OT: The ampersand invasion

On Farce Book I've seen an advert for 'Chester Draws'!

"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A. D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." (Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual)

useful datum, thanks.

yeah should be , "Me brover came to visit me 'n' the misses" ;-)

That's because "than" is a conjunction, not a preposition. The full form of the sentence would be, "he is bigger than I *am*."

There was a seaside postcard of the driver of a broken-down car talking to a drunk: "Piston broke." "Same here."

I mostly see draw in facebook buy swap sell groups.

But when words change languages the detail often does change.

Quite apart from stuff like Peking and Beijing etc.

The second word is very common, in fact more common than drawers but I have never seen chester used.

I was impressed (back in 1971) by the (locally written) BASIC system at university. If you typed somewthing that wasn't a valid number, the message was: ERROR IN NUMERIC DATUM

Plain old DOS was quite good as well, it you typed in "what do you call a general with a wooden leg" it would reply "INVALID COMMAND".

VAX/VMS Datatrieve used have lots of info about the Wombat in its help files for some reason. If you had a graphics terminal you could even type $ dtr32>plot wombat, and it would draw a picture of a wombat.

Also 'bacteria'. [A couple of years ago, in a radio discussion, I heard a doctor justifying the use of 'bacteria' as a singular "as it was just what everybody said these days".

As an aside, today I heard in a BBC TV news item about the present strikes, mention of a "railway" (sic) station. Is this a record so early in the year?

It's good to hear somebody get it right - the BBC usually uses the American version of "train station".

Am 06/01/2023 um 13:58 schrieb Ian Jackson:

So what should be the rule? Should foreign names be declensed in their native language?

Every time I tell people that "paninis" is not a word because "panini" is already the plural of "panino", they just laugh at me.

This is a scorcher: Paninies, Pizzas:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.4349352,-1.99729,3a,15y,91.14h,88.94t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjvRhlufAgxtUuzYqpRdJkg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

And 'Buffalo Mozzarella' indeed.

And of course, they often come in chesters.

A chester draw according to the BBC:

I thought the rearguard action against "train station" had been lost.