Comments on: Fiber jazz

By: Pushing String » S.A.B.L.E.

Pushing String » S.A.B.L.E. — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:09:27 +0000

[...] gives her take on our fiberrific outing (or would that be “fibriffic” spelled her way?). I guess I needn’t have been so [...]

By: Eve

Eve — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:05:28 +0000

Ian: I hate to tell you, but “fit” as the past tense of “fit” is perfectly good American English! I feel your pain as you try to squeeze ambiguity out of language, but I suspect it’s impossible to get all the way there… As a former technical editor I always use the series (“Harvard”) comma for this reason, but a fair number of other people who review my writing keep trying to rip it out again. Sigh.

Dave: It’s done! I haven’t seen the actual duplicated items yet myself, but we’ve got ‘em. Sorry to disappoint on the fiber/jazz combination. (Just remembered this: One of my teachers, Karen, also referred to “whole-wheat love” and “high-fiber knitting”, but what she meant was the act of signing up for a knitting course because you thought it would be good for you, not just because you thought you’d enjoy it. :) )

By: dwhite

dwhite — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:48:16 +0000

And here I thought Fiber Jazz was going to be about a diet of T. Monk and Flax Seed. How’s the CD coming?

By: Ian Clark

Ian Clark — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:43:06 +0000

Well, I’m giving up. The trend towards slovenly speech seems unstoppable. Is the past tense of “fit” not “fitted?” Can one say “I fit right in” less ambiguosly regarding tense. Is it the present or the past?

I read the other day, a newspaper report that said “Hilary Clinton found herself.” It caused me to reflect upon the use of the past continuous and wonder whether it was more correct to say “Hilary Clinton has found herself.”

While we’re at it, how do you construct a sentence which ends in a quote? Chicago Manual of Style dictates one should say ‘The password is “abc.$def.”‘ There is some ambiguity whether the password ends with “f” or “..” I mean a single “.,” but was constrained by having to include the punctuation mark. Dammit, I’ve done it again.

The ideal statement, or question, should identify an event with as little ambiguity as possible. “Fit” to describe events in the past does not, whereas an insistence on injecting punctuation BEFORE an ending quote creates confusion.

Regarding ambiguity, I just loved the notice that appeared in my village grocers…”Please do not sit your children on the counter by the bacon slicer as we are getting behind with our orders”.

By: Eve

Eve — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:32:13 +0000

Yeah, the source I linked does point out that talking about someone’s “knitted brow” is still correct. But I have a feeling it’ll be hard to break the habit of saying “I knitted that piece last month”. Maybe I’ll just have to resort to saying “I finished knitting…” in the fashion of the guy who didn’t know the plural of “goose”, writing to the butcher to buy two of them. (“Please send me a goose. p.s. Please send me another goose.” :-) )

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:43:10 +0000

Different senses of verbs do sometimes carry different inflections. “The sun shone brightly yesterday” (with no object) sounds fine, but “Harold shone his shoes yesterday” sounds stupid, and vice versa. So like the rest of us you probably talk about “fitted clothes” but you say “It used to fit”.

I too say “day-ta” and “stat-us”, and I’m a Hiberno-Deutsch goombah (in a purely spiritual sense, of course) from Jersey.