*phew*
Great relief to see Blogger back up and running. This thing is too addictive to go without for long.
I have a monster-sized post in prep - a piece I've been brewing up over the last couple of years. Probably throw it up here sometime in the next day or so, if only to stop me from editing the darn thing any further.
Meanwhile...
Got an entertaining and well-deserved email spanking from Steve Miller “Technical Editor and Annoying Person” who blogs here.
He politely but directly tears into my own sloppy grammar in an earlier post in which I poked fun at Microsoft’s terrible writing.
A sample:
>>“typo’s” is a possessive. “typos” would be the plural.
>>Use of comma before “that” is incorrect. use “, which” or “[no comma] that.”
>>“five year old” would normally be hyphenated like “five-year-old,” when it modifies “copy of >>Word.”
>>And bonus points for over-the-top pedantic twittiness, ending with a preposition:
>>“...a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped over.” While some grammarians consider it >>acceptable, your standard pruny English teacher would insist on:
>>“...over which a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped.”
>>Also, in “...invective at the Borg, there’s many, many more important...” I think you mean “there >>ARE many, many more...”
Ouch.
There’s a lesson here. I am indeed a great pompous nit with nothing better to do than ineptly juggle sizeable stones in my big glass house.
Our regularly scheduled programming will return just as soon as your host has managed to remove the hardback edition of Strunk & White from out his fundament.
(Later it hit me - if I wanted to get really snippy, I could easily have pushed back on the "typo's" thing. Surely "typo" is a contraction - a shorthand way of saying "typographical error". So "typo's" is not necessarily a possessive - the apostrophe indicates the elided letters. Or doesnt. Or something. Whatever...)
Great relief to see Blogger back up and running. This thing is too addictive to go without for long.
I have a monster-sized post in prep - a piece I've been brewing up over the last couple of years. Probably throw it up here sometime in the next day or so, if only to stop me from editing the darn thing any further.
Meanwhile...
Got an entertaining and well-deserved email spanking from Steve Miller “Technical Editor and Annoying Person” who blogs here.
He politely but directly tears into my own sloppy grammar in an earlier post in which I poked fun at Microsoft’s terrible writing.
A sample:
>>“typo’s” is a possessive. “typos” would be the plural.
>>Use of comma before “that” is incorrect. use “, which” or “[no comma] that.”
>>“five year old” would normally be hyphenated like “five-year-old,” when it modifies “copy of >>Word.”
>>And bonus points for over-the-top pedantic twittiness, ending with a preposition:
>>“...a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped over.” While some grammarians consider it >>acceptable, your standard pruny English teacher would insist on:
>>“...over which a five-year-old copy of Word would have tripped.”
>>Also, in “...invective at the Borg, there’s many, many more important...” I think you mean “there >>ARE many, many more...”
Ouch.
There’s a lesson here. I am indeed a great pompous nit with nothing better to do than ineptly juggle sizeable stones in my big glass house.
Our regularly scheduled programming will return just as soon as your host has managed to remove the hardback edition of Strunk & White from out his fundament.
(Later it hit me - if I wanted to get really snippy, I could easily have pushed back on the "typo's" thing. Surely "typo" is a contraction - a shorthand way of saying "typographical error". So "typo's" is not necessarily a possessive - the apostrophe indicates the elided letters. Or doesnt. Or something. Whatever...)
