Wednesday 20 September 2006

To boldly go where few pedants have gone before

Since that page listing the top ten most common grammatical mistakes to which I linked yesterday is still the most popular link here at 'Not PC,' here's a link to another piece of pedantry, this time from Josh, who has it in for everyone who overuses the phrase "methinks she doth protest too much." Too many people, he says, don't realise "it doesn't really mean what people use it to mean these days anyway." And he has a point.

And for those who liked the heads up on those troublesome words, can I recommend Bill Bryson's 'Dictionary of Troublesome Words.' Bloody useful.

(And a chocolate fish goes to the first person to explain the rule 'broken' in the title of this post.)

LINKS: Pedantry update - Josh, Brain Stab
Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Amazon.Com

RELATED: Blog

5 comments:

Josh said...

More fun links:

Common Errors in English

Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style

Copy Editor Bill Walsh's blog

Someone else can grab the choccy fish - as a technical writer by trade, I probably have an unfair advantage...

Anonymous said...

Pretty sure you've split the infinitive, which never bothered me, grammatically speaking. Much bigger (chocolate) fish to fry. :)

Dropping the past participle's a pain ... largely because when speaking, you done it before you've realised you've done it.

Those who started school after 1977 are excused thanks to crap education dept policy.

(On this topic I understand the draw toward jackboots!)

Anonymous said...

As I have quoted in my post yesterday on the "top ten most grammatical mistakes" thread, that this sort of problem is going to be eliminated completely over time as Natural Language Processing (NLP) software become better & better.

I read on the internet that Microsoft Office 2007 next release of their new operating system have far more improved NLP capability than current version. This means that users can be lazy, as they want to be when writing documents because the computer will correct everything as they are typing.

Good for Western civilization, but bad for Muslim fanatics as they don't want such technology to become available in their own territory, since they view it as a blasphemy to Allah. No, man-made machine in their minds, should be allowed to achieve human-like language understanding capability since human is interfering with Allah’s creation.

"Wikipedia : Natural Language Processing (NLP)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

"NLP Application , NLP problems"
http://www.proxem.com/WhatisNLP/tabid/59/Default.aspx

AngloAmerikan said...

Uh, falafulu, I know the muslims are a fun subject but mentioning them in every comment looks a tad obsessive.

leelion said...

are you telling me Captain Kirk had it wrong when he boldly went?