Topic: Awesome letters from stupid people!

[Pugnate]

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/07/29/old-school-anger/

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/07/22/view-obstruction/

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/07/15/class-reunion/

hahah

[Xessive]

Haha the second was hilarious! hehe

[scottws]

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/07/29/old-school-anger/

I hope the parents of this student spoke to the principal about this.  "...accept my teachings without resistance"?  So your job is to teach kids things and you think you should be able to just teach them completely false information?  Unbelievable.

I'll tell you what though.  Some of the commenters on that letter must have been taught by that teacher because they are completely unable to perform reading comprehension.  Seriously, read the comments.  This is one time I'll agree with Que when he says humanity is doomed.  Sometimes I really do think that what happens in Idiocracy is a real possibility.

[Cobra951]

I hope the parents of this student spoke to the principal about this.  "...accept my teachings without resistance"?  So your job is to teach kids things and you think you should be able to just teach them completely false information?  Unbelievable.

My freshman year at OSU, a TA gave me failing grade on a math test.  The grading is what was a complete failure.  I pointed that out to the TA in class, and she took it as a personal affront.  No further rational communication was possible with her.  I went to the head of the dept, who graded my test himself.  I got an 85%.  She ended up apologizing and playing nice after that.  She was such a dumbass.  I got a better education in politics than math out of that class.  Fun times.

[scottws]

I spent my first year of college at Miami University in Oxford, OH.  It's big enough that most of the classes had TAs or GAs.  I hated all of them.  They saw everything in black and white and there was no reasoning with them about anything.

[Xessive]

That's what it was like for me at Brock U, in Canada. They'd mark me down for what they considered grammatical errors like "colour" and they seemed to have no concept of grouping i.e. "people are" versus "a group of people is." No matter how much contested them it only seemed to make matters worse for me.

When I graded papers I looked for genuine grammatical problems: run-ons, incoherence, obsessive use of exclamation marks or commas, etc. Sentence fragments I always keep on my exceptions list because I think in certain situations a fragment can be used correctly. If I spotted obvious typos like "teh" or "dictatoin" I'd mark them for correction but I wouldn't drop points unless it became apparent the the paper was not proofread at all.

[ren]

You got marked down for writing "colour"? That would be understandable in the states but in Canada it is "colour" and Brock is no exception to that.

[WindAndConfusion]

That's what it was like for me at Brock U, in Canada. They'd mark me down for what they considered grammatical errors like "colour" and they seemed to have no concept of grouping i.e. "people are" versus "a group of people is." No matter how much contested them it only seemed to make matters worse for me.

That's exactly why I stopped trying to write for newspapers. Somewhere I have a box full of style guides, each one full of slightly different rules about stupid bullshit like whether "data" is supposed to be singular or plural, or how many periods a given abbreviation is allowed to have before you omit them (hint: it changes depending on what you're abbreviating!).

Also, words like "octopi" and "platypi" are pseudogreek/pseudolatin. The words have Greek bases, but then people incorrectly apply Latin pluralization rules to them. The correct plurals are technically "octopodes" and "platypodes." Mention this next time you want your undereducated little Kafka of an editor to look stupid, and then fire you.

[shock]

What a funny site.  I'm going to look through for more!

[ren]

Don't forget that the plural for penis is penii and lettuce is letti.

Unrelated, but your mention of Kafka reminded me. There was this foreign guy who would love to talk about Kant but because of his accent it would always come out as cunt. It was awesome.

[ren]

This was just sent to me by my brother and it belongs in this thead:

Audioclip of a guy getting fed up with the fabulous math skills of Verizon employees.

[scottws]

Wow.  What morons.  I love how he led in with the manager but she still didn't get it.  I really wish we could hear the rest.

[iPPi]

Haha those are hilarious.

I've had a couple retarded TAs as well.

A group of us turned in an assignment that we worked together on, but handed it in individually.  Each of us had different TAs, but all of us did a check on each other's work and it made sense so we all handed in what was the same answers to an assignment.  When we got it back, our scores ranged from 30% to 100%.  It was somewhat baffling.

Another time, I had to do an electronic submission of an assignment to a central server, from which the TA can then retrieve the assignments -- not direct submissions like email.  The TA emails me a couple weeks later saying that I submitted a 4kB file that was garbage.  I contact IT tech support and they verified that the file I submitted was a 0.5MB pdf and still intact on the server.  When I told the TA about it, he seemed quite offended.

[Xessive]

You got marked down for writing "colour"? That would be understandable in the states but in Canada it is "colour" and Brock is no exception to that.

Yeah, that added to my confusion. I think that particular TA was American.

There's another spelling thing that people still argue with me about: practice and practise. The difference being that "practice" is a noun and "practise" is a verb.

For the plurel Octopus and Platypus I always just went with the rule for "virus" plurel "viruses" as opposed to the common confusion I keep getting from office jockeys trying to sound smart "virae." Thanks for the clarification, Wind.

[scottws]

For the plurel Octopus and Platypus I always just went with the rule for "virus" plurel "viruses" as opposed to the common confusion I keep getting from office jockeys trying to sound smart "virae." Thanks for the clarification, Wind.

I just looked and "viruses" is correct.  Apparently "virus" was a Latin word that was a noun for something uncountable and had no plural form.  So there is no Latin plural and instead the English plural is used.

Although if there was a Latin plural, it would be "viri", not "virae".  In Latin, the "us" ending is singular masculine.  Plural masculine is "i".  It's "a" and "ae" for feminine.  Alumnus/alumni, alumna/alumnae.  (There are exceptions but I'm not going to try to teach a full-on Latin class here)

I always wondered about pluralizing Latin-based car names.  Did Ford sell a lot of Focuses or Foci?

[Cobra951]

In baseball, if you fly out, do you later say that you flied out or flew out? 

Language rules are complex enough that I try to give people the benefit of the doubt before I assume they're misspelling or using incorrect grammar.  The whole British/American thing has to be allowed for, of course, though usage should be consistent one way or the other.  Plurals and singulars are generally no-brainers for me, but there are exceptions, like "news" and "data".  I have to make a conscious effort with those.  Some things bug me.  In particular the confusion with "its" and "it's".  The first is the possessive pronoun, always.  The second is the contraction for "it is", always.  I see these misused constantly, even in otherwise literate publications.

And that last usage of quotes shows something which runs contrary to what I've been taught.  Periods and commas at the end of a quotation should always precede the quotation mark.  Bullshit.  Punctuation should go where it makes sense.  If it's part of the quotation, it should be inside it.  Otherwise not.  This is the rule for question marks and exclamations.  Why not periods and commas, aesthetics?  Thus, I rebel.

[Xessive]

And that last usage of quotes shows something which runs contrary to what I've been taught.  Periods and commas at the end of a quotation should always precede the quotation mark.  Bullshit.  Punctuation should go where it makes sense.  If it's part of the quotation, it should be inside it.  Otherwise not.  This is the rule for question marks and exclamations.  Why not periods and commas, aesthetics?  Thus, I rebel.

That's exactly how I feel about it! haha I do it "proper" occasionally just because I find it so difficult to resist what I was taught but sometimes I manage to defy those teachings and go with what I feel is better.

[Ghandi]

Language rules are complex enough that I try to give people the benefit of the doubt before I assume they're misspelling or using incorrect grammar.  The whole British/American thing has to be allowed for, of course, though usage should be consistent one way or the other.  Plurals and singulars are generally no-brainers for me, but there are exceptions, like "news" and "data".  I have to make a conscious effort with those.  Some things bug me.  In particular the confusion with "its" and "it's".  The first is the possessive pronoun, always.  The second is the contraction for "it is", always.  I see these misused constantly, even in otherwise literate publications.

And that last usage of quotes shows something which runs contrary to what I've been taught.  Periods and commas at the end of a quotation should always precede the quotation mark.  Bullshit.  Punctuation should go where it makes sense.  If it's part of the quotation, it should be inside it.  Otherwise not.  This is the rule for question marks and exclamations.  Why not periods and commas, aesthetics?  Thus, I rebel.

My Journalism degree is almost entirely based around learning stupid bullshit like that.

[Pugnate]

You got a degree in journalism?

Well, I guess Fox News is out of question as a place of employment.

ba rum bum tish!

[scottws]

Some things bug me.  In particular the confusion with "its" and "it's".  The first is the possessive pronoun, always.  The second is the contraction for "it is", always.  I see these misused constantly, even in otherwise literate publications.

I totally agree with you on this.  I'm guilty of misusing them too on occasion, but it's not because I don't know the difference.  It is because I was simply typing too fast and didn't proofread later.

And that last usage of quotes shows something which runs contrary to what I've been taught.  Periods and commas at the end of a quotation should always precede the quotation mark.  Bullshit.  Punctuation should go where it makes sense.  If it's part of the quotation, it should be inside it.  Otherwise not.  This is the rule for question marks and exclamations.  Why not periods and commas, aesthetics?  Thus, I rebel.

I'm with you on this too.  I am pretty sure British rules for quotations are different but in the United States we were always taught to put commas and periods prior to the ending quotation mark regardless.  I too disagree with this.  It is especially troublesome when giving a computer command.  For example:

3a. At the command prompt, type "explorer.exe."

A person experienced using the command line would understand the final period should not be entered, but a novice would wonder why they keep getting the error "'explorer.exe.' is not recognized as an operable program or batch file."

I have basically begun always placing the punctuation outside the ending quotation mark unless it is part of the quotation.  Rules be damned.

I do have to say that I wonder if the quotation rule is even the same today as what we were taught because quite a bit has already changed officially.  I've recently heard that double-spacing after a period or colon is less accepted today when it used to be the rule (except for MLA format).  I still do it because I find it to be much easier to read withe the double-space, but I've had people point out to me that isn't correct anymore.  Also I believe that paragraph indents are things of the past and instead paragraphs are in e-mail style block format now:  always left-justified from beginning to end with a single empty line preceding the following paragraph.

[ren]

Everything in your last paragraph fits with what I've been taught over the last couple of years.

I've always been under the impression that quotation rules are ambiguous. In general, you're supposed to put punctuation within the quotations but whenever you need a high degree of accuracy you can take them out. So "explorer.exe". would be correct over "explorer.exe."

[Ghandi]

You got a degree in journalism?

I've got a semester left.