OT: English [was Re: [Pan-users] Re: freeze, high CPU getting new headers]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 10:35:51 am walt wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:03:33 +0000, Greg Lee wrote:
> > On Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:58:21 +0000, walt wrote:
> >> ... Because pan is stuck in a loop somewhere,  ...
> >
> > In my opinion, you guys are spinning your wheels.  Because pan is
> > not stuck (if I'm talking about the same bug as you are); it's just
> > taking a long time.
>
> My old 7th grade English teacher would now rap you on your knuckles
> with a ruler, shouting "Antecedent! Antecedent!"  

Antecedent? As in, "A preceding occurrence or cause or event", and 
similar definitions? I don't understand. Did your teacher suffer from 
Tourette's Syndrome, causing her (him?) to yell out irrelevant words at 
awkward moments?

> The whole puzzle 
> here is exactly what is "it" that's taking a long time?

I can be as pedantic as the next person, assuming the next person is a 
pedant, but it's not hard to determine what is "it" in the above 
sentence: it's the subject of the sentence, Pan.

I'm reminded of one of the first programming languages I learnt (or 
learned if you prefer). Apple's HyperTalk allowed you to write things 
like this:

get the number of words of "Coke Is It"
put it into x

which would assign the value 3 to x.


[...]
> (Oh crap, now my old teacher
> would whack my knuckles for ending a sentence with a preposition.)

I hope you would say, "Listen up you old biddy, if ending sentences with 
prepositions was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, to 
say nothing of Winston Churchill and the Queen herself, it's good 
enough for me."

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/go-ahead-put-that-preposition-at-the-end/
http://grammartips.homestead.com/prepositions2.html
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/ling009.html



-- 
Steven