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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>"The Moose is Loose" - Perhaps passing this along will help in the battle!
This might be a little tricky in Scotland. I only discovered recently that mouse rhymes with loose, not sure about louse (maybe that too). So the mnemonic could be misheard as:
The mouse is louse - quite existential when you think about it.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
Occasionally there are a few posts that point out errors and cause some amusement.
I do this from time to time - but I plead not guilty (too much) on the grounds that I tend to point out those with serendipitous linguistic felicities (or doubles entendres as the case may be).
What was that quotation about a narrow (rigid?) consistency being the sign of a small mind?
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Wha's fu', wha's fu'
Saw a louse chase a mouse round the riggin' o' a house
And we're a' blind drunk jolly fu'
One of the cleaner verses of an auld Scots drinking song. All the ous are pronounced oo as is the u'
In answer to I only discovered recently that mouse rhymes with loose, not sure about louse
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
In reply to:
I do this from time to time - but I plead not guilty (too much) on the grounds that I tend to point out those with serendipitous linguistic felicities (or doubles entendres as the case may be).
I'm with shanks here. Another board that I frequent has occasionally had threads get badly bogged down by the Grammar Police. If it ends up being funny, however, I say, go for it. Of course, given the level of this board, if it's funny it was probably intended that way.
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 3,409 |
In reply to:
A few of us (including some of the most guilty – moi?), agreed a while ago that we wouldn't go around correcting each other’s errors. There were two reasons (a) Too many of us type this stuff rather rapidly, either early in the morning or late at night to be able to guarantee no typos or spelling errors.
Here, hair! I have been profoundly grateful that my typos (many CP-induced) have generally been overlooked - a gracious courtesy. It seems the most flak I ever got over a typo was for one I quoted, not one I made!  Ænigma is way too idiosyncratic to be of any real use, so I have to rely on my lousy self-discipline to force me to slow down enough to read my posts before sending, and I hate depriving you all of my wisdom for any longer than is absolutely necessary.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>serendipitous linguistic felicities (or doubles entendres as the case may be)
Yep, amusement is good.
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
If I may add my two-penn'uth (I'm going to anyway - my soubriquet was chosen wisely, and not by me ) The mnemonic that I give to my students is, "If the one of the 'o's is loose, you may lose it." This does seem to work.
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Joined: Dec 2000
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 3 |
hmm maybe i wasn't being to clear.. I most certainly did not mean corrections on this board! I mean when I help someone edit.. when I read an article.. should I even bother trying to correct others? Or will it just be a waste of effort?
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
I'm astonished (was going to say surprised until I remembered the apochyphal story about Noah Webster) that no one has surmised that many of the their/there, its/it's, etc. errors may simply be typos which are not picked up by SpellCheck or whatever accursed automatic proofreader one's software uses, since they don't cite as an error something which is a real word, albeit not the one intended in the context. May the inventor and the distributors of these programs fry in the bottommost linguistic hell. Even good magazines and newspapers are coming up with errors because of homonyms which escaped the automatic spell checker.
Regarding who should have responsibility for the lack of knowledge of grammar and spelling, it's ludicrous to say that you need a lot of time. When I was in high school (mid-50's) there was a list of the 100 most frequently misspelled words in English. Every Monday and Wednesday, a list of 10 of these was handed out and every Wednesday and Friday there was a quiz on the list last assigned. The marks on this quiz figured prominently in your English mark for the quarter, semester and year. When you got thru all 100, you started over again. And this went on for 4 years. I may occasionally misspel a word, not thru a typo, usually a word ending in -able vs. -ible, but never one of the old 'top 100'. And the best part was that going over the list and doing the quizzes only took 10 minutes twice a week.
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
>I may occasionally misspel(!) a word using self-reference to prove your(!!) point... very cute. 
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