Please and Thank You

[Seaworthy Lass]

Originally Posted by Wotname

Ah but "your's is going to die" is quite okay (in context)

ROFL
It is "yours" not "your's"

[Coops]

Now look what it's come to. Aussies giving English lessons.

Coops.

[Seaworthy Lass]

Originally Posted by Coops

Now look what it's come to. Aussies giving English lessons.

That was proper Strine .

Anyway, it saves a stroke (keystroke that is ).

[rgscpat]

Wether? Don't they have a lot of those in the Oz and Kiwi lands, along with the rams and ewes?

[Andrew Troup]

Originally Posted by Ann T. Cate

For the native English speakers among us who do not read or speak another language,
just consider how difficult it would be to piece out French strewn with
even the common abbreviations for phrases.....

So that means we can't discuss the design features of OVNIs?

(Ducking And Running ...

For What It's Worth, I think the OP has a valid point and I, for one, will take heed)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

random segue 1: My use of "I, for one", jolts me to a rather less congenial recollection, of the Ukrainian Naval chief, whose recent speech seemed to me an unconvincing paraphrase of the old formula

"Well I, for one, welcome the arrival of our new overlords, and look forward to becoming their devoted minion"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

random segue 2: I knew a gracious old lady, in my youth, who used a string of initials I found perplexing, but (once I understood) entrancing.

She would talk of a course of action as being "A and B the C of D"

Eventually I worked out she meant "Above and beyond the call of duty"

[sailorboy1]

what I don't like is when everyone (for the most part) understand what someone met but the internet english police come out

[boatpoker]

I think literacy is something to aspire to.
Anybody here speak Ebonics

[ozskipper]

Originally Posted by Wannabe-007

[PHP]

tbh, afaic tla's or mla's are imho rofl!
otoh, it's a pita to have to rtfm just to get the irc lingo!
sry 2 the op
ttyl

lol!

damn.. you beat me to it -pmsl

[JPA Cate]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

what I don't like is when everyone (for the most part) understand what someone met but the internet english police come out

^^^^Lovely.

However, many of the errors that we see in posts are due to mis-typing; some are misspellings of homonyms, such as due for do, which spellchecks won't flag, so are hard to spot; some are because someone may not know how to spell, a particular word and makes up a spelling for it.

None of that is what the OP requested, and with a "please" and "thank you", that we try to keep to a minimum the infamous internet abbreviations. I think it was a reasonable ask, and I will try. Once one gets used to them, they're quite handy. But I think it's a big ask to expect a non-native English speaker to try and decipher them, and it will certainly take away from his/her appreciation of the post: especially idiosyncratic ones, like "rodlmao."

Here's one I just made up French: NAV. It stands for Nous Aimons Volant, or (roughly) We Love Sailing. Since the words are different, so are the abbreviations. So pretend you're the OP, he has to take " lmao', look it up and then wonder about the donkey because that's what his dictionary says "ass" is. So now he's gotta go to a slang dictionary. Third dictionary in one post. Like I said, I think it was a reasonable request.

[Andrew Troup]

I personally have a perverse interest in, and occasional difficulty with understanding, what seems to be (so far) largely a North American habit

It seems likely (to me) to have originated from a phonetic spelling of a formulation which, by its very nature, is likely to be spoken in a disengaged drawl:

"I could not care less" > "I couldn't care less" > "I couldn care less" > I could care less

(Strangely enough, the "L" in "could" seems to escape the phonetic spelling police drawl-net !)


Similarly with "I could give a damn" and with "me either" ...

(although I think the latter is more an affectation of style, because "me neither" is barely more difficult to say)


Other recent examples of omitted negation:

"2 yrs ago I was anchor at Kiptopeke and went in for a swim.... could get back aboard without wifes help ... I decided to do something about that"

Another CF poster (articulate and literate beyond any reasonable reproach):
having altruistically returned the anchor on a moored boat whose owner he didn't know, after the mooring pendant fouled it and flipped it off the bow roller, recently posted:

"I mentioned it to the guys at the local boat yard, and asked them to add a new pendant or notify the owner, but they seemed to care less."

In this context, you might argue "less" was short for "less than not at all" or some such ... but the same explanation doesn't work for "I could care less"

The only sensible translation I can imagine is that it was short for "They seemed unable to care less"

and this:

"My tax dollars should go to support other countries..." from a person who clearly thought the opposite, in fact, one might describe his views on the matter as forceful.

- - - -

This fashionable omission of negation, or Under-negation, has spread, and (being sensitised) I now see it everywhere.

Stage II will presumably see it spread across the face of the planet (American vices being much more universal in their appeal than American virtues) -
I've already see occasional examples starting to appear here, downunder.

- - - -

There is also (and this is not driven by laziness, perhaps, again, by 'style')

Over-negation

as in "Unloosen"

("On any electric windlass, whether it's vertical or horizontal, you can unloosen the clutch--usually by using a winch handle--and the anchor will free-fall")

and then there's chronic over-negation:

"You can't fail to not miss it" (four and counting !)

- - - - - - -

In the interests of fairness and balance, here's a seeming over-negation, which struck a jarring note when I first read it.

But when I think about it, it makes more sense than the accepted formulation:

Skip Allen's log, written while wining the '08 Transpac, reads:

<<There was no doubt that if (the) tiller pilot was lost that we would round up and be at the mercy of these breaking waves, some of which I estimated to be in the vicinity of 25-35 feet, and as big as I hadn't seen since the '79 Fastnet Race storm on Imp>>.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by rgscpat

Wether? Don't they have a lot of those in the Oz and Kiwi lands, along with the rams and ewes?

There's nothing wrong with a good wether.
More hardy than a ewe they can be smart and fast... Well, smart for a sheep! I have chased a few little buggers around the bush in my time but the worst was a spritely bastard that got away in the centre of Perth, Western Australia, late one night and didn't he give us hell trying to catch him! Needless to say all the drunken louts hanging out of the Pub never gave us a hand to help, just lots of "advice".
But, all in all, ewes are better looking

[sailorchic34]

One small issue with native English speaking, is depending on where the native English speaker lives, affects the dialect just a tiny bit. Myself I was raised in the southern US, but my Mom was from New York.

So my spoken English is a mix of New York English /Pennsylvanian dutch and a southern drawl. Sort of Amish meets southern hillbilly. Its English, sort of, but not quite how the folks on the other side of the pond or down under speak it.


I'll be gitt'n better at talk'n to ya'll, best ey can.

[Andrew Troup]

I used to have a wether goat. Erik.

Erik the half-a-goat. Being a wether, he could hardly be accused of being an entire goat, although half is not doing him justice ... by half.

He tended my garden, being my solution when my houseproud neighbours complained that my weeds were shading their vegetable patch.

On occasions, being upwardly mobile as goats by nature seem to be, he would leap onto the roof of his hutch and pretend to be a weathercock. (wether-cock?) It was an exceptionally narrow ridge (4" x 2" on edge) so his hooves would be in a straight line. I used to half fancy I could hear the faint whine of gyros from somewhere deep within him ...

I don't have a photo handy of him doing that, but here's a random shot of him, clipped to the clothes line, whiling away time by standing on whatever came to hoof (in this case, a pile of tyres, preparatory no doubt to snacking on my washing (he's studiously pretending to be studying something else interesting, for my benefit):




PS: "But, all in all, ewes are better looking" sounds like the sort of pickup line which could be devastatingly effective when approaching a bunch of sheilas standing at a bar

[Celestialsailor]

Well at least the Valley scene has faded in the US. I thought my brain was going to explode.

Star Wars - Valley Speak - YouTube

[monstads]

Originally Posted by MarkJ

There's nothing wrong with a good wether.
More hardy than a ewe they can be smart and fast... Well, smart for a sheep! I have chased a few little buggers around the bush in my time but the worst was a spritely bastard that got away in the centre of Perth, Western Australia, late one night and didn't he give us hell trying to catch him! Needless to say all the drunken louts hanging out of the Pub never gave us a hand to help, just lots of "advice".
But, all in all, ewes are better looking

And here I thought it was in Kiwiland that the men were brave, and the sheep frightened ..

DAR!! (stolen from a post above)