Canny lass

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!

I fail to see why Clement Atlee would be needed now at all. He opposed Britain’s entry to the European Union – as, in any democracy, he had every right to do. I might even point out that, despite Atlee’s opposition, Britain entered the European Union, so did he put up a good fight for his cause? Britain is now leaving the European Union thus rendering his opinion of 1962 superfluous to the debate. “I confess I feel gravely disturbed. We are allying ourselves with six nations of Europe; it may be more, but six at present. Four of those were rescued only twenty years or so ago from domination by the other two”. Would I think I’m right in thinking that the above quotation is taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee ,Atlee’s speech in the HoL August 2nd 1962? (It’s always nice with a source reference as it gives the reader the chance to place that quotation in its intended context. So much can be misinterpreted otherwise, I always think). If this is the relevant speech, then Atlee was discussing change in Britain’s ‘ways’. He mentions early on that the proposal to enter the Common market would involve “an extraordinary change” from the old ways of Britain to something completely new. However, he also points out that he is not saying “that necessarily old things are right: I should be showing my age too clearly if I did that. It may be they are right: but make no mistake: this is an enormous change”. On the subject of being tied to the common market Atlee goes on to say that “It might be right, it may be wrong […] it is entirely different from anything we have had before” and clarifies that Britain becoming part of a larger whole “may be right now, but, historically, that has not been our position”. He reiterates his resistance to change even in the speech of November 8th 1962 (from which, I believe your second quotation is taken) when he says quite plainly “As I read the Treaty of Rome, the whole position means that we shall enter a federation which is composed in an entirely different way. I do not say it is the wrong way. But it is not our way.” It appears to me that Clement Atlee was clearly concerned about eventual changes. That’s maybe not so strange, given that he was 79 years old when he made those speeches to the HoL. It’s a common fact of life that the older we get, the more resistant we are to change. I’m always telling the grandchildren that “things were better before” and I’m sure they will be telling their grandchildren the same – as will their children after them. What he seems to be doing here is expressing his very own personal opposition to change, which we are, of course, all entitled to do, including those who made speeches advocating change. There are probably loads of those floating about the Internet as well. In his favour, Atlee makes it quite clear that he is expressing only his own personal opinion rather than fact: he makes no sweeping categorical statements. Instead, his speech is strewn with markers indicating the possibility of what may happen rather than that which will happen: “I think”, “I might be right, I may be wrong”, “we may have been”, “it does not seem to me”, “so far as I can see”. On more than one occasion, Atlee even suggests that he himself “may be merely insular” – the marker ‘may’ suggesting that he is aware of the possibility).These are admirable traits in a speaker and ones which some of us would do well to adopt in our ramblings. Another quote attributed to Atlee reads: “When we are returned to power we want to put in the statute book an act which will make our people citizens of the world before they are citizens of this country.” (C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (Left Book Club, 1937). That statement begs the question: Is not a united Europe a small step in that direction? and, perhaps even more important in these times of mass migration: Should the title “citizens of the world” be reserved only for the people of Britain?

... and I was once a girl guide, so I'm not worried either

Why have a dog and bark yourself? The sleeping Jihadists will take care of that for you. 3g said so, so it must be right!

Malcolm Robinson's the man for that!

Ah, you meant people like me and 3g! Got it now!