English
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English edit (Category edit) .
[edit] Questions
[edit] How do you form the possessive of "you all"?
Possibilities:
- your: ambiguous
- you all's: awkward
your all's: atrocious!
The problem with "your", of course, is that it is ambiguous that your subject is plural.
German (c) and other languages, of course, have solved this by having a separate pronoun, a separate [possessive pronoun] for "you all":
- du (singular); ihr (plural)
- dein (singular); euer (plural)
Often, you can solve this simply be rewriting the sentence a little bit differently:
- "I want to thank you for you all's help."
- Becomes: "I want to thank you all for your help."
But sometimes no satisfactory alternative comes to mind. How would I talk about "you all's company", "you all's idea", etc. without resorting to "you all"?
[edit] "built-in to" or "built into"?
"I thought that was built into Rails!" (my vote)
"I thought that was built-in to Rails!"
[edit] [Questions (category)][Problems (category)] Should you make a sentence readable without reading the parenthese or with including it?
[edit] Example
"Just goes to show, I guess, that writing tests for your code is often as hard as (harder even!) writing the actual implementation itself."
- Doesn't read well: "as hard as (harder even!) writing"
"Just goes to show, I guess, that writing tests for your code is often as hard as (harder than even!) writing the actual implementation itself."
- Better but still doesn't read well: "as hard as (harder than even!) writing "
- Better?: "as hard as (harder than) writing"
- but I want the "even!"
- Better?: "as hard (harder even!) as writing" ?
[edit] Example
- "And yet Esther (and his cousin Mordecai) seems to be genuinely afraid that there was a very real possibility of that happening.", or:
- "And yet Esther (and his cousin Mordecai) seem to be genuinely afraid that there was a very real possibility of that happening."
[edit] Should the article agree with the parenthese or the main subject?
agreement with the parenthese: "an (anonymous) letter"
agreement with the main subject: "a (anonymous) letter"
[edit] Should the capitalization agree with the parenthese or the main subject?
- "(Nil) documentation"
- Or: "(Nil) Documentation"?
- The copout answer would be to just put a "the" in front of it: "The (nil) documentation "
[edit] Should the number of the verb agree with the parenthese or the main subject?
- "DIG (and I) wants to decentralize the world's data.", or
- "DIG (and I) want to decentralize the world's data."?
[edit] give [something] a try
Can you say "I stumbled upon MockFS which I decided to give a try"?
Usually would say "I decided to give [subject] a try" rather than "[subject] I decided to give a try"
So it sounds funny....but it's still valid, right?
[edit] Should you put a 's after a proper noun or just a ' ?
[Possessive][Convention][Number][Plural]
I vote unanimously for the 's version!
So it would be James's, Linus's, etc. not James', Linus', etc. !
Agreement
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. I dub this: ``Linus's Law.
But what about these harder cases...?
"Rails' convention" or "Rails's convention". Rails could be considered either singular or plural. Singular because it is the name of a software product -- one single piece of software. Plural because it's the plural of "rail". Does the fact that it's a proper name used to represent a (singular) product trump the fact that rails is the plural of "rail"? I don't know. I will admit, though, that "Rails'" sounds/feels a little bit more natural...
"The United States' ..." or "The United States's ..."? I prefer the latter, because I usually think of "The United States" as singular!
[edit] whomever
[edit] use the same whomever as object of two prepositions?
Can one say "Thanks to whomever this is from."? Here the "whomever" is used as the object of the "Thanks to _" as well as the object of the prepositional phrase, "this is from _". Is that allowed, using the same word for both of those functions?? Or do we need to split it into two words?
"Thanks to whomever whomever this is from."?
"Thanks to him whomever this is from."? (Except we don't necessarily know if it's a him or a her or a them...)
It's sort of like "Thanks to the person who gave this to me." "Thanks to the person from whom I received this". Those sound grammatically correct. But a little too verbose.
"Thanks to whoever gave this to me." "Thanks to whoever is behind this."? -- but can one use "whoever" when it's the object of a preposition "to whoever"?
In other words, does the who/whom-ness of the word depend on the main sentence or or the prepositional phrase??
[edit] [subordinate clauses:] "I have [noun phrase] to [verb] [object]"
Example: "I have too many accounts to remember them all."
The problem with this is that I'm not sure if we can use "them all" as the [object] of the verb "remember" or if we've already "used up" that slot in the sentence in the form of "too many accounts".
I think part of the reason this is a problem is that it's kind of ambiguous as to whether I'm using "to remember" as part of the "too many accounts to remember" phrase or if I'm actually trying to say a short-hand form of "I have too many accounts that I can't remember them all.", where I actually have a [subordinate clause].
One can use "to" or "that" as part of the noune phrase...
- "I have too many accounts to remember."
- "I have too many accounts to keep track of."
- "I have so much money that I don't know what to do with."
- "I have so much time that I don't know what to do with."
Or one can actually form an entirely new [dependent] clause (with its own subject and verb):
- "I have so much time that I just don't know what to do with myself."
- "I have so much extra time that I just don't know how to spend my time any more."
- "I have so much money that I can't spend it fast enough."
It is clear in these cases that the "that" is not referring to the noun from the previous clause.
This can sometimes be confusing in English grammar, because "that" can be used in several different ways. In German grammar, by contrast, "dass" can only be used to introduce a [dependent] clause where you have a new subject. If you want to use the previous noun as the object/subject of a new clause, then you would use ", dem ..." or ", den ...", ", das ...", a dative/accusative/nominative subject/object...
[edit] How to make "I wish I knew what I was doing wrong" refer to the present
The problem with that statement is that most of the time you want to know right now (perhaps in addition to wanting to do know then) what you are doing wrong right now. And yet it comes across as in the past tense.
I tried to write it "I wish I knew what I am doing wrong", but I just couldn't -- it didn't sound right.
"I wish I know..." doesn't sound any better.
Actually, I think the correct way would be "I wish I knew what I were doing wrong"...
(I could also say "I wish I could know...", although that emphasizes the verb "to be able to" rather than the verb "to know" itself.)
So what is it about "I wish" that requires the verb it is applied to to be past tense?
Ahah! I think that is my mistake: believing that "knew" is past tense! Is not "knew" in past-subjective mood, present tense perhaps?
Subjunctive mood - Wikipedia admits that "past subjunctive" does not necessarily mean past tense:
[edit] Present and past subjunctive
The terms present subjunctive and past subjunctive can be misleading, as they describe forms rather than meanings: the past and present subjunctives are so called because they resemble the past and present indicatives, respectively, but the difference between them is a modal one, not a temporal one.
For example, in "I asked that it be done yesterday," be done (a present subjunctive) has no present-tense sense; and likewise, in "If that were true, I'd know it," were (a past subjunctive) has no past-tense sense.
[edit] Problems
[edit] Numbers
[edit] 57 sounds the same as 50 7
— Tyler (2006-06-26 23:04)
I noticed this ambiguity just now as I thought about how this verse label is pronounced: "Isaiah 50:7".
[edit] Problem / Which is the best way to say it?: one prepositional phrase referencing information from the other
Example:
"Need a way to store in the vendor drop information about where it came from."
- This is what I started with.
- What are we storing? "information about where it came from"
- What does "it" refer to? the vendor drop
- Problem: antecedent could be ambiguous
- Problem: doesn't read really well; feels like the "in the vendor drop" should come later
"Need a way to store information about where it came from in the vendor drop."
- Problem: Now we have the problem where the antecedent comes after the pronoun... which I think might be okay, but many English-minded people might be uncomfortable with...
"Need a way to store information about where the vendor drop came from in that vendor drop." ?
- Problem: Don't like duplicating the noun "the vendor drop"
[edit] Inconsistency: to be / being
__[Subject]__ causes __[object]__ to be __[verb]ed__.
but:
__[Subject]__ results in __[object]__ being __[verb]ed___.
[edit] Abbreviations
[edit] Why do people commonly abbreviate some words/phrases with a / instead of periods or apostrophes?
- b/c
- w/o
- j/k
- n/a
[edit] Misc
[edit] "vulgar"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era.
"Vulgar" comes from the Latin word vulgāris (from vulgus, the common people), meant "of or belonging to the common people, everyday". By the late 1800s, however, vulgar had come to mean "crudely indecent" and the Latin word was replaced by its English equivalent, "common".
[edit] Backronyms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym.
A backronym or bacronym is a portmanteau of backward and acronym coined in 1983.[2][3] It usually refers to a phrase that is constructed backwards from the phrase's abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or acronym. [...]An example of a backronym from the word acronym is as follows.
- Acronyms Condense Representations Of Neologisms You Memorize
In this example, because the word acronym itself is not an acronym, the phrase above is a pure backronym, not a replacement backronym. Since the phrase indirectly refers to the word itself, it is also apronymic. Also, because the word acronym itself appears in its backronym, the phrase is also a recursive-backronym. If this backronym helps you remember the word acronym or backronym, then it is also a mnemonic.
==Acronyms vs. initialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym.
An acronym is a pronounceable word created from the initial letters of a phrase:[6] the word radar comes from "Radio Detection and Ranging". Letters from the originating phrase are used to construct a pronounceable word. By contrast, a backronym is constructed by starting with a word (or an initialism) and, beginning with the first letter, using each letter to form the next word of the phrase. The word then becomes an acronym or initialism of the newly formed phrase. In this sense, a backronym is the reversal of an acronym.Since an acronym is defined as a word, and backronym is constructed from an acronym, it logically follows that the phrase must come from a word. However, this rule is commonly broken, even by dictionaries providing examples such as DVD (an initialism, see image) and SOS (a representation of the emergency signal used in Morse code).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initialism.
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name. Acronyms and initialisms are usually pronounced in a way that is distinct from that of the full forms for which they stand: as the names of the individual letters (as in IBM), as a word (as in NATO), or as a combination (as in IUPAC).There is sharp disagreement on the difference in meaning between the terms acronym and initialism; see the "Nomenclature" section below. Another term, alphabetism, is sometimes used to describe abbreviations pronounced as the names of letters.
[edit] _ out can indicate different kinds of relationships/meanings
Meaning 1: to get rid of, disable, etc.
- white out
- wipe out
- comment out
Meaning 2:
- gross out -- doesn't mean you get rid of them
- verbose out?
Meaning 3:
- search out: going out there, comprehensiveness?
- seek out
- pick out
Meaning 4: action/direction = out
- scare out
- push out
[edit] Number of Words in the English Language
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml Number of Words in the English Language
[edit] Links / Other sites / Sources of information
http://www.mtannoyances.com/ Mother Tongue Annoyances - Tim's Weblog on English Communication
"http://www.wordcount.org/main.php WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language"
- Has a neat Flash gadget that shows a histogram of word usage (which words are used the most often). You can drag and drop and it has "cool" animation effects.
