More commentary on Jobs and idiots who think food can cure cancer once you've got it

On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:06:20 -0500, John A.
wrote:

On Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:07:05 +1300, Eric Stevens
wrote:

On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 12:21:38 -0800, John McWilliams
wrote:

On 11/5/11 PDT 7:41 PM, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:24:13 -0400, John
wrote:

Or maybe he simply ignored it as you say you have done for his in the
past.

He has actually somewhere said that he failed to notice it the first
time ...

If that he be me, you're once again incorrect. Unless of course you can
quote my misquote.

It may have been John A. who made a remark to that effect. I can't
keep track of all the shots while I am a singleton playing a double.

And you still haven't copped to your original error, Eric.

And I won't. The most I might do is accept that I could ease the way
for those who can't easily deduce the logic from the grammar by
writing " ... where spelling, punctuation and grammar each works
against understanding what the author is actually getting at."

Now that would be grammatically correct. "...each works..." has
subject-verb agreement. (I'm not sure what the capitalization rule is
though for beginning a sentence with a mid-sentence quote with
ellipses, though, so I went with keeping the original capitalization
from the quoted material as a best guess. I could be wrong.)

Not even a smiley.

Without "each" the list is the subject and is plural. I'm sure you'll
find rules & examples covering both cases in one or both of the
references I posted earlier.

At the heart of all this argument is your determination that a list is
always plural. Had you dug far enough you would discover that
spelling, punctuation and grammar are uncountable nouns and that you
never use plural verbs with uncountable nouns. Further, while the use
of 'or' and 'nor' in a list means that the list should be treated as
singular, the use of 'and' means that the list should only generally
be treated as plural; that is, there can be exceptions. The situation
of a list of uncountable nouns joined by an 'and' is therefore far
from clear. This is a fine topic for another newsgroup but not this
one. I'm ending this argument now, if this is possible.

Regards,

Eric Stevens

Savageduck wrote:
On 2011-10-30 08:45:58 -0700, John A. said:

Le Snip

I also noticed the larger context, bearing in mind what was being
written about, and figured out, without even thinking about it much,
or even consciously, what was meant.

Are you also confused by such sentences as "Abraham Lincoln wrote the
Gettysburg Address while traveling on the back of an envelope"?

Aaaagh!

...and that is a trule demonstration of fractured syntax, illuminating
the ignorance of the writer, rather than the interpretive skills of
the reader.

A comma would fix it, though. I'm not saying that would make it the best
possible way to express the idea, but . . .