DIY English

Why don't you just get to the point?

Reply to
Alang
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My pet peeve is the mispronunciation of "sixth" by many TV announcers. It is NOT "sikth", it is "siksth"! (It probably jars on me in particular as one of my ancestors was Which Tyler, the leader of he Pedants' Revolt.}

Reply to
Mr Fuxit

My pet hate in that area is one that is perpetrated (or was, anyway) by the voice on NatWest telephone banking. I also heard it today, when some reporter was talking about the reopening of the partially closed Channel Tunnel.

What is it? Feb-yoo-erry. Where did the 'r' go?

Reply to
Bob Eager

Or paid and earned

or bring and take

or voluntary and unpaid

and loads of others, I seem to spend half the news program talking back to the TV.

-- JGH

Reply to
jgharston

Or paid and earned

or bring and take

or voluntary and unpaid

and loads of others, I seem to spend half the news program talking back to the TV.

-- JGH

Reply to
jgharston

Brian said his solicitor was regularly drunk. Brian, said his solicitor, was regularly drunk.

-- JGH

Reply to
jgharston

Pah. That's nothing.

Haitch. When did the extra noise arrive on the front?

How many newsreaders refer to the Secertary of State?

And the really scary one - should he have his hand on the button, if he thinks they are nucular weapons?

(Mind I caught myself with a your/you're mixup the other day after I;d posted. And that semicolon in place of apostrophe is always appearing!)

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ

Er, "typos". No apostrophe, unless you're a grocer :-) And a comma after "typos" please, to separate the list items correctly.

My mum's Welsh, and had to learn to speak English when she went to school. If any of the children was caught speaking Welsh - even in the street - they'd be humiliated in class by being made to wear the Welsh Knot (local equivalent of the dunce's cap). She uses English better than most people for whom it's their first language.

Reply to
John Stumbles

I am, or one of the many shops and garages, MOT's etc etc.

Yeah, I would normally have done that because it makes sense (in the rules meaning of the word).

I try to proof-read most of my posts and certainly spell check them and I often find myself talking to the spell checker asking "What the F's wrong with that?" then trying 15 different combinations of the word in an effort to give it a clue. I then gave to bung it into Gloogle in the hope that it spits out what I was trying to say "Did you mean ... ?" etc.

So, for some it's not (even) just a matter of learning or practicing but a form of mental 'issue' or blindness. It could even be a mental block? Of course some of this could be sorted with extra tuition or different learning techniques but where would many of us start and what constitutes 'sufficient' (ie, where would / should we stop)?

Personally, in spite of my second best O-Level being in English (after Technical Drawing and before Maths) I have, and never have had any interest in it (or Maths) as a hobby, using it as a tool, a means to an end.

Now, as with many other tools I probably don't use them as a 'professional' might but then who here is a master of all trades?

Shooting someone down for asking *here* if it was safe to do some d-i-y thing that most people would realise was unsafe could be considered 'acceptable' because it's perfectly on topic. Picking someone up because of some breach of an often bizarre English grammatical rule or commonly incorrect spelling or word use is (IMHO) unnecessary. Do those people believe mentioning it here will make things better? I'm 52 and with the best will in the world, anything I do wrong now I will probably continue to do that way for ever. I just don't see these things as others do (I will sometimes know a word is wrong but not why).

The fact that English wasn't her naturally acquired language may have been to her advantage, like not driving a car pre being taught how you should do it for the test etc?

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

Care to cite some evidence? I'm working from personal recollection, which might be faulty, I admit. What about you?

I am NOT saying that News Groups and Mailing Lists are the same thing, just that I distinctly remember News Groups being invented as a means of user-management of Mailing Lists. Hence my point (the one you snipped).

R.

Reply to
TheOldFellow

Because his point is that he wants to prolong argument, not to disseminate wisdom or educate the ignorant. His intention is to gratify his desire to belittle others.

He may on occasion even be right, but his form of expression is always derogatory. Personality disorder, I'd say.

R.

Reply to
TheOldFellow

On another News Group (sop to Mrs Firth) we always use to surround humorous remarks. We couldn't get it into the XML standard though.

R.

Reply to
TheOldFellow

-------------------8><

A single question mark is quite sufficient. ;-)

Reply to
Appelation Controlee

I reckon it's time to give a dishonourable mention to kil-O-meter [1], too often used in place of kilometer. We seem to get by perfectly well with kilograms instead of kil-O-grams.

[1] Presumably the result of the aural preconditioning of an odometer being colloquially refered to as a "mileometer".
Reply to
Appelation Controlee

But also: "Contrary to the critics quoted above, many people with working class English ancestry recall the use of the term in the 1930s &

1940s in northern England. [citation needed]"

In the West Riding, "cod" was simply a dialect variation of "kid" as in "kidding", eg "It's a cod".

Likewise, "wallop" was an old slang term for beer. When Mr Codd started brewing beer, the attraction between those words must have been irresistible... and still is.

Reply to
Ian White

I think you have misunderstood RFC 850. Usenet was established to use a subset of the RFC 822 mail message format as a standard for interchange of news articles. It did not have anything to do with mailing list management. Usenet and news existed prior to RFC 850, and all that was changed was to adopt the mail message format to supplant the formats existing for news articles at that time.

Reply to
Steve Firth

I did, but some argumentative tosspot calling himself "Alang" wants to ignore the point and is attemptint to define Usenet by using his misunderstanding of the content of a non-technical on-line dictionary.

You may refer to newsgroups however you wish, but if someone starts callign them "lists" or "forums" or any other such name dragged in from Compuserve, AOL or wherever they can expect to be laughed at.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Refer to that beam in your eye again. You started this nonsence with your pointless, off-topic rant in which you tried to establish what a wonderful person you are because you speak English according to what

*you* see as perfect grasp of grammar. Your intention being entirely and solely to belittle others.
Reply to
Steve Firth

What? Is this thing called love?

What is this thing called, love?

What is this thing, called love?

etc.

That is why punctuation is important, despite the lefty driven destruction of standards.

Reply to
Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)

It gets worse when you write computer programs.

or do maths.

a+b*c is not the same as (a+b)*c.

But lefties don't do sums or write programs.

Since the only way to make everyone equal is to insist on the world being dumbed down to the ability of a child of one to function in it everywhere.

The fact that it takes a heck of a lot of maths and software to dumb it down that far, and having done so, there wont be any mathematicians or programmers left, seems to entirely have escaped their comprehension.

But that's not hard to do.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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