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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2002
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and your little dog, too... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891 |
In Québec French, measure can also be used as a generic name for the item doing the measuring. Like if you want to cut a piece of wood to a specific size, you'd say to somebody with you, "Do you have a measure?"
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Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
This is true of brit English, too, belM - although it isn't in very common use, the majority of people would understood if used in that way.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
<<..where, in the space of values..>>
In the neighborhood of your inquiry might be 'to speak in measured words.'
But I wonder; since, generally speaking, value is quantitative and a category of measure, if your question doesn't really signal a being lost at sea in metaphor, 'value' and 'measure' deriving from each other but intended, in this space, to cast light on something else but not on each other.
Here, that something would seem to be the category of virtues, or qualities, ascribed to or discerned in individuals. Their abstraction to measure would both seems an act of observation and one of 'heirarchization' (what does it mean to say that one has more of this or that virtue than another?) and, since the same abstraction produces the moral shading, it is suggestive of some interesting deep-lying social structures.
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Joined: Mar 2000
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old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Dear Inselpeter, 'to speak in measured words.' indeed exemplifies the direction of my inquiry. I wondered if the "moderation"(*) side of the word has gone out of use, or if moderation as a virtue has ceased to rank among important values. You may ask why I had not explained it in this way at the start. I preferred to sound out the actual space of associations first without bias. I freely admit that I easily get lost at sea in metaphor. But fortunately there are other ships cruising nearby in this here ocean  . (*) the term moderation does not completely cover the sense of measure meant by the architect Le Corbusier when he said he wanted his buildings to be at the measure of humans.
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Posts: 2,379
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
<<whether moderation has ceased to rank among important values>>
Even *if* it has fallen into disuse, or victim to disinterest, it may (in a sense that is, perhaps, also related to your sense of measure) remain important. The more so for such fall.
However, I suspect it has not, at least not entirely.
Moderation is inherently undramatic and doesn't sell well. I wonder if the duration of (any) crisis is not best dramatized as the conflict of extremes, while its conclusion may be punctuated with terms of moderation. Such as, for example, in this country, Murrow's measured words near the conclusion of the McArthy era. Dramatically, they are cut to fit and this probably accounts for some of their appeal. All that raises the question whether drama is not, in some sense and to some (limited) extent, the measure of crisis in public life.
I would be interested to know more about this architect Le Corbusier and what he meant.
Probably not what struck me when I visited Salem, Mass, where the colonial buildings are at the scale of human manual labor.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 1,624 |
I would have said "speak in measured tones", not "speak in measured words". But whatever!
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Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
I've never heard it pronounced /mES@r/, but have heard it as /mEZ@r/, with a voiced fricative as in garage and not voiceless as in nation.
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Joined: Jun 2002
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 7,210 |
voiced fricative
yeah, what he says...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 2,661 |
To hum or not to hum (whilst shushing) tis the question at throat.
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