4/1/07 - To Hell and Back

Pilot · Joined: 31 Mar 2007 Posts: 31 Location: Universidad (NYC)

CAPITAL is the the city/town/place, and the Upper Case letter.
CAPITOL is the building.

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 5:59 am Post subject:

Sadly I suspect that this, rather like semicolons and other punctuation, will never be fully understood by the masses. And let's not even get into 'explanation marks' :-(

YenTheFirst · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:03 am Post subject:

we have explanation marks?

wow.
I thought we only had exclamation marks!
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filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:06 am Post subject:

Trust me on this; I'm my spare time, I'm an English language teacher and I run my own proofreading/editing business. Things like this bug the hell out of me (my personal pet hate is apostrophe misuse), but 'explanation marks' is a common one. The inability to differentiate between irony and sarcasm is another (but I blame Alanis Morisette for that one).

bun bun · Guest

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:10 am Post subject:

Hmm, that should have been 'in'. I don't apply my professional skills to dodgy forums ;-)

Anyway, I can't spend all day just trawling (and, occasionally, trolling) forums, can I? Having said that, it's a non-teaching day today, so even though I have to work, I can do it while slobbing around at home in my pyjamas. There are benefits to freelance work (not many, I'll grant you that, but some).

Incidentally it's a little past 9am, locally.

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:13 am Post subject:

Well I'm beginning to get a little bit lost...

bun bun · Guest

Arc Tempest · Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 4973 Location: Oregon

Wait a second, you mean to tell me we aren't dodgy? I thought that was part of the charm...
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The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:18 am Post subject:

It is part of the charm. It'd be pretty dull here otherwise.

YenTheFirst · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:36 am Post subject:

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 6:42 am Post subject:

No, you were right. There is no such thing as 'explanation marks', but a lot of people suffer from an apparent inability to say/type 'exclamation marks' and appear to quite sincerely believe that it's 'explanation marks'. Be glad if you've never come across the phenomenon.

Twister87 · Guest

Personally I never have. Most common ones I see and make me cringe are things like "your dead" and "i could of done it" and "there over their, by the wall" etc etc etc

And I like dodgy. *dodges around a bit*

filecore · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 7:26 am Post subject:

Yep, I well understand that. Compound broken grammar with the fact that there are UK/US differences (some things that I would mark a student down for in a test are perfectly acceptable in English variants) - one particular source of argument among the teachers is "at the weekend"/"on the weekend" (UK/US). It's fun to add in Australians and South Africans, because you never know whose version of English they'll agree on at any given moment. It's all such a mess.

But seriously: apostrophes for contraction (it's, we're, I'm) and possession (John's, the dog's). Never for plurals (CD's, pizza's). That's basically all the rules there are - how hard can it be?

MellowFish · Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2007 8:45 am Post subject: