Englishuser, or should I say Mr.T…? You?re an [size=150][color=darkred]idiot[/size], [size=150][color=darkred]really really an idot [/size]and I can?t understand that Torsten didn?t ban you earlier. I hope he does so now!!! :twisted:
I think you should be ashamed for your pushy way of using this site. From what will you know [color=red]what users of this site do use? :evil:
Spencer, I think as Englishuser is neither male nor female it is thing and [color=red]so it is[size=150][color=darkred] IT[/size]
You?re right, your sex isn?t interesting for the site, but your skills (social capabilities) were. And I think you didn?t show some. Didn?t you read Torsten?s requests to you or didn?t you understand them? Might be that I?m able to explain it to you!!
Maybe that you can choose but if you are speaking about respectable authorities of this site I think it?s more a task of social capabilities as a grammatically one to choose the word who.
As you are a trainee ( I wish you all the best to become a ful blooded moderator ) you should better pay more attention on what the administrators and the other moderators advise you than always to try to defend yourself with pushy arguments. Learning is a hard business sometimes and if you really listen to the proficient moderators ( and here are some) you can achieve becoming a good moderator. But you must listen and think through what they?ve told you before you answer.
Right, look at the quote below.
Have a look back to Torsten?s recent posts to you at the forum “Feedback and Commands”. You?ll find there some requests from Torsten to you. I couldn?t discover that you listened to that, but what I found was a thoughtless reply from you.
I?m neither the policeman of this site nor am I the judge or anything else. But I?m a member of it who?d like to have a pleasant atmosphere between adult people. That doesn?t mean that you can?t discuss, you only should follow the rules and you didn?t.
Michael
P.S.: It were more polite if you quote like that:
[quote=“[color=red]
username”].
And a second recommend: Have a cape of sleep about what I told you here before you reply.
One predicament of building language proficiency is that he higher one gets, the less one’s mistakes have to do with systematic issues, and the more they involve problems of nuance, wrongly overextending dictionary definitions, lack of exposure to various terms, etc.
I’m sorry. I was right and you were wrong. You were wrong on several levels.
“Evening dress”, if used to mean white tie, is uncountable. You can’t use an article before it.
“Evening dress”, if used to mean an evening gown, is countable, so you can use an article with it, and usually have to.
As I have pointed out, you said “[color=red]a full evening dress” – with an article – so you were asking if I ever wear an evening gown, not if I ever wear white tie.
You relied completely on dictionaries, and discounted empirical evidence. Showing you websites full of evening dresses did not convince you that the term could mean an evening gown, even though it was in front of your face. Instead you claimed I was only hallucinating your mistake due to the culture of my home country.
Ignoring empirical evidence, you refused to believe that the existence of the two meanings of the term (the countable one and the uncountable one) could cause confusion or humor.
You misinterpreted the term “evening dress” and thought it indicated a type of suit, rather than a general style of apparel, which is what it really means.
Language flows like a river, and the job of lexicographers is something like trying to spear water. This is why empirical observation of the world, and not the limited information in dictionaries, is what we must rely on.
I think you’re the only one in the forums who is sensitive to anyone pointing out the distinction between a foreigner mistake and a native-speaker mistake. When I have been able to point to the first-language source of other people’s English errors, they have generally found it helpful. You’re the only one who goes into a fit about it.
Of course I still like you, Spencer. You betcha. I know I act like this at various times. The best way to keep me from attacking is to keep blood out of the water.
I don’t know if I have ever found any evidence, or I just assumed that Englishuser was a woman because its thinking and behavior are similar to hyper-sensitive women I’ve taught with, and because I’ve never encountered that behavior in men. (There’s always a first time, though.)
Besides that, only women write things like this:
Sometimes I run into professors who teach online classes and make their students uncomfortable by never revealing any gender information about themselves. Only radicalized feminist women do this, because only radical feminist women believe that knowing their gender will make people question their competence. Women who are not radical feminists, and men, don’t have this kind of complex.
As I say, it’s generally women who have a background in women’s studies who behave this way. (In my opinion women’s studies sickens the minds of women in much the same way that pornography addiction damages men psychologically.)
Anyway, Englishuser could be a he, a she, or even a robot, but I think it’s a woman. That’s only my assumption based on its behavior and my experience with other people. But as I say, you can never know for sure.
Hey, Spencer! By the way, if we were writing in Hungarian, we’d have no problem choosing a pronoun for Englishuser, would we?
Next to used in the sense of tantamount to being is invariably associated with a negative idea and it follows that saying: next to all words creates an unnatural clash. In the same way you would say: next to impossible. To say: next to possible or next to something defies the natural sense of the expression.
