Slashdot Mirror
World's Tallest Building To Open Monday
dtmos writes "The Burj Dubai ('Dubai Tower' in Arabic) is scheduled to open to the public on Monday. Its height, claimed to be 824.55m (2,705.2 feet), but believed to be 818m (2,684 feet) — either way, more than half a mile — makes it far taller than Taiwan's Taipei 101, which had been the world's tallest skyscraper at 509m (1,670 feet)."
Mod -1 "Replying to yourself is lame"
WTF are you on about? I hate to break it to you, but trolling is not your strong suite.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
How can the Burj Dubai be taller than Chuck Norris's own tower? I'm sure it'll get roundhouse kicked down eventually.
Off topic but Evangelion was the shit!
You know that hanging preposition thing isn't a real rule of grammar right?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That may deserve a "funny" mod, but not "insightful". It's based on a bogus rule of English grammar that derives from attempts to impose Latin grammar on a Germanic language.
The "prepositions" at the ends of phrases are more properly called adverbial particles. They're a distant relative of prepositions, but they don't act at all like prepositions. They don't take noun phrases as objects; they're grammatically part of the verb. They're part of a grammatical construct that is found in all the Germanic languages. If you've studied German, you've heard them called "separable prefixes", because in German they sometimes appear immediately before the main verb, but usually at the end of the clause. We don't use them as prefixes in English, so we don't call them that. In English, their regular position has always been at the end of the clause, the same place that German (and Swedish and Dutch and ...) put them for simple verbs.
The reason we have so much trouble in English with pseudo-rules like the ban on final prepositions is that we had a long history in which only Latin grammar was taught in schools, because the grammar of the local vernacular was beneath the dignity of scholars to waste their time teaching (or even learning). So "grammar" meant the way things were phrased in Latin, and anything in the vernacular that wasn't similar to Latin was wrong. Latin put adverbs next to the verb, so the Germanic languages were wrong in putting adverbs at the end of the clause. Linguistically speaking, neither word order is right or wrong; they are just different ways that different languages work. What's really wrong is applying a grammatical rule from a different language.
Probably the best commentary on this sort of pseudo-grammar is the famous comment attributed to Winston Churchill, who, when an editor revised his text to eliminate a final preposition, supposedly commented "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put" (which isn't the correct word order in any Germanic language). Actually, forms of this retort have been reported from earlier than any documented comment by Churchill. But he apparently did make such comments on several occasions, though he may not have been the originator. Of course, he was well known for his sarcastic wit. Another good one, when told by an officious woman that he was drunk, reportedly replied "Madame, you're ugly, and in the morning I'll be sober."
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.