Username
D. A. Wood
Member Since
November 7, 2011
Total number of comments
260
Total number of votes received
107
Bio
Latest Comments
Latest vs. Newest
- July 24, 2012, 2:07pm
To: EnglishKnight1
If you click on my name (in the red letters above) it takes you to a place called my profile. I put my e-mail address in that, and I thought that the whole reason why was that people could read it and copy it. Doesn't it work that way?
D.A.W.
Latest vs. Newest
- July 24, 2012, 2:02pm
Jeremy Wheeler, you have no understanding of the notion of explaining things emphatically by exaggeration, metaphor. or analogy. You must be a very difficult person to deal with, but anyone who knows you, because you interpret everything absolutely literally.
By the way, there are physical disorders whose first signs include the inability to understand things by metaphors or analogies. You ought ot have this checked into.
"Latest crew" is still an awful way of expressing "newest crew".
D.A.W.
Molotov Cocktails
- July 24, 2012, 1:54pm
It has become all too easy for journalists to simply MAKE COPIES of what they get from overseas without paying any attention to what they say or what they mean. It happens all the time now, too, because their editors are either so overworked or overly lazy, so they do not give the journalists any supervision.
For example, a boy in New Zealand fell off the balcony of a 10 story apartment building, and then he landed in a "car park" -- but the concept of a "car park" is completely unknown in North America. Furthermore, there was no one word in the article that told us what a "car park" is.
Could that be a place for buying and selling cars?
D.A.W.
Use of “their” as a genderless singular?
- July 24, 2012, 1:43pm
Correction: no way to live a life
Use of “their” as a genderless singular?
- July 24, 2012, 1:42pm
I agree whole hearedtly with the following:
"Popular? One day ..?" Is that not what I am railing against? That is exactly what I say we don't want! What is genderless about a person? A person is male or female, masculine or feminine, and there is nothing genderless about that.
"More convenient?" = lazy. "One day may become acceptable .." means that day has not yet come, and...
1. Yes, doing things simply because they are popular is no way live a life. It is simply a way of living without any principles.
2. "More convenient" is very often simply the lazy and unthinking person's way out.
We must note that whatever covenient ways we have of dealing with numbers have taken a great deal of deep thought to create. Even things that seem trivial now, such as the number "zero", the equal sign, negative numbers, and "simple" algebra took a lot of effort and thinking to work out. For example, the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Romans never had anything similar to them.
D.A.W.
Use of “their” as a genderless singular?
- July 24, 2012, 1:28pm
The word "one" is singular by definition, and so is any word that ends in "one", except for some spurious words. Here are the good ones:
anyone, everyone, lone, none, one, tone
The word "tone" is included because a tone is a sound or a radio wave that consists of only one frequency. For more about this, see the famous "sommunicating with the aliens" scene from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, which was set at the Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
I am sure that you can find some spurious words that do not have anything to do with the concept of unity (one). Let's start with abalone, bone, crone, done, hone, phone, shone, stone, telephone, zone.
D.A.W.
Use of “their” as a genderless singular?
- July 24, 2012, 1:08pm
Fallacious thinking raises its ugly head again:
"If the fact that good English writers do it doesn't make it correct, then what does make it correct?"
The fallacy is that of thinking that English exists in a vacuum - that it is self-contained and it has no relationships with any othr language.
On the contrary, one needs to look at the relationships between English and all of the other western Indo-European languages, e.g. Danish, Dutch, Frisaian, French, German, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Spanish.We do not have to copy how those languages do things, but we should take input from the way they do. Holy cow, we might even learn something useful. We might even learn something useful from Greek and Sanskrit.
I am amazed by those who think that English exists in isolation. They even want to announce this faulty thinking to the world. Else, they want to jump onto one forrign language, such as French. I never said this: I said to consider a large set of languages right in the preceeding paragraph.
D.A.W.
Use of “their” as a genderless singular?
- July 24, 2012, 12:41pm
Note: "Strict adherence to the rule of pronoun-antecedent agreement may lead to a construction so absurd that no one would use it:
"Did everybody leave early because he wasn't enjoying himself?"
There is a serious problem here: "Everybody" is plural.
However, "Everyone" is singular.
"Did everyone leave early because he wasn't enjoying himself?" makes perfect sense.
D.A.W.
Capitalizing After the Colon
- July 21, 2012, 5:18pm
To: Samir Hafza
Oh, we will grant you some question marks and exclamation points, now and then
With the Internet, we will give you as many @ signs as you want. .
D.A.W.
Questions
“Much More Ready” | July 8, 2012 |
Molotov Cocktails | July 8, 2012 |
Latest vs. Newest | July 15, 2012 |
Latest vs. Newest
There is no such thing as "US English". We always call it "American English".
This fits right in with the terms "Australian English", "British English", "Canadian English", "Irish English", "South African English", et cetera.
Besides that, "US" is not even an adjective. It is a noun, and always thus, except when referring to the Federal Government of the United States.
What is so difficult about this?
D.A.W.