So standard spoken English is wrong? Or does this only apply to written English? Or is a spoken sentence starting with and not actually a sentence and actually something else making it okay?

So this is a situation we should not up with put?

There are many people in this world who find it hard to communicate clearly at all. If they manage to convey their meaning clearly, then I think, "Hooray! Give them a lolipop!" These people need to be helped with making sense of their ideas in English and informing them of the finer points of grammer can result in their language centers ceasing up entirely. I suggest a computer program be applied to this forum that will grade people's posts and roughly determine their communication ability and provide a convenient graphical reference so people will know who should be congratualted for managing to make sense at all and who should know better than to make grammatical errors and deserves a good drubbing from grammar gurus.

I used to use that function of WordPerfect years ago. After the third time it said I was communicating at a 4th grade level, I turned the smartypants off.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say hiring Masters level or higher serves two purposes.

It gives the hiring party something tangible to validate the knowledge and/or experience claimed in a resume. It's a lot more costly and time consuming to verify claimed real world experience than it is to verify a post graduate degree. This, in turn, makes the claimed real world experience that much more believable and less important to spend a lot of time or money validating.

It gives the hiring party something tangible to defend the hire with in case that employee makes a huge costly mistake. "I know they didn't pursue formal education beyond high school - but their resume said..."

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

But of course...

There is nothing "snobbish" about wanting to hire qualified people to do highly technical jobs.

I really don't know why Tuero has a problem with that.

First off, there are several types of written English. The kind we use here is informal, which means you will see a lot of things from me that you wouldn't see in formal English--such as my predilection for dashes, parentheses, and italics.

It also applies to starting sentences with conjunctions. I wouldn't do it in, oh, college application essays, gods know, but it is a stylistic choice. Starting every sentence (see, there I go) with a conjunction is a bad thing, but a few here and there is no big deal. Heck, I do it all the time. Strunk & White says it's okay to do now and again.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Thanks for the explanation Gillianren.

Would it be bad for your blood pressure if I asked what a conjunction is?

Maybe I'll go look it up on the internets.

Didn't you see Schoolhouse Rock! in the 70s? "Conjunction Junction" and all that?

No. Well. A conjuction is a part of speech that is used to hold clauses together when each clause is a complete sentence. The mnemonic I currently use to remember all of them is "FAN BOYS"--for and nor but or yet so. That's it. That's all the conjunctions in the English language.

Of course, conjunctions also string lists of words together, or at least, some of them do, but mostly clauses. (As in right there, though "mostly clauses" isn't actually a complete sentence.) I can go more into detail, of course, but it's up to you.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Sorry, Queensland was still in the dark ages back in the 70's.

So in the sentence, "Put the cane toad in the pot but don't cook it too long," the word "but" would be a conjunction?

Personally, I fully support space tourism; the person going up is fully aware of the consequences, money gets pumped into the industry, and we set precedents of "non-skilled passengers" being put into space, giving the far-reaching implication that everyday people -- such as you and I, viewer of my post -- can go into space in future time periods.

I personally see it as no different than having a civilian passenger on a military boat, or a civilian inside of a submarine; they know the risks, and as long as they have some sort of a benefit (such as pumping funds into the project), I think that it's a risk worth taking; or at the least, unless the risks are shown to outweigh the benefits, which I don't currently see at the moment. I think that the benefits are pretty... er... benefitty. But I'm just a layman, so what do I know?

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

I keep forgetting; you don't put a location in your information.

Yes. However, there should be a comma before "but."

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I'll have to work out how to do that one of these days. (We're celebrating 30 glorious years of electricity next week.)

Thanks - Put the cane toad in the pot, but don't cook it too long.

We tanned his hid when he died Clyde AND that's it hanging on the shed. - "And" being the conjunction.

Dig the hole with your hands, boys, SO they'll think a wombat did it.

Crikey, that's a big one, BUT mine's bigger.

That's not a knife, BUT this is a knife.

Hopefully I have the hang of it now.

FAN BOYS - For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, SO.

hooking up words and phrases and clauses

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

I had more of a Classical education, we had to watch Schoolhouse Bachs.

Que? If memory serves, the shuttle lofts a max crew of seven, and if memory continues to serve, we've lost 14 people in two shuttle accidents.

I'm not the math major of this here forum, but 14/2=7 last I checked....

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

No, the most ever flew on Shuttle is seven. IIRC, it is possible to fit eight seats in the crew compartment; it was never done. And of course, you could carry several more if some kind of habitable module were placed in the cargo compartment.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Since I started this Thread let me make a few points here.
Anyone going into space has to know it's a risk, anyone wanting to die of old age should not bother. Personally I would go into space with less than 5% chance of making it back. With out even having to think about it.
As for letting unskilled people into jobs they can't do. I never ever said that. What I did say was that Limiting jobs in space to members of the egg head club was Snobbish. I can not believe there are not any jobs in space for anyone not a member of the egg head club.
I also never said to look down on anyone with a list of degrees to their names. What I did say is that it is not the end all . When looking at who should go into space. An yes NASA turns their nose up at anyone not a member of the egg head club.
NASA Should also Remember that all most all it's funding comes from the US government. Which reacts to Public Opinion. AN How many people have PH D's or even a master Degree.
Also where did all these grammar cops come from.

Agreed, though I'd hold out for a 20% chance at the least...

They look for some of the best mental and physical attributes, and the astronauts have quite a bit of training in everything from aeronautical mechanics to calculus to everything else necessary to survive. There's a logical reason for sending up the best of the best...

As a member of the general public, I would consider them achievin