Truly random shtuff

[capri0mni]

Brain dump of the "bits of litter" variety:

• In English, nouns don't fall into "Singular" and "Plural" forms. They just fall into "Singular" and "Not! Singular" Unless you want to count zero as a plural:
  
  • 0 children
    
  • 0 bicycles
    
  • 0 phenomena
  
  Funny how we seem to treat the singular as the default, when, linguistically, it's the deviation (Sesame Street has started to include zero in their number lessons, now, so that's how I noticed it).
  
  
• In the U.S., in car commercials, there's always the disclaimer, in small print, on the bottom of the screen: "Professional driver on a closed course. Do no Attempt." Even when the car is driving at a reasonable speed in straight line down a straight highway. Um.
  
  
• The telephone / answering machine I've got is stupid. Because there is no way to mute incoming messages. You can turn down the volume, but you cannot turn the volume off. The only way not to hear incoming messages is to turn the answering machine off -- and therefore not receive incoming messages. In what world and in what environment does this make sense? It wouldn't work for an office, where you might want to have a private meeting with a client without being interupted by the phone's robotic voice announcing the number of the incoming caller. And it certainly doesn't work for a bedside phone (where I have it), in case, you know, you want to sleep without being interupted by telemarketers. You can mute the ring, but not the messages. The reason I need an answering machine is that I live by an odd schedule and I want to have some control over how I interact with the outside world.
  
  So I turn the machine off before I go to bed, and turn it on when I wake up. I've got caller ID. So it records the number and time of the incoming call, even without messages. And it says it will automatically dial number of the caller for you. ... But it dials the area code even for a local number, and it won't dial "1" for a long distance number.... so those calls never go through properly.
  
  I mean, WTF? Like I said, my answering machine is stupid.
  
  
• My mother's food philosophy was "Foods that ripen together, in the same season, should be eaten together; foods that don't, shouldn't." So Lean Cuisine's "Healthy Choice pumpkin squash ravoili" (with asparagas) just strikes me as full of Wrong. If it had been up to me, I'd have chosen a green veggie from the cabbage family -- braised savvoy cabbage, perhaps, or maybe some chopped up kale.
  
  
• If you dream about having a conversation in the lobby of a dormatory (at normal speaking volume) at a relatively early hour (say: 9:30 pm), and the residents of the dorm call out from their rooms that you are being too loud, and you should stop talking and go to bed... Is that your subconcious telling you it's time to wake up? I thought so.
  
  
• Here, have an illustration of the deadly Manticore:
  .

Comments

[spiralsheep]

Hmm, but English noun conventions, such as they are, originated before the language had the mathematical concept of zero so, in fact: no child, no bicycle, no phenomenon. No?

Your answering machine is full of wrongness. ::commiserates::

[capri0mni]

Hmm. But "No" can be paired with either a singular or a plural noun: "There is no child; there are no children."

"Zero" can only be used with the plural verb. We wouldn't say "There is zero child." (Well ...I wouldn't).

But maybe this is direct evidence that English Grammar predates the English understanding of zero. Maybe the internal logic of English singular and plural verbs breaks down like this: "If there is one of something, use the singular. For every number of something other than one, use the plural." If there is no concept of "Zero" any other number than one must be greater than one. So you don't need to know how many more than one there are to know that you should use "are."

Then, after that rule is perfectly at home, along comes the idea of zero...