Dear reader: please be tolerant with this old-fartie obsession of mine. I do get so pissed off about this, though. My message to Patrick Henningsen, copied below, explains it all:
SELFQUOTE:
To Patrick Henningsen:
Dear Patrick, I’m an enthusiastic supporter of your work as an admirable, principled journalist - as completely distinct from so many mediawhores who speciously claim that designation - so please understand that this very small criticism comes from a friendly source:
I just want to suggest that you take a careful look at the grammatically meaningless word-string: “one of the only”. I presume you mean ‘the only one’, or possibly ‘one of the few’? But the deeply irritating illiterate neologism ‘one of the only’ is meaningless.
I was moved to write this by hearing you use it twice now. Just a thought (from a decrepit, ancient grammar-nazi who learned his - British - English circa 1940-1950! ).
Best wishes to you and all the excellent stalwarts at UKC-News! Power to your arms, brodydd a chwiorydd! Keep sluggin’! - RhG
And while he’s about it he could stop saying ‘gaslight’ when he means ‘lie to’. I’m afraid the man is lazy and it doesn’t help when he has to get up so early in LA for UKC. ‘One of the only’ ffs. ‘Only’ already indicates a singularity. What a dickhead.
Rhis: please don’t apologise for requiring coherence and accuracy in speech and writing on the part of professional communicators. (Am I one of the only grammar-nazis who won’t do appeasement? ) Part of the NWO agenda appears to me to be the destruction of meaning of language. Didn’t that Confucius say summat abaht it?
Syme, Winston Smith’s workmate in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, was very keen on the destruction of language too; part of the fascination he felt about working on the creation of Newspeak: the process of making politically unacceptable speech - and even of such thought - simply impossible, for lack of means to express it.
Listening to him, Winston had a sudden clear understanding that Syme would be vapourised eventually - because he was too bright…
Hey, Rhis, if you do get a reply please also give Pat a gentle nudge about the plural of ‘crisis’ (crises - cry seas) - Pat says, ‘crisises’ (crisis ease)!!
Apart from that I have a great deal of time for the fellow.
Yes, I noticed that as well. You notice that people reared in the - recent - US education system are often innocent of elementary literacy: Can’t handle ‘phenomenon/na’; ‘crisises’, as you say; ‘myth’ meaning nothing more transcendental than a lie; plus one or two others which I keep noticing; plus complete helplessness in the pronunciation of any non-USIlliterate-English foreign word or name.
The barbarising, and the drowning in drossy attention-sucking junk, of the US citizenry is a dreadful sight, when you see how decently educated - and decent - their grand-parents were.
The ‘Free Market’ ideology and US ‘democracy’ - meaning rule of, by, and for the oligarch gangsters - has done the abused common US citizens proud, hannit?
Herr Gwilym, the Committee for Reactionary Advanced Punctuation (the CRAP) have observed that in one of your posts here you have been guilty of severe apostrophe abuse.
After much debate about the seriousness of this offence, the CRAP have decided to be leniant and have sentenced you to six months in a grammar re-education camp.
You will have to bring your own food and writing paper.
Should I bring toilet paper too? I usually use re-purposed ‘news’ print, so that at least the trees didn’t die for entirely ignoble purposes; basic hygiene being reasonably respectable, after all. And it all goes into my humanure composting bins, so that eventually the soil and it’s community of life get the benefit.
I presume I have to report to that salubrious concentr- er - reception centre in Kent?
Sadly (or in reality, happily), I spent too much time bunking off from school! Hence the lack of literacy. My apologies and thanks for the nudge.
I almost forgot. I’m going to have to proof read every post I make, then reread it, and then read it again. I hope I got the commas (or should that be comma’s, or commas’?) in the right place!
Final edit. My wife says I “Don’t do subtle”. So perhaps a push would be betterer than a nudge, the next time?
He should of paid better attention in grandma classes.
I jest: “should of” is the one that infuriates me. Seen twice in one sentence just now, but non-native English writer so, tight-lipped, I click on to the next atrocity.
‘Pre-planned’ is another that irritates me - why isn’t plain old ‘planned’ sufficient? Tautology abounds in modern parlance - folk seem to pad-out their utterances, presumably believing their verbosity is clever…
).
) Part of the NWO agenda appears to me to be the destruction of meaning of language. Didn’t that Confucius say summat abaht it?
Should I bring toilet paper too? I usually use re-purposed ‘news’ print, so that at least the trees didn’t die for entirely ignoble purposes; basic hygiene being reasonably respectable, after all. And it all goes into my humanure composting bins, so that eventually the soil and it’s community of life get the benefit.
