The Box of Chocolates Thread (You never know what you're going to get!)

One of them has been posting in the Trump thread lately. Maybe we could lure him to the dark side. I hear OOT mods are partial to champagne and caviar, maybe we could bait him with that.

30 minutes, FWIW. But your point still stands.

Agreed.

It's often an indicator, but not conclusive, for sure.

This. It's hard to resist once in a while when someone does it again and again, but it's best not to go there.

Meh. I felt this way more in the past, but having raised kids and being involved in education for a couple of decades, I try not to be so quick to put people in "smart" and "intelligent" or "educated" and "uneducated" boxes. I know plenty of people who have amazing levels of difficulty in some areas that seem really basic to me, while excelling in others. People who can articulate complex concepts when you talk to them, but don't write especially coherently, or the reverse. And browser's not wrong about laziness/not caring playing a role in it. I believe the two often go hand in hand - if someone struggles a bit with writing and it's a big effort to get it right, I think they're more inclined to just say **** it. Which I suppose is more understandable when all you're doing is arguing with strangers on an Internet forum.

But don't get me wrong - as someone, correctly or not, who thinks of himself as intelligent, I still give in to my instinct to judge other people's intelligence. All the ****ing time. I just keep it to myself most of the time. 😃

Maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded to me like he was making observations, not rulings or decrees.

Fair enough. I don't really go around being a grammar Nazi most of the time, other than with chez, and that's only because his endless "wiser than thou" talking in riddles and pontificating annoys the **** out of me. But yes, I think we all make those judgements when interacting with other people, it's a natural thing to do.

The only reason I even brought any of this up is that browser seemed to be saying that obviously everyone here knows the basic rules of spelling and grammar, so any mistakes are down to typos and suchlike, which is self-evidently untrue and I found it bizarre that he would say such a thing.

It may help you to know that you dont annoy me at all.

All native English speakers do know the rules of English grammar. Those become ingrained in early childhood and it's why you don't see people making ridiculous mistakes like putting words in all the wrong places.

Spelling of course is different and requires education but english spelling is ridiculous and broken so it's hard to fault anyone too much there.

I've heard of it but haven't read it, but I'd be curious about what sorts of examples are cited. Do you have any off hand?

I'm with d2 here.

When being preached to that Trump and Biden are in crime families, the nuances of Covid vaccine data and proper Supreme Court interpretation of privacy rights, I expect that the preachers also understand and are able to differentiate between you, you are and your.

One curious factoid is that young children will initially use the word "went" as past tense for "go" and then at a certain stage they will switch to saying "goed" even though they will have never heard any of the adults around them saying "goed".

What is happening is that they have internalized the rule that "-ed" is used to make verbs past tense. Only later will they then switch back to saying "went" and this is one of the arguments that Chomsky used against the behaviorism that was in vogue in the 1950s in order to show that there is a language structure in the brain that the behaviorists couldn't account for.

LOVE this book.

I read it over 15 years ago, but I knew most of what was in it anyway. Sure, I'll put some together for you next time I'm playing some tourneys.

The book title.

But you'd probably need to see the cover illustration for that to make sense - IIRC correctly, a panda part way up a bamboo shoot, eating leaves. Now I don't remember if there's also have someone with a hunting rifle.

Edit to add: LOL, no, I have that all wrong. Not sure if there's more than one cover, or if it's my memory. Probably the latter.

English has a lot of nonstandard forms and exceptions to rules for sure, which make it notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Not really an excuse for native speakers, though.

Hopefully they get better than misplaced or erroneous commas.

They do.

For best title for a book on language I nominate: Sense and Sensibilia by J. L. Austin

The edition I had definitely had a panda on the cover. Maybe firing a pistol at an empty plate on its way out of the door or something like that.

I might wait for the movie. Maybe we could get Hugh Grant and Renee Zellweger to spice this one up too.

He did not leave out that part, it's you who leaves out everything else.

He did a very good job of explaining my position, but anyone with at least a modicum of intelligence who read the entire post could have easily understood that without the explanation. As I'm sure you did, but then you took one part out of context to argue in bad faith, as you do often do.

I never said you disliked them for any reason. I dont know why you dislike them more than anyone. and your "dislike" extends far beyond Hamas considering that the vast majority of Gazans are not associated with Hamas and yet you still "dislike" them.

I am not sure why you are so "dislikeful" of innocent people getting slaughtered in the most brutal fashion for months on end. I am not allowed to make value judgments on people here so I will refrain from even speculating on your mentality.

I clearly implied that you are one of the people who had a modicum of intelligence, which is how I knew you were arguing in bad faith. Though maybe I was wrong, if you really didn't understand that.

No, I'm sure it's yet another example of your bad faith arguments.

Also I never said anything about Israelis not being responsible for bad acts of their governments. So that's something you completely made up.

You have called me racist in the past, and you stated that I said I hated Palestinians which I said nothing about.

You definitely should know why i dislike them more than anyone. I gave a full explanation and then Browser clarified even further. But I guess you didn't read any of that.

when did I call you racist? post the link. otherwise it doesnt apply to this conversation in any way since I did not call you racist in it nor imply as such.

I definitely dont know bc I find your statement illogical considering how it compares Gazans to USA and Israel who you admit do terrible acts as well. but your "dislike" only extends to Gazans. that does not make sense to me.

further, you blame the Gazans for Hamas when the facts do not support this. they were elected 18 years ago. do you know how many people that have been murdered were able to vote for Hamas? do you know how many did vote for Hamas?

ofc, this is taking it at face value that Hamas is some evil entity and not a resistance organization fighting a brutal oppressor but we can leave that aside. we can allow your hypothetical.

it still does not make sense.

and I have already explained how browser whitewashed your statement and removed the context that made it go far beyond just "not caring about Gazans".

So it has a subtitle: "the zero tolerance approach to punctuation", but linguistics doesn't really concern itself with orthography, since writing is treated as a relatively recent innovation in human history whereas spoken language goes a lot deeper. What I was interested in was examples of native speakers making ungrammatical phrases in spoken language.

I'd also recommend a book of my own, The Language Instinct by Pinker, which is going to argue that that sort of stuff would be highly unusual and perhaps only seen in people with brain damage.

If you are referring to the no between poster conversations in the mod thread think of it this way. Every other thread in the forum (about 40 active in last 6 weeks) is like a call in radio show. People call in, make comments on whatever topic is under discussion, and then others call in with their opinions. Lots of back and forth, good stuff mixed with useless stuff. But all welcome.

But the mod thread is more like the non-emergency number at the police department. And it's not monitored 24/7. So people leave messages about concerns they have that they think require police attention. The police come in regularly to check the messages and take action as necessary. But imagine when they go to listen to messages that they have 100 messages, but only 2 actually are asking for police review. The police won't know that until they have to wade through every message. It's a huge waste of time.

Modding takes more time than most non-mods realize. Over the course of a month wading through all the nonmod posts adds up to hours over the course of a month. That's hours of wasted personal time because posters felt inconvenienced by having a single thread in the whole forum they couldn't treat as a talk show. So that's it.