Username
goofy
Member Since
July 24, 2006
Total number of comments
186
Total number of votes received
652
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Latest Comments
Fora vs Forums
- October 23, 2008, 10:14am
The OED has a citation for "forums" from 1647, and no citations at all for "fora". I'm guessing that "fora" is a much later innovation based on someone's love of Latin.
I’ve got a punctuation Jones
- March 31, 2008, 1:08pm
The Oxford Companion to the English Language page 75:
the apostrophe of plurality continues in at least five areas:
[...]
(4) In family names, especially if they end in -s, as in keeping up with the Jones's, as opposed to the Joneses, a form that is also common.
Younger vs. youngest
- January 3, 2008, 8:12am
Amazed might be interested to know that the superlative of two has been used since at least the 17th century, and has been used by writers such as Fielding, Austen, Fowler (!), Hemmingway, and Boswell. Is Amazed still a purist?
Resume, resumé, or résumé?
- June 6, 2007, 10:07am
I don't see how your job is relevant to how a certain word is spelled. Dictionaries report on the common spellings of words. What other authority do we have, besides the usage of the English-speaking and writing community?
Me Versus I
- June 5, 2007, 5:51pm
Meg,
Perhaps you should look at the "This is she" vs. "This is her" post.
Resume, resumé, or résumé?
- May 7, 2007, 1:32pm
For what it's worth, the current edition -- the Fourth -- of the American Heritage College Dictionary describes the current accepted spellings of the word. If you're saying this dictionary is wrong, I'd like to know what special powers you have that tell you how the word is really spelled.
Fora vs Forums
- February 21, 2007, 7:52am
And the words "chum", "hum", "sum" and "um" should henceforth be pluralized "cha", "ha", "sa" and "a". And since "apparatus" is a Latin fourth declension noun, it should be pluralized accordingly: "apparatūs".
Only then can we know
- December 30, 2006, 1:29pm
Yes they are grammatical. And no, they're not passive.
Impact as a noun
- December 28, 2006, 12:06am
The world did not impact upon me until I got to the Post Office and picked up my mail - Christopher Morley, The Man Who Made Friends with Himself, 1949
Past tense of “text”
According to Merriam-Webster, the nucular pronunciation is in "widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, United States cabinet members, and at least two United States presidents and one vice president." Why is it frightening that some presidents have a different accent than you?
Nunberg says:
'...But it doesn't explain why you still hear "nucular" from people like politicians, military people, and weapons specialists, most of whom obviously know better and have been reminded repeatedly what the correct pronunciation is. The interesting thing is that these people are perfectly capable of saying "nuclear families" or "nuclear medicine." I once asked a weapons specialist at a federal agency about this, and he told me, "Oh, I only say 'nucular' when I'm talking about nukes."'
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html