What exactly is your definition of empty speech?

"At the end of the day" has evolved into two different uses.

1. "We'll be heading home at the end of the day."

2. "At the end of the day, we're still in the black."

I think both have useful, and not empty meanings.

This is only slightly off topic, but when I hear this phrase it strikes me that it may well be the greatest spoken contraction to ever enter the language. The entire sentence:
"Do you know what I'm saying?"

is reduced to:
'know'm say'n'

and if we write it phonetically it goes down to just 6 letters.
'no'm sa'n'

Brilliant efficiency.

This cracks skulls in Spain.

One of the reasons, perhaps the reason they speak really fast is because they can't do this in Spanish.

Good thread

Which is correct? I have freewill. I have free-will. I have free will.

If you are using the words in the normal sense then only the last one is correct. The hyphenated one is never correct unless there is some specialized coined word in use somewhere that means something else, and then only in that context. And there is really no such word as freewill except as a song title or a proper noun (both of which should be capitalized) even though I know it is sometimes used as a noun that way instead of the proper adjective plus noun.

Edit: I suppose usage really defines what makes a word or not, but I don't think the "freewill" form is really used any more even though a bit of Googling shows me it once was (like 1-2 centuries ago).

Thanks.

What is the best way to emphasize a word on a forum? I usually just capitalize it but many italisize or bold it or some crazy combination of 2 or all of them. Like it someone asked "What did he say?" would you respond:

It's more about what he DIDN'T say.

It's more about what he didn't say.

It's more about what he didn't say.

Italics do the trick. Capitals and bold convey varying shades of instability, unless done in jest.

Yes but people reading internet forums are generally scanning posts and italics don't jump out as much as caps so they might miss your emphasis on a word and consequently miss your entire point thereby damaging your reputation on said internet forum.

Italics are lost when requoted (on this forum software anyway) because the entire quote is italicized. The best option is to try to create emphasis with the word choice and sentence structure without having to resort to fonts. The thing is, italics, bold, underline, or all-caps all convey different types of emphasis and so using them has to be context sensitive, and they should be used very sparingly.

This. Italics are king.

You can't always convey sentence stress without the use of italics.

I usually italicize for emphasis, but I'm aware that it is lost in quoting and if I anticipate that problem I'll (very rarely) use bold or underline. But each of the latter seems cheesy to me. If people miss the italics, that's usually fine anyway; if I absolutely need it to be noticed — or I'm talking to someone I think is really dense — that can also make me break out the bold.

Also, werewolf players are sort of trained to avoid bolding for emphasis; in practice I think that's what caused me to switch to italics.

Edit to add: One rarely used but occasionally useful format is highlighting. Shows up bright and clear regardless what skin the user is using, doesn't get picked up in searches for "[b]" so it's fine in werewolf games. But it's somewhat over the top, and it doesn't show up at all in the mobile app. Plus, there's no button for it regardless which editing mode you're using, so you have to type out the tags ([highlight][/highlight]).

multiple!!!! exclamation marks

Pretty common in Sevilla IMO.

twss

How about underlining?

I actually thing bold works the best, especially due to the quoting thing.

You're right. I just made some weird association in my mind and suddenly it was true.

"manky pierda" is the prime example from Sevilla. It should be aunque me pierda.

Hmm. People from Extremedura often drop their s's but that's not quite the same.

I suppose it's pretty normal that they get confused when we do it. I know I have no idea what they're saying when talking (shouting) informally amongst themselves, although my poor Spanish has a fair bit to do with that.

joé que caló ase

Underlining doesn't show up on the iPhone app.

Probably bold type is the easiest to understand, unfortunately.

I just saw italics on the iPhone app and they looked pretty cool. Big up the italics.

Haha I just got this. Your use of s for th in hace confused me before.

Anyway pardon me for bringing this horrible language into the thread.

I'd like to do a Spanish bashing thread but it would prob get locked.

I hope that wasn't English class.