[sdiy] OT: grammar, spelling and communication

[Christopher Randall]

>
> to: As in "I went to the surplus store." "I was going to buy one of 
> those."

It should be noted that, while it is generally considered bad form to 
end an English sentence with a preposition, it isn't, like, against the 
law or anything. It's mainly a holdover from Latin, where a noun _must_ 
have a corresponding preposition. When writing and speaking English, 
context is less important (go figure...) so, if you're the daring sort, 
you can just leave those prepositions hanging out there waving in the 
wind. Chances are, no one will notice anyways, since the Intardweb is a 
Petri dish filled with agar agar, where bad grammar will thrive like a 
colony of mutant Escherichia coli.

While we're on the subject, my main pet peeve, grammatically speaking, 
is qualifying the word "unique." Something that is unique is, by 
definition, one of a kind. There aren't any degrees of uniqueness. 
Something can't be "very unique" or "almost unique" or "extremely 
unique." This drives me absolutely batty.

Chris Randall

http://www.audiodamage.com
http://www.analogindustries.com
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