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  • (ACB on) -- Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)

    From HenHanna@21:1/5 to Athel Cornish-Bowden on Sat Apr 6 13:33:52 2024
    XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.english.usage

    -------- Forwarded Message --------
    Subject: ACB on Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
    Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2024 10:07:42 -0700
    From: HenHanna <[email protected]>
    Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang,alt.english.usage



    That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

    -- When i saw this, i felt a bit a better about being hated by (Dr.) ACB


    Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
    On 3/29/2024 2:46 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
    On 2024-03-29 09:35:59 +0000, Ross Clark said:

    Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.

    That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

    It was three weeks before her body was found.

    Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
    called "Words Fail Me".

    She says:
    "In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
    invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
    new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
    cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
    obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
    entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
    part of a sentence."

    Can anyone make sense of this for me?

    I can sort of understand that, but not to the point of trying to
    translate it into English.

    Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

    They're the same person!

    Further:
    "To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
    the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
    invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it,
    is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can
    do with the English language as it is."

    Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

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  • From HenHanna@21:1/5 to All on Sat Apr 6 13:42:10 2024
    XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.english.usage

    That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

    -- When i saw this, i felt a bit a better about being hated by (Dr.) ACB


    Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
    On 3/29/2024 2:46 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
    On 2024-03-29 09:35:59 +0000, Ross Clark said:

    Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.

    That's worthy of a Darwin Award.



    and what's your reasons for hating Virginia Woolf ???



    __________________________________________________________________
    by: Athel Cornish-Bowden - Sat, 6 Apr 2024 01:42


    So far as HenHanna is concerned, here are some things that annoy people:


    1. Refusing to format messages in a normal way;


    2. Refusing to use normal punctuation;


    3. Refusing to use capitals when they are needed (beginnings of
    sentences, the pronoun I, etc.);


    4. Ignoring all suggestions (and not offering arguments against them);


    5. Using abbreviations like pls and ppl that may be acceptable in SMS
    messages, but are not acceptable in a group devoted to English usage;


    6. Insisting on signing as HH after being told several times that there
    was already an HH at alt.usage.english who had been there much earlier.
    (He's gone now, but was a regular when HenHanna arrived.)

    --
    Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
    in England until 1987.

    ____________________________


    ----------- (the other, older HH was long gone, when i started posting)

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