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Post by Verbivore on Feb 2, 2019 6:48:29 GMT
All is not lost with the younger generation!
At lunch today, the teenager who served me later shared my table on her lunch break (I was dining with her brother) and we got to talking language (at her initiation, not mine), and I was pleased that she showed considerable interest and care with written English. She confessed to the poor practice of run-on sentences and asked how to deal with them.
When I asked how well she knew the semicolon, she responded with, "I'm never sure when to use it, and it's never mentioned at school; my teachers didn't seem to know when I asked".
I explained that it was rather like a "hard comma" or a "soft full stop", halfway between those two marks, then how to employ it to conjoin related statements where neither a comma nor a period would work as well.
The young lady, who is about to commence liberal arts at university, had a lightbulb moment, and promised to start employing the semicolon. "Why couldn't my teachers have explained it like that?" she wondered.
The world won't necessarily end today!
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 2, 2019 9:43:00 GMT
"Why couldn't my teachers have explained it like that?"
In the 1990s, after a generation or two of UK schoolchildren had been taught that grammar, punctuation and spelling weren't important, and that they served merely to detract from creative writing, the Government decided that things had gone too far and that they would be re-introduced. I recall discussing the matter with an old-school English teacher who asked the rhetorical question, "Who will they find to teach such things, now there's scarcely anyone left to do so?". I fear he had a valid point.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 2, 2019 20:50:39 GMT
In an article on ABC News Online about an increase in burial fees the author uses internment where interment is the required term. Perhaps they've taken to jailing people in cemeteries – or maybe the writer needs to turn off the autocorrect. (I have, of course, notified Aunty of this error.) I keep trying to encourage the writers at my newspaper to kill their autocorrect because it introduces many errors for me to emend, most particularly when it comes to personal names; some of those are mangled beyond belief.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 3, 2019 3:09:12 GMT
February's the shortest month. Which month is the longest?
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 3, 2019 7:50:13 GMT
February's the shortest month. Which month is the longest? I'll bite: September. September has nine letters; all the others have between three and eight. Otherwise a serious answer: it would depend on one's global position – latitude, longitude, etc. – at the time, would it not? I'll stick with September.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 3, 2019 9:46:47 GMT
In the UK, October is the longest month because the clocks are turned back one hour at the end of British summer time at the end of the month, thus adding one hour to the thirty-one days. I haven’t the energy to work out which it is in Oz because I think daylight saving (in those states which operate it) ends in April which is only thirty days.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 3, 2019 12:52:48 GMT
Idiocy on my part; I really shouldn't try to be a clever dick at three o'clock in the morning. LJH twigged the answer, i.e. the clocks go back an hour in October, making it the longest month, having thirty-one days and one hour, but it's an answer that's relevant only in the UK and most of the rest of Europe. I assumed that Daylight Saving Time ended in March in Australia (but I now see it occurs in April) and in October in the USA (but it's actually in November). My question was thus entirely nonsensical.
Time for the sackcloth and ashes!
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 6, 2019 9:57:49 GMT
It's common enough to see / hear the misspelling / mispronunciation pronounciation for pronunciation, but here's one I'd not previously encountered: explaination for explanation.
Does anyone else have similar observations?
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 6, 2019 11:26:10 GMT
Maintainance?
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 6, 2019 12:57:30 GMT
Haven't met that one previously, Dave. Good addition to the list.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 7, 2019 7:17:37 GMT
THAT verb! For better or for worse, I abhor the trendy use of impacted for affected. Whenever I find it in my proofreading work, I replace it. Here is a particularly unfortunate example of its use on ABC News Online.In an article about a big train collision in Oz 50 years ago, where an interstate passenger train collided at high speed head on with a goods train, is this most infelicitous use of impacted. (It would not have been used in the era of the event in that way.) The trains experienced an impact and were compacted, but the passengers were killed, injured, or affected. Death to this damned biz-speak! Harrumph!
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 7, 2019 10:26:06 GMT
Agreed, Verbivore, and, as I've mentioned many a time, even worse is "negative impact" - a physical impossibility!
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 8, 2019 15:31:27 GMT
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 8, 2019 18:28:59 GMT
Mmmm. Quite a few there that seem, if not entirely wrong, then at least not worth picking on. I note the recommended MISchievous rather than misCHIEvous, where I’m happy to say and hear the latter. Missing, though, is the common-but-more-complainably-wrong mischievious (with the added “i”). Not a list I’ll bother to bookmark.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 9, 2019 9:24:41 GMT
Randomly found the following and thought it "different" enough to share. A different beat …Would Ginsberg et al. approve? Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs beat poem.
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