I have to agree. In fact, it's astounding how many times I see a message from some non-native English speaker apologizing for his "bad English" when his message is perfectly comprehensible and almost entirely error-free, and certainly far better than many lazy Americans (I say that as an American, BTW) who are too stupid or lazy to use proper spelling, know the difference between they're/their/there, know the difference between it's and its, know how to use an apostrophe, etc. It's pathetic.

Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.

What's interesting here is that you've used two Britishisms ("bugger off" earlier, and "bloody" here), and then you spelled "apologize" in the American way...

"Fo shizzle" is a useful linguistic construct. You could just say "I concur." But "fo shizzle" is laced with metadata. You now have a hint that the speaker is joking, feigning enthusiasm.

No, you don't have any such hint, unless you happen to already be familiar with that particular dialect and subculture. Expecting every English speaker to be familiar with every dialect and subculture around the planet is simply ridiculous. Thanks to modern communications and travel, people are no longer confined to interacting only with people who live within 10 miles; we need to stop dividing ourselves this way as it only hampers communications.

That's fine if you have 50 years of warning. If you only have 2 years, however, you're going to need a much, much, much more powerful probe, probably something with nuclear engines. Good luck getting enough agreement and funding to pull that one off in time.

Of course nothing stops you from doing this. The practical barrier is getting everyone else to go along. Attempting to shape the course of language is like trying to nail jello to the wall.

Stopping an asteroid, unless you have an absolutely huge amount of warning time beforehand (in which case a fairly cheap probe with a small thruster should be enough to move it enough to not be a risk), requires a large amount of resources and money to build something large enough to actually do the job. The deniers don't want to spend money on anything in space, they want to spend it on defense contractors (who don't make spacecraft).

This good be big with Americans, depending on what kind of guns they'll let us use.

True. If Elon Musk is a moron who wants to flush any credibility he has with his existing customers hyping that as if it were a revolutionary improvement.

Which I have to say is par for the course in the US automotive industry. I guess we'll find out whether Musk has lost his grip when the actual announcement comes out.

At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.

In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.

The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.

"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.

In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.

Apropos of nothing, when will Firefox be done?

As a coda to my post, consider this howler:

World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling

An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." ... The reprint will cost Penguin 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,500) ...

This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.

It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.

There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.

This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.

Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.

Jon Postel

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.

There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.

The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.

Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?

I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.

Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.

For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.

I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concerned, that's a matter for the layout engine, if it ends up being done at all. On the input side, it's just semantically wrong. All you get for it is a slight improvement of the visual tidiness on the printed page, at the cost (sometimes) of creating ambiguity in the reader's mind about whether the punctuation mark belongs to the quoted material, or not. Only a crazy person advocates at the same time for the Oxford comma (which averts ambiguity) and for end-quotation punctuation folding (which introduces ambiguity). Aesthetics or semantics? Make up your damn mind! (For myself, I use the Oxford comma as necessary and I make a point of being able to identify those cases.)

I'm sure most people sense that the argument in favour of standard usage as "just another style" mainly comes from people who wish to avoid effort and mastery rather than double down in the honourable spirit of Jon Postel.

eally ?

The actual study does not say there are "too many" studies. What it says is that, since there are more studies, individual studies are cited less frequently, and may be read by fewer people. But nobody expects every scientist to read every paper published in their field.

If only we had the technology to be able to search the available research for specific items of interest, so we wouldn't have to rely upon poorly-written study titles and could narrow down the available research to the items that apply to our own narrow subject of interest.

There may not be too many scientific studies, but I'm starting to get the feeling that there are just too goddamn many people calling themselves "journalists" without actually performing recognizable acts of journalism.

The problem with Godwin's Law is that nazism is on the rise and people are afraid to point it out because of Godwin's Law.

http://www.vice.com/read/white...

(fun fact: the nazis' internet clubhouse is 8chan, because birds of a feather...)