Punctuation lovers...I know you are out there

[popsycal]

Check out this book
thoroughly recommended

That's how it's always written for that song, though, Sue. It's called "The First Nowell".

Well, it isn't always, I've just googled both versions and they both come up - but the song is early 17th century and it's written Nowell in the old hymnbooks. (Most of the links for Noel on google are to ringtone sites...)

TBH I haven't been in a church for a long time either - DS1 did a reading at the school carol service when he was in Y7 or 8, 3 or 4 years ago, which would be the last time I saw it; so it must be a subliminal thing - you know how your brain just produces information without you having anything to do with it? (Sometimes think I should just creep away and leave my brain to run things on its own.)

Talking of BBC errors, this cracked me up today - Newsround was on, I wasn't really listening but they were talking about Christmas, up popped a caption on the screen about "Santa's Slay" !!!!

argh
in tesco they have a noticeboard where you can write letter to santa and get a response.....
santa's reply's

Brilliant piece about Lynne Truss and her book from today's Graun.

saw today "Amesbury black cab's"

grrrr lets all ring them

Ok this is the deal - we will all ring up the offenders and point out he errors of their ways.. No number in book for "black cab's"
so will keep eyes peeled for it

um - ks - what is a genitive exactly?

oh, thanks a lot, ks, that was really helpful!

"What is an anaphoric clitic?"

Answers on a plain postcard to ks.

Why does the language of language sound so incredibly dirty?

Thanks for that JanH, I'm one of the many as I've bought it for my dad, who is up there with ks on genetives.

lol, janh!

A genitive is a posessive, more or less BTW, but I think you need this book . Actually I'm quite pleased I found this as the editor was my grammar teacher at university. He is good at getting things accross clearly.

Yes, I'm finding it very stimulating

Yes, it is interesting.

I've been trying to think of an example in Spanish, but I don't think there are any. Does that make English a cliticier langauge I wonder?

Also [at the risk of terrifying people here] is the English genitive really a clitic? It is certainly phonologically bound to the noun, but I wouldn't have said it has the syntactic charcteristics of a word. I remember reading that the 's ending is a contaction of "his", as in "John, his book", but I don't really believe that.

Oh I could bore on about this all day!

Senora, I remember being taught at school that 's is a contraction of 'his', as you say.

Sounds about right, KS. Much better than the other theory as it allows for "her".

I must get reading about this stuff again. Always fancied doing a masters in linguistics, but never got round to it.

BTW please don't think you are thick for not being able to programme! It's not about intelligence, it's about having a particular mind-set (and lots of patience/stubborn-ness at the beginning). Having a programming dp who can help out when you get stuck also helps.