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quizcustodietThe august body that is the NUS has supplied me with my new student card, complete with a little booklet extolling the virtues of both the organization and the card. From the only four pages that weren't ads:
"Welcome to your National Union of Students. NUS continue to represent the interests of... students in all the work we do"
"Campaigning is at the core of NUS' mission..."
"Should you require any support throughout the year on anything that effects you..."
"Follow the instructions and your done"
(I'm previewing this post avidly in the hopes of avoiding the vengeance of Gaudere.) They appear to have made a conscious decision not to use the definite article in front of NUS, which is painful but at least consistent. The rest of it, though - subject verb agreement? Confusing effect and affect? Your and you're? Surely somewhere in this union there must be someone who can write competently. Surely?
In less pedantic news, dinner this evening (and the very nice white wine that came with it) was at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant in Oxford, and at the Physics department's expense! This minor miracle is due to the fact that the colloquium this afternoon was by an American physicist working with BEC, and because of the cold atoms link my supervisor was nominated to entertain her. His college wasn't having high table this evening, so he decided to make it more social by bringing us along. It was a very entertaining evening - I'm not sure how much of it is due to familiarity, but the physicists I encounter here in Oxford are much more social than the ones I encounter at conferences. Thank God for that!
Finished watching Buffy the other night. Meh. I was reasonably impressed with the Buffy and the Slayerettes story arc; less so with Spike's arc. The final episode had some laughably bad CGI, but was otherwise a pretty good way to end the series. I'm bitter about Anya dying, as I really wanted her and Xander to get back together. This probably influences me in thinking that it didn't make much sense: with her and Andrew fighting side by side, anything that didn't kill Andrew really oughtn't to have been able to kill Anya. She's at least had a couple of years more practice doing this as a human, even if we discount all of her thousand years of demon experience. (Which is probably fair, as nose-twitching doesn't really give you a lot of practical combat skills). Would have liked to see more resolution of the Slayerette mutiny against Buffy. Could quite happily have watched Kennedy be torn to shreds by Bringers.
I hear rumors about that Spike somehow reappears in Angel S5 - I can't really judge until I've seen it, but my initial reaction is that this is lame. You're going to need some very strange coincidences to get him out of the Hellmouth. Just let the peroxide go. Ah, well.
Overall: Whedon's got good instincts, which produced some brilliant individual moments of TV. "Hush" and "Once More With Feeling" were both almost pure gold, and I'm also very fond of the S4 episode where Willow's wishing gets Spike and Buffy in love. Also, Spike's monologue at the opening of his first episode on Angel is side-splittingly funny. 'Quick! To the Angel-mobile!' However, there were equally moments that really didn't work: in fact, most of Season 5. And chunks of 6 (despite the redeeming influence of the Trio as comic relief). And there's too much of a tendency to hit the angst button for me to prefer it over other plotted series like The West Wing or Babylon 5. Whedon's good, but not the Second Coming that the most rabid fans seem to think he is.
Random grammar [Yes, it was spelled wrong before. Yes, I did richly deserve that.] question:
I remember the moral of John 8:1-11 as 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'. A quick check of most normal translations available on the Bible Gateway shows not one with this formulation, which may render the following pointless. Nevertheless, as a grammar exercise:
Is 'he' correct in the above sentence, or should it be '... him ...'?
The argument for 'him': the object of the verb is an implied listener, you. This notional person without sin is thus the object, and so should be accusative: him. 'who is without sin' is a descriptive clause, and thus irrelevant to the pronoun.
An argument for 'he': 'he who is without sin' is a single syntactical unit, serving as a noun, and so can be a direct object without changing the case of the pronoun.
A different argument for 'he': I would say that the pronoun is really serving to indicate the subject of the verb 'cast' rather than an object of the verb 'let'.
So, grammar mavens, what do you think?
"Welcome to your National Union of Students. NUS continue to represent the interests of... students in all the work we do"
"Campaigning is at the core of NUS' mission..."
"Should you require any support throughout the year on anything that effects you..."
"Follow the instructions and your done"
(I'm previewing this post avidly in the hopes of avoiding the vengeance of Gaudere.) They appear to have made a conscious decision not to use the definite article in front of NUS, which is painful but at least consistent. The rest of it, though - subject verb agreement? Confusing effect and affect? Your and you're? Surely somewhere in this union there must be someone who can write competently. Surely?
In less pedantic news, dinner this evening (and the very nice white wine that came with it) was at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant in Oxford, and at the Physics department's expense! This minor miracle is due to the fact that the colloquium this afternoon was by an American physicist working with BEC, and because of the cold atoms link my supervisor was nominated to entertain her. His college wasn't having high table this evening, so he decided to make it more social by bringing us along. It was a very entertaining evening - I'm not sure how much of it is due to familiarity, but the physicists I encounter here in Oxford are much more social than the ones I encounter at conferences. Thank God for that!
Finished watching Buffy the other night. Meh. I was reasonably impressed with the Buffy and the Slayerettes story arc; less so with Spike's arc. The final episode had some laughably bad CGI, but was otherwise a pretty good way to end the series. I'm bitter about Anya dying, as I really wanted her and Xander to get back together. This probably influences me in thinking that it didn't make much sense: with her and Andrew fighting side by side, anything that didn't kill Andrew really oughtn't to have been able to kill Anya. She's at least had a couple of years more practice doing this as a human, even if we discount all of her thousand years of demon experience. (Which is probably fair, as nose-twitching doesn't really give you a lot of practical combat skills). Would have liked to see more resolution of the Slayerette mutiny against Buffy. Could quite happily have watched Kennedy be torn to shreds by Bringers.
I hear rumors about that Spike somehow reappears in Angel S5 - I can't really judge until I've seen it, but my initial reaction is that this is lame. You're going to need some very strange coincidences to get him out of the Hellmouth. Just let the peroxide go. Ah, well.
Overall: Whedon's got good instincts, which produced some brilliant individual moments of TV. "Hush" and "Once More With Feeling" were both almost pure gold, and I'm also very fond of the S4 episode where Willow's wishing gets Spike and Buffy in love. Also, Spike's monologue at the opening of his first episode on Angel is side-splittingly funny. 'Quick! To the Angel-mobile!' However, there were equally moments that really didn't work: in fact, most of Season 5. And chunks of 6 (despite the redeeming influence of the Trio as comic relief). And there's too much of a tendency to hit the angst button for me to prefer it over other plotted series like The West Wing or Babylon 5. Whedon's good, but not the Second Coming that the most rabid fans seem to think he is.
Random grammar [Yes, it was spelled wrong before. Yes, I did richly deserve that.] question:
I remember the moral of John 8:1-11 as 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'. A quick check of most normal translations available on the Bible Gateway shows not one with this formulation, which may render the following pointless. Nevertheless, as a grammar exercise:
Is 'he' correct in the above sentence, or should it be '... him ...'?
The argument for 'him': the object of the verb is an implied listener, you. This notional person without sin is thus the object, and so should be accusative: him. 'who is without sin' is a descriptive clause, and thus irrelevant to the pronoun.
An argument for 'he': 'he who is without sin' is a single syntactical unit, serving as a noun, and so can be a direct object without changing the case of the pronoun.
A different argument for 'he': I would say that the pronoun is really serving to indicate the subject of the verb 'cast' rather than an object of the verb 'let'.
So, grammar mavens, what do you think?
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 09:57 pm (UTC)Random grammer question
Kelsey? :p
no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 10:17 pm (UTC)Don't you mean "wrongly" rather than "wrong"? I think that sentence calls for an adverb rather than an adjective.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 10:23 pm (UTC)I give up. No more edits...
no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-14 11:19 pm (UTC)