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

I've always been aware of a use of "abroad" to mean prowling/wandering about in the neighbourhood or immediate vicinity. Is that the same as your "mother in law talking about there being tea abroad"?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

..and I will totally continue not to do so until my head's in a better state! Still, 747's are better than tumbleweed...

>>747's are better than tumbleweed

Are you talking about the taming of the American West, or some type of cocktail?

No, my 747's a 747!!

this semi-deliberate obscurantism will cease at 1200 hours tomorrow.

I found one of the most annoying observations offered by the Grammar checker was the frequency with which it chastised me about using the 'passive voice'. Cheek! I'm quite assertive, thank you.

Fortunately, I figured how to stop it from evey doing that again.

Aggressively yours,

Kaeori

What annoys me is the way it tells you. "This sentence appears to be in the Passive Voice!" as if that were a problem! The passive voice has its uses.

I find the percentage of passive sentences in the readability statistics useful. It's a rough guide to how formal your document is, anf from that you can modify your language accordingly, e.g. 45% passive sentences for an essay is almost certainly too high.

I agree with Gnomon that the "This sentence appears to be in the Passive Voice!" is telling me off ....

If the word "appears" were to be left out, it would then just be stating a fact without apportioning the blame (all of it) to me !!

I'd say it's a warning rather than a telling off. Too many passives can make you sound bureaucratic, i.e. stilted and less clear - though of course they're preferable sometimes.

Eh? could someone explain please? I know not what you mean!

As far as I know, the passive voice is used mainly for learned journals and formal documents, where it is often a sine qua non. You have to say, eg, 'a sample was taken' rather than 'I/we took a sample', or 'the results were considered satisfactory' rather than 'I/we considered...'

It must be very annoying having a computer tell you that you are using the passive when that was your deliberate intention. Can you, when you are writing formally, set it to warn you that you are using the active voice when you should be using the passive? I think that would be far more useful.

The h2g2 guidelines for the Edited Guide deprecate the use of the first person. But although they don't say so, I think this usually means the first person singular. Certainly, in a recent Entry I used the plural, 'We often find...', 'We try to achieve...', etc, not in the personal sense of a specific group of people but in a general sense. The alternatives would be either the rather distant 'People often find...' or the passive 'It is often found...' etc, which in that context would have been far too formal and stilted.

Which is as close as I can get to a fleetful of 747's, which is what I posted yesterday. If I'm ever to be allowed near an English classroom again, I have to do better

The example I used was probably unhelpful. Let's try again - chin up, here come the clarity police:

1. They failed to completely understand what he meant.
2. They failed completely to understand what he meant.
3. They failed to understand completely what he meant.
4. They failed to understand what he meant completely.
5. They completely failed to understand what he meant.

These 5 sentences have two possible meanings:

A. They only partly understood what he meant.
B. They did not understand what he meant at all.

The desired meaning in this case is A. The sentences can have meanings A or B as follows:
1: A only. 2: A or B. 3: probably A, but it's very clumsy. 4: A or B 5: B only.
OK so I was wrong, 4 is actually ambiguous. So there we are, sometimes the split infinitive is the only clear word order. Yay.

Yes, this is an annoying pedantic-but-wrong feature of Word's grammar checker. Either of these is fine: 'the box which is on the table' or 'the box that is on the table'. But note that 'the box, which is on the table,...' has a different meaning.

OK, i believe you but why does it?

I would read all three examples as refering to a box on a table. Only the first two would be saying it is on the table as clarification, i.e. as opposed to other boxes which may be littering the room.

I would read the third as refering to a box on the table, but that it was obvious from some other context (i.e. only box in view or already identified previously in the conversation) which box was refered to and that the '..., which is on the table' was a kind of aside. Perhaps to reinforce an earlier point. I suppose, if there had been an argument about said box, and where one of the points of contention was its location, but another might be say its colour. So the full version might be

'the box, which is on the table, is blue'

The main argument and assertion is that the box is blue but I am also saying i believe it to be on the table, although that is ot the main point in question.

Sorry if that is none too clear.

Where be I going wrong then?

Sorry, Gnomon,

I wasn't picking on you personally, just youngsters in general. In my day it was made clear that by combining things together: shoes into a pair, pheasants into a brace, cows into a herd, sardines into a tin, you feched up with a singular subject and it was jolly bad form to have the verb agree with the plural components because the force of the sentence was to aggregate them into a single entity; notwithstanding the fact that the items (plural) were closer to the verb than the (singular) subject governing the verb.


"There is a group of people which is obscuring my view of the eclipse.
There is a group of people who believe the eclipse signals the end of the world.

In the first one, the group is doing the obscuring, so I use "which is". In the second, it is not the group which is doing the believing, it is the individual people who are each believing, no doubt in subtly different, ways that the end of the world is nigh.

So I stand by my original statement:

"There is a group of people who believe ..." is considered good grammar."

I accept, without hesitation, that what you say is commonplace, "but it is illogical, Captain." If you go to the trouble of collecting people into a group, you should have the courage of your conviction and treat it accordingly rather than allow it to fragment when it encounters the hurdle of a verb.

So, no self-respecting Vulcan nor pedant could accept your thesis.

I blame teachers who think that "parsing a sentence" is a misprint for stopping a cassette recorder, various governments for mucking up the educational system and the BBC which allows expressions such as "the Government are intending ...." to be broadcast.

So there.

Thanks, Plaguesville. It is a while since I have been put in a group with "youngsters in general".

You shouldn't encourage me, ~jwf~.
(NB for "feched" please read "fetched" )

Before I put away my ranting hat, I can live with Word's "passive" alert but what really gets my goat is "Long sentence (no suggestions)". I know when it's a long sentence - I typed all of it; and, what is more, I typed it in such a fashion as to be a masterpiece of logic and grammatical construction so no dumb piece of software could possibly improve on it. So what are you saying, Word? Are you complimenting my ability to string together more than a couple of words? If so, why not "220 words, a new personal best!"
Maybe I should switch off the option. Perhaps I shall investigate the threshold that trips the remark before I do that.

Harrumph.

Hi, Gnomon,

Sorry, didn't see you there in the sandpit, the sun was shining in my old eyes. Now, pay attention, this is the best way to build a sandcastle ...

> ...
> So, no self-respecting Vulcan nor
> pedant could accept your thesis.

In the words of the late Queen Mother: Respec!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"