Great Britain, Australia and the United States, three great nations separated by a common language.English is quirky enough that native speakers of most other languages can get really confused by our sentence structure.
jtk
Contributor
Great Britain, Australia and the United States, three great nations separated by a common language.English is quirky enough that native speakers of most other languages can get really confused by our sentence structure.
jtk
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Contributor
From my English class 50+ years ago
Woman without her man would be nothing
You decide how to punctuate
Contributor
Be careful, this could be your last comma.Originally Posted by Sam Force
From my English class 50+ years ago
Woman without her man would be nothing
You decide how to punctuate
Contributor
I really enjoyed this thread and showed it to my wife, who is from England.
She commented “ a bunch of Americans and Canadians demonstrating their lack of punctuation and spelling skills”��
We do tend to mangle the language, however fortunately in most cases we understand each other.
Contributor
Missing a period off the end, innit?From my English class 50+ years ago
Woman without her man would be nothing
You decide how to punctuate
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
I before E, except after C
Well science disproves that
Contributor
The little cannibal child asks his parents "what are we having for dinner Mom?" Does this need a comma or not?
Bill D
Contributor
Depends what they are having for dinner.
Member
From an Australian view and one who learnt spelling and grammar in the late 1950's into the 1960's I have to agree with your wife and I find some of the sentence construction and contraction used by Americans nearly beyond my understanding at times. I won't single out any poster(s) here, it is annoying to me but then that is my problem and no one else's. I had never heard of a double space after a full stop or period until I read this thread and I was a compositor in the printing trade for many years so I guess it is an American thing.
Chris
Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening
Contributor
If you want to hear people mangle English, go to England! With their three-class education system you get quite a wide variation in education; For instance at my school they taught the males woodworking and metalworking, cooking and home economics for the females. I sincerely doubt that old king Charles was schooled in timber conversion, joinery and metalworking like I was.
In England working class people were taught at working class schools, to be workers, to fill their place in society. ( I think John Lennon wrote a song about it) You don't need to know the correct spelling and punctuation to be a bricklayer or carpenter, you just need to learn your trade, and do it with sense of honor, integrity and respect. Understand that most of those that ridicule you for not knowing whether to use a colon or a semi-colon wouldn't have a house to live in or a car to drive if they had to build it themselves.
If your life is about public speaking and writing, where you put your comma may be extremely important to your self esteem and your audience's understanding of your information.
To some of us a sense of pride is a brick wall that is straight and plumb, to others a well placed comma. C'est la vie
Contributor
Not so sure. From what I can tell, it came from the old days of fixed pitch fonts on typewriters and it was to make the sentence spacing more prominent given how some skinny characters like "i" left un-used space in the allotted space and resulted in an uneven presentation so 2 spaces made the sentences obvious. With proportional fonts available to computer word-processors this problem went away so a single space was adequate. It wasn't the first word-processor, but WordPerfect is now 41 years old.
Contributor
I am 64 years old. We were taught double space after a period at the end of a sentence. iI do not think it applied if the period was at the end of a abbreviation. A English teacher asked at a staff meeting and everyone over age 45 or so had been taught double space. Those younger single space.
Did Selectric typewriters have variable spacing?
Bill D.
Contributor
Yes, at least as far back as 1966, but it was a separate (and much more expensive) model.
But IBM had traditional proportional-font typewriters long before that. Whether they were 'smart' enough to put a wider space after a period, I have no idea.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote