Re: Which book sounds most compelling?

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:46:34 +1300, zeborah@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is no doubt that
Brian is very knowledgeable about language and perhaps, to a lesser
extent, this is true to many others reading rasfc, yourself included.

That should be "true of many others" - it was a typo.

B.A.(Hons) linguistics, at your service. (IOW, that was an incredibly
patronising thing to say.)

Not intended to be patronising, and I can't see why it is: I am accusing
you, and others, of being very knowledgeable about language but
(possibly) to a lesser extent than Brian.

You've got your scope wrong. Your original sentence had "perhaps"
outside of the parenthetical delimited by commas, thus modifying "this
is true", ie "of possibly being very knowledgeable about language but
[if so] to a lesser extent than Brian". If you wanted "of being very
knowledgeable about language but possibly to a lesser extent than Brian"
then you should have said "and, perhaps to a lesser extent, this is
true..."

I'm not replying to the rest of your post because It appears to me that
you are accusing me of things I didn't say, and taking umbrage at them,
or otherwise pointing out the obvious in a way I could choose to find
patronising, were I looking for a conflict.

The only salient point - that you believe the particular book in
question to be in the same style as the three sentence summary - you had
made earlier, and I had acknowledged.

I privately reserved judgement about that but, as you already had
pointed out, I don't have enough information to have an informed
opinion, so I didn't say so. But I would have liked to discuss how that
could be: we might have had a discussion about whether a summary /could/
be in the *same* style, or could only be *indicative* of a style,
because a book and a summary are too different. But, alas, you preferred
to harangue me.

Yes, I woke up in the morning and said to myself, "What shall I do
today? I know, I shall harangue Jonathan, because that's *always* fun."

Consider the possibility that, like above, you didn't write what you
thought you wrote.

Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
rasfc FAQ: http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
.

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