ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

crotchet-mongers all.

often seem to originate from a position of wanting to be more academically *correct* than the next person
please don’t describe my life without my permission

So will I..driue u to confesse urselfe a Conundrum, who now thinks he hath learning inough to proue the saluation of Lucifer.

oh leaue av

ap style guide . . . welcome to the resistance

SPLIT FORMS: In many cases, splitting the infinitive or compound forms of a verb is necessary to convey meaning and make a sentence easy to read. Such constructions are acceptable. For example: Those who lie are often found out. How has your health been? The budget was tentatively approved. Let readability and comprehension be your guide.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

i've begun leaving off full stops in my work emails sometimes, even to important people. i do capitalise though. what does this mean??

it means my work is done here

do you replace them with,,,, ? if so,,,, I have the facebook group for you!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5GscCfWkAA_Ybc.jpg:small

subtle commentary on the inconsistency of americans

Probably not the right thread to ask this, but oh well: what's the term for words that are principally known for some characteristic other than their meaning (e.g. antidisestablishmentarianism)?

examples

Well, antidisestablishmentarianism is known for being long rather than whatever it's supposed to refer to.

yes it's an example of a very long word

i mean, i know that's probably not what you're getting at -- but is this other word one that definitely exists (but you forgot it) or are you just asking *if* it exists (in which case what is it)

I'm pretty sure the term exists, as I saw a listicle about it. Can't remember any of the other words on it, though.

ah ok

this sent me off on a 20-minute puzzle trying to remember the word that we now use in a different sense, that used to mean -- in classical pedagogy -- types of example, viz of grammatical usage

(where the point of the example is not the meaning of the sentence or sentence fragment but the grammatical rule it demonstrates and exemplifies)

anyway i just remembered what this word is: it's paradeigma, or paradigm… which we now almost entirely associate with thomas kuhn and changing models of knowledge

Found the listicle, and I was wrong, apparently, there is no term for what I was looking for: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/internets-favorite-words/antidisestablishmentarianism

A debate in the office just now - how would you write out the expression 'Catch some Zees'?

catch some z's

That apostrophe is contentious

Catch some Zzzs

Yes, that's how I had it - I think I got it from comic strips

http://www.comicbookfx.com/images/12-1.jpg

I'm guessing the entire shorthand started with comic strips

it just occurred to me that non-Americans might pronounce it "catch some zeds"?????

that's fucked up, nigel

yup, that's what we say

(i mean if we say it at all, which is like nearly never)

"in Japanese manga… the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character's nose"

apparently it's the centenary of the earliest recognised ref for zzz as snoring = the 1919 boy scouts handbook, as the cross-hed to a poor gag about sleeping

a possible source is an earlier symbol for snoring = a little pic of a log being sawn, and "zzz" beside the log bvz it's the sound of sawing (and snoring)

source: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27045/how-did-the-letter-z-come-to-be-associated-with-sleeping-snoring

when yr editing a transcription and the interviewee says "there's tons of examples" and the transcriber writes this up as "there's tonnes of examples"

but technically a tonne = 1 x metric fvckton

so which is correct

I think you need to get in touch with the interviewee again to clarify what the examples weighed.

I suppose it's only an issue if there are between 1.81437 and 2 tonnes of them. Otherwise, it's fine either way.

https://grammarist.com/spelling/ton-tonne/

"British, Canadian, and Australian publications generally reserve tonne for very narrow uses (i.e., in reference to the metric ton) ... All use ton (or tons) in contexts unrelated to measurement"

seems fair.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_5d-Xp-MJumg/TI5l3x6dA2I/AAAAAAAAAhI/ugKIlcvVY8M/s1600/Mash+Tun+MA.JPG

Let us learn to call people by their name, as the Lord does with us, and to give up using adjectives.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 24, 2019

Good Lord

Not using adjectives is very difficultly.

pontifex otm, adverbs can also eff off

Seriously I think this may be my favourite ever papal statement about anything, not just because of its high bathos but because HE'S RIGHT

I think you mean HE IS

i do

There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

The preceding applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache there is very little data in the Eleventh Volume) the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages - and many others as well.

<3

whatever you say LIddle' Pope Francis

Saw this headline in this morning's London Metro, it's wrong, seriously wrong, but I can't get to the bottom of why:

BRAWL BREAKS OUT ON HOL JET AS PASSENGER IS SPAT IN FACE

it needs the preposition 'at' I think, because this form is transitive, but I got lost in the undergrowth. as it is it sounds like some unnamed entity has gobbed a passenger out into some other unnamed entity's face.

'hol jet' is a trying construction

What's a hol jet?

this solves any word-length issue (53 characters to the original's 57):
BRAWL ON HOLIDAY JET AFTER PASSENGER’S FACE SPAT IN

Beautiful scansion and internal assonance though. I'm chanting that headline to the tune of the chorus of "The Human Beings" till somebody makes me stop as PASSenger is SPAT in face

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JipPo-tb5wg