^^^

My bet is that English is a second language, and there's a good chance the first language is not one which uses the Latin alphabet.

Now YOU spoiled the fun. Post delivers the goods. I especially like the "correction."

Thremp came back briefly in the YTF weight loss thread, and his name was "ostensibly_thremp." Is that correct usage of the word ostensibly? It seems weird to me.

Seems like a perfect usage of the word to me.

Yeah, that's very wrong—my thesaurus doesn't have it as a synonym for anything like argumentative, butthurt-prone douche.

I know this one died naturally a few days ago, but it brings to mind a different issue of diction: My father reads phone numbers aloud by digits for the first six, and then by pairs for the last four, so for example 911-747-1234 would be read as "nine one one, seven four seven, twelve thirty-four". It startles me a bit every time he does it.

I think that's fairly common as a memory aid whether consciously done for that reason or not. And I think he's internalizing the last four as a single value or unit and not pairs. That's much easier to remember than four single-digit numbers, and we do it automatically all the time whether we vocalize it that way or not.

I was thinking you were going to link to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySEG79ae1yY

Yeah, youtube link fail. But it's exactly the same joke. Even down to the 16.

The first page of Google results couldn't answer this, so obviously it's unanswerable, but iirc, in my Spanish classes we were taught to abide by a similar, set pattern for reading off telephone numbers. (Last four digits coupled.) Hated that; I think that's why I remember it.

from imdb

EDIT: To be clear, i don't care about the spelling errors, i just thought the opposition of "noir" and "shining bright" was funny. There is a name for that sort of thing but i forgot it

Not for nothin', but that's exactly what we do when reading four-digit years (hasn't caught on for this century yet, but whatever). We're just so used to it we don't notice.

"Twenty-twelve" seems to be gaining traction.

Oxymoron.

"Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer" (Milton, describing God).

Maybe this has been covered before; I haven’t read this entire thread.

I’m seeing this more and more, it’s not just this guy. People are putting a space before the end punctuation, unless it’s a period. What’s up with that? Has someone changed the rules and not told me?