In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, John Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >Roy > >Every now and again this board indulges in bouts of mental gymnastics. >You have taken part in the past, but not this time. >Why then are you complaining. To be honest it was not really a complaint more of a joke on the nature of 'full stop' but most of this lengthy discussion, with the exception of entries like Lau's, was hardly mental gymnastics but mostly and exercise in pedantry. I didn't take part because I found it mostly boring. Language evolves. Rules change. The language used by Chaucer was different from that of Shakespeare by a vast degree which was the more correct? It shifts like sand. The rules that we use today owe more to a repressive education system trying hard to glue sand during the end of the 19th and early 20th Century. Go back to an earlier time and no one was fretting about where the apostrophe goes. (In this instance mostly up some people's semi-colon.)
What of Joyce and Ulysses? What of Flan O'Brien and 'At Swim Two Birds'? What of Brian Aldiss and 'Barefoot in the Head'? What about the whole host of artistic, creative and inventive geniuses who bent and screwed language with no thought for any of this? Anyhow there you are. I was bored. I made a joke - you didn't get it. No problem. I get just as bored sometimes when people get deeply technical and I often make silly, puerile, jokes then too. Don't turn this into another argument because I am not playing. -- Roy Wood Q Branch. 20 Locks Hill, Portslade, Sussex.BN41 2LB Tel: +44 (0) 1273 386030 fax: +44 (0) 1273 430501 skype : royqbranch web : www.qbranch.demon.co.uk _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
