Ty. The fact that the semicolon suggestion came from a chick has lead me to conclude that women don't know grammar.

CIP: I have an unrevised 177,544-word-long nonfiction doc (don't ask), and it has 1,821 em dashes. One em dash every hundred words.

I'm disinclined to follow advice from someone who not only uses media as a singular, but uses it at all when what she means is press.

But I'm our resident nineteenth-century curmudgeon.

I like TTI's suggestions for improving the passage, but would add that it should be "Critics... such as Robert Bailey". Like is for comparisons, such as for examples. [And let's not get into like versus as.]

Some critics disagree on this one.

I understand the usage. But somehow this -
- seemed kind of cumbersome. I'm not sure why. At first I thought it was the "does achieve" but now I think I would have written it, "I think it doesn't achieve exactly the same effect".

meh.

So, we have a sentence that starts out slow and stately:

Now one could argue, here, that the following part breaks out in accidental doggerel (it's largely iambic), undercutting the strength of does' stress, giving the impression of a sentence going on for a bit too long, echoing Kevin B's unnecessary-modifier-laden sentences ("Why don't you like this two-time award-winning script that could help the poker industry.").

For example, in the metrically equivalent nonsense sentence, "I don't eat the rape believe completely the whip surprise," it feels as if the sentence wants to end at "rape believe," as if "completely the whip surprise" seems like a bit of an afterthought. And maybe the part you saw as awkwardly phrased is bearing the brunt of cumbersomeness allegations that other parts of the sentence rightly deserve? Idk, maybe--the sentence didn't seem cumbersome to me at all.

shouldn't it be "critics, like Ronald Bailey blah blah..."

I just got called a grammar nit for correcting someone who used the word fabrication to mean crappy.

I'm not even really sure how to respond to that.

I'm trying to imagine how that conversation could possibly have gone. Nothing's coming to mind.

Yeah, sounds fabricated.

it's funny that "fabric" and "fabricate" have diverged so much in meaning


fabric
late 15c., "building, thing made," from M.Fr. fabrique (14c.), from L. fabrica "workshop," also "an art, trade; a skillful production, structure, fabric," from faber "artisan who works in hard materials," from PIE *dhabh- "to fit together." Sense in English evolved via "manufactured material" (1753) to "textile" (1791).

fabricate
mid-15c., "to fashion, make, build," from L. fabricatus, pp. of fabricare "make, construct, fashion, build," from fabrica (see fabric). In bad sense of "to tell a lie," etc., it is recorded by 1779. Related: Fabricated; fabricating.

Led

Yes, I said I was picking nits, in that my point was simply that it's not automatically wrong to put a semicolon in front of "but" or "and."

But you're quite right to say that it is almost always better to use a comma (or a period).

Some complex sentences, however, can benefit from the semicolon to separate the clauses, even when the second clause begins with a conjunction; and it's easy to see why.

Language nittiness - visualized! http://www.anti-wit.com

I think your avatar says it all.

You guys clearly don't hang out in NVG enough.

Hahaha.

I liked this one: http://www.anti-wit.com/pages/grammar-nazi.php

I think the new phones are making me worse at spelling. I use swype and of you forget the precise spelling you can just wiggle your finger and the right word chimes out.

F,ine it's not always perfect

Thread title: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...money-1110688/

"Really"?

Also misspelled Erick.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=31

I've probably just trained myself to ignore misspellings at this point.

I before E except after C.

So it should be Ireck?

Since linking to this thread spurred my first NVG post in 7 months, I got curious about my posting history there. It's interesting to see how blase about punctuation I was back then and ironic that the worst occurred in what was supposedly my best NVG post.

Wtf was I smoking: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...9&postcount=72