BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "So what's causing it?" the Boss asks, looking down at his screen. "No idea," I say. "Surely you have some idea?" "It's an intermittent problem. Intermittent problems are the hardest to diagnose." "Yes but you fixed it last time." "No, last time it was working when I arrived." "No, …
They sure do, especially that dodgy switch on the lift door that seems to detect when the assistant beancounter has come up with a bright idea for making more money that you just know the manglement will implement without thinking about it with the result theres a shed load more work and faffing about for the rest of us.
And then you get the help call from one of the manglers saying the lift does'nt line up with the ground floor again and can you sort it.
Few times up and down the shaft with it and it soon lines up and you learn to ignore next week's complaints about the funny smell thats come back again....
". . . Simplified English . . ."
Not really. Just simplified English speakers. Consider the hell of being in third grade, living in California, having relatives who spell "coloured" "colored" and others that spell it vice versa. You learn to use the dictionary very young, and argue with the teacher about spelling work as "labor" or "labour," and with the dictionary you prove to the teacher that both are accepted spellings. But the teacher doesn't like smart ass little nine year olds, and you spend more time writing sentences on the chalk board than any one else in history.
make your minds up... why use color instead of colour, or license instead of licence?
Do you really need to be *that* different or subtle?
Or do the Brits need to grow stiff upper lips and start using the bastardized versions instead?
:)
peace out, let's all go to ye olde pubbe and have a good time, no good will come from fighting amongst ourselves...
We were once set the task of transforming various words into different parts of speech. The only one my class partner and I couldn't work out was "idolise" - I guess we must have been tired, because we actually did know the answer, but what we put down on the answer sheet was "idoliseify", which has a nice ring to it all the same.
Is it strange if some of us non-native users of English are confused?
I “try” to stick to British conventions (as I worked there for five years, and consistency), but it can be effing hard.
BTW, I think my spellchecker gives the option of English (Jamaica). Could be interesting.
*bastardised*
Er, no, really not. Not according to Fowler
Wikipedia link to entry for Fowler's Modern English Usage.
I know most of us in Rightpondia like to spell everything that ends with an "-ise" sound with an 's' because it saves thinking, but when the ending is an "-ize" suffix to verb a noun-form it is a borrowing from Greek, in which it would have been spelt with a Zeta. The usual transliteration of Zeta into the English alphabet is 'Z'.
The OED records both spellings, but prefers '-ize'.
Since the US didn't exist in either of those centuries, I think that perhaps the argument from that historical linguistic angle is rendered rather moot. Standardi[sz]ed spellings of things didn't really emerge until the arrival of mass literacy (in the 20th century in the UK, and still a work in progress in the US)
In English licence/license, etc. have distinct meanings when written: "c" is the noun, "s" the verb. Yes, I know you can't hear the difference but that's the explanation. More details are available from the classicists.
US English contains some deliberate abberations. Some of them good, some of them stupid: defense but fence. If we're going to use "z" surely, it should be "vizualize"? British English reintroduced French spelling for some words (colour, autumn, etc.) after US independence. Although it's been clear for hundreds of years that English spelling is illogical and inconsistent, it doesn't stop people from using this as an argument for more arbitrary changes.
My biggest beef with US English is that it seems more susceptible to the bullshit coined in the various marketing departments. This often leads to unnecessary verbosity – creating nouns from verbs where nouns already exist – or confusing terseness as in the current fad for dropping prepositions from intranstitive verbs (protest this, appeal something, etc.).
But language moves on and both countries are fortunately admirably resistant to prescriptive dictums such as those trying to force data as a plural on us.
But language moves on and both countries are fortunately admirably resistant to prescriptive dictums such as those trying to force data as a plural on us.
The "data/datum" argument is a bit of a subtle one. "Datum" is unambiguously talking about a single piece of data, however "data" as a singular mass noun kind-of makes sense as well (as in saying "this data" to mean "this mass of data", as opposed to "these data" to signify countable data, and "this datum" as a single one of them.)
I short, it's because data is both the plural of a countable noun (datum) and the plural and singular of a mass noun. So "fewer data" and "less data" are both valid, but one means having fewer of the countable data (e.g. one less datum), and "less data" means less of it (e.g. 50% of the data is less than 60% of it, but 5 data are fewer than 6 of them).
Confused? The English language is just getting started...
Oh, I know the reasoning behind it and can counter it with "spaghetti" and "date/dates", which have the same etymology. In English, the collective noun "data" makes more sense giving us the option to be more specific when necessary. To persist with it is to pursue more pseudo-scientific linguistic meddling. I think I want a t-shirt with that on it!
Medium and media have the same problem as datum/data.
Worse, I have a book on XML Schema by an author (or maybe his editor) who obviously thought they were clever enough to know "schema" followed the same pattern and was a plural noun. It isn't. Schemas seems to have become acceptable as a plural alongside the original schemata. But the frequent use of "schemas are" sets my teeth on edge. Oh well, I don't need to read about XML very much these days.
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