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

Aarghh! I hit post too soon. I was going to say that fifty posts in six months may reach 200000 posts in 128 years. Six posts a day will reach that total 1.5 years from now.

Let's have a concerted effort then. This (singing in concert) is going to involve a lot a simulposts.
* shades of rallying troops and old cars and possibly (in my case, anyway) returning to good health

PS I think you may be multiplying the required number by 10

Actually, the target was too high by a factor of 10. I said 200000 posts. The target is 20000 posts, in which case we need 3200 more posts (approximately). 3200/6 = 533.3, or just under 1.5 years.

Reminds me of the mild despair I so often felt
when 'English' classes were followed by 'Maths'.

Nothing worse than that feeling of incompetence and
uncertainty when the only certainty is a feeling of
incompetence and uncertainty.


~jwf~

I was pushed into doing languages as my marks for "arts" were supposedly better than those for "sciences". A few years too late I found out my O level Maths marks were almost perfect; in those days we were told only P or F.
I think I'd have been a good engineer (not really a possibility for girls in 1959)but I did manage to parlay English language into a happy life wandering from 1965 to 2008.
I wrote 'parlay' automatically and then thought perhaps I had spelt it wrongly; I hadn't. Not connected with 'parley'.

That was cruel.

But asking people to post to a thread for the sake of reaching a number is just silly.

All numbers are good.

Personally, I wasn't asking people to post for the sake of reaching a number. The whole thing was kicked off by a reference to post 1, which referred to the original thread reaching 4000 or so. I merely drew a comparison to highlight how much further this thread had got, post-wise. It makes no difference to me when, or even if, this thread reaches 20000 posts.

jwf, I'm extremely good at maths (by most people's standards) but can't do arithmetic. I also glaze over if people start taking numbers and have to get out a piece of paper. Hence my apparent miscalculation.

By the way, the British English thread has always prided itself on reaching such a size while still staying more-or-less on roc. Anyone can reach by 20,000 posts by posting rubbish.

For roc read topic. The joys of smartphones.

Just mulling over some history, King Henry VIII and his insistence that everyone speak "the King's English", meaning his own; the gradual demise of the middle English of Sir Thomas More (though as late as the early middle colonial era, Bishop Berkeley was still writing in middle English); the inception of the standards of spelling and punctuation of modern English during the Shakespeareian era; the split between American English and British English, beginning with the 1st Judiciary Act of Congress after adoption of the American Constitution; Sir Winston Churchill's famous complaint of WW II vintage that the British and the Americans were 'two peoples divided by a common language'; the post WW II accords designed to return usages and standards to a common standard between the two. ...

English may be an international language, but British English isn't used by the majority of English speakers. I did an OU course two years ago that looked at the way the language is used around the world. Before I started the course I was aware of the different varieties in nations where English is the mother tongue, but varieties like Singlish and Manglish (Singapore and Malaysia) were a revelation.

There's a quote by Mark Twain somewhere in one of my course books, something to the effect of the British no longer being majority share holders in the English language. (I'll have to try to find the exact quote.) If it was true in his day, it has to be even more true today.

I stick as closely as possible to standard English for any serious purpose, but may go to dialect for flavor if the purpose is social or recreational.gravitation at

Pardon the machine error above. Omit everything after 'recreational'.

The word program I'm using is still in beta testing.gravitation to

That was something else that came up in the course - people don't use language the same way in all situations. My vocabulary varies depending on who I'm with. I suspect that my accent changes, too. I'm not as extreme as some - I don't use dialect words, for example - but the change is noticeable, to me any way.

I live in Madrid. At the work place I use standard Spanish in pronunciation, that is, the one from the center, the castillian one. However, when I go to my hometown, I speak dialect, andalusian, which is not uniform in all the region. My area is a lisping one and vocabulary is also different.

Out of my work I use a mix of castillian and Andalusian accent, the more relaxed and confident I´m the more Andalusian I speak.

Sometimes I drop the -s in written and oral English.... that´s not being relaxed, just lack of using it orally.

In Mecca, CA, where the nearest post office to my home is located, they speak 'Spanglish', a blend of Spanish and English.

The wild west dialect of my early formative years has many loan words derived from Spanish and throughout the American southwest, Spanish place names are a commonplace.

For example, the nearest mountains to my home are the Orocopias and the Santa Rosas, the highest peak of the Santa Rosas is Mt. San Jacinto at over 9000ft/2750m.

Joshua Tree National Park at about 7000ft/2100m is located where the Orocopia range joins the San Bernardino Mts., highest peaks over 10,000ft/3000m.

The valley floor between is called the Coachella Valley, the lowest point at the Salton Sea is 226ft/69m below sea level.

'Coachella' thought to be derived from 'conchilla' on account of the many small sea shells in the soil observed by the early Spanish explorers.

In a village next to the Gibraltar frontier, La Línea de la Concepción, people also use spanglish, with the andalusian touch.

This blending fenomenon happens a lot (I would say always, but I´m not sure)In Spain at least it happens in the frontier with Portugal, and in the French one too. Here Catalán gives to french and viceversa.