Bedevilment
Moncton probably has some positive qualities, but it was pretty much built on a bog, and that means mosquitoes. I'm scratching at a couple of bites on my legs right now; the little demons here will actually attack you through your clothing. Now, "musca" is the Latin word for "fly" (the Latin name for the common housefly is, rather charmingly, "musca domestica"), so "mosquito" pretty much has to be Spanish for "little fly", using the standard suffix that's parallel to the French "-ette". One of those things I had always idly wondered about but never looked up, for some reason, was whether there was a connection between "mosquito" and "musketeer" (and their respective French versions "moustique"--don't know how those consonants got swapped--and "mousquetaire"). I mean, just look at them!
As it turns out, yes, they are related, and splendidly so. A musketeer fires missiles that fly and sting; in Italian, "moschetti", the source of "musket", once meant both small artillery and its ammunition.
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What else is a pest? Mr. Picklesworth. And, in the return of Friday Cat Blogging, here he is; a sweet little pest.
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I ran across another annoying plural usage in a Salon.com wire story today. (I've spoken of these things here and here and for all I know some other places as well.) Here's the culprit:
There is two or three feet of breathable air above the water in that next chamber, which could hold about eight people, he said.
In order for this sentence to work, we have to assume that "two or three feet" is a singular noun phrase, and I don't think it is. If we replace it with, say, "a yard", then it's clearly singular, but when you throw those numbers in, doesn't it become plural? And therefore take a plural verb--"There are two or three feet of breathable air"?
Maybe not. Some people would argue that "two or three feet" can be treated as singular because it's not the individual feet that are significant but the height as a whole. I'm less than convinced; a good solution would have been to detach the verb from the noun phrase, rewriting the sentence as "The next chamber has two or three feet of breathable air and could hold about eight people, he said."
As it turns out, yes, they are related, and splendidly so. A musketeer fires missiles that fly and sting; in Italian, "moschetti", the source of "musket", once meant both small artillery and its ammunition.
+
What else is a pest? Mr. Picklesworth. And, in the return of Friday Cat Blogging, here he is; a sweet little pest.
+
I ran across another annoying plural usage in a Salon.com wire story today. (I've spoken of these things here and here and for all I know some other places as well.) Here's the culprit:
There is two or three feet of breathable air above the water in that next chamber, which could hold about eight people, he said.
In order for this sentence to work, we have to assume that "two or three feet" is a singular noun phrase, and I don't think it is. If we replace it with, say, "a yard", then it's clearly singular, but when you throw those numbers in, doesn't it become plural? And therefore take a plural verb--"There are two or three feet of breathable air"?
Maybe not. Some people would argue that "two or three feet" can be treated as singular because it's not the individual feet that are significant but the height as a whole. I'm less than convinced; a good solution would have been to detach the verb from the noun phrase, rewriting the sentence as "The next chamber has two or three feet of breathable air and could hold about eight people, he said."
posted by pyramus | 6:10 AM
1 Comments:
If Mr. P had that phone, he would take compromising pictures of me and use them to blackmail into feeding him nothing but those crunchy cat treats that come in little foil bags. Oh, wait; I already do that. He takes one or two dainty bites of his stinky, low-magnesium canned cat food and then leaves the rest to dry out in the bowl. He won't even touch the dry crunchies we give him (Purina Kitten Chow, since he's technically still a kitten--or, at 9 months of age, a teenager); no matter how hungry he is, he just ignores them, and if we mix them in with his wet food, he eats around them. So, although I don't think he's in any danger of starving to death, I give him quantities of those cat treats, easily enough to sustain him. I hope I'm not turning him into a picky eater, but since I get to give him back to his owners this coming weekend, I can live with that.
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