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Thread ID: 62626	2005-10-14 04:27:00	An English question	Renmoo (66)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
395985	2005-10-14 19:43:00	The newspapers are hardly reliable as far as english is concerned. Whenever I read my local newspaper, I usually find several spelling/gramatical errors. I'm no grammar Nazi - just an ordinary guy - so I hate to think what a grammar Nazi could find. One of my tutors is a real grammar Nazi, but he is also an American. It did not go down well when he marked down a group for using spelling/grammar (forget which) that is correct in NZ, but incorrect in the US. By any chance, are you refering to the article that talks about a deceased bald man hunting for ex-Nazi Officers? Cheers :)	Renmoo (66)
395986	2005-10-14 20:04:00	How would a bald dead guy hunt nazi's? More likeley they would just hang out and decompose.....	Metla (12)
395987	2005-10-14 20:20:00	One of my tutors is a real grammar Nazi, but he is also an American. It did not go down well when he marked down a group for using spelling/grammar (forget which) that is correct in NZ, but incorrect in the US. Poor guy, but then again, he IS from the place where ... they still use inches feet and yards, don't know the difference between England and the UK, cannot fathom the meaning of a scientific theory (viz. evolution), so many believe the lunar landings never happened, impeach an intelligent president but re-elect one with a chimp's brain, ...oh how easy it is to go on like this...	Strommer (42)
395988	2005-10-14 21:37:00	From: http://dictionary.reference.com/ "Exceedingly harsh; very severe: a draconian legal code; draconian budget cuts." It is not normally with a capital D, not as far as I have known it to be used and according to the dictionary. I use the Oxford English dictionary in pocket and full size editions as my preferred reference. I do not consider an on-line .com dictionary an authority on "English" english, the US have a peculiar way of mangling spelling & meanings. The OED makes the effort to provide accurate information on historic and current usage, hence the preference for a capital D. Of all the newspapers, I would trust the Herald to get it right. I read it every day and I can't remember when I last found a spelling error. They do happen, but they are exceedingly rare. Cheers Billy 8-{) :2cents:	Billy T (70)
395989	2005-10-14 21:47:00	My dictionary is better then your dictionary.....Meh. Anyhow, Language is fluid, And holding onto a publication from a point and time and insisting this is how it was, is and forever will be is just folly. Times are changing and language (as always has been the case) is changing with it, Computers are already the biggest educational and reference tool in the world, The online dictionaries have already been embraced.The capital D in draconion has fallen by the wayside. It was over-rated anyhow......Muhahahahahaha	Metla (12)
395990	2005-10-14 22:00:00	In the traditional English grammar rules, a capital was used whenever we used a Noun, for example a name of a person, locality, city, country or a plant, animal, seed etc. However, the English has been changing as people are for some time. For example, NZ English. No one is serious of learning grammer here and no schools are concerned about it! The Vic University has published a book on the plight of English in NZ a few years ago. It is worth reading. Also there have been so many orgnaisations teaching 'new English' which basically is how to rip off so many ways it is being used, like using Direct Speech than Indirect Speech for more 'something!' What is gained from that in this new age, I have no idea! These people are adding fuel to the already deterioriating conditions. All I wish to suggest is to learn some grammar to enlighten yourself. There are very simple grammar books available in the market. And it is not so hard to learn the rules of a language. But somehow it is thought otherwise as we don't want it! Good luck. ramu	ramu (726)
395991	2005-10-14 23:58:00	The reason for an optional D or d, is most likely because Draco lived so long ago, and few people would even know who he was, or how the adjective came about (certainly not the Americans, who for example think New Zealand is part of Australia). For more recently deceased well know personalities whose names have become adjectives, then we still see capital letters most of the time: Bush's Churchillian dreams. Darwinian theory. Napierian logarithms. Boolean algebra.	Terry Porritt (14)
395992	2005-10-15 00:36:00	Surely if the word is an adjective it would be lower case as only proper nouns are written with a capital as in Jameskan or jameskanian?	theother1 (3573)
395993	2005-10-15 00:50:00	I would have thought it obvious that adjectives derived from proper nouns would hence have a capital letter :) At least that is what used to be taught in formal English many many years ago when I was at school, but formal English isn't taught anymore from what I can tell. Grammar? what's that?	Terry Porritt (14)
395994	2005-10-15 01:03:00	It's all a bit confusing. The language doesn't stay still long enough to be shot. Newspapers try to reflect common use in their "styles". Unfortunately that means that they sometimes perpetuate wrong common use (e.g. "kmh" rather than the dimensionally correct "km/h" (additionally annoying because they could have opted for the nearly correct "kph", to replace "mph".) They seem to have taken steps to partially educate their writers, so now we don't often see reports about "milliwatt" power stations (mW). That education doesn't seem to have got through to the computing community. :( Even here, we often see people with very slow computers. One mHz is a millihertz, one-thousandth of a cycle per second. By the way, a "K" is not a thousand of anything. That's a "kelvin", the unit of temperature. A thousand is a "k". There I've given three examples of possibly confusing capitalizations: when you spell out the name of a unit, such as "watt" or "hertz", or "kelvin", you don't use a capital letter, even though these are the names of people. You [b]do capitalize the abbreviations: "Hz", "W", "K". (And a kelvin isn't a "degree kelvin", it's just a kelvin. ;)) One printing convention was not adopted for any grammatical reason; it was for purely economic reasons that you won't see any full stops or commas in your phone book. The British Post Office realised many years ago that they could save tons of ink when printing the directories, at no real cost in readability.	Graham L (2)
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