The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => People & Places => Topic started by: editor on June 17, 2005, 10:23:25 pm
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Hey everybody, just wanted to say hello and thanks for having me!
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Glad to have you. This place could use an editor.
~Paul
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Thanks!
Are you sure? Almost everybody here seems to be an expert on grammar and linguistics.
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Glad to have you. This place could use an editor.
~Paul
That is totally not even true. We already have lots of grammar nerds. *cries*
Hi editor, and welcome. If you really are a grammar-type person, you'll do fine. And if you aren't. We like new friends.
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Thanks!
Are you sure? Almost everybody here seems to be an expert on grammar and linguistics.
Actually, most of us are merely pretentious grammar snobs. You'll see.
In the meantime, welcome. Let us know how much you enjoy your first grammar/punctuation knee to the groin.
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Welcome, editor. Don't mind 'dawg -- he's just aggressive to newbies today, I guess.
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I'm just warning him about the standard nutting given those who dare take liberties with grammar around here.
Irony. Spot the Irony in this thread and win a big prize.
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Glad to have you. This place could use an editor.
~Paul
That is totally not even true. We already have lots of grammar nerds. *cries*
Actually that was my first thought, but I was trying to be inviting. I guess I could have written, this place could use another editor, or you can't have to many grammer nerds.
~Paul
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...you can't have to many grammer nerds.
That's grammar, Paul, grammar.
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My Grammer's birthday was last week. She just turned 86.
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Cup Check, Paul!
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I remember the spelling bee in like 3rd grade, where over half the class wiped out on "grammar" before it got to me and I spelled it correctly.
Yes, I fuck*ng RULED that day.
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That's grammar, Paul, grammar.
Blast!
~Paul
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I remember the spelling bee in like 3rd grade, where over half the class wiped out on "grammar" before it got to me and I spelled it correctly.
Yes, I fuck*ng RULED that day.
Sweet, that is freakin' awesome. But should grammar have been spelled "grammer" in your quote, because that is how those little snot-nosed bastards were spelling it, were they not?
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They couldn't all be spelling it wrong the exact same way - if they were, I would dare to say that the spelling bee victory is pretty meaningless.
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I used to get stuck on "grammer" a lot. I used to try to play it off by saying I was talking about Kelsey Grammer, but this rarely was successful.
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I think all of you grammar and spelling Nazis should be dragged out in the street and shot. You have no idea what it's like to endure an ambiguous grammar (finite automata dorks aside) because English, for all its woes, silent letters and pronunciation problems, is still relatively light on the homophones and homonyms.
Now let's talk about Semitic languages. Most Semitic languages follow a rule where there are two or three root consonants in a word with the vowels interspersed between them. But for rare cases where diacritics are written (usually for children), you don't know these vowels a priori. So you have to guess the meaning from context.
BNN, for example, can be Banana, Bonono, Bununu, Benani, etc. This can be significant in situations where the meaning changes through sound like so; "Ben" or "Bin" means "son of" where "Banu" means "sons of". For agglutinative languages like Hebrew, Arabic or Amharic, the structure of the language is regular enough that you can at least passably glean context from a sentence and pronouce/spell it correctly without pulling your hair out.
I am not lucky enough to speak one of these languages. Instead, I speak Farsi, which is an Indo-European language and thus very familiar to speakers of English, French, Hindi, Russian, Greek, etc. in structure; conjugated stems with prefixes and suffixes, a number of tenses, a series of noun and verb cases and all the stuff that I forgot about in high school Spanish.
This is also a language which -- save in Tajikistan -- uses the Arabic script, for which it is wholly unsuitable. While sans-vowel homonyms in Arabic (or Hebrew, or Amharic) reflect 'variations on a theme' (bin/banu, for example), Farsi, like most Indo-European languages, has a damn lot of words look the same when you strip the vowels. unrelated words. An english example: Bear, Bore, Bare, Beer, Boor. Take out the vowels and you have BR, and there is no semantic relation between these words at all.
Thus, while reading a line of Arabic and you read "blahblahblah BN Ali' you can wager it's either about the son of Ali or the sons of Ali. It narrows down your search criteria and you can literally do a mental B-Tree search in your head to figure out the proper solution (for you computer science dorks, a NlogN scenario). Whereas in an Indo-European language, you can read "blahblahblah BR" and wonder if they mean bear, bare, beer, bar, bore, boor, etc. You can't use a search-based system; you will need an Expert System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system). This can be exponentially more difficult to complete that word. Now try it for many words.
In addition, the historically Persian flair for calligraphy has bit the language a big chunk out of the ass. The Arabic language has four forms for their letters (instead of the Roman script's capitals, medials and ligatures.)
The first form is the letter as it is at the beginning of the word;
the second, for a letter in the middle of the word (that is then followed by another letter;
the third, for a letter at the end of the word that is attached to a previous letter; or a letter in the middle of the word that cannot have another letter attach to it -- in which case it is followed by
the fourth, for a letter at the end of the word that stands alone.
The third and fourth types of letters tend to be 'swishier' and 'flashier' than the boring middle types, so often times writers will put one of these two terminal letter types in the middle of the word and then resume the second word. Using our Western standard of capitals as a analogue, it would be saying something like:
AcheWood Is VeRy GoOd.
However, the word is considered one word, which is damn difficult to parse unless you are an expert. There is even a Unicode character, the "zero-width joiner", which is a way of saying that:
(http://www.bobbyisosceles.com/images/farsi.jpg)
is the same as
(http://www.bobbyisosceles.com/images/farsi2.jpg)
which is quite nonintuitive.
To sum up, you have to be an expert in the language to have a passing ability with it, and thus real grammar and spelling hate should be directed here, not to poor, misunderstood English.
Goddamnit you don't understand I come from CIRCUMSTANCES
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I am sorry you speak a language that is hard, Tommy. I am also sorry that you felt the need to write on it at that length. Do you have some things you need to share with Farsi?
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I'm on his side here - not so much in terms of wanting to kill whoever created the rules for Arabic languages, but in the desire to see certain people (who bitchslap and teabag every poor bastard who uses the language in a non-standard way) struck by lightning square(ly) in the genitals.
To no one in particular:
Yeah, you're smart. Educated even. We get it. Tell us what we need to say to build your self esteem and abrogate the need for you to tell us how educated you are. We'll build you up, we promise.
Edited to make it clear I'm not targeting any specific individual with this particular post.
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It's really very easy...
B:
B-Bye-Bay
B-Bye-Bee
B-Bye-Bicky-Bye
Bicky-Bye-Bo-Boo
C:
C-Cye-Cay
C-Cye-Cee
C-Cye-Cicky-Cye
Cicky-Cye-Co-Coo
D:
D-Dye-Day
D-Dye-Dee
D-Dye-Dicky-Dye
Dicky-Dye-Do-Doo
And so forth...
Today's grammar lesson courtesy Professors Howard, Fine and Howard.
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I'm on his side here - not so much in terms of wanting to kill whoever created the rules for Arabic languages, but in the desire to see certain people (who bitchslap and teabag every poor bastard who uses the language in a non-standard way) struck by lightning square(ly) in the genitals.
Yeah, you're smart. Educated even. We get it. Tell us what we need to say to build your self esteem and abrogate your need to tell us how educated you are. We'll build you up, we promise.
This I can sympathize with, yeah. Self-proclaimed "grammar Nazis" really get on nerves, both because it's an epic case of point-missing (guess what? Being a dick impedes communication more than non-standard English) and because most of them aren't actually that good at using the language or really know anything practical about grammar. It's pretty irritating even when the complainer has formal education in the language, but when it comes down to "ha ha, I was privileged enough to learn the standard dialect as a child, so I'm better than other people" it gets really irritating really fast.
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I guess we can all agree that grammar nazis are dicks.
Oh, and don't forget the spelling nazis.
And the regular nazis. Or is it Nazis. They're all dicks.
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I guess we can all agree that grammar nazis are dicks.
Oh, and don't forget the spelling nazis.
And the regular nazis. Or is it Nazis. They're all dicks.
Also, hipsters. Kill all hipsters.
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Also, hipsters. Kill all hipsters.
You're on my team.
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They couldn't all be spelling it wrong the exact same way - if they were, I would dare to say that the spelling bee victory is pretty meaningless.
Actually, they did, either "grammer" or "grammir," which made me wonder for the logic skills of my fellow third-graders. If Benny spelled it with an E and it was wrong, it'll be wrong when YOU spell it that way, poopy-head.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
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You're lucky you're so far away, Dawg.
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I've been <begging> people to come and visit though.
Kicking my ass is optional.
Edit: Note, Carlos, that you didn't actually ride that bus. You were king of the class, like Dewey on Malcom in the Middle when he got put in Special Ed.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
I pictured slow kids exercising.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
I pictured slow kids exercising.
Keep it G-Rated, folks.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
I pictured slow kids exercising.
You know / remember (no idea if they're still around) those orange-flavored frozen treats called "Push-Ups"? I was trying to figure out how a "Pull-Up" would operate / what it would taste like etc for a fair bit before I figured out, oh, diapers.
They were pretty tasty and had a really pleasing texture. A trashcan's worth would make a more than adequate reward for winning a Spelling Bee.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
I pictured slow kids exercising.
You know / remember (no idea if they're still around) those orange-flavored frozen treats called "Push-Ups"? I was trying to figure out how a "Pull-Up" would operate / what it would taste like etc for a fair bit before I figured out, oh, diapers.
They were pretty tasty and had a really pleasing texture. A trashcan's worth would make a more than adequate reward for winning a Spelling Bee.
Maybe you could hold the push-up upside down and pull the frozen treat up and out of the package to eat it. That would be a "Pull-Up". For the children in question it would be a fitting way to eat it.
If you beat a bunch of slow kids at a Spelling Bee, they'll give you your prize in a trash can.
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And then the short yellow bus with the extra wide door came and took all of Carlos' classmates home, leaving him with a spelling bee trophy and a trashcan full of swollen pullups.
It took me a few seconds to realize that you were talking about Huggies.
I......am not smart.
No, you just don't have kids. Did you actually picture something else or where you just stymied by the pullup concept?
I pictured slow kids exercising.
You know / remember (no idea if they're still around) those orange-flavored frozen treats called "Push-Ups"? I was trying to figure out how a "Pull-Up" would operate / what it would taste like etc for a fair bit before I figured out, oh, diapers.
They were pretty tasty and had a really pleasing texture. A trashcan's worth would make a more than adequate reward for winning a Spelling Bee.
Maybe you could hold the push-up upside down and pull the frozen treat up and out of the package to eat it. That would be a "Pull-Up". For the children in question it would be a fitting way to eat it.
If you beat a bunch of slow kids at a Spelling Bee, they'll give you your prize in a trash can.
Editor is just lovin' the fact that his/her first thread is getting so much play.
~Paul
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Annnnd....scene.
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Folks, as much as I love that we apparently became alt.religion.kibology (http://www.kibo.com) there for a second, and as much as I love Push-Ups, I think it's time that this one end. Welcome again, editor. Carlos, my condolences on attending the stupidest class ever.