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I learned that during a lecture in college circa 1989. But this is the best I could find.. http://alt-usage-english.org/e...

The official chemical name IS Aluminium with Aluminum being an alternate spelling

Except it's not. You are right about "alumium", however.

It is the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) standard international name, though they recognise Aluminum as an alternative.

The official chemical name IS Aluminium with Aluminum being an alternate spelling

Except it's not. You are right about "alumium", however.

And "charge" is a verb to which it applies.

The distinction you draw is a non-standard one. http://alt-usage-english.org/a...
You are fine to use it for yourself, but you are wrong to call other people's usage wrong.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxbiblic.html

there you go

Having felt for a very long while as you do, that there ought to be one overriding authority on how the English language should be spoken, and being something of a hobbyist linguist besides, I was surprised to find that it took the wisdom of a programmer arguing about how to pronounce "char" to set me straight: the reality is that you should just enjoy the variety and how it challenges the way you think about language, rather than rebelling against the difference.

Almost without exception, all natural languages are descended from a single source. If we insisted that all of the rules and vocabularies had to remain uniform at every step, then we would never have the richness of linguistic instruments that we do today. A language reflects the mindset of its users in subtle ways: Americans, for example, think of corporations as big, faceless entities with free will, whereas the very nature of the language used by Brits underscores the fact that a corporation is nothing more than an agreement between people. The former is more conceptually efficient, but devalues the people within the organization.

(At any rate, there's no academic consensus.)

Not quite.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxbegthe.html , http://www.bash.org/?364782

Not everyone speaks follows the same rules as you. That doesn't make them wrong.

True. Being wrong makes them wrong.

The link that you provided supports my assertion that the use of "are" in the case above is incorrect. This is true both in American English, where "are" is always wrong, and in UK English, where it's wrong when describing an action made collectively by an entity rather than by individuals making up that entity.

UK English: Apple are enjoying their holidays this Christmas season. Apple is dominating the market for fruit-themed smartphones.

Apple aren't anything; it's a grammatically singular entity. Apple's managers are. Apple's employees are. Apple's competitors are. Apple is.

Please be nice. Not everyone speaks follows the same rules as you. That doesn't make them wrong.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcouldc.html

Mr. Gates' grammar is perfectly valid. There is no hard and fast rule not to put prepositions at the end of the sentence. The aesthetics may displease you, but I'd rather you not force yours on your students, or us.

Britain is only called England by ignoramuses. While the full details are complex (see ) the basics are that Britain is the combination of at least England, Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland.

To equate Britain to England demonstrates that your "public" education (because in the U.K. that means something entirely different) was/is considerably lacking in geography.

The phrase "to better say it" is awkward. However, pedantry in the critique of a long, semi-professionally presented, and ostensibly edited, piece of journalism is not the same sin that it is in the context of a Slashdot post. Furthermore, a split infinitive is not always ungrammatical.

Arguably, it should just be "viruses". Not all Latin words retain Latinate plurals in English (e.g. "circus/circuses"), and not all Latin words ending in -us had plurals ending in -i. See this excerpt from the alt.usage.english FAQ for more. </pedantry>

The description you and the author are looking for is NOT "jury-rigged" - rigging a jury is a completely different thing!

The phrase you are looking for is "jerry-rigging", a racist term that comes from the even more racist "nigger-rigging" - just so you know.

Epic Fail.

Use of a plural verb after a singular noun denoting a group of
persons (known as a noun of multitude) is commoner in the U.K. than
in the U.S. Fowler wrote: "The Cabinet is divided is better,
because in the order of thought a whole must precede division; and
The Cabinet are agreed is better, because it takes two or more
to agree."

Federal Republic of Nigeria. National or official languages: Edo, Efik, Adamawa Fulfulde, Hausa, Idoma, Igbo, Yerwa Kanuri, Yoruba, English. 106,409,000 (1998 UN). Literacy rate 42% to 51%.

Virus Etymology

From Latin virus ("'poison, slime, venom'").

In Latin (not like latin america) suffix in US will do II in plural. Virus -> Virii.

But you can arg that http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxplural.html

"Virus" is not attested in the plural in Latin, and is of a rare form (2nd declension neuter in -us) that makes it debatable what the Latin plural would have been;

But in any cases, if virus have a plural and if isn't virii it should be virus

Now, what you arg that in english Virus will give viruses, but that my point, I don't write in english anyway.

Actually, apparently this is widely misattrbuted to Mark Twain; it's actually from a letter by a guy named M. J. Shields.

You also fail it. It is perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. The interesting thing is that you cite the alt.usage.english FAQ as your first source that says that "could care less" is also correct but then claim that it is contradictory for the person who says otherwise to say that sentence-ending prepositions are okay, despite the alt.usage.english FAQ agreeing with him. Maybe you meant that it is contradictory for him to get one right and the other one wrong, but your comment taken as a whole does not support that.

>That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

You fail it.

If you don't understand the language completely, you don't get to complain.

Both are perfectly valid turns of phrase. One American, one British.

Could care less: I am so uninterested that while I could care less about the subject, I'm not even bothered to that point. Also, I am so interested that I care about the subject, therefore proving I could care less.

Couldn't care less: I am so uninterested that my caring level is at zero. Also, I am so interested that caring less would be physically impossible.

Both are correct and incorrect at the same time.

Yes, it's on the list of English errors. That in itself is an error, as the author is American. He needs to read up on his English history a bit, perhaps? alt.usage.english beat him to the punch on this one. Oddly enough, this clearly prescriptive English teacher is pro ending sentences in prepositions. How contradictory. He does agree he is fighting a losing battle on it (One he lost BEFORE he put up the website, ironically).

Irregardless, I ain't wrong. Here's some more references on the matter. Cheap at half the price, I tell you!

BTW: This topic truly is important to me, I couldn't care less about it, so don't ask me to. I could care less for rants about it, though, but sometimes I miss them. :-P

Teach, where's my gold star?

or that he just cares a little bit... it doesn't have to mean that he cares 'a great deal'...

Also, see here for some history on the figure of speech

Interesting but alt.usage.english disagrees with you in part, as does Strunk & White.

I think your analogy with "anyone" is mistaken. People do not think of "none" as "not one" in normal usage. They think of it as being part of a continuum with "all" and "some," hence the natural tendency to create a parallel construction. All of the water is blue -- none of it is blue. ("Not one" wouldn't even parse there.) All of you are friendly -- none of you are friendly. However, if you choose to use none (=not one) of you is friendly, you may do so as well.

Another great example of a change in grammar I applaud is the transition to using "their" as a third-person, gender-neutral singular pronoun.

Singular "they" has been used in English since the time of Chaucer.

"try and" ... is just plain wrong.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtryand.htm l

No it's a quadrillion.

You were likely going for humor, but if you were interested, the traditional british meaning of the number is not the same as the US meaning:

10^6 million (million)
10^9 billion (thousand million)
10^12 trillion (billion)
10^15 quadrillion (thousand billion)
10^18 quintillion (trillion)
10^21 sextillion (thousand trillion)
10^24 septillion (quadrillion)
10^27 octillion (thousand quadrillion)

As per http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxbill00.htm l

"Couldn't care less" is the proper phrase. Lazy people simply used the incorrect form so often that it came into common use.

The official nationality of people from the UK is British, not English. By referring to Brits as "English", you're pissing off a sizable number of people who are proud to be Scottish, Irish, Welsh, etc. Us English did some pretty nasty things to them in the past, so calling them "English" isn't exactly going to ingratiate yourself with them.

By referring to people from the UK as British, you're still going to piss off some Irish, but at least you're correct in your terminology. Yes, British is the correct term to use for somebody from the UK, even if they aren't from Great Britain. References:

• alt.usage.english
• CIA World Factbook
• Wikipedia

Having read the article, I have no clue exactly which region of the world it is talking about, because it seems to use different regions as synonyms. It could be the UK, which is a country and member nation of the UN. It could be Great Britain, which is a geographical region within the UK comprised mainly of England, Wales and Scotland. Or it could be England, which is a region, home nation and constituent country of the UK, but which doesn't have its own government.

If I had to guess, I'd say that they were talking about the UK, even though they don't use the word "UK" at all, instead opting for "British" and "England". I base this guess on years of experience with peopel from the USA getting it wrong and the sentence "Those dismal results are despite the fact that U.S. health care spending is double what England spends on each of its citizens." Hint: England spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens. The NHS in England is run by the UK government. It's the NHS in other parts of the UK that belong to their respective constituent countries - England actually has very little to call its own these days.

England, Great Britain and the UK are three completely different things. Mix them up, and you piss people off. It's a bit like mixing up California with the USA with North America. You'd think somebody was pretty ignorant to do that, right?

Nice attempts to bring out the inconsistencies of the language, but try ghoti... At least in English, we don't have to deal with a language where nouns are conjugated depending on how they're used in a sentence or what preposition they're used with (as in Polish, among others; which, interestingly, has rather simple and consistent spelling rules)...

You say "poh-tay-toh", I say "ghoughpteighbteau".

Northern Ireland, though part of the UK, is not part of Britain. So the claim stands.

I think people are talking at cross-purposes to some extent. The headline here is "Britons Unconvinced..." People seem to be taking that to mean that the people from Britain are unconvinced. That's perfectly understandable, but wrong.

The labels "Briton", "Brit" and "British", while historically used to refer to a particular race, now officially refer to a citizen of the UK. The whole UK, not just Great Britain. Sources:

• CIA World Factbook
• Wiktionary
• alt.usage.english FAQ

If you read the BBC News article, you'll see this is a survey of UK citizens, not just people from Great Britain.

Yah... we're from Britain, which also includes the letters "Brit".

You and I may be, but I assume the person complaining isn't. The UK is larger than Great Britain; people from Northern Ireland, for example, are from the UK but not Great Britain.

It's still correct to call these people British though, 'British' is actually a correct term for a UK citizen, even if they are not from Great Britain. References: CIA World Factbook, alt.usage.english.

Try looking at these English pronunciation rules. They will cover about an 85% solution with the rest of the words largely being ones we borrowed from other languages and kept their pronunciation. Admittedly, 56 rules may seem a bit excessive but if you read through it, most don't actually apply for a particular word. *wry grin* At that, dialect will change things greatly. Technically speaking, "bother," "father," and "caught" should all have distinct pronunciations in the US. In actuality, they seldom are.

You don't think that GMail and G-Mail are confusingly similar?
Especially given that there's still no consensus as to whether to refer to electronic mail as "email" or "e-mail"...

..it *raises* the question.

"Begging the question" describes an argument that is faulty because it ultimately relies on an assumption of the truth of its own conclusion.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxbegthe.htm l

It is not the same as "raising the question," as in, "every question answered in science raises more questions."

(And those $ are US $, the only real $ in the world. All those other countries need to get their own symbol for their money. The symbol itself is a tall U overlaid on an S, cropped to fit the height of a row of text, then further simplified to a single vertical bar after the origin was forgotten by most people.)

Apparently there's a good reason people have forgotten that particular origin... http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxorigin .html/

You're probably trolling, but I'll bite. http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxorigin .html It is sometimes said that the dollar sign's origin is a narrow "U" superimposed over a wide "S", "U.S." being short for "United States." This is wrong, and the correct explanation also tells why the $ sign is used both for dollars and for pesos in various countries.

It's so difficult to determine this one, as it seems people don't agree on whether "try and" is merely colloquial or not.

Here's some information:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtryand.htm l
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=1 9960612
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000253.htm

It is somewhat controversial.

According to many references, acronyms must be pronounceable (eg NATO, LASER), so WWF is only an abbreviation.

For example: http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxacrony .html

"Strictly, an acronym is a string of initial letters pronounceable as a word, such as "NATO". Abbreviations like "NBC" have been variously designated "alphabetisms" and "initialisms", although some people do call them acronyms. WDEU says, "Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction [between acronyms and initialisms] because writers in general do not"; but two of the best known books on acronyms are titled Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary (19th ed., Gale, 1993) and Concise Dictionary of Acronyms and Initialisms (Facts on File, 1988).

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AcronymVsAbbreviation

Others disagree. For example: http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym

"There is no requirement that an acronym be pronounceable as a normal word (this is a curious myth perpetuated by American dictionaries): IBM is just as much an acronym as LASER."

Sorry, no.

In British English (and thus most Commonwealth countries, e.g. Canada and Australia), companies are considered as collectives, thus "companies are" is used.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcompan.htm l

In U.S. English, companies are considered as individuals.

http://alt-usage-english.org/groupnames.html

Saying "Apple are in the right" is completely correct. Remember you're on an internationally read forum, not some podunk server with no scope outside the U.S.A.

Sorry, no.

In British English (and thus most Commonwealth countries, e.g. Canada and Australia), companies are considered as collectives, thus "companies are" is used.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcompan.htm l

In U.S. English, companies are considered as individuals.

http://alt-usage-english.org/groupnames.html

Saying "Apple are in the right" is completely correct. Remember you're on an internationally read forum, not some podunk server with no scope outside the U.S.A.

I wonder if the threats did them any good, or if Intel have now got so used to the cries of wolf that they called Dell's bluff? Intel probably told Dell to shut the hell up or miss out on the launch.

That should read "or if Intel has..."

Company names are singular nouns. Besides not sounding right when you refer to a company name as a plural noun, it's also grammatically incorrect. You are referring to a company, a singular entity. It's a collective noun, like the word "group". While a group consists of individual members, when you refer to the group it is singular.

The only exception would be if you are referring to the individuals within that group.

http://alt-usage-english.org/intro_d.shtml#Groupno unssingularorpluralcompanyisvcompanyare

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/public-affairs/uon-sty le-book/singular-plural.htm

I'm sorry if you don't have a firm grasp of the English language. I'm here to help.

These links may help you speak what is probably your primary language:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/public-affairs/uon-sty le-book/singular-plural.htm

http://alt-usage-english.org/intro_d.shtml#Groupno unssingularorpluralcompanyisvcompanyare

Perhaps the parent poster knows this. But this is for the benefit of anyone who didn't. Please help stamp out that bogus meme! http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_marie_ant oinette.htm http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxletthe.htm l

By the way, I assume your account name is pronounced "fish".

Ghoti probably assumed that, too. He's in good company: this mistake is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though he seems not to have been directly responsible.

The problem is that ``ghoti'' violates several rules of English orthography. The explanation for ghoti is: "gh" as in "cough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation". Unfortunately for the ``ghoti spells fish'' theory, gh==f works at the end of a word, but never[1] at the beginning, o==i is unique[1] to the spelling of women, and while ti==sh works near the end of a word, it is always[1] followed by ``on'', to make tion==shun.

English spelling isn't nearly the mess it's made out to be. It's complicated by the fact that there are two sets of rules (one for the words with Anglo-Saxon/Scadinavian roots, another for the words with Latin/romance roots), and by the fact that many words which we think of as English are actually foreign words which retain their foreign spellings[2]. Still, there are rules, and they _are_ generally followed. Yes, every rule has exceptions, but they are usually few in number, relative to the number of words which follow the rule. More importantly, the exceptions are usually common words, whose spelling you will memorize quite naturally, because you write them so often.

There is a book called The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop which does a wonderful job of laying out and explaining the rules and exceptions of English spelling. You can read my brief review of it at my homeschooling books page.

[1] Exceptions to ``never'', ``unique'' and ``always'' are welcomed.
[2] Retaining the foreign spellings of the foreign words is a blasted nuisance, but it does seem a little more cosmopolitan and accommodating and tolerant than the German habit of changing the spelling to match their conventions (but I admire the ease of spelling German), or the French habit of coining neologisms to avoid loan-words.

Actually, not necessarily. Although you are technically correct (and I myself prefer "were" over "was"), subjunctive in English is widely recognized as being virtually extinct. Almost no one knows the difference anymore, which is a definite shame considering that there is one.