Help with English: "Maybe, perhaps, possibly, probably"

[Saint]

A woman who made a sex tape with her teenage son after they were reunited after 15 years apart claims their relationship was not incest - but a case of 'genetic attraction'.

Mistie Rebecca Atkinson, 32, was sentenced to four years and eight months behind bars in Napa County Superior Court, California on Wednesday.

It came after she was found in a Ukiah, California motel room with the 16-year-old boy, who had recorded his mother giving him oral sex on his phone.

Mother and son, father and daughter, all prohibited to have sex?
So, US adheres to the ten commandments of OT?

[Sarkus]

As far as I know, that's legal everywhere in the USA. Biologists assure us that this does not really increase the risk of disease in our children, so there's no good reason to outlaw it.

Many states have statutes or laws prohibiting first-cousin marriage, while some allow it. There was a move (and agreement?) to repeal the restrictions in the 70s, but no state has since done that.

The reason they had problems in the royal families of Europe is that they kept doing it again and again from one generation to the next. That will have an effect on the family gene pool.

Europe, on the whole, has so serious issue with first-cousin marriage.
Some countries banned it outright (Spain, Hungary etc) but most no longer ban it. Some still debate the issue and it's possible bans may again arise.
The European view is dominated by the Christian position where it is not seen as wrong, as cousins are not among the list of prohibited relatives for marriage.

[Sarkus]

Mother and son, father and daughter, all prohibited to have sex?

Yes - this is incest and illegal in most places.

So, US adheres to the ten commandments of OT?

On the whole, as it is a Christian country. But it is not strictly adhered to.

I'm sure it is not illegal to worship another God other than the Abrahamic God.
I'm sure it is not illegal to use God's name in vain.

The main commandments that are illegal are also the ones that, from a (Western) societal point of view, I would see as being common sense: not killing, stealing, purgery etc.

[Saint]

Eric Cantor pulls no punches about what Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives will do to "Obamacare" if the Supreme Court leaves any of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law intact.

pulls no punches = ?

[Sarkus]

"Pulls no punches" is a boxing metaphor. If you pull a punch then you stop short of delivering the blow... you pull your fist back at the last instance.
So if you pull no punches it means that you go through with the attack with the intention of hurting.

In debates, the metaphor means that the person went on the verbal attack, each argument designed to inflict as much damage (to the opponent's position, or character etc) as they can.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Mother and son, father and daughter, all prohibited to have sex?

That's not the issue in this case. The son is under the age of 18, so it's statutory rape regardless of any family relationship. As Sarkus points out, incest is generally illegal, but I doubt very much that any federal, state or municipal attorney would be motivated to devote his scarce resources to prosecuting it, if the two parties are consenting adults and don't make a dadgum movie out of it!

So, US adheres to the ten commandments of OT?

Not in most cases.

• It is not illegal to be an atheist.
• It is not illegal to construct graven images and/or worship them.
• It is not illegal to take the name of God in vain, even on prime-time television.
• It is not illegal to ignore the Sabbath or even to perform extremely unholy acts on the Sabbath.
• It is not illegal to dishonor our fathers and mothers.
• It is not illegal to commit adultery. In fact it might be called our second most popular national pastime after baseball.
• It is not illegal to covet our neighbors' possessions. In fact "keeping up with the Joneses" is the engine that has driven the U.S. economy since around 1890, when it toggled from scarcity-driven to surplus-driven. We all want what everybody else has.
• As for coveting my neighbor's wife, review my comment on adultery. There are probably still a few jurisdictions in which, if my neighbor absconded with my wife and I killed him, I would not be vigorously prosecuted for murder. But neither would the police arrest him for it.

Stealing, on the other hand, is illegal. With the gigantic exception that it's okay for the government to do it.

Exactly the same thing can be said about killing.

The majority of Americans consider themselves Christians. Many of them support this assertion by attending church on Easter and Christmas.

From the perspective of an outsider, the essence of Christianity in comparison to the Judaism that came before it is that it stresses being kind to other people, even if they are not members of the same religion. As I have often said, even though I do not believe that Jesus was a real human being nor that any of the legends about him are true, I still love Jesus because he represents our innate power to be good, decent people. (After all, I love Winnie the Pooh, Frodo Baggins and Wembley Fraggle, so what's wrong with adding one more imaginary figure to that list?)

To the extent that Americans try to live up to Jesus's standards, whether or not we pray to him, it's not unfair to call us a Christian nation.

[Saint]

Hours before troubled millionaire philanthropist Guma Aguiar vanished from his boat, according to his mother's lawyer, his wife told him she wanted a divorce.

"I'm of the belief that that's what pushed him over the deep end," attorney Richard Baron told ABCNews.com. "He loved his wife. He did not want a divorce."

pushed him over the deep end = ?

[Sarkus]

pushed him over the deep end = ?

It's somewhat of a mixed metaphor, I think.
The two metaphors are:
"to be pushed over the edge" - i.e. standing on a metaphorical cliff, for example, and things happen to push you closer and closer to the edge, until such time as something happens that pushes you over the edge.
It doesn't mean you die but that you snap, or at least there is a noticeable difference between your position/demeanour before you went over the edge, and after. And a key thing here is that you wouldn't choose to go over the edge.

The other metaphor being used seems to be "pushed in at the deep end"... or some other swimming-pool metaphor.
Swimming pools have a shallow-end and a deep-end.
Being pushed in at the deep-end generally means that you want to go swimming but are given no time to practice or get accustomed to things before you're put in at the more difficult end, given an immediate challenge.
A new employee who is given no time to settle in but whose first day involves trying to resolve a crisis could say he was pushed in at the deep end.

But the metaphor as used does seem mixed... as you are not "pushed over the deep end"... you are either pushed over the edge, or pushed in at the deep end.

In the example you give, the meaning is very much "pushed over the edge"... i.e. his troubles built up, pushing him closer and closer to the limit that he could tolerate, so he "vanished".
Presumably the writer wanted to get in a metaphor to do with water, given that it happened on a boat, and so used the "deep end"...
But personally I don't think it helps.

[Saint]

An odyssey that began during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt and dominated much of President Barack Obama's first term in the White House could conclude Thursday at the Supreme Court. With it could end the best hope to date for the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance and the hundreds of millions more burdened by rising costs.

odyssey =1) An extended adventurous voyage or trip. Or
2) An intellectual or spiritual quest.

to date = until now? Adverb?

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision sometime after 10 a.m. Thursday in a lawsuit brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business that challenges the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform law Obama signed on March 23, 2010. Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow justices could side with the president and allow the law to take root as intended by Congress. But the Supreme Court may elect to overturn the entire law, or just components of it, and in the process destroy or at least derail the most ambitious effort ever taken to address the shortcomings of the American health care system.

take root = to be effective legally?

Instead, the nation would be stuck with a status quo in which the ranks of the uninsured continue to swell, more workers lose their company health insurance, premiums rise, benefits shrink and more people skip medical treatments because of cost. Meanwhile, the nation's health care bill, which was an estimated $2.7 trillion last year, will continue to devour an ever-larger share of the economy.

skip medical treatments = Does it mean some Americans would not see doctor when fell sick?

2.7 T dollar? Who made the money? Hospitals?

But the stakes are higher for the the tens of millions of Americans who lack access to health care. Fully overturning the Affordable Care Act would deny about 30 million uninsured Americans access to the health benefits that would have been provided under the health care reform starting in 2014. Invalidating health care reform also would eliminate consumer protections built into the law that would prohibit health insurance companies from refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions, charging higher rates to women, kicking sick people off the rolls and setting lifetime limits on coverage of medical bills, among other practices permitted before the law took effect two years ago.

the stakes are higher = the risks are higher?

kicking sick people off the rolls = ?

[Fraggle Rocker]

odyssey =1) An extended adventurous voyage or trip. Or 2) An intellectual or spiritual quest.

"The Odyssey" is the second-oldest work of written literature in Western civilization. It was written around 800BCE by the Ancient Greek poet Homer, but it's obviously a compendium of existing legends. (The oldest work is "The Iliad," which is also by Homer.)

It's been 50 years since I read it, but basically it's the story of Odysseus's ten-year journey, returning to his home in Ithaca after the defeat of Troy in the Trojan wars.

So an odyssey is not just an "extended adventurous trip." It is an incredibly long and dangerous trip, the goal of which is to achieve something that is absolutely vital, something that is central to your life.

We now use the term to refer to any long, difficult project that is really important, but has a good chance of failure.

to date = until now? Adverb?

It's a prepositional phrase. You don't have prepositions in Chinese; you just use verbs. We say "I am walking to the store." "To" is a preposition. You say Wo dao puzi zou lu, "I approach store (and) walk. Dao is a verb. Westerners often translate it as "to" because we are not comfortable in a language with no prepositions, but in Chinese it functions as a verb.

Prepositional phrases are a topic unto themselves. They can function as adjectives and adverbs. In this case, "to date" and "until now" are both adjectival prepositional phrases, because they modify the noun "hope."

take root = to be effective legally?

"Take root" is a metaphor, taken from the way plants grow. If you put a seedling in the ground, an hour later it will be pretty easy to pull out if you change your mind. But if you wait a few days, it will have extended its roots deeper into the soil and you will not be able to pull it out easily, if at all.

So for a law, an idea, a language, or anything else to take root, means that it is established and accepted, and cannot be done away with easily, if at all.

skip medical treatments = Does it mean some Americans would not see doctor when they feel sick?

You always have a decision to make when you feel sick. Is this bad enough to go to the doctor, or should I just stay in bed for a couple of days and it will go away by itself? If the cost of medical treatment rises, people will go to the doctor less often and stay home more often.

As in most countries, most Americans have medical insurance. The majority of us are provided with insurance by our employers (although we pay a portion of the premium). Large employers are required to provide insurance, but smaller ones are not. If they adjust the break point, allowing more companies to stop providing insurance, some of the employees will not be able to afford buying their own insurance. They'll have to pay for each visit to the doctor. This makes them think twice before seeing the doctor for a minor illness. This can bring down the total cost of medical care by eliminating unnecessary treatments. But it can also increase it, if people avoid necessary treatments, become sicker, and then require more expensive treatments.

2.7 T dollar? Who made the money? Hospitals?

Maybe, but you can bet it wasn't the doctors, nurses, orderlies, X-ray technicians, office clerks and janitors. It was the accountants and lawyers who got it all. Our educational system is the same: Far too much of the money we spend on education goes into the pockets of bureaucrats, rather than teachers. Actually you can say that about the entire American economy. Bureaucrats get most of the money, and all they do is sit around "administering" each other.

the stakes are higher = the risks are higher?

No. If you look at this from the perspective of gambling, there are two components to a bet. One is the stakes: the amount of money being risked. The other is the odds: the probabilty of winning vs. losing.

So in any endeavor in which the probability of success is less than 100%, the same principle applies. You are risking something: money, your career, the success of a project, etc. And the probability of succeeding, the odds, are less than 100%.

The stakes are whatever it is you have to lose: money, reputation, time, your job, etc.

In this case the stakes for certain people are their access to insurance.

kicking sick people off the rolls = ?

A roll is simply a list of all the people who are members of a specific group. This may be a formal group like the employees of your company or the cast of a play, or it may be an informal, vaguely-defined group like all voters, all people who support the Republican party, etc.

You have probably heard the term "roll call" in school, to determine who's out sick.

We can talk about all the people in America who have medical insurance as being on a "roll." If we stop offering insurance to people who are already sick, in order for the insurance company (or the government, if they're the provider) to save money on treatment, then we are "kicking them off the rolls." In practice we never actually state the definition, "I'm compiling a roll of all the Americans who have medical insurance." When we're talking about medical insurance and we say "some people will be kicked off the roll," everybody knows what we mean.

[Saint]

A 6-year-old girl found dead in a canal near her home was sexually assaulted, and authorities are now searching for a suspect, police said Wednesday.

Police in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan said the girl was reported missing by her mother early Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, police ruled Sierra Newbold's death a homicide and said an autopsy determined she had been sexually assaulted.

rule = to decide or declare authoritatively or judicially; decree. Is it proper to replace it with "declare"?

"Our highest priority now is to identify, arrest, and successfully prosecute the person or persons responsible for this crime," Diamond said. "I share in the concern of our residents for the ongoing safety and security of our children."

share in = partake ?

"We haven't come to any conclusion," Sanders said. He said police have "tons of leads" and "it's paramount we find out who did this."

tons of leads = ?

Why are there so many children murdered every year in the USA? What is the psychology of the criminals? Why do they target children? Do they enjoy killing helpless children? Is this a serious social illness?

[Fraggle Rocker]

rule = to decide or declare authoritatively or judicially; decree. Is it proper to replace it with "declare"?

No. When the police rule that a certain event occurred in a certain way, this is official. If they had ruled that her death was natural (e.g., an embolism, although I'm sure these are exceedingly rare in children) or accidental (e.g., playing in a tree and falling to the ground), then this means that the government has decided officially that no crime has been committed. The case is closed, which means that the investigation is complete.

But by ruling that her death was a homicide (any of various types of deliberate killing), the government has decided officially that a crime has been committed. The case is not closed. The investigation will continue, with the aim of discovering how the murder was committed and, most importantly, who committed it.

"Declare" certainly means the same as "rule" in casual speech, but when discussing legal issues we must be careful to use proper legal terminology. In the law, "declare" and "rule" are not exactly identical.

share in = partake ?

No. "Partake" has the sense of something enjoyable. To share in concern, grief, disappointment, etc., is not enjoyable. It is also possible to share in joy, appreciation, gratitude and other enjoyable emotions. "Share in" has a wider range of meaning than "partake."

tons of leads = ?

A lead is a clue. To say you have "tons of" something is an exaggerated way of boasting that you have a lot of it, even if it's something you can't weigh on a scale like ideas, songs, or clues.

Why are there so many children murdered every year in the USA? What is the psychology of the criminals? Why do they target children? Do they enjoy killing helpless children? Is this a serious social illness?

This is the Linguistics subforum. You'd probably do better to ask this question in Current Events or Human Science. Nonetheless, I've never encountered a question I didn't attempt to answer.

The short answer is that these events are not common. More children are killed every day in places like Sudan than in an entire year in the United States. But they are so shocking that the news media always grab them. You see, people don't pay attention to good news. But they find bad news spellbinding. There are 300 million people in this country, so even on the best day when most of us are behaving like angels, there are still a lot of people acting like devils.

There are between one and two thousand children killed by murder in the USA every year, out of a population of very roughly one hundred million children. This is not a major cause of death. Besides, most of the victims are adolescents, and most of the murderers are other adolescents. These are fights among peers, not rapes or other attacks by adults.

You're talking about the murder of very young children, which is very rare. In a typical year in the USA, the total number of deaths for children age 5-9 from various causes are:

• Various illnesses and medical conditions: 1,600
• Auto accidents: 600
• Drowning: 150
• Fire: 150
• Other accidents and unintentional injuries: 300
• Homicide: 150

When they reach adolescence, suicide becomes one of the top three causes of death. Note that only 150 little kids die by murder every year. The same number who drown or are burned to death. This is not a major problem.

As for the psychology, well I don't make a habit of reading these news stories in detail, but it seems to me that the vast majority of little children who are murdered were sexually assulted first. That means that we're dealing with people who are simply not normal.

Humans are born with an instinct to protect children. It's natural in a pack-social species like Homo sapiens, in which every member of the community feels a responsibility for all of the children because their parents have other responsibilities besides caring for their own children. Every day you can read a story of an adult who risks his life to save the life of a child whom he doesn't even know personally. I would do it and I guarantee that you would too. We wouldn't even think about it. We'd just jump in and do it.

So the idea of deliberately injuring a child is repugnant to the vast majority of human beings. To actually kill one is even worse. Many parents occasionally lose their temper and slap or spank a child, but they'd never do permanent harm, much less kill him. But to assault him sexually? That is just sick. Anyone who can even imagine doing this, much less actually do it, has a mental illness.

[Saint]

LONDON (Reuters) - Pressure grew on Barclays Plc Chief Executive Bob Diamond to quit as Britain launched an inquiry on Monday into a market-rigging scandal, saying a "culture that flourished in the age of irresponsibility" among bankers had to end.
Barclays Chairman Marcus Agius resigned on Monday, saying "the buck stops with me" as the scandal over manipulating Libor interest rates claimed its first major scalp.

market-rigging=？

the buck stops with me = ？

scalp = The skin covering the top of the human head. Or What?

"Barclays has become the poster child for this because they have been the first to be assessed by the regulators," Euan Stirling of Standard Life Investments, a major investor which holds some 2 percent in Barclays, said on BBC radio. "I think this is going to spread far and wide through the industry."

poster child = ? Can I say poster kid?

[Fraggle Rocker]

market-rigging=？

"Rig" has many meanings in professional and academic language. But in vernacular language it usually means "to manipulate fraudulently." If the house rigs a gambling game, it means that its staff have changed the equipment slightly to give the house an advantage, for example in a crap game by using dice that are unbalanced. If you rig a card game in your home, you may have marked the cards so you can tell what your opponents are holding by looking at the backs.

So if a financial institution rigs the market, it means they have done something dishonorable (and surely dishonest) to make it behave in a way that will increase their profits. They might give one investor advance notice of their future plans, so he can buy (or sell) the stock before the event takes place, then sell (or buy) it afterwards at a nice profit. Then he splits the profit with the institution.

the buck stops with me = ？

In American slang a buck is a dollar. But it also has another slang meaning. In poker, it is an object that is put into a pot in addition to the chips (or actual money). It is a marker, reminding all the players that whoever wins the pot also has a privilege or obligation that has been defined and agreed to by all players in advance. (For example, to buy the next round of drinks.) Once someone has the buck, he is free to negotiate with the other players and may be able to trade it for some other privilege or obligation. ("Okay, I'll buy the drinks but you have to call my wife and tell her I'm working late at the office.")

This is called passing the buck. This phrase has become a common idiom and has lost any connection to its origins. It now means simply to find a way to hand off an obligation of yours to someone else, almost always merely by being clever, sneaky or dishonest, without taking on a new obligation of your own. The sense of the buck being a privilege rather than an obligation has been lost.

President Harry Truman was in office when WWII ended and also at the beginning of the Korean War. He was originally Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president so when FDR died in 1945 he automatically became president and he was elected in his own right in the 1948 election. (The Constitution limits a president to ten years in office so he was barred from running again in 1952.) This was a turbulent time in modern American history, with strikes, shortages, political turmoil, civil rights issues (Japanese-Americans had been rounded up and placed in concentration camps during the war; Afro-American men served with great honor in the U.S. military but when they came home they were treated like second-class citizens) so Truman had to make many difficult decisions.

He was a farm boy from Missouri and rather plain spoken. (In a conversation about farming he kept using the word "manure." Someone asked his wife Bess why she couldn't teach him to use the more polite word "fertilizer." She replied, "It has taken me many years to teach him to stop saying "shit.") Every day people came to him with their problems, unwilling to make difficult decisions and asking for his help. In other words, they were passing the buck. He said, "I am the President. The buck stops here."

"The buck stops here" is surely his most famous saying, and like "pass the buck" itself, it has become a common idiom. Agius changed the wording to "the buck stops with me," but it has the same meaning. "This ends now, regardless of how it affects me personally."

scalp = The skin covering the top of the human head.

In the 19th century the Native American tribes ("Indians") had not yet all been exterminated ("pacified"). The U.S. government often took sides in their wars with each other, aiding one side in order to defeat an enemy that was more hostile to the U.S. They paid the Indians for each enemy they killed. So the Indians had to present evidence of their kills. The standard of evidence became the scalp of an enemy.

Scalping has been practiced during warfare for thousands of years. The Scythians, Franks, Slavs and tribes all over the world did it occasionally. So did a few Indian tribes. The U.S. government turned it into a standard practice by paying for scalps. So today the practice of "scalping" is associated exclusively with the Indians even though that is unfair.

"Scalping" is also used metaphorically for slightly less drastic losses. Agius was not killed, but because he was forced to resign his position, a disaster in his career, he is said to have been scalped.

Some people buy large numbers of tickets to concerts, sporting events, etc., knowing that there are more people who want to attend the event than there are tickets. Then they sell the tickets to the highest bidder, often many times greater than the original price, making a huge profit. This is called scalping.

poster child = ? Can I say poster kid?

No. "Poster child" is a phrase relating to charity campaigns. For example, when I was young the vaccine for polio (poliomyelitis) had not yet been invented. Although President Roosevelt had it (he was almost always photographed sitting in a chair to prevent people from realizing he used a wheelchair), it primarily targeted children and was also called infantile paralysis.

Nothing arouses sympathy more than sick children, so there were always charity campaigns to raise money for polio research. Every year a poster was published featuring an absolutely adorable child with crutches, wheelchair, etc. That child was known as the poster child for the polio campaign. This technique was also used in other charity campaigns that primarily benefited children.

So today anyone who is the symbol of a campaign may be jokingly referred to as its poster child. The idiom has even been expanded to apply to any representative of a phenomenon, even if it's not a positive image. Barclay's was one of the first institutions to be "punished" by the new regulations stemming from the current economic collapse, so even though they are not cute or adorable, they can be seen as the poster child for the new campaign to stamp out predatory banking.

[Saint]

Android's apps, iOS apps, WP7 apps.

Is "apps" a proper English word?
Has it been included in dictionary?

[Sarkus]

Don't think it's yet in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it's probably not long until it finds its way in, either as an accepted shortened version of "applications" or as a word in its own right in so much as it refers almost exclusively to a certain type of application (i.e. small computer program used in the mobile computer market) etc.

[Fraggle Rocker]

We don't wait for the OED in America. It's in Dictionary.com, attested in the World English Dictionary. However, all sources identify it as limited to computer jargon and informal speech. This means that although it is used in advertising and dialog on TV shows, it is not yet acceptable in edited writing, such as a newspaper.

APP, noun
An application, typically a small, specialized program downloaded onto mobile devices.

[Trippy]

Gosh how things have changed. Back in the old days, before Windows 95, when we had Windows 3.0 and X-Tree Gold, all computer programs were termed applications.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Gosh how things have changed. Back in the old days, before Windows 95, when we had Windows 3.0 and X-Tree Gold, all computer programs were termed applications.

But the technology balance has changed. When I first became a programmer in 1967, working on a tiny mainframe (by today's standards: 1MB) with flat files (no databases), no communication, printouts (one font, all upper-case) as the only kind of output and magnetic tape as the only storage medium, 99% of an application was the program code.

Today many applications are less than 20% program code, by dollar value and development effort. The other 80% is databases, communication protocol and screen management. Many application development projects now have one or two people writing program code, with ten more designing databases and screen layouts and building interfaces to other applications.

So these days programs are only small components of applications, and not even of all applications. There are lots of tools that allow end users to build applications directly without writing any code at all.

It's like the difference between plumbing a building in 1870 and doing it today. Instead of constructing every fitting and every fixture, today we buy them off the shelf and just screw them together. Homeowners can do some pretty impressive projects without even needing to hire a professional plumber. IT applications have made that same leap, only quite a bit farther and faster.

Perhaps the main difference between plumbing and software is that instead of screwing things together, we're always screwing them up.

[Trippy]

But the technology balance has changed. When I first became a programmer in 1967, working on a tiny mainframe (by today's standards: 1MB) with flat files (no databases), no communication, printouts (one font, all upper-case) as the only kind of output and magnetic tape as the only storage medium, 99% of an application was the program code.

Today many applications are less than 20% program code, by dollar value and development effort. The other 80% is databases, communication protocol and screen management. Many application development projects now have one or two people writing program code, with ten more designing databases and screen layouts and building interfaces to other applications.

So these days programs are only small components of applications, and not even of all applications. There are lots of tools that allow end users to build applications directly without writing any code at all.

I'm not sure I agree with this.
Okay, I'll conceed that your experience programming predates my birthdate, however...

When I was first introduced to computer programming &c, GW-Basic was the application (so was Windows, X-Tree Gold, MS-DOS and so on). The application consisted of one or more executable files (.EXE, .COM and in some cases .SYS) and a bunch of other files that contained additional information (for example Dynamic link libraries). Even Iphone and Android apps follow this format, with some of the apps being bigger than anything from that age - for example, the largest app I have on my PDA is Angry Birds at 19.85Mb which is nearly four times bigger than the 5Mb that Windows 3.0 installed at.