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

It's not a problem. Google ignores punctuation anyway.

I didn't learn it at school, either (the bit about abbreviations not having a dot if the last letter etc etc)

I may have learned it during secretarial training. We were taught the version with all the dots, and without, as the 70s was a transitional period in the formatting of business letters. It is certainly easier on the paper and on the typist with a manual typewriter to leave out dots and commas all together.

Old:

John Smith, Esq.,
Station Str.,
Birmingham.

New:

John Smith Esq (Or Mr John Smith)
Station Str
Birmingham

I suppose the dots for abbreviated words which still have the same last letter is somewhere between the two extremes. These days nobody cares anyway, as secretaries are extinct and everyone writes their own correspondence and many make a terrible mess of it.

Bosses who can't spell and have no grasp of grammar - Pah! Where's the "Petty Hates" thread?

I regularly get e-mails from a friend:

Hey guy's, whats the deal?

>> I know that h2g2 House Style insists on us abandoning all such stops...<<

Must be the new millendeum.

One wonders how many old printers and newspaper magnets must be spinning in their morgues thinking how much ink they could have saved over a lifetime.
~j~

In the days of restrictive practics in the Fleet Street 'chapels', typesetters manage to negotiate exorbitant rates for fancy-schmancy stuff like punctuation marks and diacritics.

And as Kurt Vonnegut said:
'Never use semi-colons; they are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.'

I've been mulling over trousers. And their being plural.* I can see how matching examples of an originally singular garment - eg. a 'legging' - might have become both physically and linguistically joined. But look how strong the effect is:
Pants
Shorts
Breeches
Tights
Trunks
Culottes
Knickers
Knickerbockers
Plusfours
Jeans
Corduroys
Oxford Bags
Briefs
Drawers
Bloomers
Y-fronts
Kecks
Strides

A couple of exceptions:
Pantyhose
Thong (so miniscule as not to merit a plural?)








* To anyone except Trinny'n'Susanna and Gentlemen's Outfitters:
'Would sir prefer a slimmer trouser? Ooh! Suits you, sir.'

I believe that some of the garments to which you refer were originally single leg coverings. Hence, a 'pair of trousers'.
Hose are plural and pantyhose are tights in my idiolect.
scrupulously avoiding colons, let alone semi-colons

If hosen and schoon thou ne'er gav'st nane,
The wind shall prick thee to the bare bane.
-And Christ receive thy soule

Hmm. Are you sure 'hose' are plural? It looks from your quote that the plural is (or was) 'hosen. That would depend on whether the -n endings are plural or accusative. I've googled it...and while I know little of Old Scots...it does seem to have dropped accusatives by whenever it was written. Plus 'schoon' makes most sense as 'shoes'. But then again...that was an entirely different language to English. They had their own army an' all.

(Interestingly, in German they can be either 'die Hose' or 'die Hosen' - both plural)

Yes...as I said, I can see how a pair of (singular) leggings were turned into a plural garment. I can't quite see how a pair of briefs could be cut in half, though. Although I have heard of 'half a knicker'. (50p in the new money. )


for the erudite quote, btw.

My cunning punctuation could imply that it's only in my idiolect that they're plural, but, perhaps contraversially in this thread, Webster's agrees with me. Chambers doesn't seem to have an opinion. My other dozen English dictionaries are still packed in the attic and therefore the other end of the building site that is currently chez Wand'rin.
Both my downstairs dictionaries give a derivation from AS hosa. I would assume that 'hosen and schoon' were accusative ! (the previous 'verse' starts "If e'er thou gav'st hosen and schoon")
Time was when I could recite the whole thing, but that WAS in another country:childhood.
However, I have just wasted half an hour trying to come up with a plausible definition for 'flete'in the second line:"Fire and flete and candlelighte". Over to you ~jwf~

Uhm...

Chaps!
http://www.jaminleather.net/images/c74310ttc_1.jpg


~jwf~

Yes, indeed. Though presumably a one-legged cowboy would wear a chap.

(I'm a little nervous about clicking on links relating to leather chaps at work)

And I'm going nowhere near the 'Hos In Hose' site.

Hubby is just finishing off a cake he bought called "Grannies Cake". Fruit cake has fruit in it, coffee & walnut cake has coffee and walnuts in. So I have to assume that hubby's "Grannies Cake" contains grannies.

An obvious combination of bad grammar and homonym. (My dictionary gives grannie as an alternative spelling for granny, but it's not one I've ever seen. Either way, there's an apostrophe missing.)

years back I recall a cartoon in a biker mag about a woman being very pleased with her pair of leather chaps for christmas

>> I have just wasted half an hour trying to come up with a plausible definition for 'flete'in the second line:"Fire and flete and candlelighte". Over to you ~jwf~ <<

As you well know, time spent with dictionaries is never a waste of time so I'll excuse your dramatic phrasing for the opportunity to 'waste' some of mine.

Unbelievably, the Cambridge online shows no listing. I say unbelievable because dicdotcom quotes Chaucer:

"Flete
Flete\, v. i. [See Fleet, v. i.] To float; to swim. [Obs.] "Whether I sink or flete." --Chaucer."

And a Spanish dictionary (Chaucer loved Spain) shows 'flete' in the sense of a ship's cargo.

But any sense of 'floating' and 'boating' does seem unlikely in the context of fire and candlelight. So I'm going out on a limb here to suggest that it could be a 'typo' handed down unknowingly from a mis-reading of the old stylized 'S' for 'F'. Perhaps the word was originally 'slete' and the image refers to the sensory atmosphere of sitting in a candlelit room, beside a roaring fire as sleet and wind howl out of doors in the darkness. But then my perspective is skewed by my incurable romanticism and an over familiarity with the cold comforts of a Canadian winter.


~jwf~

According to Wikipedia, flete here means floor, presumably a wooden floor as opposed to the packed earth floor that was found in hovels. Fire and flete and candlelight are all the comforts of home. Tolkien uses the word 'flet' to mean a wooden platform in a tree (in Lothlorien), which is obviously the same word.

Uhm... yes, obviously.

~j~

Your comment about flete and sleet reminds me of the Vicar of Dibley:

Ye are the fault of the earth and fainted... sainted. God shall feel... seal your endeavours until ye fit on his right hand. Therefore fight the good fight, for his... fake, and he shall be thy fu...
*Succour!* He shall be thy succour.

Neither you, nor your dictionaries convince me, chaps. In this context I don't see either fire or candlelight as comforting, as the penalty for not having fed the poor is being thrown into the fire.
The candles are (I think)put round the corpse.
(For anyone who wasn't given The Oxford Book of English Verse for their 11th birthday, the poem's called 'The Lyke Wake Dirge' which means 'song for a dead body'