daryn, you're my favorite grammar nazi, even though I think you probably hate me for not being able to pronounce merry.

probably, but i would get over it pretty quickly.

For those interested in reading books by grammar nits:



It's mostly about punctuation. If she lived in the US and not England, she'd probably go insane in a week.

Merry is not a homophone of Mary?

It probably depends on where you live. In Phoenix the two are pronounced the same.

We have taught and taut as homophones too though which I think is pretty unusual.

http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?act...ke&obj_id=9827

American accent quiz

boston, that checks out

As a side note, does anybody else find it a bit ****ed up when people have written dialog where they words are spelled the way they're pronounced? I feel that it's most often used for black speakers/poor speakers

That quiz is pretty good and accurate. I got:


And I did move around a lot growing up, though spent a lot of time in Kansas City which is in the map.


The only question that weirded me out was:

WTF? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say bag like vague.

Why is the first D in "dumpster diving" capitalized mid-sentence here?
I saw it in a book I'm reading and it seemed very odd. What's the reasoning for the strange capitalization?

Minnesota accent

Down south they often pronounce them the same because they say stuff like "go get yer baaaaayg'

from wiki:

which is kind of what i expected to see.


my friend says that bayyyyg ****.. it's funny. we make fun of him for it.

You mean when the dialog is spelled out phonetically in a book?

like the black guy in A Confederacy of Dunces or pretty much all the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath? I actually prefer it that way

I love that technique in Trainspotting. It really gives you a good feel for Scottish dialect, and that book is fantastic.

True in many cases, but inapposite in the case to which you were referring.

Big blinds are countable, which according to your rule would indicate that one should say "fewer than twenty big blinds", but in this case big blind is not the thing being counted, but a measure of something that is, for our purposes, not countable (by which I mean there is no reason to believe the player in question had exactly twenty big blinds, nor exactly any other integer of big blinds). It is the same as examples I gave, earlier such as a height less than fourteen feet — feet are countable, but the height measured is not necessarily (or often) and exact number of feet, and we therefore use less.

What do you guys use for the past tense/participle of input? I looked it up and apparently inputted and input are both correct but for some reason I cringe when I read, or hear someone say, inputted.

On a related note, is it necessary to leave out the colon when using military time? I feel like military time requires two things: the 24-hour clock and putting the hour and minutes together without a colon. I have to input data for my job and the form says to use military time but the format is HH:MM and it pisses me off every time. Justified?

That quiz quite handily pegged me as Canadian.

quiz says i have a northern accent, but i grew up on long island and queens.

I could look this up, but I'll let someone feel smart.

What's the past tense of forego? Is it forewent?

I'd say forewent. Similar to understand/understood. Also the phrase "a foregone conclusion" leans heavily toward forewent

Took this at the rental car return in Denver. Wasn't sure what they meant by "keys" so I just threw my real keys in a ditch.

You should send that shot to the link in the OP, http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

They'll publish it for sure.

done. look out for it!

Wow that quiz is impressive. I grew up in VA, went to school in CT and have lived in SoCal for 8 years. People constantly say to me "You grew up in VA? You have no accent at all." The whole time I was answering those questions I was thinking "it's going to tell me I have no accent." But nope. I got Southern.