You mean:



Aside from the then/than, it seems like the "is" used to be a 's.

Thanks. This is from http://www.happyplace.com/3645/the-b...gs-on-facebook, which will shake your faith in language ...

Saw a stupid sorority girl wearing a custom shirt about the Big 12 conference referencing one of the teams leaving that said "they got up and left to!"

I discovered recently that it is "bald" faced lie and not "bold" faced lie. I felt quite stupid.

While I know "our plan" and "our room" work if Brendon & Rachel have both been mentioned, I have no idea what the correct way (if there is one) of saying either of those Brenchel sentences would be.

Never heard of a "bald-faced" lie, but google yielded:

Brendon's and my plan.

Brendon's and my room.

If you had to provide some sort of opinion, who would you say are the 20th century's five most influential English-language writers. (Influential != best, although influential ∩ best.)

(This isn't a literature thread, but there's this tacit notion that anyone who posts here often probably reads a lot etc. yada yada blah blah bing bang boom.)

Conrad, Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, Woolf?

So good.

This one is my favorite:

This is also decent.

PJ, are you a screenwriter? If so, would you mind answering this guy's question whenever you have time (he said in a subsequent post that he'd like a sw's perspective (and I would too) and I vaguely remember you saying something about working in TV).

I have written screenplays and spent a few years struggling with an optioned TV pilot I wrote and a feature adaptation that almost got off the ground (plus a few random specs that never sold), but since drifted away from that. The TV work I do now is mainly producing. There are better people to answer that question, like fsoyars.

Ty sir.

Funny site.

I think that someone using "none has" is a pretty solid signifier that you're talking to an intelligent person, all else being equal. It's almost the equivalent of the secret handshake for snobby Ivy League white people. Plenty of smart people will use "none have" but it's almost unfathomable to imagine a blue collar construction worker saying "none has." And yes this was constructed to be as divisive as possible. What do you guys think?

ETA Point being that obviously if you see someone use "peripatetic" in an email in a non-deliberately ****ish way, you might think a little more highly of the writer, but nobody ever uses that, whereas "none has/have" comes up a lot.

+1. IMO prepositional phrases play an interesting role.

Ex:
A: "None has a home in Wyoming."
B: "None have a home in Wyoming."
C: "None of the New York Yankees has a home in Wyoming."
D: "None of the New York Yankees have a home in Wyoming."

In general freq(A)<freq(B), and freq(C)<freq(D). But what is the relationship between (A/B) and (C/D)? I hypothesize that (A/B) is greater than (C/D), meaning that people get the sentence with the prepositional phrase incorrect more often. This is because the plural "Yankees" should obviously be followed by the plural verb "have," amirite?

Although to be fair both A and B sound really weird. I tend to say "None of them..." or something like that instead of just "None...." <- Is that correct usage of the elongated ellipse? <- Is that a term?

A major life insurance company gave me a sheet with motivational quotes on it after i left the interview. The very first quote: " I have learned more here in 3 months than most people don't even learn in a lifetime".

Am I the only one who is continually pissed off by this page?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

Their use of quotes is, most of the time, not necessarily 'incorrect', but it still pisses me off. It's like the BBC is afraid to take credit for reporting anything, so they just quote their sources in the headline instead.

Here's a sampling of what's there right now. Feel free to look for yourself at any time. Similar examples will be available.

New Syrian protests 'turn deadly'

Deal frees 'West Memphis Three'

Modified ecstasy 'attacks blood cancers'

Just pasting those three headlines 'made me angry'.

I know times are tough but something like this would seriously make me consider not working at this place. Somebody made the decision that it was a good idea to hand those stupid things out to candidates. That's fine, but if you're gonna do that you should at least care about what you are putting out there. I would judge their company (perhaps unfairly) for this just like I would expect them to judge me based on a poorly-constructed resume.

Also, shouldn't "3" be "three" here?

Iirc, both "None ... ." and "None [...] ." are correct, even though they look ugly. Meh, I'm not too sure about that.

I don't think there's any special term for it. (Also, ellipse != ellipsis.)

Yeah that's preferable.

Maybe it would be less ugly within a full sentence:

Idk lol; if it looks ugly, can it be correct?

You add a space after the ellipsis?

D'oh! Misclick.

I was taught that below ten the standard is numerals

And you'd spell out numbers ten or greater? That makes no sense (would you spell out 315,478,901?). I believe you have it backwards.

Yes, I had it backward. This old brain has so many things backward.