h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Our belated apologies to those of you who have received emails about posts you made to h2g2 as many as four years ago. Unfortunately, a severe technical glitch on Friday pushed thousands of old foreign language postings into our moderation queue. In order to get to the newest postings we had to deal with a substantial number of postings in a very short period of time and so some errors were made. It also meant we concentrated our resources on clearing the backlog, hence this rather late announcement. We thank those of you affected for your patience.

However, we would like to take this opportunity to clarify some things. First of all, as we are ultimately responsible for the content on h2g2 (and it is impossible for us to do this if we don't speak the language in which it is posted) then it is very likely that postings not in English will be removed. Additionally, the content on h2g2 is constantly subject to review and so there's no guarantee that because a post that has been passed previously it will remain up on the site indefinitely.

Never a dull moment on hootoo is there?

My world is full of oddities like that - I have stopped noticing them

In the second sentence of the second paragraph of the version of this announcement on the main page - but not the version in this thread - you are missing the word "we".

Ladies and gentlemen, BureauGris- pedant extraordinaire!

Egon most of that sentence is foreign

Bureau

Gris

pedant

extraodrinaire

... and shouldn't Gentlemen by capitalised?

HIDE IT!!!!

Well, maybe. It's also possible that "Ladies" was only capitalized here because it started the sentance.

*Wonders if he posted anything four years ago that might not be deemed suitable. Decides that he probably didn't*

Yes, I would say I would have to be using "gentlemen" as a title for it to be automatically capitalised.

Ah, ok... that explains things. I though someone was trailing through my old postings.

Still a pity about the languages, though. What ever happened to the TransVol [TranslatorVolunteers] scheme?


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I only see one foreign word: gris. Maybe someone intended to say "Ambergris," a whale byproduct, and lost all but the suffix?

Bureau is a type of furniture found in the bedroom, unless it's part
of a governmental unit (example: Federal Bureau of Investigation)

A pedant is a scholar with little or no sense of humor.

Extraodrinaire is not a word at all, unless it's a badly spelled French word. Is bad spelling a cause for moderation?

The word Bureau is originally French, as is ohowever the hell you spell extrordinaire.

If bad spelling got you moderated, my typos would have got me banned from the site by now...

extroadinaire is also French is origin. And pedant is from Latin.

ex·traor·di·nary
Etymology: Middle English extraordinarie, from Latin extraordinarius
It's not French.

Perhaps a post for the Common Misconceptions thread - wherever that's gotten to.

Webster's

One entry found for extraordinaire.


Main Entry: ex·traor·di·naire
Pronunciation: ik-"stro(r)-d&n-'er, ek-
Function: adjective
Etymology: French

*Decides to brush up on her French, Latin, English and whatever goes just sitting here*

Considering Middle English stems from post Norman conquest this could explain it.

Ahh, that explains those* Emails I got, I had put it down to a glitch in teh matrix, but clearly it was not, what confussed me was that I had no recollection of having made the posts in question... Being four or something years ago would certainly help explain that... Is backward writing considered a forign language BTW? .ti esu semitemos I