I’m Back!

A couple months back my back began to hurt and encouraged me to sort of retire from adding posts to this site. Well, my back is feeling better, tomorrow is Pi Day (one of my favorites), and I ran into a comic that was too linguistic-ey to resist. Here’s the comic:

I have to comment:

When you refer to our planet you capitalize the name depending on the context.

• In an ordinary sentence, with “the,” don’t capitalize the earth.
• When you have to leave off the “the,” capitalize the planet’s name. In a list, for example. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are rocky planets.
• And when you’re referring to the stuff you can hold in your hand, it’s “earth” unless it’s the first word in the sentence.

Happy Pi Day!

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I like to think that the guy is kidding the girl.

You know that his second goof should be “for all intents and purposes,” right?

First the comic, then the curmudgeonly comment.

• Nauseous means causing nausea
• Nauseated means feeling like throwing up.

So he means to say “nauseated.” Harrumpf.

This struck me as a good illustration of having different points of view about the same topic. Not a lot else to say.
—Except to point out that the English teacher gets “whom” correct.

How do you feel about rainbows?

Putting “only” too early in the sentence is one of my hobbyhorses. Put the word right in front of what it refers to. Like this guy. You can skip to the last panel.

Yay! He didn’t put “only” in front of “means.”