Sums up why 99% of students are thick as....
It's ok, i've been banging the i/I drum for years and years. I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me why we irrationally capitalise i and no other personal pronoun. And until they do... 
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
Understand where you're coming from. Text speak and the like annoys me, infact I think I'm one of about 5-6 people in 100+ contacts on my mobile that doesn't use text speak. My fiancee is terrible at it, and more often that not I call her to desipher her message
As long as my spelling and grammar is as good as I can make it, I forget about others now. Just read what I can, when I can.
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From: Mars
99% of students might be thick as ****, but what's the reason why the majority of post-schooling Scoobynetters can't even get...
there, their, they're
your, you're
to, too
its, it's (even within this thread)
...correct? Simple, basic, elementary English. Makes my teeth itch every single time.
there, their, they're
your, you're
to, too
its, it's (even within this thread)
...correct? Simple, basic, elementary English. Makes my teeth itch every single time.
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From: Swilling coffee at my lab bench
I do wonder just how thick the students seem to think the interviewers actually are. In any other situation it's pretty easy to spot someone who's a bit dim or just plain boring, so where do these people get the idea that they can bluff their way through an interview by telling the panel "what they want to hear"?
Never said I was gods gift to grammatical excellence
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From: Sunny BELFAST
It's ok, i've been banging the i/I drum for years and years. I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me why we irrationally capitalise i and no other personal pronoun. And until they do...
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
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From: Mars
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From: Swilling coffee at my lab bench
That might have something to do with it I suppose, but I'd put more money on "bad advice". Teenagers aren't inexperienced at talking or at meeting new people, and from what I remember of university and early job interviews, I did pretty well just by relaxing and talking to the interviewer like any other human being - rather than some kind of b*stard who was out to trip me up at every opportunity while still being naive enough to be hoodwinked by someone with a set of carefully practised stock answers.
...and yes, I did get into my first choice of university
...and yes, I did get into my first choice of university
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http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Defau...1201&AppName=1
Me, myself and I
Caroline Winter
New York: Why do we capitalise the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.
Consider other languages: some, like Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari-Hindi, have no capitalised letters, and others, like Japanese, make it possible to drop pronouns altogether. The supposedly snobbish French leave all personal pronouns in the unassuming lower case, and Germans respectfully capitalise the formal form of “you” and even, occasionally, the informal form of “you”, but would never capitalise “I”. Yet, in English, the solitary “I” towers above “he”, “she”, “it” and the royal “we”. Even a gathering that includes God might not be addressed with a capitalised “you”.
The word “capitalise” comes from “capital”, meaning “head”, and is associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic”, “ich” or some variation thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalised, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.
When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families, explains, “One little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”
The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ among the first evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence versus a midphrase firstperson pronoun. Yet these variations eventually fell by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I”, a potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.
In following centuries, Britain and the US thrived as world powers, and English became the second-most common language in the world, following Mandarin. Meanwhile, the origin, meaning and consequences of our capitalised “I” went largely unchanged, with few exceptions.
So what effect has capitalising “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalising the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalising “you”.
Modern e-mail culture has shown that many English speakers feel perfectly comfortable dismissing all uses of capitalisation — and even correct spelling, for that matter. But take this a step further: i suggest that You try, as an experiment, to capitalise those whom You address while leaving yourselves in the lower case. It may be a humbling experience. It was for me. — NYTNS
The writer is a Fulbright scholar.
Enjoy!
Dave
It's ok, i've been banging the i/I drum for years and years. I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me why we irrationally capitalise i and no other personal pronoun. And until they do...
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
Whilst 'inditement' works albeit rather loosely, 'indictment' would be a more apt noun.
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I think LanCAt is right, most of you are missing the point a bit which is amusing given the title of the thread. It does suggest though that careers advisors shouldn't try and force square pegs in round holes, there is far too much emphasis on going to university these days imho, its lazy by the advisors because its easy for them to hand out prospectus and tell students how they'll be good for nothing unless they get a degree, much harder to sit down and help the individual work out what they might want
Just gained my degree this week - just completed a 3 year BSc Business Computing with Multimedia. Gained a 2:2 with Honours but looking at the job market how it is it is going to be hard to gain employment as a lot of companies are expecting experience
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From: Scotland
It's ok, i've been banging the i/I drum for years and years. I am STILL waiting for somebody to tell me why we irrationally capitalise i and no other personal pronoun. And until they do...
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
But the spelling errors i've detailed i find indefensible, pure and simple. Facebook, Twitter and all the other similar sites are jam packed with those errors, time after time after time. In fact i reckon you see you're spelt as your even MORE times than as you're!!! That's a sad inditement, in my opinion. So now we have "ur" to avoid the need to know at all.
One day all the grumpy old gits like me will be gone and the English language can continue its descent unchallenged.
It's not just that you're a grumpy old git either(
), because I'm 22 and believe you either use it or lose it...and we're definetly losing it!I don't even have any qualifications worth mentioning, yet my ex girlfriend(A/B highers and currently doing a degree in psychology) amazed me at times with her stupidity when it came to the simplest of things. Not even sure why she is doing the degree, as there are no jobs she can walk into. Everyone just seems to think that they have to go through the motions of going to uni, even though degrees aren't worth anything like what they used to be.
Oh and the occasional email/texts I receive from her are virtually unreadable jumbles of crap.
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From: God's promised land
You've got apostropheitis my friend. Just for my benefit, since i can NEVER grasp why people do this, WHY would the plural of **** be ****'s? You were taught at school that the plural of cat, for example, is cats, right? No fancy stuff, no silly rules, just an s. Dog. Dogs. Book. Books. And so on. So please tell me why you think ****'s is correct. Not having a go per se, i just want to understand the thought process.
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From: God's promised land
That's really really strange! I used indictment, then changed it to inditement before posting. How bizarre is that?! On reflection though, i concede, indictment would have been the better choice.
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From: God's promised land
Dave, thanks for that passage by Caroline Winter. Not sure what it proves though. Well, to be fair it proves nothing; in fact by drawing on perceived language patterns of over 500 years ago i'd say it pretty well discredits itself there and then. It is, at best, an opinion. And fair enough. But what she challenges the writer to do in the last paragraph i do ALL the time with zero thought about its significance whatsoever, and i most certainly don't think of it as humbling in any way. Sorry but TelBoy's search for the definitive explanation for the capitalisation of i continues.
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From: God's promised land
I'm sure that was just a typo, but you've highlighted another top 5 mis-spelt word, and not just on Scoobynet.
For ANYONE who thinks that it's definately (and HUNDREDS of Scoobynet members obviously do), please, just take a micro-second to think where the word comes from. Finite. Something that has an ending. We all know the word. If somebody wrote it as finate you'd wonder what the hell they were on about. From finite we derive definite, and from there, definitely. God if i could teach that to the population of the world i'd die a happier (and less grumpy) old man.
Great to see losing correct though. If i had a pound for every time that gets the double oo treatment - AAAARRGGHH!!!
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From: England
You've got apostropheitis my friend. Just for my benefit, since i can NEVER grasp why people do this, WHY would the plural of **** be ****'s? You were taught at school that the plural of cat, for example, is cats, right? No fancy stuff, no silly rules, just an s. Dog. Dogs. Book. Books. And so on. So please tell me why you think ****'s is correct. Not having a go per se, i just want to understand the thought process.
That or i made a classic school boy error
But at the end of the day most of my socializing was done with real people. Yours? online. Good for you
all in good fun of course.
I think LanCAt is right, most of you are missing the point a bit which is amusing given the title of the thread. It does suggest though that careers advisors shouldn't try and force square pegs in round holes, there is far too much emphasis on going to university these days imho, its lazy by the advisors because its easy for them to hand out prospectus and tell students how they'll be good for nothing unless they get a degree, much harder to sit down and help the individual work out what they might want
I got a degree way back, and although it was vague, it is yet to actually help me. Partly because I am not ambitious enough (or know what I want from life) to push myself, and I'm not massively intelligent either, or confident. Tbh, it's all very well and good 'learning', to pass exams, but unless you can apply that knowledge to real life, and you can motivate yourself to get somewhere, it's just a bit of a waste of time.