Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 22:31:45 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Top Posting, overquoting, grammatical errors, etc.
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 09:32 PM 3/28/05 -0500, Keith F. Lynch wrote:

>Of course there's also the issue of the *wrong* word.  A common one
>on the net is "loose" where "lose" is meant.  And of course the old
>classics: principle/principal, capital/capitol, discrete/discreet,
>compliment/complement, affect/effect, etc.  And the people who think
>that the purpose of an apostrophe is to warn that an "s" is coming.

I keep seeing "jive" for "jibe", as in, "That doesn't jive with what I
know."  Ditto with "tact" for "tack", as in "I'm taking a different tact on
that..."  Apparently none of these people sail.

I also keep wondering what "hobbiest" means..."the most hobby"?  I'm almost
certain they were flailing around trying to find "hobbyist".

What's with "hone"/"home", as with "I'll now hone in on the area of
greatest interest..."  I've never seen a honing pigeon, but they may be out
there...or maybe the guy is just planning to sharpen his wit before getting
to it?

And then there's the sports news "seed" thing.  I'm pretty sure it really
is "seed", but it makes very little sense in context.  "Seat" would make
more sense...as in "Buddy is currently fourth seat in the tournament," but
I've been told in the past that it's really "Buddy is currently fourth seed
in the tournament," which sounds goofy and I keep wondering at the origin
of this term.  Some part of me keeps wanting it to have been "seat" in the
past, until some jock-turned-talking-head misheard it, started using it,
and the rest of the herd-beasts just trundled along toward the linguistic
cliffs with him.  Anybody know?

>(I've also been seeing plenty of text which is simply missing all
>apostrophes, or in which they've been replaced with random garbage.
>I blame Microsoft.)

If the random garbage is made up of "=" and numbers or something similar
it's probably a different character set.  Apple tends to use non-ASCII
characters in ASCII messages for some reason (usually back-quote marks, but
they've also made up some other new characters, like the "soft return"
which usually shows up as "=20" I think.  There are also international
character sets that consist of multiple bytes for a single character and
this can really confuse software that is ASCII only.  It tends to display
each byte as a separate character rather than decoding them all and trying
to pick the closest one in the local character set or just putting some
default character there, such as a black rectangle or something.  If you
want to do searches to read more about this you could start with hunting
down "UTF-8".

Back when it was just ASCII and EBCDIC it was pretty simple...and you only
needed ASCII unless you were playing with IBM mainframe stuff.  Trouble is
that ASCII is the AMERICAN Standard Code for Information Interchange, and
didn't include those funny characters that some European languages use.  It
also couldn't handle Arabic, Chinese, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and other
non-phonecian-based characters at all.  Without accents, umlauts, etc. in
some languages you can't write certain words, as without those the words
become different words.  Hence the proliferation of character sets, some
multi-byte to handle non-alphabetic languages like Chinese where you have
thousands of "characters" to deal with.

-- Mike B.
--
Possessor of a mind which is not merely twisted but actually sprained...