Assume v. Presume

You don't think the original also lacked commas or clarifying extra words?

"Boy, aged 6, found alive, after air crash kills his parents"

You could just about get away with leaving out the "aged", but not the commas unless you intend the meaning to be in the eye of the beholder.

This reminds me of American headlines where (to save space) they tend to use commas as replacements for connecting words like "and" or "or" - as you might imagine this can result in confusion whether the connecting word should be "and" or "or" and what the true meaning of the headline is (only resolved by having to read the article).
 
Back in post 1 I alluded to curious v. inquisitive without further explanation then or since, and it seems to have slipped under everybody's radar.

Inquisitive seems to have dropped out of the language in favour of curious, but in my mind they are not synonymous.

"The mouse is a curious creature" - what does that mean? Is the mouse curious about its surroundings, or are we curious about the mouse? The former meaning is where it would be better to have said "the mouse is an inquisitive creature" - the meaning is obvious. Thus I prefer inquisitive as the intransitive and curious as the transitive form - but I doubt you will find that distinction in a dictionary.
 
I agree. Curious can also be used to mean strange and as you say its meaning is somewhat context sensitive or ambiguous.
I suspect it is used more than inquisitive partly because curious is shorter and easier to spell correctly, though 'nosy' has even bigger advantages in the right context.
 

Curiouser and curiouser! (gomezz was so much surprised, that for the moment he quite forgot how to speak good English);
 
:frantic::duel::mad:

Rarely have I woken so cross. News report: the English Spelling Society (whoever they are) think we should lose the silent letters in our language to make it easier to learn (eg the k in knee). Do they not realise there are no silent letters, just bad pronunciation?
 
I don't k-now what the world is coming to. Next they'll be taking apostrophes off road signs! Oh, wait...

So, would know be written now? That isn't confusing at all.

What about vowel di-graphs, or tri-graphs come to that? 'mericans have already ditched at least one quad-graph.
 
That would be an excellent counter to the English Spelling Society's position: let's construct a sentence which would be totally incomprehensible without the "silent" letters.

First offering (not great):

Is that what you know now?
 
I think they're planning to be selective. Ridiculous.

In the interest if equality in learning, I think that people with speech impediments should also be able to spell to ease their learning. Fink that's a good idea?

If it's true, it's interesting that English children take longer to become literate than their European counterparts. I believe that English has a lot more words than most languages though which could be a factor.

While some silent letters were originally pronounced, some are from historical misrepresentations of a language the author didn't really understand. If we lose silent letters then what happens to etymology?
 
There are no "silent" letters in etymology (boom boom)

So you are saying that they would only substitute new spellings for words where the new word would be unique? Do they not realise that cough is not pronounced cof (or even coff)?
 
I recall a programme that said that Welsh was the best language for morse code due to the natural redundancy in the language. Like in English when you receive a Q but miss the next letter..
 
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