OUCH:
A typical date for Brus:
He spent a lot of his money on much-younger women; took her for a ride in his expensive sports car; took her out to dinner at an expensive restaurant where he ate way too much and told false tales about his younger days; spent a lot of money on expensive alcoholic beverages and got drunk; and continued by catching VD. Then while driving her home, he got arrested by the highway police.

Finally, he PLED guilty to driving while intoxicated -- and then he got sent to jail for four months and fined 5,000 pounds sterling. [Was that enough? I am unfamiliar with British criminal law, except that they do not whip or hang convicts anymore.]

That sounds like an "old fuel" -- an "old fool" -- to me. Just do not let it happen again!

LOL, Dale

So, are you an "old fool" or not? LOL

You remind me of a happening in "The Incredible Hulk" TV series.
David Banner had hitched a ride with a man on a motorcycle.
Then, they went to a pub near a college campus.

In that pub, they met a young woman who said, "When I went to college, my Daddy told me don't smoke, don't drink, don't mess around with men, and don't ride on any motorcycles."

Then, in a really saucy tone of voice, she added, "I've never ridden on a motorcycle" -- implying that she had already done all of the other three!"
D.A.W.

It occurred to me last night that some people do not know the humor behind
"There's no fuel like an old fuel."

This is a twist on a saying that has been around for centuries:
"There's no fool like an old fool."

Old fools do things like these: spending a lot of their money on much-younger women; telling false tales about their younger days; trying to grab too much power; spending a lot of their money on alcoholic beverages; spending a lot of their money on fast sports cars; eating too much; going out and catching VD; et cetera.
I think that you should get the picture.

I have known a good number of old fools in my life!
I just don't want to become one!
D.A.W.

"Presumably, the Air Force has lots of jet packs."

In reality -- and on "Gilligan's Island" -- the jet pack was completely experimental and those were never widely produced.
Also in reality, I don't think that the Air Force ever experimented with jet packs. Those were items that the U.S. Army experimented with, so a jet pack belonging to the Air Force was a piece of fiction on "Gilligan's Island".

The idea for the Army was that some soldiers could conceivably use jet packs to fly over the battlefield** and then land in the rear of the enemy lines, either for sabotage or for scouting. This turned out NOT to be practical.

**For many decades, the two places that the Army worried about and made big plans for defending were West Germany and South Korea. Thus, the Army's high commanders and their staffs were continually planning on
1) Fighting the Soviets, the East Germans, and the Czechs in West Germany.
2) Fighting the North Koreans and maybe the Red Chinese in South Korea.

Almost any small advantage that they could think of in the Army was worth considering. Large advantages, too, including cannons and rockets that could carry nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. We are very, very fortunate that a war like that never broke out.

I have read that the U.S. has not had any nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1992. However, the Air Force has them on Okinawa and Guam, and the Navy has them on aircraft carriers and submarines in the Western Pacific -- not too far from Korea.

D.A.W.

"Aye, D.A., ye're fair going your dinger the nicht, as we say in Scotland. Are you on the malt too?"

LOL, LOL, LOL !

I don't guarantee that I got all of the endings on the German adjectives right.
Sorry, but in German the usage of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs are all a lot more complicated than they are in English.
On the other hand, adverbs, conjunctions, and predicate adjective are all easy.

Also watch out for those notorious German compound nouns.
My favorite one is "Farbfernsehgeraet" = "color television set", but I am an electronics engineer, after all.
For many years, Germany had three different systems for color TV.
West Germany used the PAL system, which came from Britain.
East Germany used the SECAM system, a French one that had been adopted by the USSR and its satellite states.
Also, there were American Army and Air Force bases in West Germany that had their own TV stations, and those used NTSC - the American system, of course.

Years ago, some of the American stations started showing HOGAN'S HEROES, but within a month, the local governments said, "Please don't broadcast that one anymore!" No matter what kind of a TV set you had, you could still pick up HOGAN'S HEROES in black & white, and the German governmentss didn't want all of those Nazis (and idiots, too) on TV.

DAW

Hello,
I had realized that there was something awkward about what I wrote before:

"I recently saw an episode of 'Gilligan's Island' from a DVD that I bought. In that episode, the castaways found a jet pack washed up on the beach that the Air Force had lost."

However, I did not expect this to spark off a discussion of relative pronouns and subordinating conjunctions (that, which, although, because, since, so that, such that, though, unless, until, when, where, while -- and a good many more). Do not be confused that many of these can also be used as other parts of speech.

Now, I have thought of some ways to modify my sentence somewhat for clarity:

1. "In that episode, the castaways found a jet pack -- washed up on the beach -- that the Air Force had lost."

2. "In that episode, the castaways found a jet pack, washed up on the beach, that the Air Force had lost." (simply inserting two commas).

3. "In that episode, the castaways found a jet pack that the Air Force had lost and that had washed up on the beach." (Aha! Parallel construction, and what a fine thing it is!)

There are doubtless other ways to rephrase this sentence for clarity.
I do not think that using "which" helps, but it could be used.

Speaking of the German language, it has subordinating conjunctions, too.
The most common one is "dass", which is commonly written with the German "ez-set", a special letter that looks like a Greek "beta". "Dass" means "that".

Also, German has something in this area that does not exist in English anymore. (It probably did in Old English.)
German has three definite articles -- because it has nouns of three different genders. These are { der, die, das } in the nominative case. However, these are also commonly used as subordinating conjunctions, too, and those usually translate into English as "that". Subordinate clauses are also ALWAYS set off by commas in German.

Here is an example: Das Flugzeug, die rote streichende Fluegel haben, gehoert Von Richthofen.
This means, The airplane that has red-painted wings belongs to Von Richthofen.
Yes, the Red Baron.

In certain cases in German, the words "das" and "dass" can mean exactly the same thing.

LOL, when it comes to using "pleaded" instead of "pled".

I recently saw an episode of Gilligan's Island from a DVD that I bought. In that episode, the castaways found a jet pack washed up on the beach that the Air Force had lost. Before trying it out, the Professor expressed his concerns about the age of the rocket fuel in the pack.

This gave Thurston Howell III the opportunity to say, "There's no fuel like an old fuel."

Are the journalists who say and write "pleaded" old fuels ?
Likewise for "sayed" and "layed"?

D.A.W.

It is well-known among linguists and child psychologists that most small children (ages two through four, or so), go through a period when they think that all verbs are regular verbs.
I noticed the same thing about my own daughter when she was two or three.
Learning about irregular verbs come a little later.

This is why small children say things like { breaked, comed, doned, eated, flyed (two syllables), gived (two syllables), growed, knowed, maked, runned, singed (two syllables), taked, telled ...}

Oddly, we have college and high school graduates nowadays who are stuck at the same level with such words as { flyed, growed, layed, pleaded, sayed,...}

I wish that I had $5.00 for every time an adult said or wrote "layed" insted of "lain" and "laying" instead of "lying".
This is despite the fact that "layed" and "laying" have "off-color" meaning.

Just think of this statement by a woman, "I was laying on the beach all morning."
Well, at least that one sounds like a lot of fun and a pleasant experience.
My question is just, "With how many men?"

LOL, D.A.W.

I once knew a man from Indonesia who had lived in the United States for years. He was earning a B.S. at the college where I taught, and he was the husband of one of the other members of the faculty.

He told me that his parents spoke Dutch at home, and of course there is a national Indonesian language, too, which is the language of schools, businesses, government, etc.

He laughingly added that he spoke three languages: Broken Dutch, Broken Indonesian, and Broken English !! Somehow, he could make himself understood here.

I also taught electronics engineering to an old, white-headed Vietnamese man. His
English was nearly incomprehensible, but I noticed that when he was speaking with students from places like Morocco and Algeria, he spoke fluent French, and so did they. So, for them, French was their lingua franca.

Oddly, after the Communists took over South Vietnam, they sent the old man to a "re-education camp". After many months there, the Communists decided that "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," so they let him go. Then, he and his children made it to the U.S. as refugees. Next, when I taught him two courses, he was very close to completing his B.S. in electronics engineering, so he wasn't such an "old dog" after all.

I was lucky in that in both of the classes that I taught him, his daughter was a student, too. Whenever the Dad asked a question in very broken English, and I stood there with a blank look on my face, his daughter would "translate" his question into her fluent English. Then I could answer it -- and he understood English well. I look at what he did as quite courageous because his English was so bad.

I had way, way too many student who refused to ask any questions even when they didn't understand something -- and I made it abundently clear that I believed that asking questions and getting answers was a GREAT way to learn. I encouraged it. I usually answered questions then and there, but occasionally I had to say either
1. We will talk about that after class, or
2. That is a great item for graduate school. (And undergraduates do not have the background for it.)

Dale