Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Latest vs. Newest

“Latest Crew Blasts Off for the International Space Station”

I wrote this in response to an e-mail newsletter distributed by NASA.

Yes, they are all dead, dead, dead....
Also, they never could get anywhere on time.
What you really meant was the “newest crew”.

These newsletters from NASA contain grammatical and logical errors almost every time. They also include the e-mail addresses of the authors, but nobody ever writes back OR publishes any corrections. Also, about half the time, the e-mails to those addresses get returned with the note “Recipient unknown” or “Address unknown”. Why publish any e-mail address if it is not going to work? Why bother?

When I write an e-mail to the office of the President of the United States, it goes through, so the people whom I mentioned above cannot claim that they are too busy of VIPs.

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The problems with English learning for Chinese people are the boring and inaccurate curriculums and their shyness to speak, a cultural thing and a system obstacle.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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Wood, the comparison between Chinese and English is well thought, and some aspects are new to me too.

I have a question, with math, how much have we revealed the Universe? I used to think math is the most efficient to interpret the Universe, but how much?


Einstein was lucky and America has her courtesy to attract the most brilliant minds, most of the best classmates in my grade have been in America now, attending Stanford, Harvard. Surely, few are in Oxford and Cambridge. The American age still lasts.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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Oh, Chinese vs. English.
There are some HUGE differences between the spoken languages that make it very difficult for Chinese people in learning English.

1. About 95 percent of Chinese words have only one syllable, and the remainder have only two syllables.The way that Chinese supports a large vocabulary is called "tone" (you can look this up) in that some syllables are given a "rising tone", some a "falliing tone", some "rising then falling", and some "falling then rising".
In Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Celtic, Arabic, etc., we just have hundreds of thosands of words with two or more syllables. How about some words in German, Finnish, or Russian with 10 syllables in them? Completely different from Chinese.

Spoken Japanese and Korean are also very different spoken languages from all kinds of Chinese, with thousands and thousands of polysyllabic words.

2. Chinese does not have ANY conjugation of verbs like all of the Western languages do. No past tense, present tense, future tense, present perfect tense, singular verbs, plural verbs, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, and no moods: indicative, interrogatory, imperative, subjunctive mood, and no modal auxiliaries. Chinese has thousands of different adverbs for all of this, which is completely different from the way that we do it in Western languages.

3. Chinese does not have any masculine, feminine, or neuter pronouns.
Have you ever heard a Chinese person, a learner of English, struggle with { he, she, it }? I surely have.

4. We have nearly gotten rid of it in English, but Chinese does not have any declension (or inflection) of adjectives the way that they do in Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, etc.

I was quite amused to read some years ago that the French Academy was still having a heated discussion about whether the word should be "la microchip" or "le microchip" !! LOL, how amusing to an E.E.

In German, the gender of a noun depends strongly on how it ends:
"der Computer" (masculine) because words ending in "er" are usually masculine.
So are "der Lehrer" = the teacher and "der Fernseher" = the television

"das Flugzeug" (airplane, neuter) because words ending ine "zeug" are neuter. The same rule applies for "chen", "lein", and all infinitives, such as "das Fliegen".

All past participles that end in "ung" are feminine.

Words adopted from French that end in "eur" are masculine, too, such as "der Ingeneueur" = the engineer.

DAW

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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A fab American singer (from California) named "Weird Al" Yankovic has specialized for decades in making "spoofs" of songs, especially the pop songs of the time.
There was a song, orginally from the 1950s or 60s, called "I Think We're Alone Now," by there was a hot remake of it by "Tiffany" back in about 1987. Weird Al spoofed this one with one called "I THINK I'M A CLONE NOW." Cloning was also a hot topic back in the 1980s. At least, Weird Al's clone was a man.
You ought to listen to this one - find it on YouTube.

Another completely remarkable song of his was set to the tune of "Lola", but it was called "Yoda" and it told practically the whole story of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, such as wilh lyrics like these:
"Luke, stay away from the Darker Side,
And if your thoughts lead you astray,
Let The Force be your guide.
Oh, my Yoda,
Yo, yo, yo, Yoda. Yoda!"

Watch out for a spoof of a song by Michael Jackson which is called FAT,
and it appears in Weird Al's album EVEN WORSE.

Then there are the songs that I think are completely American in taste, such as
"My Balogna", "I Love Rocky Road", and "Another One Rides the Bus".

D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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To: English Knight 1
You ought to read about the Austrian mathematician Kurt Goedel and his works. There are good articles about these on the Internet. Goedel lived at the same time as Russell and Whitehead, but he was a little younger, hence he was their successor in some ways. Back during the mid-1930s, Goedel proved this remarkable theorem:

In any system of axiomtic logic large enough to contain arithmetic, there are theorems that ARE TRUE, but there is not any way to prove them.

As for false statements, those can be dealt with because all we have to do is to find a counterexample to a false theorem.

The first actual example of one of the true but unprovable theorems (an important one) was not found until the American mathematician Paul Cohen did so in 1963. It is a remarkable statement in mathematical set theory.

Both Goedel and Albert Einstein were fortunate enough to be able to escape from Naziism during the 1930s, and they both went to the (new) Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where they remained for the rest of their lives.They became close friends in Princeton, and they spent many, many hours together.

Einstein was lucky in that he was working temporarily at Cal Tech (Pasadena, California) when Hitler took power in 1933, and Einstein never returned to Germany or Switzerland to live. Goedel had a few more years in Europe because he was an Austrian, and the Nazis did not take over Austria until 1938.

Among the other greats who have spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study have been John von Neumann, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrew Wiles, the English mathematician who recently proved Fermat's Last Theorem and several other important results in mathematics.

D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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And I think women especially White women is a heavenly gift to us.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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Well, sir, you have been talking to the right person, I do have biochemistry background, and I am so happy with being XY.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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The American author Isaac Asimov, who was a biochemist, visited a large gathering at which someone presented one verse of a song that he had written to be sung to the tune of the song "Home on the Range." That verse went something like this:
"Oh, give me a clone, a clone of my own..."

Asimov was quite inspired by this one, and as usual, he had sheets of paper and a pen in his pocket. He got these out, and he quicky wrote four more verses PLUS a new chorus. This chorus went something like this:
"Clone, clone, clone of my own,
With a Y changed to an X chromosone..."

LOL, Asimov's wacky new verses and chorus were about creating a female clone of himself and then engaging in debauchery with his clone!
Recall that all men have XY sex chromosones, and women have XX chromosomes. Thus, it you change a Y to an X, you change an XY to an XX and you get a female!

Asimov died on April 5, 1992, so we have just commemorated the 20th anniversary of his passing away. I still miss him so much. Between his hundreds of books of fiction AND nonfiction, I estimate that I have read nearly 250 of them.
D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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* can demonstrate

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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Oh, well, English Knght 1, I did leave one possibility open for you -- an unreal possibility, but I left it there in a humorously.
Maybe I am my father's daughter, and he and my mother named me for Dad's male Army buddy in South Korea, after all.
Then, when I met the other female Dale at my professor's house, she was so lovely (with a great pair of legs below her skirt, and this is true) that I had a "lesbian rush" on the other Dale and I wanted to "take her to bed".

Oh, well, the other Dale and I said "hi" and that was all, and I was a married man back then, anyway. My wife was there with me, too, because she had met practically none of my colleagues from the university before.

On earlier occasions, I had the chance to meet women named "Della", "Daylene", etc., but I think that this was the first time for meeting a female Dale.

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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Of course, since I have earned my M.A. in mathematics, I think of Bertrand Russell as being mostly a mathematician. (He moved into philosophy later on in his life.)
Russell and another man named Alfred North Whitehead worked together for more that an decade in writing a HUGE series of books through which they hoped to place mathematics on a secure logical foundation with no possibility of contradiction or vagueness whatever. This turned out to be a VERY deep work of mathematics and logic, but after all those years, they decided that they had set about on an impossible task -- and Russell came to this conclusion first. Of course, the reasoning is very deep, but Russell created a parallel explanation that can be written in ordinary English. It is in the form of a small story (a piece of fiction):

There is a village in England where nobody comes or goes to it. None of the men of the village wear beards, either, and the village is so small that it has only one barber. Here are the rules concerning shaving. Every man either:
1. Shaves himself regularly (no beards!). (Note that in general, nobody can get a shave from a woman, his sister, his mother, his brother, his father, etc. Also, the barber is not a woman.)
2. Or he goes to the barber and pays to get his shaves.
3. But not both.
Question: Who shaves the barber?

Difficulty: If the barber shaves himself, then he his getting a shave from the barber, too, and this is not allowed. Also, If the barber gets a shave from the barber, then he his shaving himself, too, and this is not allowed.
Believe it or not, there is a deep contradiction here when this is translated into a more general mathematical problem.

Some jokers have taken the problem as Russell first expressed it, and they said that they could solve the problem if the barber was a woman (!).Hence, the barber never needs a shave. However, I rephrased it a little bit to give it the form that Russell intended to begin with: the barber is not a woman, and nobody gets a shave from a woman. Delilah does not live here.

D. A. Wood Jul-21-2012

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Most Chinese people can not speak English well, I don't know why. I guess it is because of the boring teaching in China or for overseas Chinese, they are not outreaching. I think they should face the problem and change.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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But see? the language of English is really so beautiful, especially with grammar, I still remember challenging my English teachers at class when in highschool in China, and by living in Australia for six years, I have been benefited more.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-21-2012

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I will kind you about my first name. It is "Dale", and in the United States, Dale is mostly a man's name, but some women have it, too. When I was a graduate school in mathematics, I was invited to a Christmas party at a professor's house, and I met an attractive woman who had already earned her M.A. in math -- from the same school in Missouri. In the U.S., the name "Dale" is most popular in the Midwestern States, and even though my family is from the South, while my father was in the Army in 1954 - 55 (in South Korea) he had a close friend who was from Chicago. Aha, the Midwest. Hence that was the source of my name. Years later, I had a professor in Atlanta, Georgia, whose name was Dale C. Ray, but Dr. Ray's home state was Michigan - right in the Midwest.

Since then, I have read that "Dale" is a rather popular name in faraway Australia, too, but as we know, lots of these cultural things in Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand have their common roots in England and Scotland.
For another example, there are more or less important cities and towns in Scotland, New York State, and Western Australia named "Albany". One Albany is the capital city of New York Also, there are there are towns in Scotland and Florida, and on the South Island of New Zealand named "Dunedin".
There are two cities named Newcastle in England, and several different towns in the United States named either Newcastle or New Castle, with the most well-known one being New Castle, Delaware. Then, there is Newcastle, New South Wales, which is probably the seventh largest city in Australia. There is even a warship in the Australian Navy named the HMAS NEWCASTLE, and one of the few "motorways" in Australia connects Sydney with Newcastle. Newcastle, NSW, has long been a center of coal mining in Australia, just as Newcastle in northeastern England has been for much longer.

D. A. Wood Jul-20-2012

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Oh, I am sorry to hear. English Knight 1, that you have had a have had an injured hand / finger, and that has upset your typing & writing. Hence I am reckoning that you meant "meaningful".
In my case, I am in my mid-50s, but I have had some persistent problems with my right wrist (from time to time) because of too much writing and typing in graduate school; while at work as an engineer; and while teaching scores of different courses in electronics engineering and in mathematics.Toss in a good bit if tennis playing (years ago) and bicycle riding, and my wrist has just been getting worn out.
An orthopedic surgeon, a wrist specialist, has told me that the treatment for my wrist would iinvolve complicated surgery, but I have decided to put that off indefinitely and just to take some medication for it.

I am not teaching now, so I don't have students' papers to grade, diagrams to draw on the chalkboard for my students, and documents to type for handing out in class. This saves a lot of wear and tear.

D. A. Wood Jul-20-2012

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*Nietzsche

EnglishKnight1 Jul-20-2012

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But it could be dangerous to assume I don't really know Bertrand Russell, I even know he was a great philosopher who criticised Nietsche so fervently. And I love the way he mentioned love while Nietsche could have seen through as Russell.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-20-2012

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Wood, it was a typo indeed, I am regretful for it, because one of my fingers was injured at work, so I easily made a mistake. Nevertheless, nowadays,you could even locate grammatical mistakes in an influential government leader's speeches. But remarkably, you detected so well. Reading your written piece can be so pleasant too,sorry but I have to promise it,especially it has been from an well-educated woman with multiple talents.To mind you, I am really reading Churchill and enjoy immensely his wording.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-20-2012

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"But fighting for great precision of words is such a meaning thing."

1. Are you trying to say "meaningful",
2. or are you trying to be ironic and intend "demeaning" or "mean-spirited"?

I disagree whole-heartedly with the second.
D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-20-2012

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To: English Knight 1
You clearly have no idea who any of these writers were: Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, and James White, and probably not Sir Winston Churchill or Bertrand Russell, either.
I will give you a clue: Churchill and Russell were both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and back when that meant something.

During the past 20 years or so, the Nobel committee that chooses the winners has gotten into the habit of selecting OBSCURE writers who wrote in obsure dialects about obscure subjects, and that has lead to immense criticism of the committee from six different continents and resignations from the committee itself in protest.

It has been a long time since that committee has made a practice of honoring the well-known and influential writers from Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Latin America, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States: e.g. Kipling, Shaw, Churchill, Russell, Eliot, Mistral (two of them), Satre, Thomas Mann, Hesse, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Hemmingway, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Isaac Singer.

This is true: to be influential, a writer has to be widely read.

Obviously, I have not read much writing in French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Japanese because I don't read those languages, but we can assume that the big writers in those languages were influential where those languages are used. Also, there are some Russian writers who have been very influential in translations worldwide.

Most of my reading has been of works that were originally written in English or translated from French - especially the works of Jules Verne.
D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-20-2012

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But fighting for great precision of words is such a meaning thing.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-20-2012

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Indeed Ms Wood, only an greatly intellectual woman can produce such a quality in wording.

EnglishKnight1 Jul-20-2012

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To EnglishKnight:
Wood, when you speak to a man " Hey, babe, what's the latest?", the expression would be ambiguity, nathless.

Your're missing something again, and not asking questions when you should asking.

1. To many in North America, the word "babe" can be used in very informal speech to address either a male of a female. Keep that in mind.
Also, have you ever heard the expression, "A babe in the woods", for example?
This "babe" can be a man, a woman, or a child.

2. Still in infomal speech, this has been with us for decades: for a man to address either a child or a woman (usually younger than himself) as "babe". Women have called a child "babe" since the time of Middle English, or earlier.

3. Still in infomal speech, this has been with us for not so many decades: for a woman to address a man, especially one whom she is atttacted to, as "babe". For example, she might say, "Babe, I am really turned on by your beard and moustache!" (How would you like to get this every week?) "Babe, I think your muscles are really hot!"

4. Some grown men have had the nickname "Babe" for quite some time, especially during the 1920s and 30s. I don't know how far back this usage might go back earlier than that. The same goes for some women who had the nickname "Babe", too.

As for my way of using precise words, this has been influenced by my mother and by the authors Carl Sagan, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, James White, a writer from Northern Ireland, and by the authors of several engineering textbooks that I have studied.

In the case of the latter, many times I can't remember their names, but I can remember the names of the universities, etc., where they worked, For example; Illinois, Purdue, Ohio State, Michigan, Arizona, Southern California, Washington State, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Don't let me deceive you by omission. I was also stuck with some poorly-written and poorly chosen textbooks in both undergradaute school and graduate school. Then when I became an engineering professor myself, I went through a lot of effort to find textbooks that would be good for my students.
Sometimes there was the ensuing problem of trying to get the Department Head to agree with me! That could be a difficult one.

D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-18-2012

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Wood, when you speak to a man " Hey, babe, what's the latest?", the expression would be ambiguity, nathless, if you are a girl, judging on your eagerness to exactitude of words, you should be a girl..

EnglishKnight1 Jul-18-2012

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There is also a lot of difference between the language of casual conversation and the more formal and precise language that should be used in government documents - incl. agency's newsletters; general newspapers; news magazines; textbooks; television newscasts, etc.

I used the word "should" (in the subjunctive mood) because so many writers and speakers have forgotten all about the various levels of formality in the language.

"Hey, babe, what's the latest?" would be very informal speech, and not always understood very well.

D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-18-2012

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"latest" means "the most recent" must be strictly British English, Australian, etc. -- because we never talk like that in North America.
Why not use an unambiguous term that is understood everywhere, such as "newest"? You suggested "most recent", and that is also a good one.

Precision of expression! What a good concept! It is always far better than vagueness.
D.A.W.

D. A. Wood Jul-18-2012

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D A Wood, the word "latest" means "the most recent". The word "late" has quite a number of definitions, including recent. Why are you cherry-picking your definitions? In any case, in no way could "latest" mean, er, "most recently deceased"? Or, er, "deadest"?

porsche Jul-18-2012

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Sure, Wood, I think I understand what you are trying to convey. But in greetings, people still love to say " What is the latest?", isn't it good enough to just express the meaning of recent?

EnglishKnight1 Jul-18-2012

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