good as the image itself.