Welcome to the Fiberhood

cpfeifer writes "According to this article in the Washington Post, high-end subdivisions are running fiber-optic cable to each house and rolling the cost of broadband, digital cable and local phone service into the home owners association cost. Apparantly home pre-wired for broadband have a better resale value and higher demand in the market."

Comments

Re:This might be a bad thing.

[FreeUser]

All my posts got modded down when I wrote that I'm a Mensa member.

People probably did not believe you were a Mensa member when you could not even get the tenses of verbs to match in your sentences. Now go into your profile and edit the sig line so that it reads:

All my posts got modded down when I wrote that I was a Mensa member.

First, language is about communicating first and foremost. Dogma, grammatical or otherwise, should always take last place behind simple, straightforward, interhuman communication.

Second, I find absolutely nothing wrong with the tenses as used in the original.

The sentence communicates the idea that his posts were modded down when he wrote that he is and remains a member of mensa.

This to me actually communites more information, in a more compact form, than your "corrected" setence, which makes no implication as the writer's current status. Indeed, the corrected version could be read to infer that he is no longer a member of mensa.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of mensa, so judge me as you will, but I find the colloqual use of tenses in the original statement to contain more information than the corrected version, however much the original may fail to adhere to the orthodoxy of grammaticians (who, let us not forget, replaced the English gender-neutral use of 'they' and 'their' when it was in common usage with the male dominance promoting HE and HIS to denote gender neutrality in the early 20th century, not out of any love of the language, but to promote a misogonist political agenda at the time. This has since been somewhat reversed, but only somewhat, in common colloqual use and, as yet, remains in place as a grammatical 'rule' in the formal language. In other words, the grammaticians (I wish to avoid the term grammar nazi, though I know any number of women who would feel extraordinarilly justified in using that term) wield far more "authority" over a living, changing language than they should rightfully be entitled to, and I, for one, have no trouble ignoring them when it suits me. I suspect our (erstwhile?) mensa member feels similarly).