Round 3104: GRA [Definitions]

[Paul Keating]

Here are 15 potential definitions of GRA. Some come from a dictionary, and one even from a dictionary article about the word gra. Please vote for two, by the deadline, which is Tuesday 15 September at 11h00 CEST, other times for other places here. That is just under 48 hours from time of posting.

1. A shard or fragment

2. A sneeze of contempt

3. The coarse outer hair of llamas, used for rugs, wall-hangings, and lead ropes

4. A critical bug in a computer program, resulting from a minor and understandable but still really bad mistake, that can take hours to figure out and fix

5. To burble or make a gurgling noise, said of a stream

6. Obs. or Scot. A feast

7. A spice made from lemongrass, turmeric, star anise and black pepper [Thai] 

8. A riding jacket of Eastern Europe

9. A graduate research assistant

10. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

11. A quickly assembled makeshift shelter

12. A brain disease suffered by sheep

13. Obs. Originally the Bearded Vulture, later applied to other vultures, buzzards and kites [prob. Celtic]

14. A dwarf buffalo native to the Philippines

15. An ancient musical instrument resembling the lyre

This is an HTML numbered list, which is a virtually inescapable consequence of my composing the message in anything other than Notepad. It is likely that  your mail client will renumber individual items of the list if you cut and paste them. To avoid this, consider using the option to paste as plain text, or equivalent. 

[Johnb - co.uk]

#5 and #10 for me (not that I am implying that they are the same! - although they are, annoyingly, a numbered list in my email client)

JohnnyB

5. To burble or make a gurgling noise, said of a stream

10. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

Virus-free. www.avg.com

[Tim Lodge]

I'll go for a couple of the Obs. ones:  6 and 10.

 6. Obs. or Scot. A feast

10. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

--  Tim L

[Efrem G Mallach]

I'll join the still-small crowd in voting for the obsolete 6 and 10.

By the way, if you compose your list in a spreadsheet program (I use Excel, but they can all do this) it's fairly easy to create a column that concatenates the definition number with the definition text as a single string. You can then paste those into the email.

Efrem

==========================

On Sep 13, 2020, at 5:29 AM, Paul Keating <dixo...@boargules.com> wrote:

Here are 15 potential definitions of GRA. Some come from a dictionary, and one even from a dictionary article about the word gra. Please vote for two, by the deadline, which is Tuesday 15 September at 11h00 CEST, other times for other places here. That is just under 48 hours from time of posting.

6. Obs. or Scot. A feast

10. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

[France International/Mike Shefler]

I'll go for 10 and 13.

[Paul Keating]

Efrem,

The problem with constructing the list with a spreadsheet is that things like italicized labels don't survive the concatenation process. For example, in Excel, this set of cells (with formula showing):



yields this result:



The problem is that the italics are achieved by hidden markup attached to the cell, not to the data, and disappear when you use the cell value in a formula.

That is Excel, but Google Sheets works the same way (as I discovered today). Despite considerable progress since the last time I tried it (before round 746), I think spreadsheets are still a poor fit for the admin of dealing a round.

I'm in any case far from convinced that defeating the numbered-list functionality is a good thing. List format ensures clean, legible indentation on small screens, by folding back long lines under a hanging indent. Forcing a hard coded number does not. I lost track of the number of deadlines I missed after postponing voting until I could get to a desktop, because the announcement had been explicitly formatted for a 72-character display with spaces and line-breaks, and appeared on a small screen as an unreadable wodge of text with random waterfalls of whitespace.

But I never complained about that, even though I thought my inconvenience was at least as much as having to press 3 extra keys after a cut and paste operation.

P

[Efrem G Mallach]

You're right, Paul. Italics have to be put back by hand. I generally have few enough of those, often zero, that it doesn't create a problem in practice.

I have not had, or seen, any of the other problems you  describe. Having a hard-coded number in the def shouldn't affect wrapping. It's true that HTML lists indent nicely, but I haven't seen lack of indent after the first line become a problem either.

Anyhow, whatever works for a given dealer, yourself included, is fine with me! I'd rather cope with an HTML list than deal! And I appreciate your calling attention to the list formatting. Some other people have also used lists, but left it to each player to discover that.

Efrem

On Sep 13, 2020, at 1:10 PM, Paul Keating <kea...@acm.org> wrote:

Efrem,

The problem with constructing the list with a spreadsheet is that things like italicized labels don't survive the concatenation process. For example, in Excel, this set of cells (with formula showing):

<int_1.png>

yields this result:

<int_2.png>

The problem is that the italics are achieved by hidden markup attached to the cell, not to the data, and disappear when you use the cell value in a formula.

That is Excel, but Google Sheets works the same way (as I discovered today). Despite considerable progress since the last time I tried it (before round 746), I think spreadsheets are still a poor fit for the admin of dealing a round.

I'm in any case far from convinced that defeating the numbered-list functionality is a good thing. List format ensures clean, legible indentation on small screens, by folding back long lines under a hanging indent. Forcing a hard coded number does not. I lost track of the number of deadlines I missed after postponing voting until I could get to a desktop, because the announcement had been explicitly formatted for a 72-character display with spaces and line-breaks, and appeared on a small screen as an unreadable wodge of text with random waterfalls of whitespace.

But I never complained about that, even though I thought my inconvenience was at least as much as having to press 3 extra keys after a cut and paste operation.

P

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dixonary" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dixonary+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dixonary/1977581950.20200913191021%40acm.org.

[Tim B]

1 and 15, please.

Best wishes,
Tim Bourne.

[Judy Madnick]

Good thing I noticed that the numbering changes if I delete the definitions I don't want to use! And I didn't see the explanation until I read to the end.

 

I guess I'll take 10 and 14.

 

 

Judy Madnick

Albany, NY

---

Original Message

From: "Paul Keating" <dixo...@boargules.com>

To: dixo...@googlegroups.com;

Date: 9/13/2020 5:29:34 AM

Subject: [Dixonary] Round 3104: GRA [Definitions]

Here are 15 potential definitions of GRA. Some come from a dictionary, and one even from a dictionary article about the word gra. Please vote for two, by the deadline, which is Tuesday 15 September at 11h00 CEST, other times for other places here. That is just under 48 hours from time of posting.

1. A shard or fragment

1. A sneeze of contempt

2. The coarse outer hair of llamas, used for rugs, wall-hangings, and lead ropes

3. A critical bug in a computer program, resulting from a minor and understandable but still really bad mistake, that can take hours to figure out and fix

1. To burble or make a gurgling noise, said of a stream

2. Obs. or Scot. A feast

3. A spice made from lemongrass, turmeric, star anise and black pepper [Thai] 

1. A riding jacket of Eastern Europe

2. A graduate research assistant

1. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

2. A quickly assembled makeshift shelter

1. A brain disease suffered by sheep

2. Obs. Originally the Bearded Vulture, later applied to other vultures, buzzards and kites [prob. Celtic]

3. A dwarf buffalo native to the Philippines

4. An ancient musical instrument resembling the lyre

This is an HTML numbered list, which is a virtually inescapable consequence of my composing the message in anything other than Notepad. It is likely that  your mail client will renumber individual items of the list if you cut and paste them. To avoid this, consider using the option to paste as plain text, or equivalent. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dixonary" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dixonary+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dixonary/831ae271-e2f7-4135-811d-1cabb3efbb37n%40googlegroups.com.

[Daniel B Widdis]

3 for llamas and 10 for vox pop or whatever the Celtic equivalent is.

 

[Debbie]

3 and 10

10. Obsolete. rare. An exclamation ascribed to Irishmen [apparently representing Irish a ghráidh ‘my dear’, in English books commonly rendered agra(h or arrah]

and

3. The coarse outer hair of llamas, used for rugs, wall-hangings, and lead ropes

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 5:40 PM Daniel B Widdis <wid...@dixonary.net> wrote:

3 for llamas and 10 for vox pop or whatever the Celtic equivalent is.

 

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dixonary" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dixonary+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dixonary/E68C41DA-0BEA-4B69-895D-F97EBDB77E46%40dixonary.net.

--

~Bending under the weight of His mercies~

Through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through Him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the Law of Moses (Acts 13:38-39)

[amal...@comcast.net]

Paul – I don’t like any of them particularly, mine included. I’ll follow the crowd with #10, as a tribute to the etymological effort, and add #11 with no particular conviction.

Alan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dixonary/11007A9E090D0E3B1615003006%40LAPTOP-NG0A64CK.

[nancygoat]

Not vox pop: 8 and 12.  (Although I love 10, too.)

[Paul Keating]

Guth na ndoaine [ɡəh n̪ˠa n̪ˠiːnʲə] unless Google Translate is much mistaken.

--
Paul Keating
Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France

2020-09-13 23:40

[Ryan McGill]

12 & 14

[Shani Naylor]

First & last for me - 1 & 15.