Being a Yankee who lived in Texas for two years, I feel I need to say that it's not only Yankees who get confused about the grammatical status of "all y'all." I was told by at least two of my native Texan friends on separate occasions that "all y'all" is the plural of "y'all." They were both schoolteachers, so I assume they know what "plural" means.
On the other hand, my own empirical observation of usage is in line with what you said, i.e., the first "all" in "all y'all" is an intensifier. I noticed it being used in two primary circumstances: (1) when a group was unusually large, so the speaker wanted to emphasize "all" of the large group (perhaps applicable when making a Slashdot posting), or (2) when the emphasis was to be fully inclusive of all individuals, as in "every single one of you" as opposed to just a generic reference to "the group of you together."
Anyhow, while you're correct about usage, clearly even some (educated) Southerners think that "all y'all" is somehow a "plural" of "y'all," even if that is not the most accurate description of its usage. It's not just "foolish Yankees."
Bravo, sir. I remember in a philosophy class making almost the exact same argument (although about a different identity paradox). My TA thought I was being flippant. But while it's fun to play around with ideas like "identity" and act like they are some sort of Platonic ideal, the reality is that "identity" is just a word. If you define it in one way, it will raise some paradoxes. If you define it another way, it'll raise others.
Paradoxes are fun mental exercises, and you often do learn something about how a word is used or about how to create a better definition, but philosophy sometimes gets too caught up in believing that its concepts are objective entities. Philosophers have been playing the game of "what do you mean by X?" and then pouncing on you when your definition turns out to be flawed ever since Socrates. It's a fun game, but often if you take a step back, you realize it's all just about the vagueness of language.
"With all due respect," I do know something about the professional writing world, but that's irrelevant. As I said in my original comment, I have nothing against Word, and I use it myself. And I always have a copy laying around in part because of the very reason you mention -- when collaborating with various editors, they want to use Word's system for tracking changes. Fine. It's a good system, and it's a valid choice. I've also dealt with editors who wanted to use Acrobat to track comments and edits, which isn't as useful as Word's in some ways. But I therefore have a copy of Acrobat as well. Others still want paper proofs with hand edits. So I also own some pens and pencils.
But my argument wasn't about whether Word was good -- it was questioning the GP's assertion that Word has certain "features" essential for professional writing that are unique ("nothing else even comes close" or something like that). If you define "has a huge market share" as a "feature," then I understand where you're coming from. (Why it has that market share is a separate issue that may or may not have anything to do with its current quality.) To me, that's an extremely important aspect of using Word, but is that one of the "features" that the GP was talking about?
The fact is, in the publishing world, everybody does things their own way. Many use Word, for various reasons; that is true. Just as a publishing house can tell me I need to use some crazy non-standard citation system, they can also force me to use Word for collaborative purposes because everyone else does. But that, to me anyway, has nothing to do with the "features" of the underlying software.
The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.
Are you serious? I believe MS Word has its uses, and though I'm ambivalent about the new design, I can understand how some might find it useful. The point is, I'm not a Word hater at all. I've used it for many years, and I still do at times.
But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?
If, by "professional writer" you actually mean "book designer" or something similar who is actually concerned with formatting the text, then Word's typography and design choices are just awful compared to the output of professional software (InDesign and Quark, which are admittedly expensive, or the free LaTeX). And if you're an independent writer who has to both produce text and format it, and you need a GUI, free programs like LyX and Kile can easily provide almost all the features of Word.
What "sophisticated features" do "professional writers" need that Word has, but other software (and even free software) doesn't? I don't think Word is bad, but I just don't understand the claim that nothing else "comes close."
Not sure that the word "debit" is appropriate here for the U.S., since the U.S. had only just hit a trillion dollars for the DEFICIT during THIS FISCAL YEAR. The actual _debt_ (equivalent to the total charged) has exceeded a trillion dollars for a couple decades and should be up to 12-13 trillion dollars this year. To me, the word "debit" implies a single charge, which isn't exactly the same as an annual deficit. (I say this not to be pedantic, but mainly because most Americans don't seem to even realize that there is an ongoing debt in addition to the "deficit" that is discussed every year on the news.)
Indeed. And what about almost every major European "scientist" of the 16th and 17th centuries? Copernicus was a priest. Many of the major names you'll recognize from your high school science textbooks were either priests or affiliated with religious orders. Isaac Newton wrote pamphlets on the interpretation of the Bible and forecast that the world might end in the 20th century. My favorite example -- Johannes Kepler. His third law of planetary motion was accidentally discovered while he was searching for proof that the motions of the planets were in proportions that are the same as used in musical harmony. Yes -- Kepler was looking for musical intervals in the skies, and even after he found his law, he believed it was only an approximation. The "true order" was the musical intervals.
The point is that these scientists still made progress by collecting data, analyzing it, and doing experiments. It wasn't at all like modern science (despite our nostalgic idea of the "Scientific Revolution"), but their quest for truth in the physical world wasn't stopped by their religious (and often mystical or occult) beliefs.
Over 150 years ago, Newman noted that some people would argue that you could learn everything you wanted from the scholarly discourse in books, because some said that all knowledge that was worth knowing was available through written materials.
But Newman concluded that the true value of a university was never about classroom learning, per se. It was about being in a community of scholars, where the true learning was about all the various interpersonal interactions that happen. Some of this can happen online, it is true, but universities in a particular place won't be extinct until we can model all the social interactions that generate knowledge and learning in a virtual reality. Even then, it's an open question whether people would trade in real interactions for total virtual interactions.
Sorry to rain on your citation parade, but this distinction of "font" vs. "typeface" is somewhat antiquated. Before the advent of electronic publishing, most people rarely had to use either word. Typesetters actually knew the difference, because they were the only ones who used them.
Then modern word processors came along, and for some reason they started labeling things that typesetters called "typefaces" as "fonts." Is it a useful distinction? Of course, though it was more useful when you actually had little individual metal letters to move around when you were setting up a page to be printed. It would still be useful, but few people (and few software packages) make that distinction. If you're still doing typesetting by hand or perhaps working in professional desktop publishing, the distinction of "font" versus "typeface" may still make sense to the people around you.
But when you have even many major typeface designers calling typefaces "fonts" (sometimes even using "face" to describe subdivisions of fonts! -- look inside a dialog box in standard word processors and you're likely to see the same thing), your distinction has little meaning for most people. Hell, even LaTeX users don't usually make this distinction, probably because it has become increasingly meaningless when changing the size or style of a typeface became so easy. It's like trying to maintain the mathematical distinction between "set" and "group" when having a normal conversation. It's a very useful technical distinction, but most people don't know about it, the distinction isn't even applicable to many situations in the real world, and most people don't care.
I'm usually the first one to applaud knowing important distinctions. I do so here. But trying to legislate a nomenclature anachronistically onto technology where the such distinctions are almost never made in current software, and are increasingly meaningless, is just pedantic and a waste of time.
When you get MS Office or something similar to use your definitions, come back and we'll talk again.
Proper Latin plural would actually be fetus, with a long 'u'. (I don't know how to get the macron to display correctly.) Fourth declension masculine nouns form plurals by changing the final 'u' from short to long rather than using the second-declension plural ending of 'i'.
Contrary to popular belief, not all Latin words ending in "-us" form a plural form with "-i". All the more reason to use English plural forms (add "-es" to the end) rather than trying to form a foreign plural through erroneous means. The plural of "fetus" should be "fetuses" (or "foetuses", if you prefer).
No grammar mistake is more glaring than when rules of foreign languages are misapplied to English. To those who aren't familiar with the other languages, it comes across as pretentious. To those who do know those languages, it comes across as ignorant.
No problem. "The Rite of Spring" is a really novel work, and its new musical ideas have been incredibly influential on many other composers. But the riot at the premiere is something that's a bit overemphasized. It's so ingrained in music history that even many music historians don't realize that it has been effectively debunked for a while.
I just looked back at the Taruskin article I mentioned, and he notes that most reviews of the premiere don't even mention Stravinsky or the music other than to note that Stravinsky was the composer. It was only once the score was published in the 1920s and Nijinsky's choreography had been forgotten that Stravinsky started promoting the novel musical characteristics of the piece. This is part of a larger trend in the writings of a number of composers around this time to try to differentiate themselves from the past and make it seem like they were making a clean break from tradition.
Anyhow, I don't fault Radio Lab too much for this, because it is a well-accepted story. I do fault the person they interviewed... who is a scholar and should know better before using that as an example.
The Stravinsky segment of the show is nonsense. When "The Rite of Spring" (not "Rites") debuted, there was a riot. That is true. However, there is a lot of evidence that this riot had less to do with the music than with all sorts of other factors -- there was a group of people (somewhat politically motivated) who already planned to stage a riot, the choreography was perceived as complete nonsense, and besides, most accounts say that people had already started shouting so much when the curtain went up that no one could hear any music after the very beginning.
Notably, the were a half dozen more performances in the initial run without further disruption.
The myth that the novel music was the cause of the riot was something propagated by Stravinsky starting about a decade later, when he actively started trying to shape his public persona. His autobiographical information is notoriously suspect among 20th century composers, further shaped through the supposed "conversations" he had with Robert Craft, who ghostwrote most of his later books.
Richard Taruskin (perhaps the world's foremost expert on Stravinsky) has detailed the reasons why this myth came to be, and this information has been around for at least a couple decades, though it was effectively summarized in his article: "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Music Itself'" (Modernism/modernity - Volume 2, Number 1, January 1995, pp. 1-26).
Anyhow, I love Radio Lab in general. But that particular show had a lot of bogus claims, and this was probably the biggest.
Simplicity and complexity is not as important as the idea that these patterns (whether simple or complex, and whether in ID arguments or among ETs) are statistical aberrations.
Quick example -- you see a bunch of kids walking around with a jar of assorted colored marbles. A while later, you come back to the same place and find these colored marbles apparently spilled on the ground. But, the more you look, the more you wonder whether the kids actually arranged the marbles that way. How do you know?
Well, you could see patterns of high complexity or patterns of statistically unusual simplicity. For example, if the marbles were very clearly placed in the likeness of an animal, that may be evidence that they weren't randomly spilled. Or, if the marbles were neatly sorted into color groups -- a very simple thing, but nonetheless far from a random distribution -- that might also be evidence that they were arranged. Either would potentially point to some sort of "design."
The fact is that although the ID people are often a front for Christian agendas, the problem of sorting out design from random occurrence is a very real one, whether it is in looking at potential "artifacts" at an archeological dig or sorting out whether something was "intentional" in a work of art (or, for that matter, artistic attributions, which has now become a part of forensic science). What is important is the unusual anomalies in the distribution of the "data" in any of these cases, which could be evidence for complex design or a reduction to simplicity to streamline things. Either one can be evidence of intervention, *once* other natural causes can be dismissed.
This article thus strikes me as missing the point and trying to create a false dichotomy, obviously due to discomfort with the right-wing ID agenda. Just because questions of design are often invoked with a political agenda doesn't mean that they don't exist in other contexts and can't take similar forms. The answer is just being more careful to consider all aspects of your data set, something ID proponents don't do because they have an agenda. (Overzealous evolutionary theorists sometimes overstate their case and do the same.)
Statistics, of course, are only the first step -- the interpretation of the anomalies is where the tough questions begin, and those questions that come up are the same for ID as they are for ET life... and no simple statistical test can answer them.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a Yankee who lived in Texas for two years, I feel I need to say that it's not only Yankees who get confused about the grammatical status of "all y'all." I was told by at least two of my native Texan friends on separate occasions that "all y'all" is the plural of "y'all." They were both schoolteachers, so I assume they know what "plural" means.
On the other hand, my own empirical observation of usage is in line with what you said, i.e., the first "all" in "all y'all" is an intensifier. I noticed it being used in two primary circumstances: (1) when a group was unusually large, so the speaker wanted to emphasize "all" of the large group (perhaps applicable when making a Slashdot posting), or (2) when the emphasis was to be fully inclusive of all individuals, as in "every single one of you" as opposed to just a generic reference to "the group of you together."
Anyhow, while you're correct about usage, clearly even some (educated) Southerners think that "all y'all" is somehow a "plural" of "y'all," even if that is not the most accurate description of its usage. It's not just "foolish Yankees."
Bravo, sir. I remember in a philosophy class making almost the exact same argument (although about a different identity paradox). My TA thought I was being flippant. But while it's fun to play around with ideas like "identity" and act like they are some sort of Platonic ideal, the reality is that "identity" is just a word. If you define it in one way, it will raise some paradoxes. If you define it another way, it'll raise others.
Paradoxes are fun mental exercises, and you often do learn something about how a word is used or about how to create a better definition, but philosophy sometimes gets too caught up in believing that its concepts are objective entities. Philosophers have been playing the game of "what do you mean by X?" and then pouncing on you when your definition turns out to be flawed ever since Socrates. It's a fun game, but often if you take a step back, you realize it's all just about the vagueness of language.
"With all due respect," I do know something about the professional writing world, but that's irrelevant. As I said in my original comment, I have nothing against Word, and I use it myself. And I always have a copy laying around in part because of the very reason you mention -- when collaborating with various editors, they want to use Word's system for tracking changes. Fine. It's a good system, and it's a valid choice. I've also dealt with editors who wanted to use Acrobat to track comments and edits, which isn't as useful as Word's in some ways. But I therefore have a copy of Acrobat as well. Others still want paper proofs with hand edits. So I also own some pens and pencils.
But my argument wasn't about whether Word was good -- it was questioning the GP's assertion that Word has certain "features" essential for professional writing that are unique ("nothing else even comes close" or something like that). If you define "has a huge market share" as a "feature," then I understand where you're coming from. (Why it has that market share is a separate issue that may or may not have anything to do with its current quality.) To me, that's an extremely important aspect of using Word, but is that one of the "features" that the GP was talking about?
The fact is, in the publishing world, everybody does things their own way. Many use Word, for various reasons; that is true. Just as a publishing house can tell me I need to use some crazy non-standard citation system, they can also force me to use Word for collaborative purposes because everyone else does. But that, to me anyway, has nothing to do with the "features" of the underlying software.
The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.
Are you serious? I believe MS Word has its uses, and though I'm ambivalent about the new design, I can understand how some might find it useful. The point is, I'm not a Word hater at all. I've used it for many years, and I still do at times.
But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?
If, by "professional writer" you actually mean "book designer" or something similar who is actually concerned with formatting the text, then Word's typography and design choices are just awful compared to the output of professional software (InDesign and Quark, which are admittedly expensive, or the free LaTeX). And if you're an independent writer who has to both produce text and format it, and you need a GUI, free programs like LyX and Kile can easily provide almost all the features of Word.
What "sophisticated features" do "professional writers" need that Word has, but other software (and even free software) doesn't? I don't think Word is bad, but I just don't understand the claim that nothing else "comes close."
Not sure that the word "debit" is appropriate here for the U.S., since the U.S. had only just hit a trillion dollars for the DEFICIT during THIS FISCAL YEAR. The actual _debt_ (equivalent to the total charged) has exceeded a trillion dollars for a couple decades and should be up to 12-13 trillion dollars this year. To me, the word "debit" implies a single charge, which isn't exactly the same as an annual deficit. (I say this not to be pedantic, but mainly because most Americans don't seem to even realize that there is an ongoing debt in addition to the "deficit" that is discussed every year on the news.)
Indeed. And what about almost every major European "scientist" of the 16th and 17th centuries? Copernicus was a priest. Many of the major names you'll recognize from your high school science textbooks were either priests or affiliated with religious orders. Isaac Newton wrote pamphlets on the interpretation of the Bible and forecast that the world might end in the 20th century. My favorite example -- Johannes Kepler. His third law of planetary motion was accidentally discovered while he was searching for proof that the motions of the planets were in proportions that are the same as used in musical harmony. Yes -- Kepler was looking for musical intervals in the skies, and even after he found his law, he believed it was only an approximation. The "true order" was the musical intervals.
The point is that these scientists still made progress by collecting data, analyzing it, and doing experiments. It wasn't at all like modern science (despite our nostalgic idea of the "Scientific Revolution"), but their quest for truth in the physical world wasn't stopped by their religious (and often mystical or occult) beliefs.
you could really creep out your enemys after you're gone, but you wouldn't be able to enjoy it.
Speaking of "creeping out your enemies," this adds a whole new meaning to GhostNet.
See, for example, one of the most famous historical essays on the function of higher education: John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University" (1854).
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/newman/newman-university.html
Over 150 years ago, Newman noted that some people would argue that you could learn everything you wanted from the scholarly discourse in books, because some said that all knowledge that was worth knowing was available through written materials.
But Newman concluded that the true value of a university was never about classroom learning, per se. It was about being in a community of scholars, where the true learning was about all the various interpersonal interactions that happen. Some of this can happen online, it is true, but universities in a particular place won't be extinct until we can model all the social interactions that generate knowledge and learning in a virtual reality. Even then, it's an open question whether people would trade in real interactions for total virtual interactions.
Sorry to rain on your citation parade, but this distinction of "font" vs. "typeface" is somewhat antiquated. Before the advent of electronic publishing, most people rarely had to use either word. Typesetters actually knew the difference, because they were the only ones who used them.
Then modern word processors came along, and for some reason they started labeling things that typesetters called "typefaces" as "fonts." Is it a useful distinction? Of course, though it was more useful when you actually had little individual metal letters to move around when you were setting up a page to be printed. It would still be useful, but few people (and few software packages) make that distinction. If you're still doing typesetting by hand or perhaps working in professional desktop publishing, the distinction of "font" versus "typeface" may still make sense to the people around you.
But when you have even many major typeface designers calling typefaces "fonts" (sometimes even using "face" to describe subdivisions of fonts! -- look inside a dialog box in standard word processors and you're likely to see the same thing), your distinction has little meaning for most people. Hell, even LaTeX users don't usually make this distinction, probably because it has become increasingly meaningless when changing the size or style of a typeface became so easy. It's like trying to maintain the mathematical distinction between "set" and "group" when having a normal conversation. It's a very useful technical distinction, but most people don't know about it, the distinction isn't even applicable to many situations in the real world, and most people don't care.
I'm usually the first one to applaud knowing important distinctions. I do so here. But trying to legislate a nomenclature anachronistically onto technology where the such distinctions are almost never made in current software, and are increasingly meaningless, is just pedantic and a waste of time.
When you get MS Office or something similar to use your definitions, come back and we'll talk again.
Proper Latin plural would actually be fetus, with a long 'u'. (I don't know how to get the macron to display correctly.) Fourth declension masculine nouns form plurals by changing the final 'u' from short to long rather than using the second-declension plural ending of 'i'.
Contrary to popular belief, not all Latin words ending in "-us" form a plural form with "-i". All the more reason to use English plural forms (add "-es" to the end) rather than trying to form a foreign plural through erroneous means. The plural of "fetus" should be "fetuses" (or "foetuses", if you prefer).
No grammar mistake is more glaring than when rules of foreign languages are misapplied to English. To those who aren't familiar with the other languages, it comes across as pretentious. To those who do know those languages, it comes across as ignorant.
Better to stick to the rules of English.
No problem. "The Rite of Spring" is a really novel work, and its new musical ideas have been incredibly influential on many other composers. But the riot at the premiere is something that's a bit overemphasized. It's so ingrained in music history that even many music historians don't realize that it has been effectively debunked for a while.
I just looked back at the Taruskin article I mentioned, and he notes that most reviews of the premiere don't even mention Stravinsky or the music other than to note that Stravinsky was the composer. It was only once the score was published in the 1920s and Nijinsky's choreography had been forgotten that Stravinsky started promoting the novel musical characteristics of the piece. This is part of a larger trend in the writings of a number of composers around this time to try to differentiate themselves from the past and make it seem like they were making a clean break from tradition.
Anyhow, I don't fault Radio Lab too much for this, because it is a well-accepted story. I do fault the person they interviewed... who is a scholar and should know better before using that as an example.
The Stravinsky segment of the show is nonsense. When "The Rite of Spring" (not "Rites") debuted, there was a riot. That is true. However, there is a lot of evidence that this riot had less to do with the music than with all sorts of other factors -- there was a group of people (somewhat politically motivated) who already planned to stage a riot, the choreography was perceived as complete nonsense, and besides, most accounts say that people had already started shouting so much when the curtain went up that no one could hear any music after the very beginning.
Notably, the were a half dozen more performances in the initial run without further disruption.
The myth that the novel music was the cause of the riot was something propagated by Stravinsky starting about a decade later, when he actively started trying to shape his public persona. His autobiographical information is notoriously suspect among 20th century composers, further shaped through the supposed "conversations" he had with Robert Craft, who ghostwrote most of his later books.
Richard Taruskin (perhaps the world's foremost expert on Stravinsky) has detailed the reasons why this myth came to be, and this information has been around for at least a couple decades, though it was effectively summarized in his article: "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Music Itself'" (Modernism/modernity - Volume 2, Number 1, January 1995, pp. 1-26).
Anyhow, I love Radio Lab in general. But that particular show had a lot of bogus claims, and this was probably the biggest.
Simplicity and complexity is not as important as the idea that these patterns (whether simple or complex, and whether in ID arguments or among ETs) are statistical aberrations.
Quick example -- you see a bunch of kids walking around with a jar of assorted colored marbles. A while later, you come back to the same place and find these colored marbles apparently spilled on the ground. But, the more you look, the more you wonder whether the kids actually arranged the marbles that way. How do you know?
Well, you could see patterns of high complexity or patterns of statistically unusual simplicity. For example, if the marbles were very clearly placed in the likeness of an animal, that may be evidence that they weren't randomly spilled. Or, if the marbles were neatly sorted into color groups -- a very simple thing, but nonetheless far from a random distribution -- that might also be evidence that they were arranged. Either would potentially point to some sort of "design."
The fact is that although the ID people are often a front for Christian agendas, the problem of sorting out design from random occurrence is a very real one, whether it is in looking at potential "artifacts" at an archeological dig or sorting out whether something was "intentional" in a work of art (or, for that matter, artistic attributions, which has now become a part of forensic science). What is important is the unusual anomalies in the distribution of the "data" in any of these cases, which could be evidence for complex design or a reduction to simplicity to streamline things. Either one can be evidence of intervention, *once* other natural causes can be dismissed.
This article thus strikes me as missing the point and trying to create a false dichotomy, obviously due to discomfort with the right-wing ID agenda. Just because questions of design are often invoked with a political agenda doesn't mean that they don't exist in other contexts and can't take similar forms. The answer is just being more careful to consider all aspects of your data set, something ID proponents don't do because they have an agenda. (Overzealous evolutionary theorists sometimes overstate their case and do the same.)
Statistics, of course, are only the first step -- the interpretation of the anomalies is where the tough questions begin, and those questions that come up are the same for ID as they are for ET life... and no simple statistical test can answer them.