Kevin's random thoughts - language

It's its!

2008-02-18T17:34:00Z

It's a shame that the English language has had its writers in the current generation so poorly trained as to confuse the usage of "its" and "it's". Since I recently had to retrain my well-educated partner, via much repetition, to use them properly, and since I've seen such misuse this morning in two articles written by otherwise intelligent people: here is the proper usage of "its" and "it's".

"its" is a possessive pronoun.
"it's" is a contraction of "it is".

See the first sentence of this post for an example of correct usage. Anywhere you see "it's" (with apostrophe), mentally replace it with "it is". Do that several times and you'll start to cringe when you see the wrong usage, just like I do.

Past participles

2007-02-12T17:26:00Z

Grammatical pedantry of the day:

The past-tense form of ‘to lead’ (with a long ‘e’) is ‘led’, not ‘lead’ (with a short ‘e’).

(Technically speaking, both the simple past tense and the past participle are ‘led’.)

This particular issue probably doesn’t affect understanding all that much, but it does cause my mind to wedge momentarily every time I see it. Really, it serves as a good example of why English orthography is in serious need of reform. (That is, English spelling is stink.)

I bring up the point because I’ve seen the aforementioned incorrect usage independently in at least two geek blogs: The Daily WTF and Roughly Drafted.

Another strange perturbation of language involving past participles also presents itself to me regularly: people (particularly Minnesotans, and perhaps other Midwesterners) saying and writing ‘would of’ in place of ‘would have’. Example:

Incorrect: “I would of gone if it weren’t so expensive.”
Correct: “I would have gone…”

This is probably because of the Minnesota accent, which finds it difficult to pronounce “would’ve” as, for example, a Brit would, and instead inserts a vowel where the apostrophe is.

One might get the impression that I’m a prescriptivist (that is, a language nazi), but I’m really not—I just want people’s usage to actually make some sort of sense. If you consistently change the perfect tense to use ‘of’ instead of ‘have’, fine by me. But you’ll have trouble communicating with some people that way, and your English usage will be less universal.

Give a man a thought...

2006-09-19T20:22:00Z

I often hear teachers (in the most general, not strictly professional, sense) and others complain about our educational system’s failure to teach people to think. Viz. specifically this rant by the venerable[!] Dr Edsger Wybe Dijkstra.

But in my analysis of such sentiments, I’m forced to ask, how does one person teach another to think? That is, how can I convince another person not to accept at face value what I or someone else says, and instead analyze, break down, understand and reconstruct the knowledge being communicated?

This is an earnest question; I’ve never yet found a way to do it, despite years of trying. It’s also an important question, as the oft-stated goal of education is to teach people to think and deduce and discover for themselves, not to blindly follow the rubrics they’ve been handed.

Give a man a thought, you teach him for a day. Teach a man to think…

Backslash

2006-09-17T17:26:00Z

Okay, there needs to be some serious intention put into education on this point:

This: '\' is a backslash.
This: '/' is a forward slash, or just a slash.

Is it a niggling little issue (he asks rhetorically, while also rhetorically referring to himself in the third person)?

Yes; it is however an important issue, because we use computer systems for which these two characters have different meanings. In particular, this is not a valid URL (i.e. Web site address):

http:\\www.google.com\images

If you feed the above into a browser, you will get an error message. This didn't stop an NPR announcer from quoting a URL on the radio in similar fashion, though. The correct address is:

http://www.google.com/images

and the correct way to read this is "H-T-T-P colon slash slash W-W-W dot google dot com slash images". You can also elide the first part and just say "W-W-W dot google dot com slash images", and it will still work if you type it into your browser's address field.

The difference is important outside just the Web, though. In written English, the slash is used in several ways, and in none of these situations is the backslash acceptable. For example, when quoting poetry inline, the slash is used to indicate a line break: "since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;".

The backslash was ostensibly invented by an IBM engineer in 1960. In any case it is a modern invention, used only in computer systems for a few particular purposes, which purposes do not include Web addresses.