Yeah, for me the first syllable is more like the “oo” in “book” than the “oo” in “boo.” So, “wuh” might be a closer non-IPA approxiamtion. So /wʊs/ if you’re doing IPA.
You wuss, Tully. Don’t be shy! It’'ll be your turn ere long
I’d like to go back to cats. I missed the cats.
But are there any ultimatums*?
*Yes, the plural would be ultimata, if we were speaking Latin, but I think in this particular context, “ultimatums” works better.
beware the penultimatum
Sounds like a flasher.
He creeps at night, and suddenly, there he is…SECOND TO LAST! HE WILL ACCEPT NO OTHER POSITION! Offer him anything else, and you will find out what real pain is!
His friends call him Mr. November.
But he was born in February. On the 28th. Of a Leap Year.
Somehow the sum of these two made me think of “automata ultimata.” Which caused me to ask: From “I’ll be back!” to our own @BeepKillBeep how many times in literature, film, etc., has a machine issued a dire threat or a “do it or else” line? Gotta be lots.
Which in turn raises the word choice question of whether “lots” is appropriate for a countable noun phrase or should that be “many”? How do the adjectives for qualitative quantity (is there an official term for that idea?) break down in applicability between countable vs. noncountable?
Great. Just when I’d made a dent in my insomnia.
One of my friends threw a hissy fit when he heard our waitress say “I’ll be right back with you guys’s checks.” Pronounced the same as “you guises.” My friend felt that the poor waitress did not deserve any tip at all after saying that.
She should have added “plus a constant”
I get it. Can anyone else explain it?
I can, but I probably should let someone else do it.
Well of course you can, Andy_L, it was your post.
I wasn’t taught that in grade 5. Also, I missed most of grade 4, and all of grade 6. I also missed most of the ‘hard’ spelling words, and, until this thread, thought that the possessive of “it” was written the way it is written in the constitution.
Am I excused?
I just don’t agree. The apostrophe started as a way to show letters had been omitted in speech. Possessives were originally written with an -es at the end, while possessive plurals just got an -e.
Granted, things can change from their origin (hence the etymological fallacy). But we don’t add an extra syllable to plural possessives, and often to certain other singular words, so the difference still seems to be in effect.
Besides, without that convention, I have no grammatically acceptable way of notating the difference when transcribing speech. I can’t write whether someone said “Jesus’ name” (JEE-zuhs NAEM) or “Jesus’s name” (JEE-zuh-sis NAEM).
I just believe that general writing (i.e., when not being deliberately formal) should try to reflect how people actually speak. Yes, that includes that parenthetical I included–it describes how I speak. So does the em-dash.
It’s also why I think the New York Times’ overuse of commas is annoying. I find it difficult to read, as the voice in my head pauses too much. I have to mentally translate it to “normal” speech.
(Not that this means one should overuse commas where they don’t fit grammatically. When necessary and significant, there are other ways to illustrate such… pauses.)
I have an ex girlfriend whose mom says “you’s guys”. Probably standard in the Brooklyn area according to TV and movies. Not Milwaukee. She’s the only one I’ve met in this region that says it.
That is spelt “youse”, not “you’s”.