And thusly were the wise words spake by Adrian Graham Plus you get exposed to these terms on an international list like this and tend to pick them up sometimes.. :) Cheers, Bryan

Another reason to tell your friends, AND follow up on leads, is that if you dont, you will hear later about the stuff they sent to the "dumpster", as I unfortunately did. I heard a story of an old man that had closed his radio shop in the 1960s and had a garage FULL of NEW old tubes in their boxes. He lived just a few blocks from me. He was planning on cleaning the garage out and throwing the stuff away. I quized my friend and he assured me this was first hand information. I didnt want to come off as a "Vulture" but I really didnt want the stuff to be thrown out either so I asked if he would ask the guy if he would sell the lot to me. I forgot about it and a few months later I learned that the old guy had died and the entire garage full of parts and tubes and radios had gone into the dumpster because his kin "knew" that tubes were now worthless since the invention of the transistor and Integrated Circuit. Its enough to make you cry. On 7/19/06, Philip Pemberton <philpem at dsl.pipex.com> wrote: -- Jim Isbell "If you are not living on the edge, well then, you are just taking up too much space."

Don't dick around. Money talks. Often LOUDLY. -- Will

On 7/19/2006 at 10:40 PM Adrian Graham wrote: metal The US term is actually a trade name, although it's become a generic term over the years (much like "hoover" is a UK-ism for a vacuum cleaner). But perhaps the UK term is also a trade name--perhaps named after someone called Nigel Skip? :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster Cheers, Chuck

Warning--very, very OT: On 7/19/2006 at 11:42 PM Jules Richardson wrote: Thankfully, languages evolve. Over the years, I've noted the gradually increasing use of "vacation" for "holiday" on the BBC. Now, if you folks could learn to spell... :) My aunt and her family used to refer to the refrigerator as the "icebox". It made no difference to them that the iceman hadn't cometh for several decades. Who keeps gloves in their auto's glove compartment/glovebox? Do the Brits refer to an act of sabotage as "throwing gas grips into the works"? Cheers, Chuck

On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 11:42:15PM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote: They can, if all the parties in question can actually speak the language. This discussion reminds me of freshman English in college. I had Dr. Dutt, a woman from India who went to college in England and was trying to teach English in America. She loved to compare English and American expressions. Her favorite was "You can have your cake and eat it too." Apparently the English version is "You can eat your cake and have it too." I really didn't seen enough of a difference between the two to warrant the number of times she brought it up. Unfortunately she would frequently say, "This is the word I am using" as she wrote a word on the board because we couldn't understand what she was saying. Now folks, don't start asking the English to learn to spell. I have enough trouble when I see center spelled centre. When I see the English spelling my brain tries to pronounce it like century without the u. If they start working on their spelling we might end up with words like doctor spelled doctah. That would really take some getting used to. <VBG> English spelling I can handle. What they really need to work on, or perhaps America needs to work on, is their date formats and their idea of what a decimal point is. If I see 3.000 somewhere I read it a three, not three thousand. English dates that are between the 1st and 12th of the month are very easy to mis-interpret. I interpret 01/02/2006 as January 2nd, 2006, not February 1st, 2006. Spelling variations are understandable. Differing date and decimal point formats can really cause confusion. According to dictionary.com a decimal point is a dot: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimal%20point A comma is a puncuation mark: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/comma Now, if we can just come up with a standard date format ... Kevin http://www.RawFedDogs.net http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org Bruceville, TX Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.

Hardly surprising, since dictionary.com is a USA thing. That's already been done; the ISO came up with that long ago. yyyy-mm-dd. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Strictly from an information-ambiguity perspective, I agree. (While *nobody* uses yyyy-dd-mm, there is, absent that context, an ambiguity for the first 12 days of each month.) But I can see why they didn't; it raises the politically touchy question of whose language gets to be the one whose MON abbreviations get used. ISO date format has the advantage that chronological sort order equals lexicographic sort order (assuming your digits are in order); if you strip out the delimiters (dashes, above; I've seen slashes used too), it also equals numeric sort order. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

...when it's not a "period"(US) or "full stop" (UK). :) I rather like the space as a grouping operator---1 000 000 instead of 1,000,000 or 1.000.000. But why is it that no grouping is observed to the right of the decimal? (e.g. 0.000 003). Our common system of numeric notation is inadequate when it comes to expressing precision. Does 1000 mean 1E3 or 1.0E3 or 1.00E3 or 1.000E3 or something else? But scientific notation has never really caught on with the masses. I suspect that most adults don't even know what it is. Cheers, Chuck

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Adrian Graham wrote: It comes from watching British comedies on the telly (PBS) ... :-) Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/