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

You're as responsible as the next yank for the confounding reality in the USA. Put an organization together.

So it is with Gazans.

Personally, I'd remove the gen discussion and the in other news thread and replace with with an LC low content thread -keep it to one place. You've still got other mod thread. It's easier to navigate and easier to move posts.

I also believe that it's fine and normal to have short derails of convo in a particular thread without the need to move anything. A bitcoin derail in a trans thread isnt going to shift that thread to the new finance thread. History has seem to shown that it all reverts back to the topic at hand when new news breaks.

Just my opinion.

This thread was originally the low-content thread but it lost that title and that's unfortunate because I have some low content posts I could make and I'm not sure if they belong here now and wouldn't want to get them caught up in the serious discussion of what's now essentially mod thread #2.

Go forth... and be certain.

Short details in any other thread are fine, as I've said many times. I can't remember the last time I moved posts out of a topic thread rather than the mod thread.

As to what can be discussed here, pretty much anything. Here is post 1 that was edited when I renamed it. No one should self limit their topics itt bc of concerns it doesn't fit.

Maybe it's just me but when I see gen discussions, I think complaints and problems and I feel like it fans the flames and creates more drama.

An LC thread where we can talk about whether an elephant penis weighs more than my honda seems to be better, at least in my opinion, for creating fun dialog about useless ****.

As someone who has read the P forum for 15 years, I think doing just that would actually make a noticeable improvement. Nut this is all a minor nitkpick of mine.

“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

When it was titled as low content, some suggested that there were in fact some high content discussions going on (like weight of elephant dicks) that didnt warrant their own thread. So I renamed it the hi-lo content thread. But it still was rately used as everyone was so used to using the old mod thread as a "discuss anything" thread that they just wouldnt use the hilo thread.

Then it was suggested that we sticky the hilo thread like the mod thread so it would be easier to find, and renamed it general discussion, which usually refers to a broad range of topics, the way an old general store sold a little of everything or a general studies degree in college was a little bit of a lot of subjects.

But still little success in getting people to stop shooting the **** in the mod thread, which led to the drastic move of closing the mod thread. This eliminated the nonmod stuff but did cause mod discussions to move to the general thread. So we reopened the new mod thread, under very different restrictions because the earlier versions were just unworkable from a mod perspective.

Im willing to rename the general thread to anything that will assist posters in understanding what it is to be used for.

Please submit suggestions here.

The difference between this being"mod thread two" and the new mod thread is simple. If you have a question for a mod, put it in the new mod thread. A mod will see it quickly because he doesnt have to wade through dozens of nonmod posts to find it. Poster asks question to mod, mod answers. No other posters are involved in that exchange, but some continually want to insert themselves. They dont speak for mods, so their answer carries no weight. Just as the inevitable chorus of other posters engaging each other doesnt answer the question.

So if posters want to engage freely in discussions about modding, or give their interpretation of policy to other posters, they can knock themselves out in the general thread. But no one should expect a mod to wade through that discussion and answer questions, or even read the posts.

If you want a mod answer, post in the mod thread. If you're not a mod, don't answer the question. If you want to opine on modding with each other, do it in the general discussion thread. Easy peasy.

What a cute thread title

With the benefit of hindsight, which would you say has so far taken more of your time?

- Wading through non-mod posts in the old mod thread
or
- Explaining for what now has to be, by my count, at least the 253rd time how the two new threads should be used

Here are some examples of gramatical mistakes of the type you are after:

- Between you and I (between you and me)
- She was upset about me going to the pub (she was upset about my going to the pub)
- Not sure for who this letter is for (not sure whom this letter is for)

I could probably come up with a bunch more, that was just what sprang to mind in 30 seconds.

But when I talk about mistakes that betray a lack of basic education, I mean any of the following:

- Failure to spell basic homonyms correctly
- Failure to capitalise correctly
- Failure to use basic punctuation correctly (think full stops)
- Failure to identify singular vs. plural form of certain words ("women" spring to mind)
- Missing or misplaced apostrophes

I'm not talking about some esoteric rule like "the possessive precedes the gerund" (no. 2 in the post above). I'm talking about basic stuff that any 10 year old schoolkid would get marks taken off for getting wrong.

That doesn't mean that any poster who does any of those things is automatically an ignorant heathen, but it certainly increases the odds of him or her being one, in my mind. The body of work, including content, needs to be taken into account as a whole. A post or group of posts is a gestalt, you can't necessarily derive the properties of the whole by deconstructing it into its constituents.

springs?

It's already happened. Past tense.

That's all what's termed "prescriptivist" grammar and a linguist would all find them perfectly grammatical.

But if you're going to be prescriptivist, then I'm not sure your corrected third example would be correct as you're ending the sentence with a preposition (again completely fine in regular everyday speech), and it was always my impression that "whom' should follow a preposition which it isn't doing there-- not sure the best way to make it proper. Probably something like: "I'm not sure for whom this letter belongs"?.-- it sounds awkward though because people don't actually speak that way.

Just so we're crystal clear, because I knew the statement would end up being, shall we say, controversial, I chose my words very carefully. What I actually said was this:

The only claim I have made is that it is an indicator of poor education. The second claim was left deliberately as a hypothetical. "Some might argue", but I haven't, at least not yet. I have plausible deniability here.

I never deliberately type apostrophes when I type a contraction. If the autocorrect adds it, fine. But I refuse to bother to switch to another keyboard on my ipad just to add the apostrophe. IMO just as technology has killed cursive writing, I think it will eventually kill the apostrophe in contractions. Does anyone really give a **** or not grasp the meaning represented by the word dont or don't?

Yes, I know these are all rules that nobody gives a **** about outside the context of formal writing, but you constrained me pretty heavily in the sort of mistakes you were looking for.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is considered poor style, but it's not gramatically incorrect as far as I am aware. I also happen to disagree that it's poor style, at least as a blanket rule. Same for starting sentences with "and" or "but".

sprung?
sprang?

There are times when a poster's inability to write complete sentences has made his or her posts ambiguous or even incoherent, but they're fairly rare. Nonetheless, the argument "you knew what I meant" is both a poor defense of habitually sloppy writing, and irrelevant in the context of what we're discussing. FWIW I think your writing is fine and I wouldn't group you in with the egregious infractors here for failing to use apostrophes on a consistent basis. Now, if you used them, but incorrectly, thereby taking away the "I can't be bothered" defense, that would be a different story.

I'll repeat what I said above:

That doesn't mean that any poster who does any of those things is automatically an ignorant heathen, but it certainly increases the odds of him or her being one, in my mind. As browser has said many times in the mod thread, the whole body of work, including content, needs to be taken into account.

Nice try, but no.

Bingo.

There are around 200 verbs in English that are called "Germanic strong verbs", and eventually-- maybe in 500 or so years, no one will be sure how to use them and we'll just say things like "springed" and "buyed".

I'll be honest, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to explain the difference between the simple past tense and the past participle, I doubt I could. I guess I just intuitively know how to use them.