> My British-born boss corrected me for preparing a letter that said “I am writing you” instead of “I am writing to you.” He sniffed that dropping the preposition “to” in the first example was an Americanism and bad English.
Despite the alternation with "to," the indirect object with "write" has more of a benefactive sense, like "I'm cooking you a meal" vs "I'm cooking a meal for you"
Note that "I'm writing a letter to you" isn't actually analogous to "I'm giving a book to him," since you can say "That is a letter to you" but not "That is a book to him"
@Robusto My point is that, though "give" and "write" are both ditransitive and have alternants with "to," the syntactic structure of the alternants differ
> 17. a. transitive. To compose and send (a letter or similar communication) to someone; to communicate with a person by (letter, email, etc.). Frequently with the recipient indicated as an indirect object or in a prepositional phrase introduced by to (also †unto, †till); cf. sense 17b.
> 1613 J. Saris Jrnl. in Voy. Japan (1900) 94 This daye Mr. Cocks writt me a letter.
> 17. c. transitive. To compose and send a letter to (someone). Now chiefly North American.
In early use with the recipient as an indirect object (in Old English dative object). By the late 18th cent. apparently typically analysed as a direct object, and in Britain viewed as colloquial, or associated with the usage of business and commercial circles. Now viewed as nonstandard in British English and similar varieties, but in standard use in North America.
So we just didn't get nunned to death.
It was always there.
But busybodies rapped the wrists too exhuberantly.
SO much damage was done to innocent native speakers by asshole pseudo-grammarians during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the language is unlikely to ever fully recover.
@Robusto No, but strangely enough I had friends who did. I came from the Protestant majority, not the Catholic minority. Only the Irish and Italians and Poles went to St Francis de Sales Parochial School in Lake Geneva. They were our minorities. By high school the wandering Catholics joined the rest of us at big Badger High School.
@Cerberus fundamentally, just what I said; that ionic compounds are giant networks and molecules are individual units that stay together due to weaker forces (or don't, as in the case of gases). Less simplistically, it's a spectrum, with the covalent type of bond (between, say, hydrogen atoms in the hydrogen gas, H2) in one extreme and the ionic type of bond (e.g. in table salt, NaCl) in the other. No bond is purely covalent or ionic, but that's needlessly complicating the discussion.
Let me think. I think Williams Bay drew from Fontana and Walworth. But not positive, because I did go to high school with kids from BB along the back side of the lake.
> It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be **molested,** You will find it better policy to say
@M.A.R. OK so I gather two points from this: 1. the metal atoms in Fe2O3 are not connected to just one instance of O3, but to several at once? 2. Those meta atoms form much weaker bonds than atoms normally do in molecules?
The normal molecules you're thinking of, no. But metals can also bind to parts of molecules that have 'extra' bits of electron. The result is a whole different beast entirely, which we call a complex, because it's complex. So you have this big molecule with a hole in the middle, that can form complexes with metals, and it does, and that's how metals function in our body.
Big organic molecules with a hole in the middle where iron cations can bind. They're the cores of hemoglobin.
One spot is open, so an O2 molecule binds this spot in the lung's capillaries and is released in tissues with less oxygen around the body.
@Cerberus no, because the nature of their bonding is complex, hence their names. They can be small, perfectly stable molecules forming bonds with metals. Say, carbon monoxide.
The bond between the iron in hemoglobin and CO is 200 times stronger, so if one inhales CO, they're essentially stopping hemoglobin from binding to and releasing oxygen.
The tissues don't get oxygen, and the rest is cacare
In a 12 Apr 2023 ABC nightly news segment on the 2023 Louisville Shooting (in which an AR-15 style rifle was used), they included a segment of a press conference with Dr Jason Smith, Chief Medical Officer of UofL Health.
Beginning at timestamp 4:30:
Rifle rounds pulverize and liquefy tissue beca...
Okay, I still don't get this. What kind of citizen and for what reason might need an AR-15 to protect their property or whatever?
Or do the NRA types use the slippery slope fallacy instead, that first it's your assault rifles, and then your pistols, and then, I dunno, your children?
How come there hasn't been a law passed against being able to purchase military gear? Okay, a simple background check is too intrusive for these people. But how does anyone justify having access to bigger guns?
@Robusto IKR, he's pretty normal otherwise except he and his >90 y/o dad loved to watch 'Naked and Afraid' together. They used to camp in the Grand Canyon together, and in Turkey too, big places, but loved that show. They were like, 'It's a survival show: They'll find fig leaves or something; it's fine.' Haha, ah.
@Robusto Yes, my FIL was stationed there, Air Force. He was a simple man, but very proud he took his boy camping often in those places. They would watch survival anything!
At some point, old white people are going to have to realize that young people, quite a few, would rather sound like Black people, who are under age 50. And no one is going to consider either/or a vernacular anymore. Just putting that out there for people to bump against from time to time like, 'OIC.' That's all of that.
@HippoSawrUs The Chair Force had a base in the Grand Canyon?
Oh, you're talking about Turkey.
BTW, sorry for the "Chair Force" dig. Nothing bad meant by it, it's just what a friend who is a civilian employee calls them. He works out of Kirkland.
totes Rennen; chaleur morte. According to Google translate. I doubt if either actually works.
@CowperKettle I actually attended, some time in the early 1970s, a birthday party for the Shah of Iran (who was not, as I recall, present) at the Iranian Embassy in Wasginhton, D,C, It was quite an elegant party, with good food.
I also attended, in the early 1980s, a reception given by the Romanian embassy, where the food was good but in short supply and thus ran out early. Less elegant, more directed toward finding some potential informants, but friendly on the surface,u
Etymology of the day: serac - From Switzerland French sérac (“kind of cheese; sharp tower of ice”), from Franco-Provençal sera, seré, from Latin seraceum, from serum (“whey”), from Proto-Indo-European *ser- (“to flow, run”). Sense 2 is from the resemblance of the towers of ice to the cheese, which tends to cleave into rectangular pieces.
@HippoSawrUs When I was in high school I was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol. We had an encampment (two weeks living in barracks at Chanute AFB in Illinois, and taking classes in all kinds of Air Force things, from flying to fire defense to rocketry). When my son was touring the U of I when checking out colleges, I took him by there but it was long gone.
@Robusto Aw, I would've liked to see Fort Dix again, but it's something else now.
@Robusto I remember my FIL saying 'Clovis, New Mexico' (so that would be Cannon AFB?), but I can't remember now where he was actually stationed and where all he went temporarily, for training and such.
Hmm, I see "If there is every is a locale designed for purveyors of dry witticism, let's call it Drollywood" should read "If there ever is ..." not "If there is every is ..." Although perhaps that is redeemed slightly by the fact that may be the first time anyone has made that utterance (and will probably be the last).
@HippoSawrUs Tuesday? My wife, an ex-librarian/ex-accountant, had ours done in February. I didn't marry her for that, but it's nice having that kind of talent in-house. But good luck anyway!
@Robusto Yes, Tuesday, the 18th, odd day for a deadline. Why, is the mail too heavy on Mondays? Who still mails their tax return? IDK, I worked for H&R Block for two seasons, do our taxes at the last minute every year, but we have two states all messed up…I'm not prepared.
> But all of these cases...are bound by the common thread of narcissism. Teixeira ... might be the dorkiest of these cases... The damage he is alleged to have caused looks to be immense, all because he reportedly wanted to be the boss among a clique of online pals.
"So... What are you in the slammer for?" "Leaking state secrets" "how much would you have made if you got away with it?" "What?"
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…