I didn’t say that I don’t think it’s rude; I said I don’t automatically think it’s rude in all cases, especially in the cites given in this thread for Walloon’s corrections.
It seems like he was attempting to be helpful, so if the same happened to me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t take offense.
Only when they say something like, “Hey, Ma’am!”
Only if they look like pumpkins, smell like bananas and taste like Treet.
Just the ones with a return address of “T. Kaczynski”.
What the heck is Treet?
Er… wait. I’m wrong about that; Armour makes Treet and Hormel makes Spam.
They just sound like they’re siblings.
Wow. Where’s that barfing smiley they keep promising us?
How bad is imitation SPAM? Good lord, it’s not even good enough to be SPAM! I hope they don’t market it as food.
HEY WALLOON look at your posts…
YOU CAN"T SPELL WORTH SHIT ASS HOLE!
YOU WANNA GO HEAD TO HEAD WITH A REAL LIVE COPY EDITOR???
BRING IT ON!!!
YOU SUCK DICK
SINCERELY
your momma
That was so hot.
Actually, “medias” as the plural of singular “media” has been around just as long as singular “media” itself. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations of both terms from 1927:
[quote]
[ul][li]1927 Amer. Speech III. 26 It was finally decided to allot a definite media to each member.1927 Amer. Speech, III. 26 One of the best advertising medias in the middle west.[/ul][/li][/quote]
IMHO the trouble with apostrophising plurals is that it makes the language less clear. It’s like choosing to spell every word ‘red.’ Of course, some people choose to do it, and there are some reasons why it might be better (eg. distinguishing it from a singular) but when your usage is making english less clear, in some sense, that is worse, not just in my red.
No it isn’t. When you listen to someone speaking in English, do you stop them every time they say a word ending in S and ask them if the word was supposed to be a plural, a possessive, both, or neither? Didn’t think so. Context is more than sufficient to distinguish plurals from possessives in the vast majority of cases, be they in speech or in writing.
Don’t get me wrong – the apostrophe is a convenient marker when used consistently, and can serve to clear up some ambiguous constructions in highly technical writing. But unless I’ve been explicitly asked to employ my copy-editing skills on a piece of text, I’m not going to pull a Walloon and get floral on your asses every time I see you write “potato’s” to refer to more than one tuber, or “its” as the contraction for “it is”. Unlike some people, I don’t have some compelling need to demonstrate my imagined intellectual superiority over others by picking nits over obscure linguistic minutiae.
But by christ you’re good at it if you put your mind to it.
In summary, media can be singular or plural. The more scholarly usage is plural, and the more popular usage is plural. Such differences in usage are common in English.
Walloon has attempted to impose his or her usage preference on others, has done so by asserting an assumed and unproven authority that usages other than his or her preference are incorrect rather than different, and has done so by interrupting an an unrelated discussion.
The phrase “pedantic ass” comes to mind.
(And yes, in my past life I was an English professor and senior technical writer.)
Correction: The more scholarly usage is plural, and the more popular usage is singlar.
Sigh.
Singlar?
Hee hee.
I learned a new word: prescriptive. Cool.
I like “octopodes,” too.
Would it be zucchinus or zucchinum?
LMAO
Let’s see if third time is lucky: singular.
Zucchino, actually. It’s from Italian, not Latin. Well, most recently, anyway.
Just found a thread on a hunt for a hit-and-run spelling corrector. Makes you wonder what motivated our good friend Walloon to join in. Returning to the scene of the crime, perhaps?
