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Was, Were, Wasn't and Weren't

CDRIVE

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This topic is truly pointed at members with far to much free time (like me) to ponder what most would consider anal. Especially when you consider that a few decades of smart phone texting has inflicted damage to the English language equivalent to the evolutionary aftermath of an apocalyptic event!

For those of you that obsess over stuff like this the link provided discusses when, where and how "was", "were", "wasn't" and "weren't" are properly used in sentence structure. For many sentences this should be obvious to most English speaking people but there are times when it's not obvious at all.

When reading the replies in this link please keep in mind that these folks are 'Word Meisters'. Consequently, you can't read it without constantly searching the definitions of yet more terms. Unless of course,... you're a word meister too! :p
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/73134/if-it-wasnt-for-vs-if-it-werent-for/73136

Chris
 

Harald Kapp

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... and then people say Geman is a complicated language, Haha.
 

CDRIVE

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This comment will sound odd to a native German or Japanese but I find both languages have something in common.... To my ear they always sound very angry. In fact either would be my choice of languages if I were charged with belching out commands with enough punch to scare the hell out of anyone who dared disobey them! :D

Chris
 
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shrtrnd

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You know somebody that still writes in English?
Fast food restaurants with product symbols keyboard instead of numbers so cashiers don't screw up the cost.
Grocery store price scanners so cashiers don't need to know the prices, or enter them.
Kids on mobile devices where everything is an abbreviation.
Pretty soon everything will be voice activated.
Maybe those guys are theorists, ... practical application is almost dead now.
 

CDRIVE

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Yes, most if not all U.S. public schools no longer teach Script. My 22 year old grandson can only write script when signing his name! :eek:

Chris
 

duke37

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Voice activation will need persons to speek ploply.
No-one seems to distiguish between their and there, cote and coat, weather and whether. Books are now kept in lybwies, in it?
 

shrtrnd

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My daughter, who is a grade-school teacher, moved to another state years ago. She left a boat-load of construction and other paper products she didn't want to pay to move. A contractor was at my house yesterday working on the plumbing, he mentioned his mother was a school-teacher and that she was always on the look-out for spare school-supplies for her students. I offered him all the boxes of paper my daughter left.
.... get this, he said they don't use paper. Everything is done on computer tablets.
What the frick is going on in our schools these days? They're not even teaching actual writing anymore?
Or maybe we're so eco-friendly now, that we don't cut down trees to make paper?
 

Bluejets

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Or maybe we're so eco-friendly now, that we don't cut down trees to make paper?

I wouldn't be too concerned there.
By the look of the amount of junk mail one sees (at least half a tree per letter box I'm guessing).
Plus the fact that every time one needs to keep a record, one has to "print" even though the banks etc. say they are discontinuing paper transactions. Even ATM's remind you to take your receipt.
Must admit Coles and Wollies ask if you want one.
 

hevans1944

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Hey! Hows come @Ratch hasn't weighed in on this? He's self-admittedly hopelessly pedantic.

And on trees for paper... why not? You can plant and re-grow trees, and trees put oxygen back in the atmosphere. What about all those zillions of tons of plastic bags now used in grocery stores in lieu of paper bags? We gonna plant some more oil to make more of them? Ahem, I am glad we don't bring cockroaches (Palmetto bugs if you live in Florida) home in paper bags anymore, and I can hook at least six or eight plastic bags on my fingers for carrying groceries from car to house. Without handles that are likely to fall off, two paper bags is all I can manage. Wife wants me to carry cloth bags to grocery store!

If it weren't for Electronics Point, we would have to do this discussion on Stack Exchange.
 

Harald Kapp

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That is why Harald is so good at english
Thanks for the compliment.

To my ear they always sound very angry
I wouldn't call it angry, but I admit a harsh tone in these languages (though I know Japanese only from Movies ;)).
If you're on the lookout for mellow tones, go to Spain, Italy or France - although French can sound harsh, too. With French I think it depends very much on the person speaking.
 

CDRIVE

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If you're on the lookout for mellow tones, go to Spain, Italy or France - although French can sound harsh, too. With French I think it depends very much on the person speaking.
In order of precedence I would have to put Italian at the top of that list. Both my paternal and maternal grandparents were born in Italy. My father would say "Son, there's no language in the world that sounds so sweet. It's like listening to music. It's 'ah singa songa' language"! :)

Chris
 

shrtrnd

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I lived in Japan for a while. What I noticed is that the man-talk seemed harsh, and the women-talk seemed soothing.
Often wondered if they've got some kind of separation there between the sexes in the spoken word.
My concern about not teaching kids to write, is what's going to happen if we ever experience an EMP strike from some nut-case, or another powerful solar flare that zaps our microelectronics. Are we going to wind-up with a bunch of dolts who don't know how to communicate unless they've got some kind of technological crutch? I read somewhere
that the last big solar event was in 1858. Transformers melted, and telegraph stations were set on fire.
Image what something like that would do to us today?
I had to look-up hevans1944 'pedantic'.
CDRIVE, you opened a can of worms here for us, too.
At least SOMEBODY is thinking about modern-day literacy and verbiage.
 

CDRIVE

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Steve, sure you can. What you typed is saved to disk. You can recall it anytime you want. So you didn't loose any time at all!:p

So what would it be?????
"If it weren't for Chris' pedantically lame topic I wouldn't have wasted two minutes of my life".

Or

"If it wasn't for Chris' pedantically lame topic I wouldn't have wasted two minutes of my life".

Or is it...
"I don't give a sh!t either way"! :p

Chris
 

shrtrnd

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Ya' know. If we all wrote our posts in mobile abbreviated slang, we could have saved *steve* a whole lot of aggravation time.
 

shrtrnd

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See it before it completely disappears, you mean, Harald?
(Sorry *steve*, I gotta learn mobile abbreviated slang before I can shorten my posts, to save you review time)
Good one Hop.
 
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