See, there you go again… oh wait. A prescriptivist? Do carry on!
“Doesn’t shine.”
“Don’t” is punchier.
Your location now says Santa Fe. Missed going there. I used to ski in Taos every year, and as much as I wanted to make a side trip, we were so dead set on skiing every breathing minute that there was just no time. Maybe sometime in the future.
Cheers!
Next Ice Age maybe? Things are not going well this winter in the southwest.
Yay?
Although I’ve got my eye on some of you… 
Ewww. Get it off me, get it off me! It’s gross and weird and gooey!
One word, Shakespeare.
Yep. Like ketchup, only more of a peeled grape vibe.
Yeah, you can include him too. [the poster not the real thing]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Morgenstern
You know, it’s a damn shame, but the Irish got all the humor, all the pretty women and of course, most of the good ale. The British and the Scots got nothing but kilts and stiff noses. Frankly, I think that’s why God detached Ireland and moved it so far from away from England and Scotland when he was making the world.
One word, Shakespeare.
I feel obligated to include single malt Scotch whisky here. It may not have been invented by the Scots, but they refined barley distillation to an art form.
Yeah, whisky got a lot better when that Pete guy got involved.
And his girlfriend Sherry Cask.
Him again. Isn’t he the one who popped up to white-knight PCarolinus?
Mmmm… Sherry Cask
I’d sit with her Speyside.
Posting just as a poster here, you were the one who was acting like a jerk in that thread. No one owes you a complete dissertation on the structure of the universe in their first post. Riemann was consistently politer to you than you deserved; you got snarky and obnoxious in your very second post. Reimann was not at fault in that thread, you were. You were acting like a petulant child, as you’ve continued to do here. And you’re so butt hurt about having your poor widdle feelings hurt that you have to come to the Pit to insult him, and then blame him when he responds to you?
You know, you’re both informed and valued posters here, and the most regrettable part of Chimera’s absurd little hissy fit is that it served to revive this conflict between you.
The prescriptivism argument was probably far from the greatest of our difficulties. But let’s get one thing straight, pal: the irony of it all is that I was never a rigorous prescriptivist in the sense in which such mavens are usually disparaged, and in recent years have come so far over to the dark side that I believe I’ve argued (possibly more than once) that a sentence like “Alice and me are going to the movies” is actually acceptable. And I’m positively frothing at the mouth about the correctness of a construction like “If only you were as clever as me” and believe that anyone who insists on “… as clever as I” should be introduced to some of the great writers in English literature, and then should be held upside down with his head in a toilet bowl to think it over.
My adherence to the vestiges of true prescriptivism remains directed at idiots who butcher the language horribly out of sheer laziness or stupidity. I’ve read Why English Won’t - and Can’t - Sit Still (Like, Literally) by the apologist for extreme freewheeling descriptivism John McWhorter, and a lot of it is laughable bullshit. I would actually be interested in a civil discussion sometime about why it’s bullshit. BTW, there was about a five-minute snippet of interviews with high school students on the radio the other day about their views on the fentanyl abuse epidemic, and I swear I counted at least 68 occurrences of “like”. It’s not something that normally bothers me unless it’s really excessive, which this was, but I could just see McWhorter fiercely applauding this evolution of the language – evolution to a level of, like, elegant expressiveness that Shakespeare could not have dreamed of.* :rolleyes:
- I ended a sentence with a preposition. Throw me a bone.
If Riemann said “don’t shine”, then “don’t shine” is ipso facto correct. The lad is a raging descriptivist.
I felt I had a point to make about how Riemann can be arrogant and annoying sometimes, and having got that off my chest, I have no further axe to grind and am happy to patch things up. 
Yeah, you’ve made your point many times, so obviously it got you a bit upset too. Thanks for coming here to continue posting it. I hope you feel better now. :rolleyes:
I apologized to Riemann in a PM, if you must know. Got no response other than the public ‘Hey, he called me an asshole, so my over-the-top hyperbole was excusable’.
Don’t care. Moving on. Thanks for playing.