Learn by Repetition

This one is courtesy of yours truly. I almost just typed:

I’ll configure the e-mail features to be configurable, so you can change a config file to configure them.

I think I’m suffering from Mountain Dew deprivation.

Mr. Hyde

Josh: the only sport i’m into is mario kart

Kelli: ha
wow
not too into sports, are we?
i’m not really myself
really, myself
i am really myself

You’re two tents

I have a feeling I’m about to expose my ignorant Americanism – but that’s OK. I like getting news from the BBC, but they seem to have some trouble getting their verb tenses right.

• Septuplet couple ‘need support’
• China win women’s trampoline gold

The couple need? China win? I’m pretty sure those are both collective plurals, so that there’s only one couple, and there’s only one China. It sounds like the BBC writing staff “need” some grammar lessons.

Problems with the grammar

Found on a Sourceforge.net download page:

Problems with the download please use this direct link or try another mirror.

At first glance, these words do suggest some kind of understandable concept. But it seems to be communicated by less of a sentence structure and more of a stream of consciousness technique. It’s really quite literary.

Abolish the Run-On

From the Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty blog:

Yesterday Ron Paul endorsed Republican George Lilly, running in Colorado’s the 1st Congressional District, defeated Charles Crain for the right to take on six-term incumbent Denver Democrat Rep. Diana DeGette in the November general election.

If only Ron Paul’s minimalist views of government carried over into minimalist views of sentence structure. Amongst the violations: I’ve never seen a “the” used after a possessive before. It’s almost impossible to read the first clause without reading it as the main clause: “Ron Paul endorsed George Lilly.” That’s what happened, right? This probably could have been a whole paragraph. This is “the internets,” guys – we’re not killing trees here.

Parsing

Found on a random programming discussion board:

And frankly said, I don’t begrudge [sp?] any penny to a programmer who manages to correctly parse and decode any incarnation of the proprietary, badly (if at all) documented Word formats.

And *I* don’t begrudge any penny to a person who manages to correctly parse and decode any incarnation of that badly (if at all) written sentence. Seriously, dude, this is English, not Lisp. I read 18th century theology books, and *I* had trouble with that one.

Yes. I mean no.

“I think Heath Ledger will get a supporting actor nomination, he did have enough screen time to be considered the lead.”

Let’s ignore for a moment the run-on nature of this sentence. There are few grammatical mistakes more jarring than leaving out a negative. He’ll only get the supporting nomination, although he “did” have enough screen time to be the lead? Sigh.

Words, When Used Right

“Action speaks louder than words. But words, when used right, overwhelms any action” – someone in a random forum, quoting himself in his own message signature

And, when used incorrectly, “words overwhelms” me even more!