Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all? I'll never forget the day I found my children looking at Spam for the first time. My son was particularly perplexed, asking: "Is that what I think it is?" It was my own fault. I had left the tin on the kitchen counter. Even in his tender years, my tech-friendly tweenager was perfectly familiar with spam. But not Spam. He'd …
How can you discuss policy with a minister whose only means of expression is to scream at you "Eeeeeeeeeeeee-oooooooo buh-doyngg buh-doyngg eeeeee-AAAAAAHHH!" before promptly hanging himself?
Absolute bloody genius. I'm assuming, since he does the gain adjustment bit, that he's a v.92 modem?
"weaved" might also be a mis-grammaticisation of "wove". 'I wove a fabric of lies", rather than "I weaved a fabric of lies". But when it's a past participle, yeah, "woven". "I have woven a fabric of lies". And of course, you can use a past participle as an adjective: "Felt is not a woven fabric." (This happens to be true...)
But there's also the people who say "I have went". That makes my teeth itch.
"I have went"
If the pedants will look away long enough for me to say "It's not very irregular.", then I will. (If they won't, then would the rest of you be so good as to skip the rest of this post. Otherwise we'll get logical paradoxes.)
I think "went" is to "wend" what "spent" is to "spend" and so "I have went" is about as irregular as "I have spent" and therefore rather more regular than "I have gone". It should, of course, be "I have goed" but I imagine it is too late to insist on that now.
Quite how the verbs to go and to wend (as in, "wend their merry way back from the pub") ever became entangled remains as mysterious as ever, of course, but most western European languages seem to have one or two stupendously irregular verbs with different persons and tenses taken from different root verbs in older languages. I think it is some kind of competition.
"One is (I think), past-perfect (ie a complete past action) and the other is continuous historic.
"
Parce que nous sommes tous francais(es). Или русский.
The application of Latinate grammar to English is something I find irritating. It makes me want to boldly split infinitives, just because I can. And because it's Friday, sacred to Freya, and not vendredi, sacred to Venus.
"In a world that knows too many details about unimportant matters, one would think that our collective expertise could be certain about something as essential as the days of the week. There is, however, a scholarly debate regarding which goddess of love in Norse mythology is the namesake of “Friday.” To complicate matters, it may be that Frigg (or Frigga) and Freyja were at one point one goddess, or at least stemmed from the same one. It’s a headache."
"Bloody hell, did I write that? "
There was some research a few years ago that said the brain makes a regular conjugation immediately. It takes a little longer for it to be overridden by the correct irregular form. So if the second process gets delayed too much - then we just use the regular form.
I still maintain this is the easiest way to distinguish the service for the general public. Granted, lots of us know it's not actually fibre all the way to your house, but at the end of the day the bulk of slow internet connections is caused by the bottleneck at the cabinet, and fibre helps resolve this issue. There are those who suffer being miles from the cabinet but still, keep it simple for average Joe.
Also:
POTS is analogue duplex voice frequency over copper / steel. i.e. DIAL-UP. We've all heard of that.
Broadband from the exchange uses ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+. Lots and lots of people have heard of that.
3G/4G. Internet for mobiles. Everyone has heard of it.
Fibre-to-the-cabinet uses VDSL/VDSL2. No bugger outside the telecomms industry has ever heard of it.
Just call it by the technology used. People will catch on soon enough (if they even care)
Dial-up -> ADSL -> ADSL2(+) -> VDSL (or FTTC if you must) -> FTTP
Calling something something that it isn't is just going to confuse people in the long run. How many people still think that their desktop background picture is a "screensaver" FFS?!?!?! When FTTP gets widely deployed (currently scheduled for the 57th of Novemruary), they won't know what to call it because some bugger has made people associate fibre optics with this pitiful excuse that's copper from the cabinet.
By the way, even when using dial-up, it was fibre from the exchange so the components haven't changed. Copper/Aluminium from me to someplace over there and glass from there onwards.
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