Canny lass

Lesmes, I’m intrigued to know which big names were missing. I’ve just returned from the UK where I saw the usual range of chocolate eggs for sale – all under the banner *Easter Eggs’. I’ve just shopped on-line for my own chocolate eggs and I can choose ‘Easter eggs’ made by Cadbury, Mars (Malteser and Galaxy),Guylian, Thornton and Nestlé (Aero, Milky bar, Smarties, Yorkie,Rolo, Quality Street, Munchies, Kit Kat chunky, Toffee Crisp and Dairy Box) and Lindt – who even offer an Easter Bunny and an Easter Sheep. Even Ferrero have Easter eggs and Easter bunnies. Kinder and Haribo, while they don’t offer Easter eggs, do offer other ‘Easter’ products, such as bunnies, figures, pouches and mini hunts. Even Tescos has a range of Easter eggs (N.B. their Gin and Elderflower egg is not sold as an ‘Easter’ egg). I think there are some pretty big names in the chocolate industry there.

Top marks, Eggy. I do like a quick learner! Getting back to Easter eggs, I think the word 'Easter' should have been removed years ago and it should have been replaced by 'New Year'. How can anybody legitimately call a chocolate egg an 'Easter egg' when it appears like clockwork on January 2nd every year!

I'm pigeonholed as a 'Guardianista', despite tha fact that I read not one but two daily nationals - one left of centre and one right of centre - and neither of them is even British! Take the pigeonholing for what it is, Steve, wild, uninformed guesswork with an underlying argumentum ad hominem thrown in for good measure.

Why do people automatically assume that the use of quotation marks/inverted commas indicate that the words they enclose must be a quotation of something previously said or written? I think the problem lies in the name – quotation marks. According to MLA (2.2.8) The quotation mark/inverted comma, single or double, has several other uses, among them: placement around translations of foreign words or phrases: Example;The word idiot is derived from the Latin word idiõta ‘ignorant person’. placement around words or phrases used in a special sense or purposefully misused: Example; In terminally PC Sweden they skirt around this and call them “exclusion areas”. These “exclusion areas” multiply by the week. Tell us exactly what is “excluded” from them please? Thanks for the example sentences 3g. Steve’s use of single inverted commas falls clearly into the latter category.

Pigeonholing people is what the left do, and certainly not me! Because of this they do exactly what you do above: rather than tackling ideas which they can't handle they go in for ad hominem attacks. I thought it was hilarious! It must be one of the all time classic greats on here!

Don't know about Merc, but I get round it by avoiding those contracts like the plague!

MLA used here, Merc, where letters versus numerals is related to the number of words required to express the number. Numbers requiring one or two words (one, fifteen, twenty-one, forty-five, one thousand etc.) are written as words while more than two words requires expression in numerals (121 - instead of one hundred and twenty-one, 1 340 instead of one thousand three hundred and forty etc.). Mind you, it also advises the use of a hyphen to separate two-word constructions but I'm not so fussy about that and neither are my clients. It's a complex (and interesting) business!

One learns something new every day, does one not! How is it with twenty one, thirty one and so on(e)?

... also many examples of text written with all vowels removed. Still perfectly understandable though - if things are working up top. One has to agree.

Sadly, we didn't get to Peru last April as hubby was locked in a lead-lined room radiating becquerels and probably glowing in the dark. I can't say for sure as visiting wasn't allowed. However, all being well, it's on the cards for this autumn or next spring.

Yes, but these need to be kept under one's hat and I wouldn't dream of getting my incandescent purple hat claggy with marmalade.

Quite! Spelling, and I'm being serious here, is the least important property of a word. Of a word's form, function and semantic content it's not the form of the word that conveys information to the reader. Speach, even in its written form, is about communication and It takes a great many spelling errors and/or typos before communication is lost to the average native speaker (assuming that they still have a couple of grey cells functioning up top). I tend to see spelling errors as no more that contributions to an ever present and ongoing language change. The more narrow-minded tend to see them as language decay. It's an interesting debate.

L’enfant qui est aimé a plusiers noms. Non? I answer to most names.

Same here!

I don't wish to be pedantic or anything but would that be the same as liminality? You can't go missing out letters here, there and everywhere. It upsets the natives.

Complete wuss is a perfect description! This one is too.

Bernese sennenhund? Babysit an 8 year-old 3 days a week. Lovely dog. I don't think the young lady will be lifting it like that in a year or so!

Yet another of my endearing qualities! I'm pedantic as well, apparently! We all have our cross to bear. Just a pity yours is made of lead. Certainly! Always nice to be able to put a face to a name.

I do my best, Merc, I do my best.

Anybody in the Edinburgh area 19-22 February, who would like to meet up for a coffee or something stronger? E-mail me at puttevanilla@gmail.com.

It's an annoying habit that I've developed over the years. You are forgiven.

... and by the way 2g, you don't need to read my posts if you think they are too long, too boring, or too 'anything else. As owner of this site you must be aware that there is a 'Mark site read' option at the top of the page, just under the 'search box'. It works well.

So I incorrectly wrote ‘Atlee’. My deepest apologies to the good people of Bedlington. There’s just no excuse for getting a proper noun wrong!. Ah well, at least I remembered the capital letter. However, if you want to play ‘language police’ or ‘naughty, pedantic language police’ as I prefer to call it, then I must point out that English words of Latin origin don’t usually take the prefix un-. This is most often reserved for words of Germanic origin. Non-, or a- are usually good substitutes for un-. Looking at some of the text submitted during the last few days (Where are you when we REALLY need you Clement Attlee) I see: Wednesday 13:30 “If you are referring to slavery, we pioneered the abolition of that - a practice which had gone on for thousands of years before we brought the forces off Empire to bear on it.” Some of us miss a letter (Atlee), some of us add an extra letter. I think ‘of’ might have made more sense here. Wednesday 14:25 “Good use of the old Ad Hominem there Merc!” Ad hominum requires only one upper-case letter, the letter A., and this ONLY in initial position in a sentence. Really surprised here as this is a frequently used expression when up against the wall or in a corner on this site. It just goes to show that practice doesn’t always make perfect, eh? Wednesday 15:02 “Berlusconi has his areas of support in the center of politics” That’s not very patriotic now, is it! Center is usually spelled ‘centre’ in British English. Feb 5th “I've just done a bike up for my Nigerian friend "Happy" so he can get from his hotel to the supermarket car park on the other side of town with less risk of being own down on these treacherous roads,” I think the particle verb required here is ‘run down’. … and you Merc. You really should know better! Wednesday 14:36, Lord Ridley socks it to the HoL on your behalf? “By the way, here's a tip for recognising when someone is really struggling to keep their place in a discussion: they start calling people names like 'leftie' and so on, as you have done! It's a dead giveaway! It's the equivalent of throwing ones toys out of the pram.” How many times must I tell you that the correct spelling of ‘toys’ is d-u-m-m-y (s-o-o-t-h-e-r, if you’re not patriotic and using American English) Consider your wrists well and truly slapped, young man!

L’enfant qui est aimé a plusiers noms. Non? Of course he was referring to the EEC. So was I. In 1962, when he made that speech, the EU was the common market but then came the Maastricht Treaty. You remember the Maastricht Treaty, don’t you, or did you not manage to get past page 3 the day the Sun newspaper reported (I use the word loosely) on it? Suddenly the EEC got a new name – the European Community or EC – and it didn’t end there! Do you remember the Treaty of Lisbon a few years ago? I’m sure the Daily Wail mentioned it a couple of times. Anyhow, that treaty lead to the dear old EEC getting yet another name, would you believe, the European Union (EU). I thought everybody knew about these name changes but apparently not. Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty, or ‘Amendments to the Treaty on European Union and to the treaty establishing the European Community’, to give it its full title, reads: “The Treaty establishing the European Community shall be amended in accordance with the provisions of this article. 1) The title of the Treaty shall be replaced by ‘Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’. 2) Throughout the Treaty: (a) the words ‘Community’ and European Community’ shall be replaced by ‘Union’ and any necessary grammatical changes shall be made, the words ‘European Communities’ shall be replaced by ‘European Union’, except in paragraph 6(c) of Article 299, renumbered paragraph 5(c) of Article 311(a). In respect of Article 136, this amendment shall apply only to the mention of ‘The Community’ at the beginning of the first paragraph”; (Oh, how I miss my job!) Both the good earl and I myself were, in fact, referring to the same thing, each using the terminology of the day. So, my “blundering” wasn’t totally irrelevant. The European Union is definitely a public issue in my time, is it not?

Absolutely!