5 Apr
2013
5 Apr
'13
2:36 p.m.
On 4 April 2013 21:40, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
That reminds me of a sentence that I think is quoted in one of Martin
Gardner's books :
'Show the bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout.
Teach this slaughter-lover his fall nears'
Yuo can delete the initial letter of all the words to form a new sentence.
Incidentally, for the 'i before e' rule, I always liked :
'E before E except after C. We live in a weird society' :-)
But 'I disconencted the speakers of all the computers in the lab' could
mean multiple speakers for each machine.
That might have been comprehensible if not so typo-ridden that it was
word-salad.
I have hopefully corrected the major one, it should bow be readable.
English has inconsistent [spelling] rules, and
freely breaks them.
Indeed. In my more cynical moments I sometimes feel it has more rules
than it does words. Consider `laughter'. Now prepend an `s'. Or "I
disconnected the speaker on all of the computers in the lab." does
not imply that they share a speaker.
Strictly speaking, the grammatical construct does imply that; in the
case of that particular sentence that implication is overridden by the
semantic unlikelihood of having all the lab's computers sharing a
single speaker.
Should I have said that I disconnected the
"speakerS"? or maybe "the
speaker on EACH computer"?
Either one would fix it, yes.
That was one message, Tony, where it would have been worth your time
to go slowly and carefully. It's also not threaded for me.
Yes, and perhaps one day you will be able to do trivial soldering jobs,
will be able to handle machine tools, and do various other things that I
do without having to think about it.
-tony