Posts by linger
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Idiot Savant,
[O'Connor] should have been out long ago.
Instead, there he is, still behaving like a classic closet case...
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living as a foreigner in places like China is really liberating in that the locals expect you, on the basis of your skin colour, to be weird.
Too right. I’ve long referred to my alien registration card as my “lunatic’s licence”.
Which doesn't necessarily conflict with your later commentif we can behave better, we should behave better
except that that additionally implies we have a duty first to understand why the locals do things their way, before we decide not to follow them.
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Hard News: Dreaming of a world without evidence, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Ethnography is, ideally, about faithfully recording and explaining the viewpoint of the subjects of the investigation. The problem is that if you follow that method, it's difficult to use any external reference frame to criticise anyone.
So I hope it’s more like ethnographers (uncritically) reporting politicians as blaming poor sources, and reporting politicians’ own myth about “story creation”.
Even so, that description of “story creation” is just mindboggling in how far it bends over backwards and spreads its legs to be fair to politicians.
they used evidence to create persuasive policy stories.
should really read:
“they cherry-picked, abused, and tortured evidence to tell stories that fit pre-existing policy preferences.” -
@Ben:
But even then, being in an overwhelming majority shouldn’t be a reason to take an anti-minority position. -
I was saying, we don’t know, but it’s possible, as Frizzell has done a fair amount of advertising/ branding work, and his art has in the past served to reclaim some of his own commercial work.
In this case, even if the ball logo isn’t his, then it’s still very likely he was given a specific brief to use it: what can you do with a load of balls? -
the anonymous graphic designer who created that rugby ball symbol
might that have been the eponymous graphic designer?
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no-one bats an eye – it’s the straight-face delivery.
cricket: ur doin it wrong
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As part of compiling the Wellington Corpus of Written NZ English, we needed to “normalise” the text samples we had collected (which were all previously published and, presumably, edited writings) so as to allow automatic grammatical tagging of the text, and to allow (as far as possible) automatic word searches to retrieve all examples of a word. We corrected all the nonstandard usage[*] that had somehow survived the original editing process, and we made an explicit note of all changes that we made to the original text. Apostrophes were the single most common usage problem that we needed to note and correct (= 138 errors or ambiguities, 31 of which were confusion of its/it’s, in 1 million words).
[* Within limits. If the usage adopted in the text was a viable alternative in some standard variety of written English, and was used consistently in the text, then we did not correct it.]
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I'd get rather narked having to scrape seal goo out of the detailing.
One word, Craig: sealant.
<coat> -
we get alot [sic] of women for whom English is a secondary language
… and after a few years of marking ESL output, nativelike errors start to look OK?
(I have to confess to being an utter pedant; but I try not to correct everything in my students’ first drafts: partly because I still have to work out what they mean at that stage of the process, and partly because it would be far too much editing for them to do in one step without introducing new errors.
But you do tend to remember the research reports that mention the small sample size, and a need for further study “with larger gropes”.)