h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Perhaps it is because you should mull over the complexities of flavour in the mulled wine.
As I'm now posting in reply to a hidem message perhaps it should be whine.

Have we done flabergasted? I was flabergasted the other night when during a phone call with a fiend I was asked to be the best man.

I'd be flabbergasted if a fiend asked me to be best man, too. Do fiends get married or do they just storm in and grab the girl? But I do remember discussing flabbergast before.

I don't know what that hidden posting was, so I don't understand the comments.

That was a fiendish way of pointing out my typo there Gnomon!

The hidden post was from TC and was asking about where the mull in mulled wine came from. It contained two french words which is why I guess it fell foul of the moderators cut.

This thread, by definition, should be exempt from Moderation of forrin langwitch postings. We're only trying to find out where English came from. And we've already discovered very little of it comes from England.

~j~

Both mull (as in wine) and flabbergast are "origin unknown" in my dictionary. But the dictionary does list the wonderful adverb "flabbergastingly"!

The inquiry about flabbergast made me realise that we really need an index to this thread. I've started one at A775929, just to see how it would go. I've only indexed the first 40 postings, so there's another 4,500 to go. What do people think? Is it worth doing?

There has always been a discussion of an index, and I for one would find it most useful, seeing as I have very little new to contribute here anymore. I blame it on only being a pseudo-native speaker
Oh, and enjoy mulling over Mull on holiday Gnomon, its a lovely part of the world, but do take a raincoat.

Thanks Munchkin. It is obvious that an index would be useful. But is the approach I have adopted useful?

I think it's useful, but maybe ranges would be better than lists of numbers for nearby entries, though it's debatable how large a gap is justified before starting a new range.

e.g.
14-21, 42-48
rather than
14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 42, 45, 46, 48

On the subject of 'kerfuffle', a link to a topical US cartoon site.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020628

The advantage of individual numbers is that each is a link to the actual posting in question. With a range, what would I link to, the first posting of the range?

Gnomon, yep, that seems a pretty good way of doing things. I'm sure any problems with the approach will reveal themselves shortly before you get to post 4912.

It's been good enough for reference books for a while....

As an aside, would it be allowed to put links to online resources for words? Such as miriam webster, dictionary.com (or whatever it is) and peoples other favourite / useful resources for looking up the answers?

Could be used as a general resource for this site.

You could make a link to the range e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F19585?thread=100569&skip=13&show=5 will show only posts 14-18.

As long as you leave the skin out of the link. Please!

>>It's been good enough for reference books for a while

Reference books do not normally have hyperlinks to the entries in question!

And how long does a thread have to get before people with tortoise connections get fed up waiting for it to load and go somewhere else instead?

If you index, say, the first 5000 postings, you could then start a new thread, and index as you go.

An index is an excellent idea, but it would be a shame to saddle Gnomon with the lot. I've too much else on here with subbing and scouting to volunteer myself (no, honestly, I already spend several hours a day on h2g2 stuff), but maybe others could commit to, say, 500 or 1000 postings to help out, with Gnomon in overall command and control?

Delegate, Gnomon, delegate!

Gnomon,

Picky, picky, picky!

Well, having had the indexing problem at the back of my mind for some 2 years now (ahem), I had put so much thought into it that it had become so complex in my mind that I was too daunted by the task to start it.

Everyone has different ideas about it. Bossel, for example, who sent me the original thread as an enormous file (html - I was expecting the bare .txt!!!) made completely different suggestions regarding statistics etc.

I was going to write an intro, including online dictionaries etc., and naming all the contributors.

The rest would then be in table form, sorted alphabetically as to the key words. This would make it easier to find things, once the list gets over 10 items.

Gnomon's way is so much simpler and I wish I'd thought of it. Provided the words are kept in alphabetical order, as they are at present.

I would be happy to add the key words as defined in the first thread if this is all that's required. It's just a question of when.

Judging by my track record so far, that's rather a long time.

TC - not always full of empty promises.

The indexing seems simple enough to be helped by a little bit of software. Not working out what should and shouldn't be indexed, but merging lists written by from multiple people, keeping things alphabetical, removing duplicates, stuff like that.

I'm happy to hack out a little something something that could do *that* part of the job, once some rough standards have been agreed for how the index data is prepared.

I think a format like a text file arranged as

"wordorphrase1" num,num..num,num
"wordorphrase2" num,num,num,num,num..num
(where num..num is an inclusive range, ie all intermediate entries contain the word in question)

would contain sufficient data be enough to generate the final h2g2 code from. Any decisions about having ranges (or not) in the final h2g2 code could be made later, without having to retype any data.

People's contributions could simply be posted on another conversation (on someone's home page?), and then copied off to text files on a PC and amalgamated by the program to make the final result.
(And I could post the C code for the program to ensure someone else could change things if I fell under a bus)

(Regarding using a range to set the link to limit the nuber of entries shown, I'd suggest it might not be the best idea, since if someone looked at an example with a 'show=5', and then decided to read further down the thread, all subsequent pages would be in units of 5.)

Duhh - I suppose people could add their contributions in a conversation attached to the article.

Maybe *this* conversation should move to a thread on the article?