Oh Glorious Day

I ave at last, after all thse days, reconnected to my old blog to show my prejudices and complain about things.
Today's complaint - conservative Republicans who refer to Democrats as Communists and Socialists etc. A label is not an argument. Republicans and Democrats are both capitalists - they just have different views about how certain things are done.
Democrats should not call Republicans dirty names either.
Learn to talk coherently about the issues.

It still goes on

People have NO idea of the words they use. They hear them - they use them, with no thought of derivation and meaning. Illiteracy is becoming the norm with articulate, thinking individuals. What they say is interesting, but they cannot spell or punctuate.
People continue to "loose" things rather than "lose" them. They have no idea what to do with the apostrophe (they would probably bin it, if allowed).
Another example, a recent poster on an IT forum has invented the new word "boulderdash"! He heard the word "balderdash", presumably, and then invented a supposedly sensible spelling.
Other people, eg sportscaster, misuse words by diminishing them. For example, if they are a few players milling about on a football field with aggrieved expressions, this is referred to as "carnage out there".
Save the English language before it dies!!

What is Scholarly Research?

Re-search = look again for something lost or look again for something nobody wants?
Scholarly research - stating the obvious in ponderous and arcane language for the benefit of the intellectually destitute.

It doesn't get any better

I blog here. I blog there. I try to get people to realise that the singular of criteria is criterion but it is so uphill. Even teachers of English are arguing that usage has changed that "a criteria" is now correct English. However, even though this usage has been around for 50 years, I have founf no dictionary that supports this. As far as I can see, the use of "a criteria" is still illiterate.
Oddly though Meriam-Webster seems to recognise the non-word "irregardless" as having the right to exist through usage, even though noting it as a poor verbal usage and not recommended in written English.
Mind you, none of us avoid a fall completely. Earlier, I used the phrase "so uphill" like a teenage fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Please help protect our language!

Get A Life PLEASE

In technical forums, someone posts information about a current problem, bug, vulnerability in Windows or MS Office. The one-joke ponies instantly ride in with a suggested "fix". If the problem is the OS, the fix is delete Windows and replace with Red Hat, Suse, Debian, FreeBSD ..whatever. If the problem is Office, the "fix" is OpenOffice.org. Why don't these ponies get a life?
As a kid, I often heard the cry "Shut Up! You sound like a cracked gramaphone!".
Given that many readers will not know what a gramaphone was/is - I will update it to "You are stuck in a FreezeFrame. Fast Forward Already!"

When was education cancelled?

In discussion boards I have participated in, I have twice come across intelligent individuals writing "Here Here". There, there: I assume they mean "Hear, Hear".
Another piece of appalling english is "to little too late"???!!??
When was the idea of teaching people to use their mother tongue cancelled?
People repeating common sayings by ear with no intervention of a thinking process.
USE ENGLISH. IT IS A RICH LANGUAGE.

Be very Afraid - MICROSUCKS WINDOZE

It seems there is a very nasty company called MICROSUCKS that is guilty of every crime under the sun:

• Theft of intellectual property
• Lack of innovation
• Crippling competition
• Charging for software licenses
• Being mean, nasty and wearing ties

To make matters worse they have written a deliberately unsafe, insecure, broken OS called Windoze.

Please avoid these. Myself I use Microsoft Windows and have done so without any problems for 20 years. Lucky me - that I have avoided MICROSUCKS and Windoze and even the evil M$.

A little bird has whispered that MICROSUCKS, Windoze and M$ are some sort of ongoing joke by people who dislike MS Windows and have got nothing useful to say. Repearing the same immature, primitive joke over and over and over again???

GET OVER IT! GROW UP!