The Creamy Center of the Atom

There's a funny article on SatireWire with a light hearted view of the joys at the center of the atom. Better then a Crackerjack box.

Comments

Re:Slow news day?

[keesh]

Go away. Your UID is too low to be allowed to make that kind of comment. Welcome to my foes list.

(Posting anonymously to preserve my precious karma)

SatireWire on remote-controlled rats

[DaoudaW]

Slashdot's coverage of remote-controlled rats was woefully inadequate. SatireWire has the full story. It appears that the Pentagon is having a difficult time deciding which is the politically correct animal to control. Many slashdotters have experience working with ratlike animals, perhaps they can lend their expertise. Which species would you chose for remote-controlled search and rescue missions?

Re:Then?

[PurpleBob]

some 60% of spoken English (significantly lower in written English) is Latin

Where in the world did you get that fact? English arose when Old English (a Germanic language with no roots in Latin) was mixed with French. The only Latin in English would come indirectly from French. And why would more spoken English than written be like that?

If you're going to make up statistics, at least make them slightly believable.

Did I ever say that people should use prepositions with no object at all like "We don't live here, we're from"?

If you say "We don't live here, New York is where we're from", it makes sense, because it uses one of the methods in English that you can use to change the word order of a sentence.

Look at the original sentence that started this.

"I know this is not exactly on topic but this is something I am really sick of."

The second "this" is the prepositional object, and the final "of" is the preposition. Of course he could have said "...but I am really sick of this", but he rearranged the sentence in an entirely acceptable way to put more emphasis on "this".

Even the clunky "grammatical" version, "this is something of which I am really sick", separates the preposition from its object, and that has the disadvantage of separating the idiom "sick of". And even your dictionary allows for these situations:

so called because usually placed before the word with which it is phrased