so uh

basically, a friend went to a bbq joint for lunch on monday, and long story short, my phone ended up suggesting "Solutions" as the word to go after "Gender," cuz of course gender is going to get involved in any discussion between two trans people, so i went with it, and ve responded with...

gender.solutions

so guess what i worked on tonight

http://gender.solutions/

that's about all i can say about that

@rey Trans and solutions?

There is a chemistry joke about solubility and double bonds in here somewhere, I just can't see it.

(Chemists have been using the term trans and cis to describe a the bond geometry of carbon-carbon double bonds for a very long time.)

@Canageek with all due respect, this is very serious website and there's no room for humor here

(but if a chemistry joke precipitates accordingly, i'll take it)

@Canageek @rey I think that "precipitate" in the non-chemical sense is a strictly transitive verb, so this doesn't quite work. almost

@kara @rey It scans to me. I've seen it written that X precipitates Y, X precipitates out of solution, and If X precipitates then. Are those all the same type of verb? @DialMforMara

@Canageek @kara @rey "X precipitates Y" is transitive. The other two look like unaccusative intransitive verbs.

@DialMforMara @kara @rey X precipitates Y would be a kind of old fashioned way of saying it. Today it would be on addition of X, Y precipitated from solution.

@Canageek @kara @rey So "precipitates" has become almost entirely unaccusative.

@DialMforMara @kara @rey I guess? That might just be that 3rd person passive has become more common over time.

@Canageek @kara @rey
That's not passive voice. Passive would be "Y was precipitated from solution (by the addition of X)."

"Y precipitated from solution" is an active unaccusative intransitive verb.

@DialMforMara @kara Ok, so what are these examples?

"Irradiation in hydrocarbon media leads to the formation of products which precipitate as their concentration increases."

"X was precipitated by the addition of pyridine into a solution of TfOH in Et2O" (I guess I'm wrong about that being old fashioned)

"Addition of counterions such as K+ induces these negatively charged clusters to precipitate into crystals suitable for structure analysis using X-ray diffraction"

@kara @DialMforMara "The aqueous solubility of these clusters must be low, as as they precipitate extremely fast under a yellow solution." (Under a yellow solution? Odd way to say that)

"and lactams used to precipitate uranyl(VI) species from nitric acid solutions."

"these phases are highly insoluble and generally precipitate as microcrystalline or amorphous powders"

@Canageek @kara
4 and 6 here are active unergatives. 5 ("used to precipitate uranyl species") is a control construction embedded in the passive clause headed by "used".

@DialMforMara @kara I no longer know what the words you are saying mean, but is it safe to say we use it in a bunch of ways?

(Also, this is only examples from papers that aren't decades old, and that use precipitate as a verb of some sort. It can also be a noun. Oh and only exactly precipitate, not Products precipitates or precipitated.)

@Canageek @kara Yes. You use it in a bunch of ways, most of them not passive, and your discipline's insistence on calling them passive displays a disappointing but not uncommon lack of understanding of how your own language works.

This isn't your fault; it's institutional.