What then of the commonly heard "brang" and "brung"? How would this fit into this pattern?
The model for such formations is sing-sang-sung, drink-drank-drunk[en], etc. There are enough such "correct" conjugations among frequently used verbs for "incorrect" ones to creep in by analogy. It helps that bring-brought-brought is itself irregular and thus hard to remember.
Sometimes such a construction survives long enough to become "correct". For example, the past tense of "dive" used to be "dived" everywhere, but in US English it's now mostly been supplanted by "dove".
A much older example is wear-wore-worn, which was a weak verb in Old English and would regularly have developed into wear-wear-weared.
Perhaps there is some intuitive understanding of how strong verbs conjugate that is then misapplied in such cases as this?
It's the same kind of analogical reasoning that makes strong verbs become weak. If the pattern is common enough and obvious enough, it has a good chance of being reproduced.
even if I never watch ANY BBC programs I still have to pay the BBC £131.50
If you have a car but never drive on motorways, do you think you should get a rebate on your road tax? After all, you're paying for something you don't use.
There are probably more drivers who don't use motorways than TV viewers who never watch the BBC.
Developers, programmers, and advanced users just need to step back abit and not respond with rude comments or short statements that might be taken as rude.
And this is as much as question of self-interest as morals. Here are two examples.
Example 1
I submit a bug report.
I receive a reply saying "This is already fixed in CVS".
Example 2
I submit a bug report.
I receive a reply saying "Thanks for your bug report. This issue is known to us, and we believe that it's fixed in CVS. If you don't want to wait for the next official release, our CVS repository is here: [URL]. Also, if you're compiling from source code, the specific problem can be addressed by changing X to Y in foo.c"
Both these examples are from my own early experience. In Example 1, I'm now happily using alternative software and occasionally submitting a bug report, while the original project in question appears to be dead. In Example 2, I'm now checking out CVS daily and submitting bug reports frequently, often with fixes attached. There have been several new releases.
Not all of the reply in Example 2 is essential every time, but the word "Thanks" is.
If developers don't want their bugs fixed, I suppose that's their prerogative, but most developers do want them fixed, and treating the rare people who actually take the trouble to report them as fellow humans helps.
I doubt if an email sent from one gmail user to another even uses SMTP at all.
No, Gmail uses SMTP within its own network.
Received: from gmail-pop.l.google.com [64.233.185.111] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-6.2.5) for pjr@localhost (single-drop); Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:33:50 +0000 (GMT) X-Gmail-Received: 713bd0b9259c38cc4ff423185da512b6eba2bb86 Delivere d-To: *******@gmail.com Received: by 10.65.177.12 with SMTP id e12cs41859qbp;
Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:38 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.70.15.17 with SMTP id 17mr172678wxo;
Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:37 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.70.39.18 with HTTP; Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:37 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <e464c65d0602190829r4d353e7r@mail.gmail.com> Date : Sun, 19 Feb 2006 11:29:37 -0500 From: "*******" <*******@gmail.com>
But I don't know whether they filter Gmail-to-Gmail mail at all.
The author of TFA is right to deplore low standards of communication skills online, but wrong to blame technology. Instant messaging, chat rooms and the rest merely make an eternal problem visible. People who are incapable of writing anything more interesting than "LOL" and "m3 2" are also incapable of saying anything more interesting, and always have been. The visibility of the problem has changed, not its cause - which is, quite simply, that many people can't or won't express coherent thoughts in any medium. The percentage of such people is probably much the same as it always was, or even less, since there are fewer "mute, inglorious Miltons" being denied opportunities to learn.
Unless a way is found of boosting intelligence, there isn't going to be a solution to the problem of bad writing, but it will probably become less visible when the present text-based methods of communication (or non-communication) are superseded for most people by speech-based methods, derived from VOIP or whatever. Those of us who read and write may, at worst, be left with faint traces of the horde's brief invasion, if such ugly spellings as "u" for "you" persist, but so what? The English language was perhaps richer and more subtle when we wrote "ye" in the nominative and "thou" or "thee" in the singular, but we didn't enter a dark age when we stopped doing so.
If it is written in a standard compliant manner, it should be rendered the same everywhere.
No, because standards-compliant CSS2 should degrade gracefully in CSS1 browsers, and also allow the user to specify styles for font-sizes and other accessibility-related elements without making the page unusable. The point of the current standards is precisely that pages don't have to be displayed the same way in every browser and by every user. CSS contains suggestions, not commands.
In a better world GuyMannDude's excellent post would have ended this thread and persuaded all the governments of the world to end censorship.
But this isn't a better world. Those of us who are opposed on principle to any kind of censorship are somehow going to have to try to explain our point of view to the honest-if-muddled proponents of blacklisting - to parents who don't want their children to be exposed to porn on the Net - to battered wives who don't want their husbands to learn how to batter them without leaving marks - to grassroots Republicans who think that any criticism of American foreign policy is unAmerican.
We at/. are *right*, philosophically and historically, since it's been demonstrated over and over again that without freedom of speech and its corollary, freedom of information, no other freedom is secure, yet the world is full of people who don't know that *their* liberty is at stake every time they say "This is disgusting! Someone ought to put a stop to it."
Surely there *must* be a way of teaching people this obvious truth? It's not as if it were something trivial. We're fighting for the survival of hard-earned civilised values here.
Slashdot Mirror
The model for such formations is sing-sang-sung, drink-drank-drunk[en], etc. There are enough such "correct" conjugations among frequently used verbs for "incorrect" ones to creep in by analogy. It helps that bring-brought-brought is itself irregular and thus hard to remember.
Sometimes such a construction survives long enough to become "correct". For example, the past tense of "dive" used to be "dived" everywhere, but in US English it's now mostly been supplanted by "dove".
A much older example is wear-wore-worn, which was a weak verb in Old English and would regularly have developed into wear-wear-weared.
It's the same kind of analogical reasoning that makes strong verbs become weak. If the pattern is common enough and obvious enough, it has a good chance of being reproduced.
If you have a car but never drive on motorways, do you think you should get a rebate on your road tax? After all, you're paying for something you don't use.
There are probably more drivers who don't use motorways than TV viewers who never watch the BBC.
And this is as much as question of self-interest as morals. Here are two examples.
Example 1
I submit a bug report.
I receive a reply saying "This is already fixed in CVS".
Example 2
I submit a bug report.
I receive a reply saying "Thanks for your bug report. This issue is known to us, and we believe that it's fixed in CVS. If you don't want to wait for the next official release, our CVS repository is here: [URL]. Also, if you're compiling from source code, the specific problem can be addressed by changing X to Y in foo.c"
Both these examples are from my own early experience. In Example 1, I'm now happily using alternative software and occasionally submitting a bug report, while the original project in question appears to be dead. In Example 2, I'm now checking out CVS daily and submitting bug reports frequently, often with fixes attached. There have been several new releases.
Not all of the reply in Example 2 is essential every time, but the word "Thanks" is.
If developers don't want their bugs fixed, I suppose that's their prerogative, but most developers do want them fixed, and treating the rare people who actually take the trouble to report them as fellow humans helps.
No, Gmail uses SMTP within its own network.
Received: from gmail-pop.l.google.com [64.233.185.111]
by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-6.2.5)
for pjr@localhost (single-drop); Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:33:50 +0000 (GMT)
X-Gmail-Received: 713bd0b9259c38cc4ff423185da512b6eba2bb86
Deliver
Received: by 10.65.177.12 with SMTP id e12cs41859qbp;
Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:38 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.70.15.17 with SMTP id 17mr172678wxo;
Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:37 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.70.39.18 with HTTP; Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:29:37 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <e464c65d0602190829r4d353e7r@mail.gmail.com>
Dat
From: "*******" <*******@gmail.com>
But I don't know whether they filter Gmail-to-Gmail mail at all.
Unless a way is found of boosting intelligence, there isn't going to be a solution to the problem of bad writing, but it will probably become less visible when the present text-based methods of communication (or non-communication) are superseded for most people by speech-based methods, derived from VOIP or whatever. Those of us who read and write may, at worst, be left with faint traces of the horde's brief invasion, if such ugly spellings as "u" for "you" persist, but so what? The English language was perhaps richer and more subtle when we wrote "ye" in the nominative and "thou" or "thee" in the singular, but we didn't enter a dark age when we stopped doing so.
You expect that to work? The damn thing can ring as much as it likes once I've embedded it in concrete and thrown it in the river.
If it is written in a standard compliant manner, it should be rendered the same everywhere.
No, because standards-compliant CSS2 should degrade gracefully in CSS1 browsers, and also allow the user to specify styles for font-sizes and other accessibility-related elements without making the page unusable. The point of the current standards is precisely that pages don't have to be displayed the same way in every browser and by every user. CSS contains suggestions, not commands.
In a better world GuyMannDude's excellent post would have ended this thread and persuaded all the governments of the world to end censorship. But this isn't a better world. Those of us who are opposed on principle to any kind of censorship are somehow going to have to try to explain our point of view to the honest-if-muddled proponents of blacklisting - to parents who don't want their children to be exposed to porn on the Net - to battered wives who don't want their husbands to learn how to batter them without leaving marks - to grassroots Republicans who think that any criticism of American foreign policy is unAmerican. We at /. are *right*, philosophically and historically, since it's been demonstrated over and over again that without freedom of speech and its corollary, freedom of information, no other freedom is secure, yet the world is full of people who don't know that *their* liberty is at stake every time they say "This is disgusting! Someone ought to put a stop to it."
Surely there *must* be a way of teaching people this obvious truth? It's not as if it were something trivial. We're fighting for the survival of hard-earned civilised values here.