A few years ago a user on Stack Exchange asked why the construction used in this English sentence is not considered a double negative.
If I don’t use the microphone, nobody will hear me.
This question was presumably prompted by the familiar admonition not to use a double negative. This warning refers to dialect constructions such as in this sentence:
If I don’t use no microphone, no one will hear me.
My attention was recently drawn to an article in the Provincetown Independent entitled The Marconi Mythology. This makes the claim that “His ideas were derived from spiritualism, a pseudo-religious movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by which people sought to commune with the spirit world.” It also claims that Marconi believed that “sound never disappears from Earth” and that one could potentially construct a device to recover the sound of the angels singing in Bethlehem!
For a long time now Zoom has been sending release notes to the e-mail account I used to register. I didn’t want this and so I scrolled to the bottom looking for a way to unsubscribe, but found nothing. I also searched the web where I found information on unsubscribing from meeting notifications, but nothing about the release note e-mails. Today I finally figured out how to unsubscribe.
Q: Why do some users complete forms all in capital letters?
A: This is because early teleprinters and computer systems had no provision for lower case. Mixed case teleprinters came on the market in the 1930’s, but the standard US military teleprinter of World War II was the Teletype Model 15 (produced from 1928 to 1963) which only printed in upper case. This exposed an entire generation to official communications and reports typed in all upper case. This ‘official’ style was then duplicated by users of typewriters by engaging the Caps Lock toggle key.
On September 1st a number of news outlets published stories about the discovery of the skeleton of a whale with four legs. If true, this would lend support to the popular theory that whales evolved from a four-footed land animal which gradually adopted an aquatic way of life.
In most cases the story was illustrated by an artist’s conception provided by one of the discoverers of the skeleton:
All of the news stories I read leave the reader with the distinct impression that the skeleton as found actually has four legs.