* Posts by Jonah

10 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2008

Wakefield does a Brum with possessive apostrophes

Jonah

whingeing numpties

Place names don't need apostrophes, we're not trying to deduce meaning from them. Who cares whether it's Sheppard's Bush or Sheppards Bush, or Blackfriar's Bridge as opposed to Blackfriars Bridge?

Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment

Jonah

this could get addictive

Groovy! Go to the training area section and select 'challenge - hard'. My first attempt scored 15/15 and 492 points. On this level they no longer ask you to spell 'wood' or 'read', so you'll less likely to suffer from homophonia :-p ...this could supplement my http://thinks.com/daily_codebreaker.htm fix :)

Jonah

learn to spell right

I hate these relitavists who go soft on the English language. Ours is a beautiful tongue witch is now the lingua franca of the planet. Personelly I blaim the Americans for there language reform effert which really confused things. Not only did they reform the spelling, but then the desided to reform the reformation, making their spelling just differently bad from standerd English. If they'd stuck to speellling English as its allways beens pelt their wouldn't have been any confution. Say NO to spelling reform and YAYS to propper English chewishun!

I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

Jonah

Some validity, but mostly whinging

Climate models are incomplete, and will always be incomplete, historical world temperature *estimates* are bound to be subject to reappraisal, yet the overwhelming evidence collected by climatologists over the last few decades is unequivocal: climate change is occurring at a rapid rate. What's more, it should be obvious that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate. That's the salient point, however imperfect our understanding of historical temperatures, or climate models.

Brits decline to 'think outside the box'

Jonah

And another...

"Let's solidify the agenda"

Unabashedly spouted on a train journey from Bradford to London as two business types thought it would be great to have a meeting in transit, ruining my carefully set aside book time. I considered heckling.

Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

Jonah

Web 2.0 hard to "better"

Surely nothing beats Web 2.0 (that's "two point zero") for pomposity, pretension and downright redundancy.

Stick health warnings on gays, says Stock Exchange chaplain

Jonah

Christian Virtues

Great work by the rev, many of whom's best friends are homosexual. It's good to be reminded every now and then that the pious totalitarianism suffered for centuries under the church really wasn't much different from the fascist orthodoxy offered by the Nazi party. Perhaps he should have used pink triangles and stars of David to make his point more forcibly. Hallelujah to a Church built on hatred, bigotry and persecution.

Why have Radiohead broken copyright activists' hearts?

Jonah
Thumb Down

What's with the sub-rock-journalist critique?

Andrew: "Even the most inventive major label marketing genius with the biggest budget would have struggled to get such an indifferent "product" to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic."

It's one thing to have an opinion, it's quite another to make such sweeping assertions based on your own personal tastes. You sound like an overweened NMEer.

I bought the "low-bitrate version" for £8, 128Mbps is quite sufficient for me, and I rate the album as only minutely inferior to "Kid A", which IMO makes it a bit of a masterpiece. I suspect the more likely reason it achieved such success is that many people felt similarly, rather than it being down to a canny marketing lark fooling massed ranks of simpletons.

It's a pity Radiohead aren't continuing with the experiment, I thought it was a fantastic idea, far preferable to CD purchases from which the band get a pittance while financing their record company to subject us to G4, The Pussycat Dolls, etc.

El Reg decimates English language

Jonah

@ Tom Welsh

Chambers disagrees...

decimate verb (decimated, decimating) to reduce greatly in number; to destroy a large part or number of something. decimation noun. decimator noun.

ETYMOLOGY: 17c in this sense; 16c in historical sense 'to select by lot and execute one in every ten': from Latin decimare to take a tenth person or thing, from decem ten.

We are no longer living in the 1500s, if you choose to adhere to the word's original meaning I hope you are equally rigorous with the following: bead means prayer; hussy means housewife (not derogatory); villain means peasant (not derogatory); restive means at rest; and devious means remote.

Otherwise you're being hopelessly inconsistent. :)

Jonah

Ah, pseud batting :)

Quote:

'we personally prefer "usuage", "ignorent", "ignorence" rendered as "usage", "ignorant" and "ignorance", but then we're a bit old skool ourselves when it comes to spelling...'

It's always fun to hoist the pedant by his own petard! Despite the best of intentions, Lynn Truss seems to have given licence to some dreadful berkery. I see you didn't choose to defend 'for free' which Chambers lists it as a colloquialism and thus entirely in keeping with this site's writing style. Keep up the good work!