I was reading this article today and this sentence jumps out at me:

something to do with reneging, an act of renegation(?), right?

so I tried to LIU. it doesn't seem to be defined anywhere! not in W3, not in OED -- but it's much in evidence, and seems to have been often used by Marxists and the like, applied to former leftists who have reneged their views. (googling turns up lots of Lenin papers!)

so, what the hey?!

-joe (it's a conspiracy) friday

Could it be regnancy

(n.) The condition or quality of being regnant; sovereignty; rule

no. read the article. google.

edit: a word they might have used is 'apostasy', but I suppose that smacks of religion too much for the socialists.

I once worked with someone who insisted that any word could be converted from noun to verb to adverb to adjective and back again. Annoying trend!

yes, language has annoyaic tendencies.

For an excellent source of such words, and a good laugh, I recommend the works of Kim Il-Sung. Some friends had them all and I read or skimmed most of them in my mid-teens. Daffy dialectic at its creative best.

Did he write them in English?

I assumed they were translated from Korean.

So it was the translator that came up with the words you love so.

Indeed, and I never attributed the words themselves to The Beloved Leader. That would have been presumptuous, and contrary to the spirit of juche.

I wonder why he didn't simply use reneging? You could write to him and ask.
Although--one of the definitions of renege is break promise: to go back on a promise or commitment. I was thinking that renunciation might have been a better word for what he may have intended. But I have a sneaking suspicion that neither really is accurate. Renege and renounce both imply--well, mean--actively deciding against something one has previously determined to do. Confess I more skimmed the article than read it, but somehow I don't think all of the writers in Britain did that re: being politically engaged.

I think we'd have to take the TARDIS back to ask Lenin (or his translators) why the word became de rigueur amongst the Marxists; but I will try to find a latter-day leftist to ask.

having found no joy in scaring up my own leftist, I did the next best thing and fired off an email to a Prof. who penned a book on the Essentials of Terrorism, ostensibly for use in his class, TERRORISM AND EXTREMISM(!), in which he quotes (and I quote) "... the opportunists, as fair-weather "revolutionaries," are reveling in despondency and renegacy, ..."

here then is a copy of that, and his quick reply:





[Dr Martin evidently takes me for a student in his class, which meets on Tuesday evenings. one could assume from this that he gets little external email, although I had little trouble finding his address.]


-joe (at least I didn't start a new topic, this time) friday

Actually, I have a question about the grammar. Shouldn't it be "There is a number of factors...", since "number" is singular? I am always running into this, and I don't recall it being hashed... :0)

I noticed that and was wondering if anyone was going to ask about it. I'd have to see the context but I think the subject is really 'factors'. If it were something like "the number of factors has increased by ..." I'd be with you on that but I don't think it's any different than if it had been, say, "[t]here are seven factors in such renegacy."

No. No. Are. "A number" = many, here. There are many factors in such renegacy.

Gonna persist, here...

What about "group"? Isn't that the same idea? Yet, no one would say "There are a group of factors..." I really want to know the hows and whys on this one! Which collective nouns go with "is" and which with "are", and why isn't there a consistent rule? Thanks! :0)

There are 25 hits for "there are a group of factors", so we do say it, but not often.
MWDEU on collective nouns

Well, lessee. Let's google goofy's "There are a group of factors".








Let's look at some "is a group of factors"







I got 16 hits for "there are" and 44 for "there is". One thing is that in other languages with a stock construction for this kine of thing it is in the singular. In German we have es gibt not sie geben, in Spanish hay, as I remember, is derived from a singular form of haber, similarly the French il y a is singular. In all cases they are singular regardless of the number of whatever there is. I get 388,000 hits for es gibt drei, 1,800,000 for hay tres and 9,290,000 for il y a trois. In English we also have the fact that it's easier to say "there's" than it is to say "there're" and the apostrophized form is probably more common in spoken language. I'd also say that what may affect your choice is whether you're talking about the group or the factors.

Help?

...there are some guidelines for deciding which verb form (singular or plural) to use with one of these nouns as the subject in a sentence.

If we refer to the group as a whole and, therefore, as a single unit, we consider the noun singular. In this case, we use a singular verb. ...

If, on the other hand, we are actually referring to the individuals within the group, then we consider the noun plural. In this case, we use a plural verb....

Indefinite pronouns can pose special problems in subject – verb agreement.

The difficulty is that some indefinite pronouns sound plural when they are really singular....

As subjects, the following indefinite pronouns ALWAYS take singular verbs. Look at them closely.
either; neither; other; anybody; anyone; anything; somebody; someone; something; everybody; everyone; everything; nobody; no one; nothing; each; one.


However, the following indefinite pronouns ALWAYS take plural verbs.
both; few; many; several; others.

A third group of indefinite pronouns takes either a singular or plural verb depending on the pronoun’s meaning in the sentence. Look at them closely.
some; any; none; all; most.

Online Writing Support

Thank you Jackie, that's a bilingual reminder to pin to the wall.
I mailed your post to my own adress.
Was there in the 'old system ' not a button for printing seperate
posts?

thas jes someone trying to develop definite rules for an indefinite situation. and then someone else has to come along and deal with the exceptions to these rules.

-joe (rules is made to be, or not to be, broken) friday

For example:

*Either the Cubs or the Cardinals is going to win today's game at Wrigley Field.

But, I beg to differ... neither either nor neither are words that have to conform to this rule.

What I said.