Re: punctuation

Oleg Lego <rat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

On 8 Dec 2007 05:47:19 GMT, cybercypher posted:

Oleg Lego <rat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
On 8 Dec 2007 04:14:36 GMT, cybercypher posted:
Oleg Lego <rat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 08:06:53 -0800 (PST), fyfpoon@xxxxxxxxx
posted:
[...]
Do you live in an island like Japan or GB or HK?

Is this idiomatic in your dialect? I would ask "Do you live ON
an island?"

Oh, really, Oleg! That is a cheap and tawdry shot.

It wasn't a "shot". It was a legitimate question, and I asked
because I have never heard anyone say that they "lived in an
island."

The Brits say "I live in Brown Street" and we North American
speakers say "I live on Brown Street". And they're always
saying things like "It says in page 93" when we NA speakers
would say "on page 93". Do you ever question the idiomaticity
of BrE when spoken by native BrE speakers? I don't.

No, I don't, because those particular usages are well known to
me. I would also question the speaker who use "talking in the
telephone", or "skating in the canal" or living on a house".

The poster is an EFL student, so he or she doesn't have a dialect.
I would simply correct what I considered incorrect. It seems
ludicrous to ask EFL students about their English dialect.

I didn't know he was an EFL student.

He does fairly well for an EFL student, or at least until he tries
to correct others' English. I did figure him for Chinese, which
apparently upsets him, but I was genuinely interested in his use
of the phrase.

I assume that they know how to speak proper BrE and I know that
I don't. Hong Kong English speakers have their own brand of
English.

Fine. Is there something you feel is inherently wrong with me
trying to find out if this is, indeed, idiomatic with that
particular speaker, or in that particular dialect?

See my comment above.

What I've seen of it in print does not recommend it highly to
my eyes, but ETTO (each to their own), as I never say -- I
often prefer SIMWOBS (say it my way or be silent), as so many
others do: it's important to follow the leader and not be a
sore thumbthat will be made even sorer when beaten down like an
as yet unhammered nail by the sledge of self-selected
superiority.

Confirmity to the norm is very important in an island.

"Conformity".

This portmanteau neologism, "confirmity", seems fitting, if also
a bit ambiguous (it might allude to confirmation as well as to
conformity, but we'd need the religious experts Tony Cooper and
Steve Hayes to confarm(sic) that). All conformists have the same
infirmity: they can't stand to be different. And when one lives
on a tiny island, as I do, being different is dangerous if one
is a local, as fyfpoon is.

Doesn't matter. I offered a correction to what I saw as an
error. The actual danger of being a nonconformist is irrelevant.

fyfpoon makes a lot of errors in written English but apparently
isn't well disposed to correction from overly critical native
anglophones. My response was not at all to your correct correction
of his or her typo or thinko or whatever type of typing error it
was. I was speaking for myself and commenting on the fitness of an
accidental neologism, not on the status of fyfpoon's spelling. You
missed the point. Too many oats and apples, I suspect.

More like "too ready to interpret your reaction as a nasty one." I
leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why.

You underestimate my keen analytical mind and my own level of self-
awareness (not to be confused with my narcissism). I have no illusions
about how others see me; I just don't care. As my erstwhile hero Popeye
the Sailor Man always says, "I yam what I yam!"

When the RRs here make comments like "I leave it as an exercise for you
to figure out why", I just have to shake my head and wonder why. Surely
so many of you can't be as thick as such statements imply. Surely no
one here thinks that I am or have ever been posting here to win friends
and influence people or increase my personal popularity in the world or
in this NG. That's out of the question for anyone as pedantic,
tendentious, linguistically inconsistent, critical, sarcastic,
emotionally volatile, churlish, opinionated (knowingly and openly),
biased (knowingly and openly), and otherwise unforgiving as I am. [I'm
sure I've left out a lot of other negatives that will instantly pop
into the minds of some of the RRs here, but that is of no consequence
to me.]

I'm here for the English (there are quite a few RRs here whose English
is an outstanding model for native and non-native anglophones and
anglophonies alike. I like to read what they have to say and how they
say it), for the stiumulation -- what little there is left of it of
late -- for interesting information about English usage (what little
there is of that these days), for the EFL students who often are abused
by those who don't seem to know any better, and for the writing
practice. I sit in front of this infernal machine all day long revising
medical and EFL student papers, so I need the diversion -- and it's
more useful than playing solitaire, which I do when I can't be bothered
to think. I also enjoy reading the posts of ThUDs, the holier-than-
thou, the self-righteous, the illiterati who comment without
compunction about English usage (of which they know nothing -- and even
I fall into that category from time to time), the obnoxiously PC, the
pathetically pusillanimous, and the mentally infirm (a group comprised
of a few of my chronological peers and elders and even a few juniors --
all those for whom the expression "get a life" is now indecipherable
and unduly deferred).

I am sometimes nasty, for which I make no apologies -- unless, of
course, I do when I realize that I misunderstood some poster's words
and intentions and so shouldn't have been nasty. If I'm nasty, I mean
to be. If I'm not, I don't mean to be. I don't always get it right,
though. I still have a long way to go before I can consider myself a
compleat reader and writer. I probably won't get there before I die,
though.

Anyway, take me both more and less seriously and you won't need to be
so defensive. Or you can always punish me again by putting me into your
killfile until you think I've been properly rehabilitated.
.

Relevant Pages

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