Posts by Sam F
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hey, no offense meant. Of course the true explanation is (relatively) innocent, but the image of the third wheel left standing in the street was just so entertaining... :)
-
I'm suprised that people approach Meatloaf, full stop.
Actually, I find it quite believable that someone who'd actually walk down the aisle to that song would just run up to Meatloaf on the street and tell him they'd done so.
-
Trick question, citizen. We are at war with Eastasia and have always been at war with Eastasia. The Oceanians are our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms, and always have been.
Report to your nearest Reggio-Emilia re-education facility immediately.
I lol'd so hard. All the way home last night I was thinking along the same lines.
-
I cannot but think of the third guy, alone on the street, singing "I, who have nothing."
Or, as tears roll down his cheeks, "two out of three ain't bad"...
-
Who made that assumption?
Well, if the only reason to learn good grammar is to show that you know good grammar, then the only real reason to insist upon good grammar must be to defend the time you spent in learning it, right? So "good" or "bad" grammar is just a power play, a reason for people to say "because of my learnings, my English has value and yours doesn't, and how dare you rub it in my face that you can get by without the rules I religiously stick to"?
That was the moral strawman I saw being put up. Wasn't my intent to put up another strawman in response - if so, my bad...
-
I'm amused by this whole conspiracy angle, as if evil grammarians have created a language cartel, and are suppressing 500-mile-per gallon revolutionary New English to protect their enormous salaries in the education system. (Please read those last six words with the appropriate sense of irony.)
Why this assumption that pointing out grammatical conventions is a moral judgment? Maybe it's because everybody has made mistakes (by someone's definition) and thus feels judged when the issue of "correct" grammar comes up - and at those times "grammar nazi" is the easiest tag to hand to shut down your opponent and soothe your bruised ego. We've all done it, surely?
I mean, as long as we're saying that The Queen's English isn't inherently better than other usage, doesn't it go the other way? Is there actually a middle ground here, or are apostrophiles going to be up against the wall, along with all the bad-faith Internet trolls and crusty English professors on the wrong side of history?
-
As some luminary on the Internet once said:
Correct punctuation and caps make the difference between "I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse" and [...]
-
I have learned that using 'alt' and some 3-digit codes will give rise to copyright or trade-mark symbols - is there a similar combination for macrons, umlauts, etc?
In MS Word, if you type 0101, then hit Alt and X together, the numbers transform into the macroned " ā ". If you go into the Insert -> Symbol menu you can look up the codes for whatever non-standard letters/symbols you want, or set up your own shortcuts (if you don't like inserting them with the mouse each time, and who would?).
Personally, though, if I expect to use words with ā in them a lot, I just copy and insert the letter at each instance in the document.
The Unicode + Alt-X thing doesn't seem to work here on PAS, so I've been copypasting to get the examples in the paragraph above. I assume that's what everyone else did above - or is there a trick I don't know?
-
Personally, I think we should celebrate Saint Sebastian's day on the 20th January instead. Instead of giving flowers, we'd all go get pierced.
Super classy.
I tip my hat to you, sir.
-
Just to push things along a bit, who finds themselves compelled to use actual sentences with proper grammar and spelling when mobile texting?
For short texts, yes - for longer ones, I still start off using the correct forms, but often suddenly shift to txtspk once my patience runs out. So much for writing style being unobtrusive...