What happened to this group?

Here I am, back after a break, and nothing has been posted for ages. OK - so I haven't posted for ages either but is anyone still out there?

This group used to be so much fun.

Creeping tolerance?

Or maybe mistakes are getting scarcer?

>3 thorold: *snort*

I think we're all just too fatigued.

>4 2wonderY: Or wary. I'd post more often but I've been warned that painful penalties are exacted for misuse of a semi-colon in this group. And do you remember the member who began a post with, 'I thought I'd ask people here on Pedant's Corner . . . . '? She was never heard from again.

ok so like i mean whats youre point?

Everyone is out hunting for Pokemon?

"What has happened to this group" surely?

>8 starkimarki: starkimarki

Hear, hear. Release the hounds.

It's 'Shirley' but don't call me that.

>1 pinkozcat: Long time no see.

Yes, it is very sad that this group is almost stagnant now.

:)

All but one of the LT groups I visit are dormant. I post but get little or no response. :(

Well, let's talk about something. And someone throw a couple new thread topics out there too.

Big League - Bigly - Big Lie?

Pretty much all of my LT groups are dormant (or stagnant!) too ... it's weird, they used to be so lively. "Tea" and "Crosswords" perhaps not so much, but here in PC and also in "Happy Heathens" I used to enjoy coming in and browsing through rants and discussions. :-/

I've posted in several dormant groups in the last year or so, and they've come backm at least temporarily. No rule abt not posting in dormant groups...

>13 darrow: >14 Crypto-Willobie: >15 dtw42: >16 Crypto-Willobie: Long time no see.
Yes, it is very sad that this group is stagnant now. As far as I can tell there were about 20 lively contributors to this and other LT threads who seemed to make the whole thing swing along. The omnipotent Tim Spalding suddenly decided to kick them all off, for some reason best known to himself. A few others protested and soon found themselves kicked off too. (I'll probably be next!)

Sadly, since then, many of the old contributors have lost interest with LT and gone elsewhere.

Kicked off? 20 regulars? being kicked off is pretty rare... who are you referring to?

>17 SpikeSix: News to me.

>18 Crypto-Willobie: I believe you meant to type: "to whom are you referring?"

>19 PhaedraB:
I'm operating in American Demotic just now...

I think he means his 20 sock puppets.

My Mother, Boobalack aka Lettie Ann, was a member of this group. She passed away Feb. 2014....

>22 DeanieG: Belated condolences. Losing one's mother is difficult in so many ways.

True...

>22 DeanieG: She is remembered with fondness.

You call it "pedantry". Could it be that this is an ill-conceived habit? Might it be a bad idea to associate careful use of good grammar and language usage with a term of disparagement?

>3 thorold:

LOL!

"If The Left Wins Their Soft Coup, Everyone Loses - But Mostly Them"

Kurt Schlichter
Posted: Jun 19, 2017 12:01 AM

"Them lose"? Sorry, Ken. Sorry, Thorold. No scarcity of mistakes.

>26 proximity1: No scarcity of mistakes
Hmm. Looks like anecdotal evidence to me. No true pedant should allow anyone to get away with extrapolating from one data point in six months to a global cascade of errors. :-)

To me the singular/plural confusion and the use of American-style "title-case" are both much more disturbing than the use of the accusative pronoun. Technically, we all know it should be "they", and we would probably take care to get it right in writing, but in normal speech I'm sure most of us would use an accusative there as well.

I woudn't put "soft coup" into a headline - it's almost impossible to read it without thinking of ice-cream.

The Wikipedia page on "soft coup" currently starts: A soft coup is a conspiracy theory that argue that a national leader may have been the victim of a coup d'état attempt,... - obviously it's a phrase that distorts the number of any verb that comes near it.

>27 thorold:

"No true pedant should allow anyone to get away with extrapolating from one data point in six months to a global cascade of errors."

Pick any "popular" source, any article, any author. Such errors are to be found everywhere one looks. I recently found one of my favorite authors, Philip Roth, who needs no lessons from me in how to write, using such a construction in an essay. You ignored my central point.

>28 proximity1: "You ignored my central point."

That's an excellent way to re-induce dormancy in a discussion group.

>29 Muscogulus: Your reasoning escapes me.

I think that the most likely explanation for the dormancy is to be found elsewhere. For a clue, consider the date of the OP, above. A little thought about that date might lead one to hypothesize a rather different souce for it--one that has not yet been mentioned in this thread.

Crypto-Willobie,

re: "Well, let's talk about something. And someone throw a couple new thread topics out there too."

OK.

1. The Messiah said that He would be three days and three nights in the "heart of the earth"

2. There are those who think that the crucifixion took place on the 6th day of the week with the resurrection taking place on the 1st day of the week.

3. Of those, there are some who think that the "heart of the earth" is referring to the tomb.

4. A 6th day of the week crucifixion/1st day of the week resurrection allows for only 2 nights to be involved.

5. To account for the lack of a 3rd night, some of those mentioned above say that the Messiah was employing common figure of speech/colloquial language.

6. I wonder if anyone who thinks that it was common could provide examples to support that belief; i.e., instances where a daytime or a night time was forecast or said to be involved with an event when no part of the daytime and/or no part of the night time could have occurred.
K.

>31 rstrats:
Not sure whether to say "huh??" or "no comment"...

>32 Crypto-Willobie:

Somebody's riding his hobby horse: http://www.librarything.com/topic/154294

>33 lilithcat:
Ah. Thanks.

>31 rstrats:

If you climbed into your time machine and went back and spoke to Yeshu ha Notzri in person and told him that one day he would be worshipped as a divine being I think he would be aghast. He would tell you There is no God but God.

>35 Crypto-Willobie:

Oooh, a new one! I love those, and wish they would have them more frequently.

That was fun! I have never seen these before! k4k

It took me 19 tries to get 14 of 15 right. Apparently this was better than 83% of their respondents. So, good but not great.

Oh now I cry foul. The Federal Reserve 'ARE'. So what if it's a quiz in an American newspaper & thus obviously dealing with American English. But what would you expect from a country where you can't get a proper cup of tea harumph.

Actually I think American usage is more sensible in making distinction between members of a group acting as one and acting separately--consistent use of plural form doesn't permit that. I wondered about a connection between that plural & absence of possessive apostrophes in shop names and found https://londonist.com/2016/10/londons-dropped-apostrophes, though I don't remember shops here having ever had such apostrophes.

I didn't think it was all that hard. >39 bluepiano: probably cost me a try.

15 out of 15 in 17 tries.

It probably helps that LT is my only social media, and I don't see any English language television.

I tried the previous one and did a lot worse.

One pass through got me 13 out of 15 in 15 tries. Suppose I'll take that. The New York Times' habit of referring to itself as The Times meant it took me a moment to spot that it wasn't actually The Times. Wonder what I'd have scored if I'd been looking at an English English quiz.

British media could use copy editors, too. I was reading a news story on a well known media site today that explained that someone "started work at 08:30 to 18:00".

>39 bluepiano: My sympathies. :-) About the tea, of course.

You might enjoy this book, The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time

>39 bluepiano: Despite the rubric, I don't think the problem was simply that the Federal Reserve 'are' but that the author also used a singular pronoun later in the text to refer to them/it. Consistency!

I'm a bit cross with another quiz in the series, though, (13, I think) where a political 'jibe' was corrected to 'gybe' and 'he bid farewell' corrected to 'he bade farewell'. I'm happy that the 'corrections' are correct, but the uncorrected terms are correct too, at least in UK usage. Is this a trans-Atlantic issue, or a NYT stylebook issue?

>44 shikari: That's odd. God forbid I should take the time to google but 'bade farewell' sounds UK (you know, UK--a place where you can get a proper cup of tea), 'bid farewell' US, and 'gybe' seems a word you'd be most likely to find in an Edwardian (hence UK, a place near another Anglophone country where you can get a proper cup of tea) forerunner of The Famous Five.

How shameful & wrong of me, submitting a post with a sentence like that one to a group called Pedants' corner.

>45 bluepiano: To be pedantic, the members of the other tea-swilling country were also Edwardians at the time, were they not? (I'm assuming we mean subjects of Edward VII, not VIII, or indeed pre-VII Edwards whose Hibernian title was more moot).

Hmm. 'gibe', not 'gybe' was used by the NYT. Gybe suddenly looks very Jabberwocky.

>46 shikari: Pfff, a minor detail. In any case the Irish wouldn't have been considered Edwardian had the lads not spent the better part of two decades arguing over whether their Rising should be Easter Sunday or Easter Monday, and just got on with it in 1899.

>44 shikari: >46 shikari: Which type of jibe was it? My Shorter OED lists “gybe” or “jibe” for the sailing manoeuvre (in politics this would presumably stand for an unplanned or unpredictable change of course), “gibe” or “jibe” for a taunt, but only “jibe” in “jibe with” (which is the only one of the three to be marked as US usage).

>48 thorold: A taunt, Thorold. I have sailed, so perhaps that's where ai picked the gybe up.

>47 bluepiano: Ah, as decidedly Edwardian subjects of the King-Emperor, my proudly Irish Keenan ancestors in India had little such political distraction, as far as I can tell. But can we really tell our families' onetime loyalties a hundred years after a revolution and a civil war that retrospectively clarified peoples' views one way or the other?