12-16-2006, 09:56 PM
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Reasonably priced male pills
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Rhen Var, sitting on a radiator...
Posts: 4,595
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Originally Posted by mudshark
It is? No, no, no -- "contraction" is one letter longer than "corruption", heh heh heh.  |
*shakes fist in ineffective annoyance*
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Originally Posted by mudshark
(Actually, I see what you mean... I think.
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How can you *see* a meaning?
..."An eye for an eye" 
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Originally Posted by mudshark
"Ain't" is a contraction, but it's also an altered form of more than one earlier contraction (some of which are longer and some of which aren't, and most of which were even more awkward to begin with than "ain't" is) which, depending upon who's doing the defining, may also make it a corruption -- it's hard to tell, sometimes. The English language was a lot more fluid around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than it is now, and I think that, more than anything else, when the lists of What Would Be Standard English and What Wouldn't were being drawn up by the people who do that sort of thing, "ain't" was simply standing in the wrong queue, and it has never managed to recover from the gaffe. The Usage Notes in two entries on the page to which I linked above go into more detail on this, if you're interested, but, in my opinion, far more time has been spent in human history arguing about the validity (or lack, thereof) of the word "ain't" and how to correctly classify it than the subject is properly worth.
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Much like the split infinitive - the third way to lose friends forever in three minutes...
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Originally Posted by mudshark
(Oh, and aren't parentheses fun?  )) |
Possibly (But then (you see (I think) ) you could (possibly (just about (perhaps) ) ) get away with using commas (don't you think? (I'm not sure (you see) ) )
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Originally Posted by mudshark
That's about it, really -- noise. h4XX0r, r0xx0rz, 5uXX0rz, LOLz0rz: it's all a hangover from the time when preadolescents used to send each other messages on their telephone pagers, and thought it was pretty clever to bamboozle their parents and teachers with odd spellings and character substitutions. It's funny and not a little pathetic when you see a forty-something, otherwise "respectable" citizen using words like "pr0n" without thinking, but there you go...
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!nd33d...
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O to be wafted away
From this black aceldama of sorrow;
Where the dust of an earthy today
Is the earth of a dusty tomorrow!
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