ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

lol at maths panic on this thread.

xpost It's a misplaced (or dangling) modifier.

Should sentence starting with "Surely" end with a question mark?

not unless it's a question or you want to use a question mark

Surely sentences of this type usually act as rhetorical questions?

Surely they do.

Surely (ha) that depends on whether you mean "surely" as "certainly" or as "it should certainly be the case that..."?

Sorry, that last one should be "it should certainly be the case that...shouldn't it?", shouldn't it?

Yes, indeed. The latter is far more common, though. It's just that sometimes the sentence is long and by the time you get to the end, the question mark might surprise the reader.

Though that could be the case with a real question, too.

i think i read somewhere that questions can be divided into direct and indirect ones, the direct ones need a question mark and with the indirect ones its voluntary, "surely" is mostly used indirectly i would say and thus does not need a question mark.

as for the problem with "he or she", i use "its", works like a charm. "the tavern-keeper must spellbind its customers".

low income countries or low-income countries?

depends. are the countries low and ... no, sorry, i can't actually find any occasion when it wouldn't be low-income countries :)

yeah, I thought so. I just keep seeing it without the hyphen.

yeh, you will. people be punctuation mooks :(

but as long as some of us keep flying the flag, there is hope for a better dawn.

(christ. that beer has gone straight to my head.)

What part of speech is "low-income" in that case? It's not a compound adjective, is it, cause that's two adjectives together.

Should there be a question mark at the end of my previous sentence?

The World Bank has two types of member countries: income and target. Income countries pay in, target countries take out. However, it's harder to get money down from the hilly high countries, so they prefer to use low income countries for their banking pleasures. or something

C-

yeh but I cans ues a question mark so blah

There are some people who would argue that precisely because few people would be confused about the meaning of "low income country" that the hyphen isn't necessary. I tend to err on the side of using it, though.

what about least developed countries? I don't think I've ever seen that with a hyphen. what is the actual rule here?

the rule is simply to only hyphenate whenever confusion is in the air, science fiction, science-fiction book, science-fiction book-club, peanuts.

Perhaps there is a different thread for just ranting, but I'd just like to make known my weeks-long annoyance at the huuuuuuuge plastic sign outside the Hounslow Asda that promises seasonal produce "at it's best".

And also the worst attempt at pun ever, which can be found on the wall of the waiting room at my local doc's surgery. It is an NHS poster for Hounslow Stop Smoking group.

"It's not easy to quit smoking, but with our help it's less of a fag."

I'd like to think that the money they saved by not making the poster good was added to the wage packets of the brilliant and overworked doctors and nurses there. But I suspect not.

"drag"? is that really the pun?

No. "It's a fag" is slang for "It's a pain". I like the slogan!

Really? Fag = it's a pain? I have never heard fag used that way in my life. Drag would praps have been better.

Lemme think. I have seen 'fagging' used as a term for the hazing that older form students at British public schools inficted upon the lower forms. I have also seen 'fagged out' as a synonym for 'tired'. Either of these useages might, with a bit of tweaking, be generalized into 'it's a fag' to denote that an activity is unpleasant or tiresome.

Still, I have never heard or seen that particular useage, yet.

"it's a fag" = "it's a hassle". that's totally normal colloquial english, i thought, along with "i can't be fagged" = "i can't be bothered".

Signs at Gatwick signs after security yesterday:

ANYTHING YOU BUY HERE INCLUDING BOTTLES OF WATER ARE ALLOWED ON BOARD.

Commas would've saved the day

not really!

if you set off "including bottles of water" with either emdashes or commas and then exclude it when reading the sentence aloud you will quickly see the other prob

I always wonder if I'm more aware of these things because I studied Mod Langs. A mistake like that in another language was more likely to get your work covered in red pen than one in Eng Lit at my school.

ANY THINGS would've saved the day, though it's not elegant. But Gatwick isn't really elegant. And I had a three hour delay too!

three-hour?

Boots loyalty cards advertised as: "No other loyalty card is more generous" (or words to that effect).

Can you have both 'other' and 'more' in this context?
Can we have a product blacklist where the label makes no sense or says "it's" instead of "its"? I swore at some Boots footcream today because of this.

What Boots would appear to be saying is that there are other cards which are precisely AS generous, but none that are MORE -- i.e., they are in a tie for first place.

Haha possibly they are referring to the individual card they are offering you: "Card #8134-9123's generosity is surpassed by no other card, but we must admit it's equalled by the generosity of all the other individual cards we've issued to other shoppers."

but it's still pretty clumsy when you look at it.

i don't like it. thumbs down.

Hm, but by saying "No other loyalty card is more generous" are they kind of saying "THIS loyalty card is more generous, but no OTHER card is"... but more generous than what?

It's the 'other' that I don't like.

Huh? The problem isn't with the "more" antecedent --

No other loyalty card is more generous (than our loyalty card).

It's still grammatical -- they've just included a clumsy "other" that makes it mean something other than what they want. They surely mean --

No loyalty card is more generous (than our loyalty card).

Or, if they really want to specify "other" --

No other loyalty card is as generous (as our loyalty card).

But because those parentheticals weren't there, they have overclarified and wound up saying something not quite as bold as they want:

No other loyalty card is more generous (than our loyalty card) (though some might be exactly AS generous as ours).

(OH WAIT okay I follow you -- yeah, the "other" construction makes it read like the equivalent of "no other card is GREEN" or "no other card is RECTANGULAR." As if it's saying "our card is MORE GENEROUS (than nothing in particular), and other cards aren't.")

Usage query: People now seem to use the construction "<ACTOR> vehicle" to mean just "movie featuring <ACTOR>." Isn't the original thrust/connotation of "vehicle" (in this context) that the film is mostly banking on the star's potential popularity -- that the film was constructed to advance the career of the star, more so than the star just winding up cast in it?