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Tuesday 22 November 2011

An Ode to the English Plural

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
 But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
 One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
 Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

 You may find a lone
mouse or a nest full of mice,
 Yet the plural of
house is houses, not hice.
 If the plural of
man is always called men,
 Why shouldn't the plural of
pan be called pen?

 If I speak of my
foot and show you my feet,
 And I give you a
boot, would a pair be called beet?
 If one is a
tooth and a whole set are teeth,
 Why shouldn't the plural of
booth be called beeth?

 Then one may be
that, and there would be those,
 Yet
hat in the plural would never be hose,
 And the plural of
cat is cats, not cose.
 We speak of a
brother and also of brethren,
 But though we say
mother, we never say methren.

 Then the masculine pronouns are
he, his and him,
 But imagine the feminine:
she, shis and shim!
 Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
 There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
 neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
 English muffins weren't invented in England .
 
 We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
 we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
 and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
 And why is it that
writers write, but fingers don't fing,
 grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
 
 Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If
teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
 
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people
recite at a play and play at a recital?
 We ship by truck but send cargo by ship...
 We have noses that run and feet that smell.
 We park in a driveway and drive on a parkway.
 And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
 while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

 You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can 
burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
 And in closing, if
Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?

The Blogger network and new climate change Emails

Since I started blogging, the one thing I’ve appreciated is that bloggers  network to share information. Bloggers are not like the MSM who jealously guard their articles, and in a lot of online cases, do not allow comments on contentious issues. Anyone is entitled to comment on any post I write, as long as it is not abusive.
Bloggers will share information, because they are the new means of unbiased reporting of day to day events. What have bloggers to lose?
We are unpaid, but consider we have a duty to counteract the drip drip of untruths fed to us by the organs of government. Government is increasingly worried about this trend. No longer can they just release a press release without it being challenged.
Hot off the blogger press is that there is another set of leaked E mails on the subject of Climate change. 
You can read them at Tallbloke’s Workshop.
I’m not sure of the veracity of them yet as I’ve only just started reading them.
Just a little snippet to wet the appetite.
As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)
<1577> Jones:

[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

There is even more here. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37

A lame excuse for hiding in the wardrobe