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Post by Little Jack Horner on Nov 9, 2018 14:16:55 GMT
I never know what to make of these collective nouns. Most of them are very seldom heard and seem to me to have no serious use or association with the creatures concerned. I suspect that many were invented for the amusement of someone or other. Even most of those catalgued in the Book of St Albans seem more whimsical than useful. One thinks of an exaltation of larks, a leap of leopards and an ambush of tigers, none of which is/are normally encountered in groups of more than two or three. I suspect that even a pride of lions and a gaggle of geese originated as jokes. Very many listed here for example www.namibian.org/travel/misc/collective-nouns.html are manifestly absurd. The list omits a babble of posters on this forum.
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Post by Twoddle on Nov 9, 2018 19:16:45 GMT
May I raise a word of discontent concerning the increasing - nay, almost exclusive - use of the term, "World War One"? Even more do I deprecate its abbreviation to "World War 1" and to the absolute nadir of "WW1". The BBC is as guilty as anyone, referring to the conflict almost exclusively with these appalling and demeaning misnomers. When I was younger the conflict was always referred to as "The Great War" or "The First World-War", and I consider it undignified to make that unfortunate and tragic conflict sound like the first in a series of computer war-games. (The same consideration applies to the Second World-War, of course, but the centenary of the 1914-1918 slaughter has brought the problem to mind.)
While on the subject of numbers, frequently nowadays I see dates written as, "9 November 2018", but it isn't the "Nine November", it's the "Ninth of November". Can we no longer cope with ordinal numbers?
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Post by Twoddle on Nov 9, 2018 19:26:08 GMT
I never know what to make of these collective nouns. Most of them are very seldom heard and seem to me to have no serious use or association with the creatures concerned. I suspect that many were invented for the amusement of someone or other. Even most of those catalgued in the Book of St Albans seem more whimsical than useful. One thinks of an exaltation of larks, a leap of leopards and an ambush of tigers, none of which is/are normally encountered in groups of more than two or three. I suspect that even a pride of lions and a gaggle of geese originated as jokes. Very many listed here for example www.namibian.org/travel/misc/collective-nouns.html are manifestly absurd. The list omits a babble of posters on this forum. By chance I have before me a book, lent to me recently by my brother and titled, "An Unkindness of Ravens. A Book of Collective Nouns", by Chloe Rhodes. I'm afraid I've only skim-read it because it becomes rather repetitive and tedious after a while, but the point that comes across fairly plainly is that the vast majority of collective nouns were, as LJH suggests, invented as whimsies or jokes. A few are onomatopoeic but most are just silly. Two of my favourites are "An abominable sight of monks" and "A superfluity of nuns".
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Post by Dave Miller on Nov 10, 2018 8:08:25 GMT
May I raise a word of discontent concerning the increasing - nay, almost exclusive - use of the term, "World War One"? Even more do I deprecate its abbreviation to "World War 1" and to the absolute nadir of "WW1". The BBC is as guilty as anyone, referring to the conflict almost exclusively with these appalling and demeaning misnomers. When I was younger the conflict was always referred to as "The Great War" or "The First World-War", and I consider it undignified to make that unfortunate and tragic conflict sound like the first in a series of computer war-games. (The same consideration applies to the Second World-War, of course, but the centenary of the 1914-1918 slaughter has brought the problem to mind.) While on the subject of numbers, frequently nowadays I see dates written as, "9 November 2018", but it isn't the "Nine November", it's the "Ninth of November". Can we no longer cope with ordinal numbers? I’m OK with both of the things you decry there, Twod. “The Great War” seems unkind to other wars which were equally bad (or worse, in the proportion of participants killed), and if we didn’t have a first world war, what would we call the second? I nowadays write 9 November, mainly because that’s the house style which I became used to at work, but it does seem better than 9th November. That latter is of course a clumsy contraction for THE 9th OF November, or even THE 9th DAY OF November. People live at (for example) 9 The Avenue, even though their house is the ninTH in the street.
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 10, 2018 22:26:25 GMT
May I raise a word of discontent concerning the increasing - nay, almost exclusive - use of the term, "World War One"? Even more do I deprecate its abbreviation to "World War 1" and to the absolute nadir of "WW1". [...] This doesn't address your discontent with or deprecation of the term, Twod, but is an observation: The BBC's online news this morning (it's already 11/11 here in Oz) contains bugger-all other than sport and Armistice Day, and in every instance of the latter are references to World War 1 or WW 1, showing a style distinctly different from that employed in Oz – World War I / WW I (the difference being the Oz use of roman numerals). The roman numeral styles – World War I / World War II and WW I / WW II – are the Oz standard, and it's rare (though becoming less so) to see the arabic numeral 1 used to describe those two conflicts.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Nov 13, 2018 13:53:14 GMT
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Post by Dave Miller on Nov 13, 2018 17:40:02 GMT
An interesting “illusionl, ljh.
However, I see three problems: (1) There’s no illusion. The map background specifically informs us that the dots are moving across a region! Given that, then the dots are indeed chasing (or at least following). You could just as easily take a film of, say, Hamilton overtaking Vettel, remove the background, and call it Vettel falling back behind Hamilton! (2) There’s no difference in effect between animate or inanimate objects. Unless, that is, the researchers are taking the verb “chase” to imply decision/purpose. But it was the article itself which mentioned “chase”. It could have mentioned “follow” and there would be no need for decision (two balloons being blown along?) (3) Article influence again: “who is chasing whom” directly implies people - definitely animate objects!
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 15, 2018 9:44:03 GMT
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 16, 2018 10:28:15 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Nov 16, 2018 17:15:24 GMT
I have previously mentioned an alternative suggestion for “word” of the year: single use. But I notice that alongside this article is a link to another, also by Tiger Webb, advocating abandoning the use of the apostrophe. His argument seems to be that, since it is often misused without causing ambiguity, it is redundant. I wonder whether he similarly advocates losing the distinction between, for example, infer and imply, or compliment and complement, or affect and effect which are also frequently misused with little or no ambiguity?
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 16, 2018 21:51:51 GMT
I have previously mentioned an alternative suggestion for “word” of the year: single use. But I notice that alongside this article is a link to another, also by Tiger Webb, advocating abandoning the use of the apostrophe. His argument seems to be that, since it is often misused without causing ambiguity, it is redundant. I wonder whether he similarly advocates losing the distinction between, for example, infer and imply, or compliment and complement, or affect and effect which are also frequently misused with little or no ambiguity? LJH: In Oz single use / single-use has certainly become the term of the month / year / whatever as we engage with the banning of single-use plastics (shopping bags, drinking straws, etc.). I have previously posted about Tiger Webb's proposal to kill the apostrophe (as well as a few of his other linguistic notions); his views and pronouncements give me much grief, and we had a few arguments over such matters before I concluded the debates were futile (he's a casual social acquaintance from the past). Aunty ABC's written English has gone down the toilet since TW's installation as "Language Researcher", replacing the woman who was formerly Aunty's style-meister.
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 16, 2018 22:11:56 GMT
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Post by Twoddle on Nov 16, 2018 22:50:16 GMT
It sounds like another of those negative impacts.
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Post by Twoddle on Nov 19, 2018 19:10:49 GMT
What e-mail software do you all use? For some years I've been using Windows Live Mail, which fulfils my every need in respect of e-mailing, but it's developed a bug in my desktop PC version and Microsoft no longer provide or support it, so reluctantly I'm having to look for a replacement.
I'm not after anything fancy and definitely don't need some complicated, all-singing, all-dancing, multicoloured stuff. Simplicity is the order of the day; in fact I'd be happy with exactly what WLM does already and I consider it a great shame that MS has dumped it. Any ideas, please?
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Post by Verbivore on Nov 19, 2018 20:29:29 GMT
Twod: I use ProtonMail – protonmail.com – which is platform agnostic, has sufficient bells and whistles for my needs, and is supposedly "secure"; it uses military-grade encryption. There is a free service for low-volume users and a couple of grades for paying users who, like me, want to use their own domains or are heavy users. It can be configured to run through onboard third-party mail clients such as AppleMail, Eudora, etc. (I use mine through AppleMail because I prefer that interface over webmail style, but when at work I use webmail directly to Proton.) I switched to Proton a couple of years ago and am satisfied with it. Combined with DuckDuckGo (search engine), onboard encryption, and my VPN, I believe that ProtonMail completes my online "security" package.
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