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| 2006/5/4-6 [Politics/Foreign, Politics/Foreign/Europe] UID:42928 Activity:nil |
5/4 Bored: http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=10261089081449493081 Grammar/spelling test. I think there's one wrong on this but I can't figure out which it is. Anyone? It's driving me nuts. -John \- caveat browser: they ask a bunch of personal questions before giving you the results. the test claims i missed one too and i am pretty sure i didnt. this is not a good test. if you dont know the answers to a fair number of these you are simply an idiot. it would be like giving a geography test and asking "what countries are the following cities in: london, paris, berlin, ouagadougou." the distrubution will not have good distribution properties. i think the only goo question was the desserts/desert one. the economist grammar or usage test is a pretty good one. like what is the difference between "i read the article on google in the last/latest issue of the e'ist." ok tnx. --psb berlin, ouagadougou." the results will not have good distribution properties. the only thing it answers is "are you a moron, are you a regular person, or are you one of the few people who know where ouagadougou is". i think the only good question was the desserts/desert one. the economist grammar or usage test is a pretty good one. e.g. what is the difference between "i read the article on google in the last/latest issue of the e'ist." ok tnx. --psb \_ You don't actually have to fill in the personal info. Just click the Next button and leave that stuff blank. \_ Yeah, ditto here--I am positive I got 30/30, went over it very carefully and cannot find the one that's causing 29/30. It's not a good test in any case (and for the data farming, use mailinator) but I just want to know whether one of the answers is wrong or whether it's a scoring glitch (or intentional, as it _is_ a dating site.) -John \- oh i didnt know what kind of "cite" it was. i just entered some random info and was wondering why they wanted all that. i think the error mighyt be with the brit spelling of caret. or maybe he got the dessert/desert one wrong. karat/caret. or maybe he got the dessert/desert one wrong. anybody who believes some of those questions are reasonable seems suspect. if you judge people by the company they keep do you know anybody who would get less than 25 on that test? do you know anybody who would get less than 20 on that test? (excusing non-native speakers ... it might be a decent ESL test). presumably he does. general observation: i think you can quite easily tell petty grammarians from people with really good and deep understanding of language. the good people come up with good examples of why agreement to subject/object or other subtle distinctions are important ["john has more friends than me/i"]. while they lamers just relish in berating people. this is a good example of what i mean: http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/040628crbo_books1 i also remember talking to a woman who i think was ABD in english and was harshing on the poor writing of attornies at the law firm where her job was to edit these letters. at the law firm where her job was to edit their writing. she seems to have trouble following "lack of care" != "lack of knowledge". i.e. it probably made economic sense not ot have +$300/hr attorney's running spell check and it was better to pay an unemployed english MA 1/8th the salary to make those kinds of corrections. \_ It's not the carat/karat thing and I don't have the patience to go through every conceivable permutation, I'm more curious about whether, this being a dating site/cite, the script purposely auto-deducts a point from every 30/30, whether it does so from all scores, if it's just a flaw, whatever. Idle curiosity is all. -John <<<<<<< Other Changes Below \_ <summary: mice is stupid> \_ I thought "desserts" was colloquially accepted? I used mice's ("dessert") and got 29. Care to write down your answers somewhere? -John \_ see above summary...mice != 30/30. \_ Ah, the you answered 30/30 questions thing? -John \_ Heh, yeahhh. Lack of sleep, too many drugs, recovering from brain surgery, distracted by french foreign exchange student roommate, etc..... \_ I managed to walk away with 30/30. -mice \- what did you put for dessert/desert? \_ dessert. *shrug* -mice \- that is wrong. as i imagined the author of the quiz is leem. desert doenst just mean a hot and sandy place but also from the same root as "deserve". 29 > 30. --psb \_ Huh, that's interesting. Colloquial usage doesn't seem to be in agreement with this, but I suppose that's the sort of conflict inherent in a living, evolving language. I'll have to keep that in mind. Thanks, psb! -mice \_ Actually, I think both options (as they're presented) are wrong. -mice ======= \_ Whoever overwrote mice's posts, fuck you. It was interesting. -John >>>>>>> Your Changes Above \_ I got 29/30 but then I now noticed that #24 is talking about oxen. I didn't really read it before and chose the wrong one. The one with "voila" seems arguable though. \_ What did you think #24 was talking about? And what's arguable about "voila"? Lack of diacritics? \_ I thought it was a simple spelling question or something. (dealing with eggs) I dunno I was racing through it. And yeah the diacritic. \_ Okay, I managed to get 30/30. As for "just desserts": http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.htm Do you want me to post my answers? |
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| www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=10261089081449493081 Again, for the stupid: DO NOT MESSAGE ME TO WHINE ABOUT THE SPELLING QUESTIONS ON THIS TEST. ANOTHER THING THAT YOU CAN KEEP TO YOURSELF IS THE HISTORY OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND/OR FASCISM. Maybe it's because you can't keep spelling and grammar straight to save your life. Find out if you're a sad, sad person or one of the few and the proud - another Grammar Nazi. You can write tests about anything and send them to your friends. You can also subject yourself to our ongoing personality experiments. Best of all, we have a free matching system where you invent your own matching rules. |
| www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/040628crbo_books1 BAD COMMA by LOUIS MENAND Lynne Truss's strange grammar. Issue of 2004-06-28 Posted 2004-06-21 The first punctuation mistake in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Gotham; "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax. The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause ("I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn't know what to do with") and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe ("printers' marks") and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as "of course" are set off by commas; Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases ("Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions"), before correlative conjunctions ("Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't"), and in prepositional phrases ("including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final s' "). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: "You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors." Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: "I bought a copy of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has)." Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as "Luke, xxiii, 43" and another, a page later, as "Isaiah xl, 3" The word "abuzz" is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. And it is stated that The New Yorker, "that famously punctilious periodical," renders "the nineteen-eighties" as the "1980's," which it does not. The New Yorker renders "the nineteen-eighties" as "the nineteen-eighties." For some reason, the folks at Gotham Books elected not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers. As Truss herself notes, some conventions of British usage employed in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" are taboo in the United States--for example, the placement of commas and periods outside quotation marks, "like this". The book also omits the serial comma, as in "eats, shoots and leaves," which is acceptable in the United States only in newspapers and commercial magazines. The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss's departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss's writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts--for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. And she admits that her editors are continually removing the commas that she tends to place before conjunctions. Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation? Truss, a former sports columnist for the London Times, appears to have been set a-blaze by two obsessions: superfluous apostrophes in commercial signage ("Potatoe's" and that sort of thing) and the elision of punctuation, along with uppercase letters, in e-mail messages. Are these portents of the night, soon coming, in which no man can read? Truss warns us that they are--"If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago"--but it's hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can't always separate the sense from the sensibility. And that, undoubtedly, is the point, for it is the sensibility, the "I'm mad as hell" act, that has got her her readers. A characteristic passage: For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word "Book's" with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker. Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that "language is always evolving," or some other slice of liberal pie. They don't even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. They don't care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place. Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, Truss doesn't want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is really a "decline of print culture" book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships--the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation--commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on--is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words. What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. But people say that someone's prose is "colorful" or "pungent" or "shapeless" or "lyrical." When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. When deli owners put up signs that read " Iced' Tea," the single quotation marks are intended to add extraliterary significance to the message, as if they were the grammatical equivalent of red ink. Truss is quite clear about the role played by punctuation in making words mean something. But she also--it is part of her general inconsistency--suggests that semicolons, for example, signal readers to pause. She likes to animate her punctuation marks, to talk about the apostrophe and the dash as though they were little cartoon characters ... |
| www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.htm Click here Claim: A person who gets what he deserves is said to have received his "just desserts." Origins: Sometimes it doesn't matter if you use the language correctly, because people will think you're wrong even when you're not. Crime and Punishment" section of this site, we created a category for tales about criminals whose punishments were meted out in unusual ways. Like so many others before us (particularly operators of bakeries and pastry shops), we played on the "desert"-"dessert" pun and called the section "Just Desserts"; before long we started receiving mail from readers chiding us for misspelling the phrase "just deserts." Eventually we gave up, removed the punning references, and renamed the section "Just Deserts"; then we began to receive even more mail from readers informing us that we had misspelled the phrase "just desserts" and providing us with mnemonics to help us remember the difference between "desert" and "dessert": You spell "Dessert" wrong in this link. I think your intention is to refer to metaphor using the term for after dinner snack. The way you spell it, "Desert" means a region that receives little rainfall. A rule of thumb - Dessert has 2 S's because more people would select to have dessert than spend time in a desert. Just wanted to point out that under your "Criminal" section, you spelled "Just Desserts" wrong. Just remember "strawberry shortcake" has two s' and that's how many s' desserts has! The confusion is understandable, because it involves a little-known word whose correct spelling and pronunciation runs counter to that of two similar and much more commonly used words. The noun "desert" (accent on the first syllable) is generally used to refer to an arid, barren expanse of land; the noun "dessert" (accent on the second syllable) is a sweet course or dish usually served at the end of a meal. However, the word "desert" -- when spelled like the former but pronounced like the latter -- also refers to a deserved reward or punishment. Therefore, someone who does wrong and is punished in a suitable manner has received his "just deserts." Many people, unfamiliar with the "reward or punishment" meaning of the word "desert," mistakenly assume that the phrase "just deserts" is properly spelled "just desserts" because of its pronunciation. ") When one gets what one deserves, good or bad, one is getting one's "just deserts," accent on the second syllable but spelled like the arid, barren lands. |