Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Skitt filted:

My father was born in 1935...my brother was born in 1961...my niece was born in
1974....

The interval fluctuates....r

It didn't help me either (another Turnpike user).

RFC 2396 (<URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt>) says, in part:

  URI are often transmitted through formats that do not provide a clear
  context for their interpretation.  For example, there are many
  occasions when URI are included in plain text; examples include text
  sent in electronic mail, USENET news messages, and, most importantly,
  printed on paper.  In such cases, it is important to be able to
  delimit the URI from the rest of the text, and in particular from
  punctuation marks that might be mistaken for part of the URI.

  In practice, URI are delimited in a variety of ways, but usually
  within double-quotes "http://test.com/", angle brackets
  <http://test.com/>, or just using whitespace

                            http://test.com/

  These wrappers do not form part of the URI.

URI = Uniform Resource Identifier(s).

I see no objection in that RFC to the use of the ) character in a URL,
but I can see from a web search that other software has similar
difficulty in deciding if it is external or internal punctuation when )
occurs at the end of the string.

The brief biography of Nicholas Flamel written by Charles Mackay in his
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions" says that at an early stage of his
life Nicholas "became desperately addicted to the study of alchemy, and
thought of nothing but the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and
the universal alkahest".

There's a comma problem in there. Did Nicholas think of two things, or
three? The alkahest is distinct from the other two by any standards. I
think there are three items in that list, though it's not impossible
that the first two describe different properties of one substance
(trying hard not to think of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity,
now). Although an elixir is often a liquid, it isn't obliged to be.

And as a general warning to versifiers, Mackay remarks that before this
time Flamel practised as a letter-writer and copyist on the corner of
the Rue de Marivaux in Paris, "but he hardly made profits enough to keep
body and soul together. To mend his fortunes he tried poetry; but this
was a more wretched occupation still." Ahem.

Fortunately, he eventually acquired for two florins a book of three time
seven leaves, written by the Patriarch Abraham. It had passed through
the hands of Moses, Joshua, Solomon and Esdras, and liberated from the
Temple by Tutus, before it fell into Flamel's hands. Fortunately Abraham
had written it in Latin, and it contained all the instructions for using
the philosopher's stone, assuming that the reader already had possession
of it. It took Nicholas until he was eighty to find the secret, but that
was rather late in life for the elixir to take full effect, and he only
survived until the age of 116.

My Dad bought his first car on HP.

--

I may have to look for that, so thanks for the interesting
information.

...

I'd say Brer Rabbit is pretty chaotic neutral too.

--
Jerry Friedman

["segashuate"]

Quite so.  I always want the @ to mean "ash", but it never does.

Damn tooting.