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#41
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More commentary on Jobs and idiots who think food can cure cancer once you've got it
On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:06:20 -0500, John A.
wrote: On Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:07:05 +1300, Eric Stevens wrote: On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:21:38 -0800, John McWilliams wrote: On 11/5/11 PDT 7:41 PM, Eric Stevens wrote: On Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:24:13 -0400, John wrote: Or maybe he simply ignored it as you say you have done for his in the past. He has actually somewhere said that he failed to notice it the first time ... If that he be me, you're once again incorrect. Unless of course you can quote my misquote. It may have been John A. who made a remark to that effect. I can't keep track of all the shots while I am a singleton playing a double. And you still haven't copped to your original error, Eric. And I won't. The most I might do is accept that I could ease the way for those who can't easily deduce the logic from the grammar by writing " ... where spelling, punctuation and grammar each works against understanding what the author is actually getting at." Now that would be grammatically correct. "...each works..." has subject-verb agreement. (I'm not sure what the capitalization rule is though for beginning a sentence with a mid-sentence quote with ellipses, though, so I went with keeping the original capitalization from the quoted material as a best guess. I could be wrong.) Not even a smiley. Without "each" the list is the subject and is plural. I'm sure you'll find rules & examples covering both cases in one or both of the references I posted earlier. At the heart of all this argument is your determination that a list is always plural. Had you dug far enough you would discover that spelling, punctuation and grammar are uncountable nouns and that you never use plural verbs with uncountable nouns. Further, while the use of 'or' and 'nor' in a list means that the list should be treated as singular, the use of 'and' means that the list should only generally be treated as plural; that is, there can be exceptions. The situation of a list of uncountable nouns joined by an 'and' is therefore far from clear. This is a fine topic for another newsgroup but not this one. I'm ending this argument now, if this is possible. Regards, Eric Stevens |
#42
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More commentary on Jobs and idiots who think food can cure cancer once you've got it
Savageduck wrote:
On 2011-10-30 08:45:58 -0700, John A. said: Le Snip I also noticed the larger context, bearing in mind what was being written about, and figured out, without even thinking about it much, or even consciously, what was meant. Are you also confused by such sentences as "Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling on the back of an envelope"? Aaaagh! ...and that is a trule demonstration of fractured syntax, illuminating the ignorance of the writer, rather than the interpretive skills of the reader. A comma would fix it, though. I'm not saying that would make it the best possible way to express the idea, but . . . |
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