Is "thinks I" in Melville's Moby-Dick used in the sense of "thought I"? The following is just one of the examples of thinks I being used by Melville:  When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are.  Thinks I occurs thirteen times, whereas thought I occurs thirty seven times in  Methinks the phrase is used by Melville in the meaning of thought I. What puts me in doubt, though, is the lack of definitions of such meaning in dictionaries and the lack of any discussion in the Web, e.g. at ESE. I intend to edit  as soon as I learn from you all..
"'Hello', says he. 'Hello', says I" — is this correct? I'm reading a novel in which once in a while a character says something like "I are", "He do", and similar stuff. I understand the author is just reproducing the way people talk on the streets.  However I've found a piece of text of which I'm not sure if it's proper English. One of the characters, who almost always speaks proper English, is reproducing a conversation that happened many years ago using the present tense in the following manner:     I was with this guy and "Hi", says he, "how are you", says I...   and so on.  My question is if the "says I" is proper English (a special case in which "I" is treated as a third person because we are relating in present tense something that happened in the past) or it's just kind of slang.  I was also a bit surprised by how the usual order is switched ("says he" instead of "he says") but to me it's secondary to the "says I" issue.
Check if table exists in SQL Server Everybody has to obey their own parents I am new here and I don't really know how to post, so please forgive my mistakes. My question is this: Is a sentence like "everybody has to obey their own parents" nowadays completely acceptable under a grammatical point of view or it is still preferable, in written form, to use "everybody has to obey his/her own parents"? Thank you very much and sorry if this has been asked before. What does "Perform GC" button do in jconsole? How to discard unsaved changes to a view when editing it leads to a WSOD? Product of quotient maps and quotient space that is not Hausdorff I am looking for easy(!) counterexamples that the product of two quotient maps is not necessarily a quotient map and that the quotient space of a Hausdorff space is not necessarily Hausdorff. I'm trying to use ARIMA process to predict the behaviour of a time series, the probleme I face is that I can't get the order of each component of ARIMA, the lag is between 0 and 1, same goes for the acf. The time series has no tendency, and I guess no seasonality.     My question is : Does this mean that ARIMA orders are all 0s, and if so, is the HoltWinters a good (or the best) solution for modelling this kind of TS ? We need a profanity filter I searched SE.Meta and was unable to find such question.  Someone just swore at us in a  as an  (warning: profanity, may be NSFW), sure, Arqade (profanity in phrases in games) or some SE (ELU, ELL or Anime.SE maybe?) can sometimes contain profanity as a small parts of question.  I think that a part should be added to the review system that will automatically hide questions/answers with profanity, just like the close vote system, the question/answer will be on hold and will be voted to be shown or be deleted.  Tip, if this gets implemented, u can be typed as \/ or v, and most other can be written as leet (l = 1 etc). Maybe it can be called "suspicious activity", and can be triggered when there is too many number or Unicode characters. (I can write hi as |-| |, |-|I, |-|l, l-li, hî, 1-1i, H1 and many more) How to determine if a string is a valid variable name? Are you less likely to down-vote someone whose gravatar is a photograph of them? I know this is hard to answer since, to the extent that anyone does this, they likely don't do it consciously. In the spirit of Richard Wiseman and  I just wondered what were people's thoughts on it.  Please bear in mind that that's me in the picture, and if you down-vote this, that'll be a real person hurtin', not some abstract symbol. Voldemort ordered Nagini to kill Snape in hopes of claiming the Elder Wand's ownership.  Let's suppose that Snape was indeed the owner.  In this scenario, would the Elder Wand's ownership truly pass to Voldemort?  I ask this because, after all, the one who overpowered Snape was Nagini, not Voldemort.   Voldemort ordered Nagini to kill Snape. However, this would be equivalent to ordering a Death Eater to kill Snape, in which case the Death Eater would gain the ownership - in a similar manner, Nagini is the murderer. Nagini isn't a "spell": remember how Draco summoned a snake to attack Harry back at CoS? If that snake kills Harry, I'd imagine that Draco gains the ownership (if Harry had the Elder Wand) because that snake was a "spell" casted by Draco - but this time is different, because Nagini isn't a "spell" casted by Voldemort, but rather an actual third-party creature.   The curious thing is that Voldemort did cast some sort of spell (he flicked his wand), which I think caused Nagini's barrier to break so Nagini could kill Snape. In some way, Voldemort did provoke Snape's death - however, it was mostly indirectly.  So, would the ownership pass to Nagini or to Voldemort? If it passes to Nagini, would the Elder Wand's "ownership cycle" end, or would it continue if Voldemort decides to kill Nagini?    The simplified version of this question is: if an animal kills the owner of the Elder Wand, what happens to its ownership? Get latest Flash player on Ubuntu I know, it's been asked before but I couldn't really get a satisfying answer for some details/backgrounds and I guess it's an important question for many.    Some application seem only to be running with Adobe Flash 15 (or at least I know it does, because I have that version on my Windows Partition).  The official Adobe website says:     NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.   Some search on the web like "Ubuntu Adobe Flash 15" or similar does not return any good websites.  I found something that says   (using a "pepper-based version"), and  .   Is it impossible to use this for Firefox too? Would it be a privacy risk?  Are there no alternative projects (I know it's closed source but there are so many so very bright people out there using something similar to wine but just for the plugin....)?  How about the Mac-Version? Shouldn't someone be able to port that one to Linux? I bought a Magic the Gathering display box today with cards from the new edition Innistrad. Unfortunately one of the cards in a booster pack was damaged. It is not just a simple scratch - one corner is bent and a small part of the card is missing. According to different trading platforms this card would be worth about 6 Dollars minimum in mint condition. So it is not really expensive but also not totally worthless.  What can I do about this? Can I obtain a replacement card from the producer (WotC) or from the store I bought it from? How can I prove that the card was damaged when I opened the booster pack? I am sure I am not the first person who got a damaged card from a booster pack. How are such issues usually handled? Can a countable set contain uncountably many infinite subsets such that the intersection of any two such distinct subsets is finite? Can a countable set contain uncountably many infinite subsets such that the intersection of any two such distinct subsets is finite? I'm Egyptian and flying to Cairo from Tbilisi, via Istanbul. The first flight Tbilisi-Istanbul is on Atlasjet, then from Istanbul to Cairo I am flying on Egyptair. For that, I have to recheck in at Istanbul to my Egyptair flight  Will I need to pass passport control at Istanbul airport to collect my bags and check in on Egyptair? Will I need a transit visa for that? Or it can be all done through neutral zone? Can I make `find` return non-0 when no matching files are found? I've been reading a lot about dual-booting, and it seems as easy as loading Windows and then loading Linux with GRUB, but everybody says that Windows loves to trash GRUB when it gets the opportunity. What are some steps I can take to prevent this from happening (other than using Windows' bootloader, I want to keep this as simple as possible)? Using Thunderbird and gmail, sent items appear as unread in "All Mail" I'm using a gmail account in Thunderbird. When I send a message, a new mail notification appears (sound and system try icon), an unread message appears in the gmail All Mail folder, and the account name turns blue.  I have to click on "Sent Mail" or "All Mail" to get rid of the notification. Unsubscribing from "All Mail" is not effective (it still turns the account name blue).  This seems to be popping up elsewhere (), but nobody has posted a helpful answer.  How do I keep Thunderbird from thinking that a sent message is new unread mail in the All Mail folder? I am trying to show the current date in my JSP page using JSTL. below is the code I am using.  &lt;jsp:useBean id="now" class="java.util.Date" scope="request" /&gt; &lt;fmt:formatDate value="${now}" pattern="MM.dd.yyyy" /&gt;   But the above code is not producing any results? Am I missing anything here or is there any better approach for this? I am using JSTL 1.1. How do you make Vim unhighlight what you searched for? I search for "nurple" in a file. I found it, great. But now, every occurrence of "nurple" is rendered in sick black on yellow. Forever.  Forever, that is, until I search for something I know won't be found, such as "asdhfalsdflajdflakjdf" simply so it clears the previous search highlighting.  Can't I just hit a magic key to kill the highlights when I'm done searching? Why aren't people voting for questions?