OT: more PC insanity

It's only labels that start in Col 1, Shirley.

Some 50 years ago a young Danish aeronautical engineer came to visit our lab to discuss a problem of mutual interest, and attend the same conference in London that we were going to. After the conference was over we took him along to a pub. During the course of the evening I commented that his English was very good. He put this down to the best technical and scientific books and journals being written in English, and if you wanted to progress you had to learn the language so they could be read and understood.

If British universities are going to turn out educated scientists and engineers that are otherwise semi-illiterate, then the source of leading information will shift elsewhere and the country will sink that much lower.

Typos are one thing. we can agree that that was wrong

But people on the telly say 'the police *is* looking for a criminal'.

What, all of them, as a unitary block?

I bet a majority of posters here can't see what is wrong with that.

Not in this assembler.

Are "the police" countable? That is, are there less or fewer of them? I'd agree that policemen and women are countable.

Or even 'has', innit!

My bilingual nephew says that Kant is easier to read in English than the German in which it was written..

I think English is a wonderful mix of Romance and Germanic languages and has benefited mightily from cultural appropriation.

Pig (Nordic) Swine(Germanic) and Pork (Romance/French) shows us the real value of being able to say the same thing in a common vulgar way, and unpleasant way, and a upper class Norman, toff, sort of way..

And where would we be without our bungalows and boomerangs?

Any time you're having trouble reaching a reagent on the shelf, you can stand on a copy of this to make you taller :-) Mine is the 1973-1974 edition.

My dad had to go to a French-speaking part of Canada and the man he was seeing took him home for dinner where he met the colleague's wife and children. All of them were bilingual English and French. They sometimes spoke French to each other. However he noticed that the children *always* spoke English when they were playing. He asked them why and they said that they found English to be a better language for expressing themselves because there were more ways of saying *almost* the same thing with subtle differences (except they may not have put it so eloquently at the age of five!).

I think it's totally appropriate that we use German words for the animal (cow, pig etc) for the animal and French for the food (beef, pork etc).

Another Dave

Likewise.

The thing is, 'some people' can just absorb this sort of (often) un intuitive (eg, non phonetic) spelling whist others can't.

When I question our daughter (or the Mrs) *why* they can't remember the route to somewhere they have been once, they ask me why I still can't spell words I must have written thousands of times.

The reason I haven't 'remembered' is in many cases the same reason I couldn't remember the mobile phone number I've had for ~15 years (till very recently) it's because I didn't need to because there were often ways of gleaning such that were more reliable (spell checkers, phone books etc).

I think I may have had similar in English 'O' level and whilst I enjoyed the classes and got average marks, I would often be let down by 'bad spelling'.

But what is bad spelling but an inability to remember a sequence of letters, some of which don't follow any tools used to take away any ambiguity?

When reading something (on a subject I have some knowledge of) I will often spot anything that either doesn't make sense but may well completely miss spelling mistakes on *some* words.

If I think that anyone else reading such might then question the 'professionalism' of the writer (say on their web / sales site) then I might feed such back in case they might like to adjust what they had written.

The last was the Odroid N2+ I bought as the host for my Home Assistant where the advert suggested that it 'came with' a part in the 'bundle' when it actually did not (well, not included in the price), making it slightly misleading / confusing. I mentioned this in general pre sale correspondence and they confirmed it wasn't as clear as it could be and they would feed it back to the marketing / web boys (not that they seem to have changed it yet). ;-)

Black Metal powder-coated case ODROID N2+ with 4GByte RAM eMMC Card storage with Home Assistant pre-installed RTC backup battery Power adapter (12V/2A)

Storage 1 x eMMC connector 1 x microSD slot (DS/HS modes up to UHS-I SDR104) - eMMC cARD Preinstalled"

Except, no eMMC card is included in the 'price' bundle at all so maybe the headline price should read 'Starting from <and the price of the smallest card>'? However, I don't think you can complete the order without selecting at least one from the list of capacities.

Cheers, T i m

When I went though secondary school, it was not uncommon for pupils on the science/maths side of the distribution to have dropped any subject that required them to write essays; just as the other "humanities" group had dropped science and maths subjects as soon as possible; naturally, this greatly exacerbated the weaknesses of both groups.

#Paul

The latter being better for maintaining the cognitive dissonance when people are buying a nicely presented and comodified chunk of flesh in a packet from the supermarket.

The labels on said packets may show a 'happy pig' standing in a field (that most pigs never see of course), not the unhappy pig thrashing about, desperately trying to survive in the gas chamber or having it's throat cut.

They don't (or choose not to) consider that all 'pork' (/bacon) has to come from individual, intelligent, social, trusting pigs.

If only all the words used around this whole 'industry' of animal suffering, death and exploitation where more honest ...

Cheers, T i m

I wouldn't mark down for bad spelling per se, but I do mark down for lack of clarity, illegibility, or ambiguity (e.g. taking your example, what should someone think the miselpting "sulphade" was?). I also emphasise to students the need to make what they produce easy to understand, so as to reduce the likelihood of misunderstanding by either markers, or some putative future colleague or employer.

Generally, misspellings are not a significant issue; more interesting is the students who can solve problems correctly ... whilst also being more or less incapable of explaining how or why they managed to do so :-)

#Paul

or constable even :-)

Yeah they are good at landscape painting too. :)

Spelling requires a set of cognitive pattern recognition skills that not everyone has (including me!), however as with many things, if you have the skills it can be difficult to comprehend why others might find it so difficult.

The best comparison I have found that gives them a "feel" for the complexity, is to point out that you asking me to learn the spelling of a list of words, would be for me a task of similar complexity to me asking you to remember a similar length list of phone numbers. I.e. something that you would be forced to remember as a special case for each.

Yup, I find in many cases I can read through something generally badly spelt and not even notice.

Although I will tend to notice poor grammar far more readily, even where it's spelling related (say using there in place of their, or weather in place of whether etc.

Indeed - and to be fair they have a point, but it's another case of one's own abilities skewing perception. If they find it easy to proof read a page and spot all the spelling errors, they they will tend to assume that someone not correcting them is just being lazy / sloppy.

Yup I see what you mean - pricing the entry level at £135 including the

charles formulated on Monday :

I did, one of my favourite subjects, but unused I promptly forgot most of it :-(

• 1

We need to set the standard, not lower the standard to the lowest common denominator.