Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

On Jan 27, 4:46 am, "-=Kesti Pauli, alias Allo=-"
<komodovara...@isoallo.net-njet> wrote:

No but I don't know Phil

Cannot tell without more context but the thought not the language may
be insulting.

Also the sentence is not good English.  You might want to try
something like "If you don't know this, look it up in Google.''

Google is a proper noun and does not take an article in English.

Again this depends on context. However it should read something like
this:
Avoid using capital letters (or upper case letters), they give others
the impression that you are angry or shouting.

This makes no sense.

Possibly you meant,  " If he makes it a habit to whinge in this
group ..."

Your English usage is passing strange, but in most cases
your probable intended meaning is reasonably clear.  An
exception is the above clause, "This lending what you pasted
your message".  I can't even come up with a guess as to what
you mean by that.

I can guess that you're using "lending" in a completely
wrong sense, and that your "pasted" should have been
"posted", but I'm still left without any idea what the
intended meaning of the clause is.

That part has the problem that the only possible antecedents
of "where" are "lending" and "message".  "Your message"
can't be "where I say", so that leaves only "lending", whose
meaning in your sentence is a mystery to me.  The comma
after "that" is wrong, and when that's deleted, the meaning
of your clause is clear enough, that somewhere you have said
that someone has written that "pecker" can mean a man's
organ.

That probably should be

   For example, are these phrases insulting?

That's fully acceptable English, although your intended
meaning may have been comforting rather than comfortable.

The clause "If you don't know this" implies that the "this"
has been explained, so there would be no need to use Google.
"Must" implies no alternative, but Google is only one means
to find out about things.  Maybe you meant

   To learn more about this, one way is to use Google.

Or maybe you meant

   If you didn't know this, you should have used
   Google.

It's almost never acceptable to have two independent clauses
joined by a comma.  At our level of writing, your comma in
the above sentence should be a period or a semicolon.  

You could convey your intended meaning in better English by
saying

  Avoid using capital letters; they may make readers
  think you are shouting in anger or for some other
  reason.

But the use of capital letters can be quite appropriate
where they are used to emphasize a word.  In printed
material italics would be used for that purpose, but in
Usenet italics are not usually available to the writer.

I don't know of any way to have sexual intercourse with a
comma.  You probably mean something like "Don't use a comma
incorrectly".  Your use of "f.ck" may come from the common
phrase "f.ck up".  It would be good English, but offensive
to some people, to say "Don't f.ck up your usage of commas".

You probably mean "Nobody can be perfect", so the double
negative is quite wrong in this case.

There you probably mean "I'm referring to myself".

That should probably be "when I earlier wrote".

The phrase "I wrote little wrong" can be taken in two quite
different ways.  In unexceptionable English it can mean "My
writing had very few errors".  In your idiosyncratic
English, it can probably mean "I made a small mistake".  I
suspect the latter was your intended meaning.

First, in that clause you probably wrote "wring" for
"writing".  With that change, your intended meaning was
probably

   If he makes a habit of writing in this newsgroup

The meaning of your "it" is open to conjecture, and your "a
two weeks" should probably be only "two weeks".  I'm
guessing that your intended meaning is one of the following,
but there are other possibilities:

   I'll refrain from responding for two weeks.

   I'll refrain from reading this newsgroup for two
   weeks.

   I'll ignore what he writes for two weeks.

I assume your intended meaning is

   Note the exclamation mark in the last phrase.

In your version, you at least need a "the" before "last".
You could say correctly

   Notice the last phrase's "!" mark.

But "last phrase's", while not wrong", is awkward and
unusual usage.  (Some people might tell you you shouldn't
use the genitive case with inanimate entities, but they
would be wrong.)

But your beginning question was whether any of your
statements are "insulting".  Taking a strict definition of
"insulting", none of them seem to be, but you may have
intended the meaning "offensive" rather than "insulting".

The only ones I would call potentially offensive are the one
with "f.ck" and the one where you say what you will do if
someone keeps posting in the group.  

Incidentally, there's a list of a few dozen synonyms for
"penis" at http://namingschemes.com/Penis_Synonyms .  Most
of them I haven't been familiar with, but I have heard, and
maybe used, "dick", "dong", "prick", "love muscle",
"member", "peter", "rod", and "tool".  They don't list
"job", but I've heard it used repeatedly by at least one
man.

On the television show "FYI", the character Corky once used
"weeny" (slang for "wiener", also spelled "wienie") for a
penis.  Murphy Brown had inadvertently seen Miles when he
was stark raving naked, and Miles was terribly embarrassed
over the incident.  Corky explained the situation to someone
by saying "Murphy saw Miles's wienie".

On a tangential subject, I find it interesting that there
really is a newsgroup called "alt.alt.alt.alt.alt".  Since
your remarks have to do with your reception in that group, I
thought about crossposting this there, but I fortunately
realized in time that that would be a terrible mistake,
possibly leading to a deluge of crosspostings that most
people here could do very well without.

I hope no one else will crosspost this thread to that group.

Commas are shy little things, and need to be handled with discretion.

It's OK to f.ck a period, but it's a good idea to put a towel underneath
first.

I personally wouldn't f.ck a colon, but some people like it.

As for a hyphen - I don't think I've ever met a virgin, so I wouldn't know.