When you care enough to give the very best...

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Was he found referring to debatable subjects, or was he fond of referring to debatable subjects?

Sounds like a scapegoat to me...

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. A human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

Oh, boy, don't get me started. I have many, many pet bugbears when it comes to language use (or abuse).

Probably the most annoying for me is "it's" and "its" being misused (BTW, "it's" can also mean "it has"). I get irate at any form of abuse of the humble apostrophe (after all, it's probably the second-easiest form of punctuation to get right), but most especially when it is misused in forming plurals.

Oops. It looks like I got started ("Rant" mode is on).

"Loose" for "lose" and "chose" for "choose" also wind me up a bit. I have seen a novel (yes, a published novel, with a publisher and editors and everything!) use "shined" for "shone". Aaaaargh! As if the transitive and intransitive forms of "to shine" were identical!

Of course, I've also spotted many instances of "there" for "their", or of "thier" for "there", "their" or "they're" (these dratted homophones make life so tricky, don't they?). Similarly, "where" and "wear" get confused, but rather less so. I've often seen "too" for "to" and vice versa, but rarely "two" for "to". I must confess, however, that "born" and "borne" is one that confuses me.

I've seen commas used so ill they make a sentence totally nonsensical (but it's simple, really: what's the difference between a cat and a comma? A cat has claws at the end of its paws, while a comma pakes a pause at the end of a clause). I've been wound up by someone using "disinterested" for "uninterested" a few times too often. And I've seen questions missing a question mark.

.... Calm down, get a grip .....

<Rant mode off>

I'll leave you all with this charming nursery rhyme (before I find more things about which to rant):

Scintillate, scintillate, globule aurific,
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific;
Loftily placed in the aether capacious,
Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Ah, I know that one... it's "Twinkle, twinkle little bat"!

Are you, perhaps, homophonophobic?

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Then there are those unintentionally funny headlines, such as



One wonders if it was a Mounds bar. Or perhaps Almond Joy. Maybe there were Snickers in the crowd outside the restaurant?

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Kewl topic.

Irregardless, I'm ascared the Detroit Tigers just ain't going to hang onto the division title.

Then there are the "Rules of English" which, when applied to the subject language, are a lot like the "Laws of Chicage Cub Probability" as applied to the World Series

For instance, remember that weighty rule of English spelling that each of us in the neighborhood learned at either eight or nine years old which was deigned infallible as if handed down from a deity: "i before e except after c"? Really bad, weird language science. Totally forfeit.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

As for the Tigers, given their record against KC this year compared to the Twinkies record against Chicago, I'm "ascared" Detroit's position as Division Champion is pretty safe.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

The original post (and others) complained about "lose" versus
"loose". I can't complain about anyone confusing those two.
There is no rhyme or reason to the spelling difference. The
difference in pronunciation is primarily in the consonant, while
the difference in spelling is purely in the vowel.

I will, instead, complain about the people who complain about
people who use those words incorrectly. :P

Similarly for where/were and its/it's, even if you are extremely
careful and re-read what you have written several times, it is
too easy to use the wrong spelling to hold the speller to fault.

Human proofreaders have become almost nonexistant for the
same reasons that transportation by horse and carriage, and
multi-course meals, each course with its own specialized
silverware, have become almost nonexistant: The cost of
labor shot up, and technology made it easier to do yourself.
Most people cannot afford the costs of the servants
required to constantly care for horses or to manage the
cooking and table settings of multi-course meals.

Still, aside from the idiocies introduced by computer spelling
checkers, I suspect that the main reason we see more errors
nowadays is that we are older than we were, and notice
errors we perviously didn't see. :-)

I didn't do that deliberately, but I liked it so I let it be.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

This is a list of words I've collected as I happened upon them
over the last five or six years:

being
Cassiopeia
counterfeit
Deimos
deicer
deionize
deify
deity
eider
Eiffel
Einstein
Eire
Eisenhower
either
foreign
forfeit
gneiss
height
heir
heist
herein
Keith
Leibniz
Leiden
Leipzig
leisure
Neil
neither
nuclei
Perseid
Pleiades
Pleistocene
protein
reimburse
reinforce
reinstall
reiterate
seeing
seize
stein
surfeit
their
theist
weir
weird
Zeiss


deign
eight
freight
Leigh
neigh
neighbor
reign
rein
simultaneity
veil
vein
weight


agencies
ancient
conscience
efficient
fancied
frequencies
glacier
policies
science
society
species
sufficient

Words in the first group violate the first part of the rule
"I before e except after c".

Words in the second group also violate the first part of the
rule, but are covered by the most-often-heard exception.

Words in the third group violate the second part of the rule.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

There is no rhyme or reason, that's true. It is pretty much arbitrary. However, the spelling has never changed (in our lifetimes), and they're both common words. This is the case for many frequently-confused words, and if you're a native English speaker, you've been using the words and seeing them used practically your entire life. I firmly believe that expecting the computer to do all the work is laziness. Contrary to your examples, whereas a car is in many ways superior to a horse and carriage, a computer is not superior to a human proofreader.

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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!"

Yesterday I confused two people simply because they are both
female cousins (and sisters to each other) whose names begin
with the same letter: Heather and Heidi. (A name which I see
I omitted from my IB4E list, along with some "hei..." words.)
Especially surprising since one has a Scandinavian heritage and
the other has an African heritage. (My cousins, not their names.)
I just like the name Heather so much I call them both Heather, I
guess. :-)

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Oh, that story reminded me of another, since it involves some
other cousins in their part of my family.

My aunt's family has had a dog named "Ching" since before I
was born. Not the same dog over four decades, but several
generations of Chings. So one day when I was visiting my
aunt's daughter and her family, she called to her son, who
was in the next room, addressing him as "Ching". I thought
it was pretty funny that a mother could call her own son by
the name of their dog, and that it just shows how easily we
can mean one thing but say another.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I dunno, I think a car is superior/inferior to a horse and carriage in very similar ways to that. It's not an exact comparison, but I kinda like it, the more I think about it.

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is.
If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's.
It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.


It's Neil and it's Niels (as in Bohr), for some reason it's the latter they get wrong even if it's the former that breaks the "rule".
Tolkien (as in J.R.R.) is frequently spelled wrong as well.

You should include a list of words often misspelled even when the "rule" is correct for them.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

English rules!

That's why we have a representative democracy.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Well, Jeff, I disagree with you. While there is no reason for the difference in spelling of "lose" and "loose" (other than the fact that the words are different, have different meanings and probably have different etymology), they are so easy to get right that there is no excuse (other than a genuine handicap such as dyslexia) for getting them conflated or confused.

Similarly for where / were and its / it's, they are very easy to get right, and carelessness all too often leads to them being wrong. Whether it is the "don't care / don't know and can't be bothered to find out" type of carelessness or simply a lack of care during the composition, this is not an excuse for getting them wrong. And getting them wrong can (a) change the meaning of the sentence; (b) render a sentence intrinsically meaningless, and in which the reader is forced to deduce the intended meaning from context, or (c) at best, betrays one's lack of care in composition. We all make mistakes - it is only human to do so. To deny offhand that a mistake has any consequence, however, betrays an unwillingness to accept responsibility to improve oneself.

I think you must also accept that it is possible (and perhaps even likely) that we are seeing mistakes we did not see previously because they were not there previously to be seen. In the last 10-15 years, I have seen a proliferation of what Lynne Truss calls "the greengrocer's apostrophe", i.e. the casual and brutal abuse of the apostrophe in forming a plural. Yet I have been a pedant for more than 15 years, and I am sure I would have spotted at least some occurrences of the greengrocer's apostrophe if it had been there to spot.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

On the "I before E except after C" rule, I was under the impression that this mnemonic applied only to words containing the "ee" sound. Since English is a largely Germanic language, "ie" is sounded "ee" while "ei" is sounded "eye". If the rule is applied only to the "ee" sound, it is largely correct.

So, Jeff, your list of words that supposedly violate this rule in fact, to a large extent, do not. Notice also how many of them are recently adopted (say, in the last 150 years) or are proper nouns that are not originally from England (in fact, I believe a few of them are not actually English words at all - such as Einstein, Leipzig, Leiden).

And before anyone tries to use "either" and "neither" as counter-examples, these words (until very recently) only had one correct pronunciation - the Germanic one, in which the "ei" group sounds as "eye". I am a bit anachronistic, in that I still consider the pronuciations "eether" and "neether" to be wrong.

Now, don't anyone get me started on hyphens...

__________________
The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?