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Comment Re:Death of the Adverb (Score 1) 945

Firstly, let me admit that I learned English post-1980.

Secondly, IANAL[inguist], the second sentence, "Sarah is acting foolish.", doesn't seem incorrect to me as I read "is acting" in a similar way to "smells". That is, to me the sentence reads "Sarah is acting [as if she were] foolish.". Should one then say "Sarah is acting oldly.", or whatever the adverbial form of "old" is?

Just my $x cents

Comment Re:How is newline invisible (Score 3, Insightful) 390

I think the issue is more that tab and space are visually indistinguishable.
A good guideline is that you should be able to glean all the semantically meaningful data from the source code even on a hard-copy. I can certainly see a newline in hard-copy (although I can't tell whether it's \n, \r\n, \r or whatever). Similarly, I can see tabs in hard-copy, but I can't tell them apart from spaces, so in that sense it's wrong for them to be any more semantically meaningful.

Comment Re:subject-verb agreement (Score 1) 260

Well, whether you treat a collective noun as singular or plural (which obviously varies by context) I am still firmly of the belief that the verb and the pronoun should agree, which is, I think, what the GP wanted to express. Of course, it isn't technically a subject verb agreement thing, but you should probably treat the subject the same way throughout the sentence. That's why "has unveiled their" sounds odd. "has" treats VG as a singular, whereas "their" treats it as a plural. This change in the space of a couple of words is just a little disorienting.

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