Posts by linger
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there has to be a balance and fairness for all kids
Unpacking this rather crucially depends on what you mean by "fairness".
* fairness of resource allocation by government? (in which case, your children's education depends on your family's income)
or
* fairness of opportunity to develop potential? (in which case, some children will need more resources available) -
"It's in your head" (x2)
Ah, *another* argument apparently taking place only in both protagonists' heads. Where's Ben Wilson when you need him?
Mark: She lives, she will die. That much is fact. What happens in between or, more importantly, what you know about it is up to her and her publicist.
Stephen: you don't know the meaning of "or".
Try reading it here as "or rather"; Mark is actually downplaying the first (overly general) statement in favour of a more accurate one. You could possibly (as Stephen did) take the referent of "what happens in between" to include absolutely everything, whether or not it's under the control of the named individuals concerned -- but that is probably an overinterpretation; in the context of the following clause, "what she does" seems intended. Thus, if you interpret the paragraph as a whole , Mark's message is reasonably clear, and entirely consistent with his later stated intentions.
Possibly Stephen's expectations were thrown off balance by the (deliberate) bluntness of Mark's opening comment "she will die", which is certainly [albeit regrettably] factually correct, but its brevity may come off as callousness.(Relax, I'm not about to start parsing Craig & Joe.)
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piles of undergraduate "dissertations"
*shudder* Yep, the old Great Steaming Pile of Theses. We eventually stopped forcing our undergrads to put us through that -- but that just moved the problem up into the MA program, in spades, and in shovelfuls.
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And Green Onion Slave Girls.
*considers this*
Yes. We definitely should have Green Onion Slave Girls for things like pendant.Emma: It's been a while since I've been glorified, and never for copy-editing.
Amy: It's one of those gratifying jobs where the meaner you are, the more people like it.
Sure, change just a few words and I've often had the conversation:
Grovelling student: Ohhhh most exalted sensei, please accept my unworthy thesis draft.
Me: I may consider it this time, peasant. OK, toss it on the pile, you snivelling maggot.
*squelch*
Grovelling student: Oh, thank you, sensei.
Given the contents of the things, though, I suspect an argument could be made that both participants in this exchange are masochists. -
As do copy editors.
Mark Aronoff has written that the main function of the [American] rule against restrictive which is "to give copy editors more billable hours".
OTOH, the large chunks of my job that (or, which) are blown on glorified copy-editing are done on a fixed salary, so I have a different perspective on the need for such rules. :-) -
Uh, anyway, relevance to main thread:
ideally, rules should be there for a good reason, and rules set up without any good reason have the effect of wasting a lot of time.
But then, the human capacity to waste time is simply astounding. :-) -
My inner pendant swings wildly when I see "corrections" of that nature -- because Amy's original punctuation was also correct, for a quote enclosed within a larger sentence.
Put aside the pronouncements about what style should look like, for a moment, and consider the functions .
Punctuation at the end of a quote has two functions:
(a) marking the intonation of the included material: such punctuation needs to be included within the quote marks;
and
(b) marking a pause boundary between the included material and the enclosing sentence: such punctuation belongs to the enclosing sentence, and therefore needs to be outside the quote marks.Hence we can potentially have two different punctuation marks, as in:
The question on everyone's lips was, "Do we really care about this issue?".(Would you ever try to put that first comma inside the quotes? If not, why inconsistently insist on putting a following comma or full stop inside the quotes?)
Where things start to break down is that by convention, if the two punctuation marks are the same, we're told we should only use one of them. And, by and large, American editors and British editors make different decisions concerning which one should be marked. American style guides tend to assign such ambivalent punctuation to the quote, whereas British style guides tend to assign it to the enclosing sentence. Neither convention is "wrong". The choice is entirely arbitrary.
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blurring the distinction between Carry On and carrion.
Indeed: substitute Clary, and voila, no distinction (see, or rather, don't, Carry On Columbus ).
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Ron Jeremy is the Platonic Idea for short, balding, faintly unsavoury white men in a hideous shirts
The Platonic Far-From-Ideal, surely?
Mark:
I found a huge puddle of saliva in my lap
Saliva. Yeh. That's your story, and you're sticking to it...
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Maybe it's just me (using Netscape 6.2), but I'm seeing everything on this thread in strikethrough after the point where Russell seems to give contact details (but those don't appear) for Simon Power. Or is it intended, as a "blackout" motif?