ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

centre-halfs imo but i agree it's against instinct

My instinct is to rewrite the whole thing.

^stock answer itt :)

everyone else seems to use halves though, maybe it's just one of those accepted inelegancies

"soccer players"

^stock answer itt :)

Yeah. Sorry. I gave up battling the language a long time ago. If it's hard to make work, there's probably a better way to do it. Your question is bloody good though — it's one of those constructions that doesn't seem to have an easy/obvious form.

there's a baseball version of this. "to fly out" is to make an out by hitting the ball and having someone catch it before it hits the ground. so the past tense is... "flied out". feels a bit wrong but "flew out" would be 1000000x wronger

technically "centre backs" is more correct in reference to the modern central defender position, i use "centre back" and "centre half" interchangeably like most people but iirc "centre half" technically refers to the old style W formations and other oddities where the centre half wd be positioned more like a modern holding midfielder tho they wd still have the key defensive duties.

having said that, or if "centre half" is specifically what you wanna use, i wd go with "centre halfs" too.

You know, I struggle with this on a weekly basis on ILF. Perhaps if I only had one centre half to moan about, this would never be an issue.

I think I generally plump for centre halfs.

(actually general plump for "useless bastards" which pluralises much more easily)

I'd go with central defenders. It's clearer in meaning.

xp tho of course if you're talking about centre-back pairings of useless bastards and you want to talk about more than one pairing you have to use 'useless bastardses'.

just a little unrelated q that came to mind when i was writing recently - is "him or herself" the right way of putting it? that 'him' seems a little off. "him- or her-self"? dinnae hink so.

Thanks for all the answers everyone - I realise "centre-half" is something of a throwback to yesteryear when we had half-backs, inside-lefts and wing-halfs/halves and that centre-back is the more correct modern term but I'm stuck thinking of them as centre-halfs/halves.

I think I'll go with the Glaswegian "centre hoff" as you'd only ever pluralise that to hoffs.

All this so I can moan about them collectively for the next 40 weeks :)

(ailsa, misread your 2nd last as "I generally go for plump centre halfs"!)

haha, my soft spot for Gary Caldwell still shining through :)

"centre half" technically refers to the old style W formations and other oddities where the centre half wd be positioned more like a modern holding midfielder tho they wd still have the key defensive duties.

― graveshitwave (Noodle Vague), Friday, 22 July 2011 13:42 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

not necessarily an outmoded concept tbf, although you would have to signal that you were using the term verrry deliberately. (in any case you wouldnt have more than one these days).

not sure where to post this but this quick vocab quiz game is a fun time-killer

http://www.merriam-webster.com/quiz/index.htm

3960 was my high

Hm 3360 on first try. Try try again!

3980!

Getting to 3960 or 3980 would partly depend on the percentage of words rated as medium or hard that the quiz randomly generates. I don't think the "speed bonus" is quite sufficient to push the score that high all on its own. I tried it once and got 3780. At max speed on all words (I'm assuming 180 is the max speed bonus), that could have been 3900.

the speed bonus starts at 200 and drops 20 for every second you take; answering in less than a second (which is doable) gets you 200

just got 3980

Final Score: 4000 Points!

yeah getting difficult words is half the battle

3800 on first go, but after three glasses of wine. Does anyone have the formula to work out what my wine-adjusted score is?

fuck I got the word 'quiddity' and all I could think about was the q&a thread and the debate we had over whether or not quiddity was appropriate for the title

3740 on my first try

3880 on first go. Don't fancy trying it again now for fear I'll just get worse.

I got 3800, and that was with getting all ten right and clicking as fast as I damn could on my stupid laptop trackpad, so it seems like doing any better would just be luck.

"Pro and anti-government protesters"

"Pro- and anti-government protesters"

It's a case where you can't recast. I'm going for the former, as the latter looks ugly and the hyphen leads you briefly to expect something else. Any idea what some of the main manuals of house style would say?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/mar/31/sanaa-yemen-protests-abdullah-saleh

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/02/02/egypt_protester_violence_mubarak

I would go the latter

Thanks conrad. Hmmm, I think I'm going to go with the former, AA. Specifically in this case it's for an on-screen item, and the latter looks a bit fussy to my eye. I guess the latter does indicate clearly that it belongs to something coming a bit later, though.

Especially where 'pro' can be taken as an abbreviated form of 'professional'.

I prefer the latter as well.

Latter.

Thanks everyone. I'd feel rather stubborn if I went for the former still after tapping the collective wisdom on offer, so I'm going mull it over tonight and decide tomorrow. I mean, who cares really? But sometimes those sort of questions are the toughest ones to come to a decision on.

pro- I think

For a headline I'd say the former; for body copy, the latter

latter seems kid of pedantic to me. former.

latter seems kind of correct to me. latter

Latter.

can you omit to notice something?

nope imo, you can fail to

xp I guess this phrase is a thing, but I would use fail to notice, or neglect

you can actually - i've seen it used but depending on the type of literature in which it's used it'd probably be better to go with a less obscure transitive verb like "fail" or "neglect"

lol or exactly what brad said

ja, you can omit to do things. it's verging on archaic usage though.

"omit" sounds more intentional/conscious than "fail" imo. In that case, whether it makes any sense to "omit to notice" something probably depends on the precise sense of "notice" being used.

"omit to notice" has a faint rhetorical or joky undertone, suggested that actually you perhaps intentionally overlooked the thing

if this is what you want to suggest, then it's ok -- if a bit arch

xp