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

Username

Brus

Member Since

September 4, 2011

Total number of comments

316

Total number of votes received

617

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Latest Comments

This reply to the telephone always intrigues me, as the obvious course of the chat should be, but never is:

#caller - "Good morning, is this Jane Smith?"

# Jane Smith - "No way! I am. You're someone else."

He was sat

  • May 14, 2013, 12:07pm

Tessa - 'I like to watch (him) sat at a stool' is "perfectly correct grammatically", is it? Your assertion is straightforward, and I look forward to reading your reasoning for it when you furnish it. You offer none here.

On Tomorrow

  • May 12, 2013, 11:58am

Warsaw Will -
I don't like 'demographic' here because it is a euphemism, meaning in the example I cited something along the lines of 'class' or 'race' but too coy to say, and it is ungrammatical in all the examples bandied here because it is an adjective, from the noun "demographics" = 'the science of population statistics' but in your examples it is being used ungrammatically as a noun, a nasty habit creeping into modern English usage, and popular in the Antipodes. You say it is in wide use in the USA too. Yes, it is. That's what I'm grumbling about.

Pled versus pleaded

  • May 9, 2013, 10:58am

Jayles asks "are we not all underlings to the spell-checker?". Does Jayles live in Stalin's Russia, or in some other dictatorship? Where I live we are free to think for ourselves and if the spell-checker suggests something different we are free to consider it and reject it if we think we know better. It is there to pick up spelling errors. So: 'are we not all underlings to the spell-checker?'. No, of course not, no! no! no! to cite a former prime minister of these parts.

On Tomorrow

  • April 14, 2013, 11:06am

Agree entirely with your argument, Wackyruss, except the bit about having to be PC, (you most certainly don't, and mustn't) and I say again, please Google "political correctness" and read the Wikipedia stuff about it for the history and so on, not to mention all the other pieces.

On Tomorrow

  • April 11, 2013, 7:33am

Wackyruss he belong to a PC society: "in this PC society, you can't say anything or you are an instant "racist"". Oh dear, resign from this society at once, I advise you, especially if, as I suspect, you mean "politically correct". The term was invented in the 19th C as a joke and used, tongue in cheek, by socialists such as Lenin in the early days of the Soviet Union to enforce ideas which did not bear too much scrutiny. it is a bit like saying "it is so because I say so, and I'm your mother". Lefties all knew it was said in jest all through the 1980s, and in the 1990s we all heard about it, and knew it was a joke, then suddenly by the '00s lots of people began to take it seriously. It is a mighty dangerous doctrine, to tell people to believe what they are told because "we say so" which is the same thing as "politically correct".
If you think I am havering, look at "political correctness" on Google. There are many hilarious entries there, as well as a great deal of wisdom. I have yet to find one single site to suggest there is anything good about it.

It is astonishing that Americans seem drawn into it.

On Tomorrow

  • April 11, 2013, 7:12am

Great letter from Wackyruss who I assume has Russian ancestors (the name). No preposition with 'yesterday' etc, as in Latin. It does remind me of the quirky thing in South African speak where we said if asked 'when?', "just now" as our answer, which elsewhere means "I am already doing it, it is happening and being done as we speak" but in those parts means, or meant "soon, sometime" or even "I'm not actually going to do it, ever, but you don't want to know that". "I'll get it just now" meant therefore "it is now on my list of things to do soon, or sometime, or never".
This may have been peculiar only to English speaking white South Africans. Black South Africans did not in my time use this expression, as I remember. Or am I meant, in the light of the 'African American' euphemism for 'black' to call most of my countrymen "African African South Africans". I must confess that to me is almost more silly an expression than African American.
(Why ever do we need a euphemism for 'black'? Is there something wrong with being black? By the way, love the comic expression 'ebonics' employed there by Wackyruss. That one was coined with a healthy dose of humour.)

On Tomorrow

  • April 10, 2013, 2:09pm

Ag, Zee! I thought my little offering was impenetrable, but yours is filled with weird things like "demographic" and, er, actually that's the worst one. I like your reference to " I do nothing to my R's". It reminds me of the Scots lassie who was told, admiringly, "I like the way you roll your Rs" and she said "Och, it's these high heels I'm wearin'".

The Caucasian community? Do white folk all live in the same areas, like in South Africa with apartheid before 1994? Or do you really mean Caucasian? I have not been to the Caucasus, but I plan to visit Georgia and Azerbaijan sometime soon. African-American?! It reminds me of the American politician who said that Nelson Mandela was probably the finest African-American of his time, only to remember that our national hero Madiba actually has no connection with America, so "African" would be better, only there are lots of white Africans too, so maybe "black" would be sounder, or maybe not because ... he ended up babbling, or indeed, he had babbled from the start ...!

Would "black and white" make things clearer and save a lot of bollock-speak? I am suspicious that you are a victim of folk who think political correctness, rather than the joke it is, is meant to be serious, and you believe them too. Oh, please! Sharpen up your ideas!

On Tomorrow

  • April 10, 2013, 1:46pm

Ag pleez! I grew up in South Africa where the wonderful speech patterns, accents, and cute ways of saying things were not stupid, or embarrassing, or shameful, but rich material for emulation and use among the cognoscenti, ever since. "Howzitt you ous?" for "Hello, everyone, how are you?" for example. You could write a book about these phrases and indeed it has been done, by 'Rawbone Malong' for example.
'Lekker bly, en level met die grevel', inane but a richly fun way to say "See you on tomorrow, hey?". The "hey" invites the interlocutor permission to find room for argument.

Resume, resumé, or résumé?

  • April 5, 2013, 11:02am

No, no, you're wrong. It is pronounced "RAY-zoom-ay" and is spelled with both acute accents. And that's the end of it. If you want to use a French word for a summary, at least spell it correctly and pronounce it the French way, or why bother choosing it in the first place?