The Write Way

7 June 2002

Things That Go "Whirrrr... Clunk ... Sphtt ..."

Greetings,

Late last week, I received a card in the mail from my friendly computer doctor - the one who makes house calls. When we had our last brief encounter over the rubble of my hard drive just before Christmas, he mentioned that he was setting up a PC Safeguard Club ... i.e. he was going to start flogging insurance policies for home computers.

(You know the Law behind insurance policies, don't you? The Law states that you can fork out thousands of dollars to insure, say, your car, over a period of twenty years, and never get so much as a bird dropping on it. Then, when you've let the policy lapse for one day and you drive your car out of the garage and park it in front of your home, in that quiet little cul-de-sac that never gets any traffic on it, a dirty great semi-trailer roars around the corner, out of control, and deposits a full load of scrap metal on it and the car's a write-off.)

What can I say? I'm a pushover for anything that will allow me to pick up the phone and have someone who uses terms like "CPU, PNP, PCI, IDE and NMI" with a straight face come rushing to my side ... So I rang and the technician arrived the next day.

Apparently it's part of the deal that they have to inspect everything I have within coo-ee of my PC to make certain that it's in absolutely no danger of ever breaking down within the next millennium before they'll let me throw copious amounts of money in their direction. If your mother board cries uncle, the jig is up!

The tech entered that forbidden territory that is only accessible to people with teensy little screwdrivers, and with a flourish he whipped off the cover of my .... thingy, you know the bit that sits on the table and has all the whatsies in it that go whirrrrr.

Every person who has ever come to investigate problems I've had has made similar comments along the lines of, "Hmmm ... that's different" and "Whoa, I haven't see one do that before!" and "How'd that happen?!" The latter usually accompanied by a scratching of the head ... This chap was no different.

By the time the hour's consultation had stretched over 90 minutes I felt that we knew each other well enough to exchange Christmas brag letters next year. Much of the time was spent waiting for different programs to scan various bits and pieces hidden in the bowels of the aforementioned thingy, so we had lots of time to chat and the time passed happily enough. 

All the talk about CPUs and NMIs had my head spinning, though. There were just too many u's and i's for my liking.

Yes, I know ... it's a tricky one, isn't it? To add the apostrophe or not - that is the question.

This topic was discussed on the Board a few days back and this is what Richard Tinsley found:

It is acceptable in American English to use an apostrophe after numbers and letters to form plurals.  Apostrophes are not used to form plurals of words.

Kenneth G. Wilson (The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press - http://www.bartleby.com/68/58/458.html) discusses the apostrophe:

(1) to indicate a missing letter or letters, as in   contractions such as isn't, they're, and it's,

(2) to distinguish genitives of nouns from noun plurals not in the genitive (boy's, boys', but plural boys), and

(3) sometimes to mark plural numbers and letters (three 6's, two A's). Never use an apostrophe in front of the -s ending that forms a plural noun.

He also says (http://www.bartleby.com/68/50/4650.html):

PLURALS OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS

usually add -s: two Xs, Ph.D.s, MIAs, 1990s, the '20s. Use an apostrophe only when you need it to prevent confusion: Mississippi has four i's. He got A's in both courses.

The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html) says

The apostrophe has three uses:

1) to form possessives of nouns
2) to show the omission of letters
3) to indicate plurals of letters, numbers and symbols.

Apostrophes are NOT used for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.

Jack Lynch, Associate Professor of English at the Newark, NJ campus of Rutgers University discusses  the apostrophe and other elements of English usage (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/).

These are American English sources, but, as far as I know, there are no major differences in apostrophe usage in the UK and the US.  An excellent source for English usage is www.xrefer.com; http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=441020&secid=.- will take you to "Apostrophe" from The Oxford Companion to the English Language, © Tom McArthur 1992.

So there you go - more than you ever needed to know about indicating the plurals of letters and numbers! The bottom line is that you add the apostrophe to avoid confusion in expressions such as:

 "You used three u's instead of two" ("us" is confusing).

Recommend this page to other writers by clicking the Recommend it! button below, then see what pages others are recommending here.

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Wow, Jennifer,
I had no idea I'd be getting such cool goodies for my subscription.  May your running away fund live long and prosper.  I'll be going through them as soon as I come up for air here.  Thanks again and take care down there.
Happily,  Shelley :>) 

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Last week's ditty "Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoe?" wasn't submitted by Richard at all, he was the one, he writes, "... who didn't understand it!" C. J. Strolin provided the piece.

It seems a few other people are not yet in their prime either, because I received a number of messages asking what it was all about ... It's actually from a song (all right ... an old song!) called Chattanooga Choo Choo and you can find all the words here: http://www.smickandsmodoo.com/aaa/lyrics/chatchoo.htm You even get one of those horrid electronic plastic tunes so you can sing along.

Is your evening meal often interrupted by those annoying telemarketers? If so, here are some responses you might like to try next time you get a call:

Telemarketing Repellent

1. If they start out with, "How are you today?" say, "I'm so glad you asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all these problems.  My arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore, my dog just died..."

2. If they say they're John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name.  Then ask them where it's located, how long it's been in business, how many people work
there, how they got into this line of work, if they're married, how many kids they have, etc. Continue asking them personal questions or questions about their company for as long as necessary.

3. Cry out in surprise, "Judy? Is that you? Judy, how have you been?" This will give Judy a few brief moments of terror as she tries to figure out where she could know you from.

4. Say "No" over and over. Be sure to vary the sound of each one, and keep a rhythmic tempo, even as they are trying to speak.  This is most fun if you can do it until they hang up.

5. Tell the Telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask him/her if he/she will give you his/her home phone number so you can call him/her back. When the Telemarketer explains that telemarketers cannot give out
their home numbers say, "I guess you don't want anyone bothering you at home, right?"  The Telemarketer will agree and you say, "Me neither!" Hang up.

6. Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.

7. Ask them to fax the information to you, and make up a number.

8. Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a joke.  "Come on, Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how's your momma?"

9. Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to speak up ...louder ... louder ...

10. Tell them to talk very slowly, because you want to write every word down.

Aah - love it! Thanks to Lachlan for passing these valuable tips to us.

This week's quiz:

Match the word with its meaning:  rudimentary, pandemonium, Muse, surreptitious, quintessence, cantankerous, valedictory, dénouement, pusillanimous, rubric

1. lacking courage; cowardly; faint-hearted

2. a perfect example or embodiment of something

3. a class or category; any authoritative rule or direction 

4. stealthy; secretive; sneaky; underhanded

5. signifying a goodbye, farewell

6. a place of anarchy;  wild confusion, commotion, chaos

7. the unraveling or solution of the complication of a dramatic plot; the issue or outcome of a situation

8. any of the nine goddesses of the art, said to be a source of creative inspiration to all artists, especially poets

9. hostile, argumentative, irritable

10.basic; elementary; crude; primitive

If you decide to go out to a restaurant for a meal in an effort to forget your computer woes, think again ... here's a true story that happened to Jim, the patron in the following story ... really ...

Patron: Waiter!

Waiter: Hi, my name is Bill, and I'll be your Support. What seems to be the problem?

Patron: There's a fly in my soup!

Waiter: Try again, maybe the fly won't be there this time.

Patron: No, it's still there.

Waiter: Maybe it's the way you're using the soup; try eating it with a fork instead.

Patron: Even when I use the fork, the fly is still there.

Waiter: Maybe the soup is incompatible with the bowl; what kind of bowl are you using?

Patron: A SOUP bowl!

Waiter: Hmmm, that should work. Maybe it's a configuration problem; how was the bowl set up?

Patron: You brought it to me on a saucer; what has that to do with the fly in my soup?!

Waiter: Can you remember everything you did before you noticed the fly in your soup?

Patron: I sat down and ordered the Soup of the Day!

Waiter: Have you considered upgrading to the latest Soup of the Day?

Patron: You have more than one Soup of the Day each day?

Waiter: Yes, the Soup of the Day is changed every hour.

Patron: Well, what is the Soup of the Day now?

Waiter: The current Soup of the Day is tomato.

Patron: Fine. Bring me the tomato soup, and the check. I'm running late now.

Waiter leaves and returns with another bowl of soup and the check.

Waiter: Here you are, Sir. The soup and your check.

Patron: This is potato soup.

Waiter: Yes, the tomato soup wasn't ready yet.

Patron: Well, I'm so hungry now, I'll eat anything.

Waiter leaves.

Patron: Waiter! There's a fly in my soup!

The check:

Last week's quiz:

1. To 'thunder'; to denounce scathingly - FULMINATE

"The root of this word, Latin fulmen, means "lightning," not "thunder" ... but why spoil a good story? In the Middle Ages, Latin fulminare was the technical term for a formal condemnation or censure by the pope or other church authority. Now, however, anyone is free to fulminate."

2. Excessively sentimental; having a faint, sickly taste - MAWKISH

"Although mawkish often describes something excessively sweet, this word originally referred to something far less tasty: maggots.

"The obsolete English mawk means "maggot," and mawkish is now used to describe a person who feels nauseated and to something "nauseating" or characterised by "a faint sickly taste." As so often happens, mawkish lost its early vividness, and now just means "feebly sentimental" or "faintly sickly-tasting.""

3. To throw something or someone out of a window - DEFENESTRATE

"Although these days you can defenestrate just about anything that'll fit through a window, this word first applied to history's most famous such tossing-out, which occurred in Prague in 1618.

"Angry at a lack of religious freedom, Protestant insurgents broke up a meeting of royal officials in Hradcany, the Prague Castle, then went on to express their extreme displeasure by tossing two officials and their secretary out a window. Those thus defenestrated weren't seriously hurt, however. (Depending on which account you read, this is either because they were tossed out of a window that was relatively low, or landed in a moat, or perhaps both)."

It's also a computing jargon term for "the act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program" or "the act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters" or "the act of dragging something out of a window (onto the screen.)"

Defenestrate comes from Latin fenestra, meaning "window," and is therefore a relative of words for "window" in several other languages, including French fenêtre, German Fenster, and Italian finestra.

4. Flitting about from one thing to another; disjointed, disconnected; not methodical - DESULTORY

"In Roman times, a desultor was a circus entertainer who would leap from the back of one horse to another. This name derives from desilire, meaning "to leap down."

"(Desultor shares a common linguistic ancestor with several other "leaping" words as somersault.)"

5. A drop of mucus at the end of the nose - MELDROP

"Here's one of those isn't-it-nice-to-know-there's-a-word-for-it words. "Meldrop" comes from an Old Norse term for "a drop or foam from a horse's mouth.""

6. A remark that occurs to someone only later, after the fact; the thing you should have said, but didn't think of - ESPRIT D'ESCALIER

"This wonderful French expression literally translates as "wit of the staircase." The English quickly recognized its usefulness, and had adopted it by the early 1900s. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit d'escalier as: "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room.""

7. Cheap and showy, gaudy. Of persons: low, mean, or base -TAWDRY

"Like many women of her day, the seventh-century Anglian princess Etheldreda was betrothed against her wishes. So, understandably, she fled to the Isle of Ely in the middle of the river Ouse, just north of Cambridge, England.

"There she established a religious house, served as its abbess, and eventually was canonized as St. Audrey. She died in 679 due to a throat tumour, which St. Audrey herself declared was divine punishment for the vanity of her youth, when she was overly fond of fine neckwear. In honor of St. Audrey, the townsfolk of Ely held an annual fair, where merchants hawked frilly lace scarves they called St. Audrey's lace. Over time, this expression shortened to tawdry lace. Soon tacky imitations abounded, giving tawdry its later connotation of "cheap and pretentious."

8. Weak, helpless, ineffectual, futile - FECKLESS

"This word comes from Scotland (where its opposite, feckful, means "efficient, vigorous, powerful"). Feckless comes from the Scots dialect term feck, a shortened version of the word effect."

9. An abnormal sensation that ants are crawling over one's skin -FORMICATION (and no, it's not a typo!)

"The term formication derives from the Latin word formica, or "ant.""

10.Extremely severe; harsh; cruel - DRACONIAN

"Draco was an Athenian legislator, who in 621 B.C. received special authority to codify existing laws that had never been formally written down. Although his aim was to ensure a more uniform system of justice, the result was that he made those laws especially severe, such as mandating the death penalty even for trivial crimes."

I found this wonderful collection of words and origins here: http://www.funwords.com/archive.htm

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A Little Something Extra ...

One of the essential elements of any good story is conflict and children's author Laura Backes writes, " ... a character encounters an obstacle or conflict of some kind, and then resolves it through his or her own purposeful action. This makes up the events of the story, or the plot. How the character changes as a person through this conflict and resolution process reflects the book's theme, or underlying message. But lately I've been thinking that the above explanation is too simple."

Read more here: http://www.write101.com/conflict.htm

Oxymoron:   maintaining our computer theme, here's one for those-who-know: advanced BASIC

Word of the week: Redhibition (n) Here's a handy word you might find yourself using the next time your PC goes on the blink. It means the "return of defective product and cancellation of sale."

This week's Latin phrase is doing a Nellie Melba:

Non erravi perniciose! (I did not commit a fatal error!)

(Nellie Melba was an Aussie opera singer who retired a number of times - and made a come-back each time.)

Regards,

Jennifer

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