goofy and no added salt.
You are nuts if you think all of that junk. You must be uneducated in the basic foundations of logic that tie language, math, and science together. Where did you get your master's degrees in such subjects as Information Theory and Communication Theory?

Why are you even bothering coming here if you don't want to learn anything ??
Why it is that you would rather argue about things that learn something new ??

Language is NOT always evolving and changing -- because if so the writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Locke, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, etc., would make no sense at all now.

The following question was posed by the great English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell to illustrate an important point in logic, mathematics, and language, and it is totally verbal and it contains no mathematical symbolism:

There is a village in England where none of the men wear beards, and there is one barber. All of the men in the village either shave themselves or they get shaved by the barber.
Who shaves the barber?

Believe it or not, this is a very deep question, and it can be rephrased in many ways that do not have anything to do with beards and barbers.
Doubtless, you know little or nothing about Russell and his extensive writings, but he did win a Nobel Prize for them.

D.A.W.

Goofy, if you think this:
" Again, math and physics are irrelevant,"
then you are really lost in the fog and in the forest, w/o a compass.
Math and physics are relevant to everything in everyday life, and this was true even for the cave man.

Go and sin no more, and leave me alone. I have been wasting my breath.
D.A.W.

Textbooks on Euclidean geometry are full of descriptions of things that are ideal (and there are no such things as "more ideal", "most ideal", or "less ideal"):

ideal points, ideal lines, ideal line segments, ideal planes, ideal circles, ideal triangles, ideal equilateral triangles, ideal pairs of parallel lines, ideal right angles.

Ideal, Ideal, Ideal, Ideal, Ideal ! Nothing is better than ideal !
D.A.W.

Well, that might be because you have been studying in the wrong country all along ??

Go to some good libraries and find some American junior-high-school or elementary school textbooks that describe the use of the absolute, comparative, and superlative of one-syllable and two-syllable adjectives.

Also consider that "NotAGrammarSnob" stated that a person is either competent or not competent. Clearly he and his mother learned this one somewhere good.

Furthermore, you should go to some science textbooks to read about perfect gases, ideal machines, frictionless planes, and perfect fluids. You might find a chapter titled "The Ideal Gas Laws." Watch out for a subject called the "Ideal Mechanical Advantage", too.

Go to some good junior high school and high school mathematics textbooks for the concept that a real number is either zero or nonzero.

I think that I should put this on my list of "Things to Do", but it will have to be at the bottom of the page -- below many more.

The Federal Government of the United States is something like the Center of the Universe for acronyms, and especially if we also include all of the acronyms of the Department of Defense (DOD) (and the four branches of military services), NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Federal Communiction Commission (FCC), and the Department of Energy (DOE) - which is in charge of making, recycling, and destroying nuclear weapons. Just starting on acronyms..
Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms, acronyms, acronyms!.
USA = U.S. Army, USN = U.S. Navy, USAF = US Air Force, USMC = US Marine Corps, USCG = US Coast Guard.
Some wags have suggested that the United States is the only country whose Navy has its own army (the Marine Corps) which has its own air force -- many squadrons of high-performance fighter and attack planes (mostly F/A-18 Hornets, but AV-8B Harriers, too), plus squadrons of cargo planes.
It all does sound rather odd.

We could probably compile a huge book of OBSOLETE Federal acronyms, and I will give you some examples of those: ADC, BIA, BP, CCC, GP, HEW, ICC, JAN, SAC, TAC, USPO, WPA,...
and fictitious ones like the OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) of the TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman".
By the way, "GP" means "General Purpose", and that might have been the origin of the word "Jeep". There is some dispute over this. .

I do not know if "JAN" still exists because that was one that was older than the Air Force. It was frequently used in electronics, weapons, and other things that both of the services could use because JAN = "Joint Army - Navy". "JAN" was used for a long time after the Air Force was created (we used it during the 1980s), but has it vanished from use now?

DAW

I recently complained to the source of an article about the terrible airline crash in the equatorial Atlantic. The journalist mentioned "B.E.A." without any explantation of that at all, and his editor let him get away with it.

In my e-mail to the Associate Press, I explained that for anyone who knows ANYTHING about international airline travel since about 1960, B.E.A. means "British European Airlines" -- unless explained otherwise. It makes no difference if B.E.A. doesn't exist anymore. We know what Pan-Am, TWA, and BOAC mean, too, and none of these is in business anymore.

I was amazed that I actually got an e-mail back from someone at the Associated Press.
He admtted to these facts:
1. In his department, the people really knew that B.E.A. = British European Airlines. (Surprised! was my reaction.)

2. The writers and editors really did have the oblgation to explaing what the new meaning of B.E.A. is, and they had been slackers in leaving it out.

3. His "B.E.A." is actually a French acronym for a 50-letter phrase that is the name of the branch of the French government that investigates aviation accidents
Aha, this made sense in the long run because the flight that crashed belonged to Air France. (The passenger flight was one between Rio de Janerio and Paris.)

In the United States, the name of the organization is much simpler, but in any news article it should be explained on first appearance like this:
NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board). This is very important to keep the reader informed.

In the United States, we have a prominent government acronym with two different meanings:

FHA = "Farmer's Home Adminstration", and it helps people get financing for their houses.
FHA = "Federal Highway Administration", and this obviously has jurisdiction over the Federal highways in the United States.

It is a salient fact that one needs to explain which one you mean!

D.A.W. .

By the way, I contributed the whole topic of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, and the necessity of fitting the statements that one makes (in the public media) fit the language of one's audience -- or else have the TV networks and the newspapers expending the effort to explain oddball foreign expressions to the audience.
D.A.W.

Perfect Pedant

"Probably read from the back of a cereal box."

PROVE IT, and where did you get your master's degrees in mathematics and engineering from from? Doubtless you continue to count on your fingers and toes to do arithmentic.

If you do not wish to discuss anything about Molotov cocktails and jet fuel -- and how people should match their speeches to their audiences -- then shut up here and vamoose elsewhere to make rude and unfounded remarks about everything.

I continue to be amazed by people who wish to SHOOT THEIR MOUTHS OFF at people whom they know nothing about, rather than being respectful of people who might be better educated than they are. On the other hand, I have dealt with so many people who have Ph.D.s and/or multiple master's degrees in important fields that I am a lot more cautious about making unfounded statements.

Someone needs to puke on your lap. Be gone with you!
D.A.W.

READY to do some basic algebra:
Given three real numbers a, b, and c.
Reflexive Law: a = a
Symmetric Law: If a = b, then b = a
Cancellation Law: If a + c = b + c, then a = b
Transitive Law: If a = b and b = c, then a = c
Multiplication Law for equations:
If a = b, and c is any real number, then ac = bc
Division Law for equations:
If a = b, and c is not zero, then a/c = b/c

My position is that if you don't know them by name, then you don't really know them.
D.A.W.

To: NotAGrammarSnob

CORRECT! Someone or something is either
competent or not competent;
ready or unready;
ideal or not ideal;
perfect or imperfect;
parallel or not parallel;
and to get quite mathematical,
either zero or nonzero.

In mathematics, there is the Axiom of Trichotemy for real numbers:
A number is either positive, zero, or negative.

I have taught a lot of college math, as a part-time professor, and most my students reacted in amazement that they not only had to know the axioms of math, but they needed to know the names of them, too (!).
When I said "by the Transitive Law", most of them had no recollection that this one says;
If a = b and b = c, then a = c. When I said "Transitive Law", I might as well have been speaking Sanskrit.