ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

How about more than the work of three normal laptops?

Its chief breakthrough is what Apple claims is an eight-hour battery that can be recharged 1,000 times (which would take a thousand monkeys working feverishly at a thousand normal laptops to achieve).

How about just:

"Monkeys!"

"Apple lie about battery life."

Oh god, company names as plural, grrrrr

Next you'll be saying band names are singular.

Blur: is shite.

OK, this is ridiculous, but does the word "pants" (in the UK English sense) always mean men's underwear? This is what I am arguing now. Women don't generally wear pants, do they?

Yes, they do. Next.

You're more likely to call them knickers, though.

Actually, I think I might call them 'pants' as much as 'knickers'.

I love the fact you appear to have spent a whole minute thinking about that.

If the planet we live on is the Earth, why is the moon not the Moon?

Cos that's its name, right? Our moon happens to be called Moon, no?

Where I work, it's "the Moon" when referring to it as an astral object ("The Moon is thousands of miles from Earth") and "the moon" in more poetic or metaphorical usages ("man in the moon," "reach for the moon").

Also, there seems to be a trend toward deleting the "the" before "Earth," as I have just done, since it's just one planet among eight, but no one seems to be suggesting that the same be done for "Moon."

Actually, I have seen "the" dropped from Moon quite a bit.

it's "the moon" for the same reason it's "my mom" vs "Mom" or "the sun" vs "Sol" etc

I like the sound of Man on Moon. But that is not a good guide for usage.

merriam-webster says both "often capitalized" and "usually used with 'the,'" which i dont really agree w/

of course, saying "often" is essentially read as "ask someone else"

"Internet" vs. "internet" also y'alls.

Maybe "the" should be dropped from "the Internet".

I will look for this tasty recipe on Internet.

iirc AP says "Internet" and "E-mail" which i think is ridiculous

That's, "the E-mail".

Anyways it's all just "mail" now thanks to the wondrous technology of backronyms and "snail" or "postal" mail.

pleas no hyphen in email

and no e in please doh

plas

oh, AP also says "Web site"

my bad, AP doesn't capitalize email, but it does add the dash

I get into this conversation fairly often, but "Internet" and "e-mail" are so standardized to me that it's impossible for me to imagine them any other way. On the other hand, "Web site" has always looked silly.

We go with the Internet, but email and website.

But anyway, we have started extracting stuff from the reports we doand putting them into PowerPoint, which we then have to sub (a bit).

But it drives me mad!

For example, how can I do a non-breaking hyphen, an optional hyphen, a non-breaking space? Help!

In PowerPoint? I don't imagine you can, to be brutally frank.

Has no-one ever wanted to do a line break in a presentation? Or not split Mr and Smith?

Gah!

"business-friendly formats"

Non-breaking space: don't have PPt here, but try alt+0160 (on numpad).

Non-breaking space: similarly, try alt+0173.

Optional hyphen: I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't possible, that sounds like word-processing type funcionality.

I was riding the train to work, and across the aisle, I saw a woman with a cardboard box perched on top of her backpack. The boxstarted to slide off, but she hesitated before catching it -- so I must've saw it fall before she did. Or must I have seen it fall before she did?

seen

wait what

"I must have seen it"

Seen would imply past imperfect though, and this was a one time thing?

NEVER use "have saw"

seen is past participle

Have saw will travel. I don't know what's wrong with my grammar nowadays. ;-:

'...must have saw it...' is always wrong. If the thing troubling you is that the box didn't actually fall all the way to the ground before the woman caught it, then you could change it to "I must have seen (or noticed) it falling (or start to fall) before she did"

'have saw' seems to be exclusively an American colloquialism. It is very very very very very very very very wrong, whether American or otherwise.

Have saw. Will travel.

oh d'oh

'have saw' seems to be exclusively an American colloquialism.

No, I think Leeee was just overthinking this. I've never heard anyone say it.

Ok... one I was picked up on by a fellow grammar fiend (Grammar Fiend?) a few years ago. And was ashamed never to have thought about.

"I am ..." (doing something etc.)

Does the opposite construction exist?
"I amn't..."

If so, why do we say "I aren't...", when we wouldn't say "I are...".
If this is subjunctive skullduggery, please use words of one syllable.

Do people say "I aren't..." though? I don't think I do. You would say "I'm not", rather than "I amn't" though, surely.

no one in the history of the world has ever said "i aren't"