Anyone who had a childhood and thought it was funny that someone left his fly down would automatically assume, as did I, that P, D and Q would logically come next!
My lawyer has them though. He also has electronic surveillance jammers and everything! The annoying thing, though, is that my cell phone stops working as soon as I cross the threshold to his office...
That joke, though funny, demonstrates the exact situation that needs to be eradicated at all costs. Adding "at" to the end of a question like that is not only useless, it makes the speaker sound very ignorant and uneducated.
Using a pronoun requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. So?
It only makes a reader figure out to which person the pronoun refers.:-)
You shouldn't use pronouns when there's more then one person the pronoun could apply to (for example: "Bill and Bob went to the store. He paid for the check.") But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use pronouns ever.
1) thAn
2) Yes, pronouns should not be used when they introduce an ambiguity. This has nothing to do with placement of prepositions.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to read your sentences and rewrite them when they are too tangled.
I agree. But, it is also cleaner and more proper to replace a sentence like: "What did you do that for?" with "Why did you do that?". It's more proper and doesn't sound haughty or anything.
In any case, "What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight over about up for?" is a bad example because it's unquestionably wrong; "disagree about" and "fight over" are prepositional phrases; "disagree and fight over about" is wrong.
I'm sorry, "disagree about" and "fight over" are NOT prepositional phrases. There is no object in either of these.
I must say, though, that I do not believe that the complete elimination of sentences ending with prepositions is appropriate. For example, I put a ":-)" at the end of my first sentence in this posting to show that I really didn't think I should have said "to which person the pronoun refers". That sounds funny and is inappropriate.
That said, I also believe that people who say "Where are you at?" should be eviscerated in a public square.
Prepositions are words that combine with nouns/pronouns to make a phrase. A phrase, in turn, is a group of words that express a single thought or idea. In a prepositional phrase, the preposition logically comes at the beginning: "at the store," "on the table," "with much interest." Ending a sentence in a preposition requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. Compare: "The store we saw the coat at," with "The store at which we saw the coat." Again: "The table you left my book on," with "The table on which you left my book."
Winston Churchill is said to have asserted that this is a rule "up with which I will not put," but the reason for the rule is clear if one ends a sentence in several prepositions: Consider:
What reason did you bring the topic up for?
What reason did you bring the topic we disagree about up for?
What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight
over about up for?
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to avoid ending sentences with prepositions.
Hey, butt nugget, listen to what I say... My UPS, upon which the TWO PCS AND THE MONITOR run, reports a TOTAL DRAW of 347 Watts. So, somehow, between these THREE THINGS, we only have ~350W of power being used. SO, in conclusion, you're full of shit. I was trying to be nice about it before, but geez.
Not technically, unless you can go without a HD, CD-R/W, DVD-ROM, floppy, AGP card, PCI tuner card, NIC,
I have a 2 hard drives (Raid 0), HD, CDRW, DVD-ROM, floppy, AGP video card and a NIC (no tuner) on one of the PCs. The other is a little more sparse with just a CD reader and one hard drive and an AGP video card. I'm still nowhere near the ballpark of what you were talking about. Including a 19" monitor! I have 350W power supplies in these machines, but they are under-utilized (obviously).
Slashdot Mirror
I watch it for the theme song!
"It's been a loooonng road.... Gettin' from there to here..."
(That, and you like LISP!)
T
Wow... I am completely astonished... I actually read that whole thing with barely a speed difference between that and my normal reading... wow.
Do all your
messages wrap
so you can see
them on a very
narrow screen?
FLoyd was a cat3 and it did $4.3 billion in damages! Don't underestimate it!
No, seriously, nobody's going to trust someone else's test data. We've seen how wrong things can go.
:-)
I personally crash test all the cars I buy. It's just not intentional!
Using a pronoun requires the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. So?
:-)
It only makes a reader figure out to which person the pronoun refers.
You shouldn't use pronouns when there's more then one person the pronoun could apply to (for example: "Bill and Bob went to the store. He paid for the check.") But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use pronouns ever.
1) thAn
2) Yes, pronouns should not be used when they introduce an ambiguity. This has nothing to do with placement of prepositions.
The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are hard to untangle is to read your sentences and rewrite them when they are too tangled.
I agree. But, it is also cleaner and more proper to replace a sentence like: "What did you do that for?" with "Why did you do that?". It's more proper and doesn't sound haughty or anything.
In any case, "What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight over about up for?" is a bad example because it's unquestionably wrong; "disagree about" and "fight over" are prepositional phrases; "disagree and fight over about" is wrong.
I'm sorry, "disagree about" and "fight over" are NOT prepositional phrases. There is no object in either of these.
I must say, though, that I do not believe that the complete elimination of sentences ending with prepositions is appropriate. For example, I put a ":-)" at the end of my first sentence in this posting to show that I really didn't think I should have said "to which person the pronoun refers". That sounds funny and is inappropriate.
That said, I also believe that people who say "Where are you at?" should be eviscerated in a public square.
T
Hey, I don't know about you, but I never sponged SCO in the first place... Yuk!
If you figure out where it _actually_ came from, you can double your money!!!
T
Hey... I don't know about you, pal, but I don't want to know anything about SCO's taint...
T
T
T
Not technically, unless you can go without a HD, CD-R/W, DVD-ROM, floppy, AGP card, PCI tuner card, NIC,
I have a 2 hard drives (Raid 0), HD, CDRW, DVD-ROM, floppy, AGP video card and a NIC (no tuner) on one of the PCs. The other is a little more sparse with just a CD reader and one hard drive and an AGP video card. I'm still nowhere near the ballpark of what you were talking about. Including a 19" monitor! I have 350W power supplies in these machines, but they are under-utilized (obviously).
T
I think I had some of that with breakfast today!
T