Slashdot Mirror
'Grammar Vigilante' Secretly Corrects Bristol Street Signs (irishtimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A self-confessed "grammar vigilante" has been secretly correcting bad punctuation on street signs and shop fronts in Bristol for more than a decade. The anonymous crusader carries out his work in the dead of night using the "Apostrophiser" -- a long-handled tool he created to reach the highest signs. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the BBC that correcting rogue apostrophes is his speciality.
We need a grammar vigilante to come here and correct the misspelling in your subject.
Considering the amount of misspelled words and improper usage (their/there/they're or break/brake), it might be a not-so-subtle hint to get your act together.
If you don't think proper grammar is important, then you probably don't believe proper coding is important either.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The level of care given to writing a question sets the bar for the level of care given to answering the question.
If you can't be arsed to reach your pinky finger to the side to hit your Shift key, why should other people be arsed to stop what they're doing to help you?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I have a friend who has the nickname 'Chip'. I keep suggesting to him that he should open a fish and chip shop and call it.....
Chip's
You want help specifically from pedantic nerds, but you can't be bothered to speak their language? Further, you're upset about the very personality traits that make them able to help you?
Just go back to Facebook and Twitter. You fit in there. You don't fit in here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Grammar, it's the difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.
A few years ago a local artist improved a confusing L.A. freeway sign, making an interstate number shield in the process:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
https://www.good.is/articles/t...
http://gizmodo.com/how-one-fed...
One down, 9,999 to go...
Table-ized A.I.
Not less but fewer. ...ten or fewer items...
Items are countable.
Golly, here on the internet, they're called "Grammar Nazis". Maybe people who correct bad grammar aren't so bad after all...
Fun fact: in Germany, they don't call them Grammar Nazis (obviously). Their word basically translates as "comma fuckers," which is way cooler.
Bwahahaha!
Oh, cripes. Are you suggesting that less & fewer are *sometimes* interchangeable? Wonderful. Just what we need is another ambiguity in this language.
I've heard the argument that what you have in your shopping basket ("groceries") is a fluid quantity because you don't talk about having a 'grocery'. That sort of makes sense. I think it's like quantum mechanics though. As soon as you take the groceries out of the basket and put them on the conveyor, they cease being fluid and become discrete "items".
I would refuse to shop in a place that has "10 items or less" on a sign. :-)
There's everything "wrong with it" when you've spent decades using "fewer" for that which is discrete and "less" only for that which is fluid or continuous.
"10 items or less" just sounds wrong.
"A count is also a measure."
Only if accompanied by a unit
Occasionally, a count is a vampire.
And number is how you feel after he sucks the blood out of your body.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There used to be a site called Portland Pattern Repository at c2.com that was a wiki and discussion board for software-engineering-related topics. There was nothing really like it for general software engineering topics and debates. It wasn't a help-desk like StackOverflow, but up at the philosophical level. (It's messy, but arguably this accurately mirrors the different viewpoints and lack of formal research in SE.)
It was the very first wiki, invented by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term "wiki" for a kind of web collaboration software resembling Apple Hypercard. ("Wiki" is based on a Hawaiian word for "quick".)
Anyhow, a grammar-and-spelling-correcting "grammar vandal" (GV) ended up killing the wiki, which is set to read-only mode for now.
To save it, volunteers had built scripts to try to back out GV's changes, but GV was highly persistent and kept a step ahead of the clean-up scripts, flooding it with garbage at times. GV was one determined SOB.
Part of the problem was that some of the corrections were questionable/debatable in nature and potentially changed the interpretation different from what an author had intended (some content was signed). GV argued this was a small price to pay for improving overall grammar and spelling, which most disagreed with. Negotiations for a compromise broke down; GV wanted full editing control.
The wiki is still alive in read-only mode, but Ward Cunningham decided to experiment with a "federated wiki" concept whereby different participants can keep a version of how they wanted the content to look and more control over who can change one's own copy. Interesting idea in theory, but so far it's failed to catch on the way the original did. It makes things too fractured for users and readers. And, you pretty much have to manage your own federated-wiki-server to participate.
GV believed "my way or no way" and sank the entire ship. Jerk!
Table-ized A.I.