Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
It has always been a puzzle to me how so many people - especially, it seems, on the left side of the Atlantic - assume that The Lord of the Rings is somehow Celtic, or related to Celtic myth. Tolkien was positively anti-Celtic. He expressed a "certain distaste" for Celtic myth because of its "unreason". Look up Wikipedia, and you'll find that there are some Celtic influences, particularly with the elves, but a lot of it is Germanic or Norse in origin. Similarly, it really grates when people confuse runes with Celtic stuff. Just sayin' ...
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
... there’s a glutton of would-be experts flooding YouTube with their two cents ...
... and I'm a glut for punishment.
Strange typo ... the 's' is nowhere near the 'g' ...
I thought so too, but then I remembered that "their" is an acceptable pronoun when we don't know if the glutton is a he or a she. I know, it's weird, but if it's good enough Shakespeare, I grudgingly guess it's good enough for me. Then again, he did write "more better", so ...
What intrigues me is how would-be experts must taste.
Tell us something.: I'm a fiddler and, latterly, a fluter. I love the flute. I wish I'd always played it. I love the whistle as well. I'm blessed in having really lovely instruments for all of my musical interests.
Location: Unimportant island off the great mainland of Europe
I'll bet the grammar police lost no time knocking on the writer's door for this one. "Loathe" (rhyming with "clothe") is a verb: "I loathe being a wet blanket." Instead, the writer should have used the E-less "loath/loth" (rhyming with "both"), which is the adjective. While "loathe" is still common in its proper use, "loath/loth" has become quite dated [Edit: in the States] and may thus be counted among literary pretensions (yes, mea maxima culpa), so it is best doled out sparingly. It's easy to mistake their differences if you haven't been paying attention; I've seen "loath" incorrectly used as a verb, too.
If that weren't bad enough, the article was titled, "Stop Trying to Make [politician] Happen". Ontologists take note.
I saw this one a few weeks ago on the Washington Post website. I assumed they'd clean it up, but they haven't:
Former Australian foreign minister claims Melania Trump assumed she was minister’s partner during encounter
I was wondering, Did Melania think she was the minister's date? Partner for a dance? No, Mrs. Trump thought the Australian Foreign Minister, a woman, was not the minister, but the minister's partner.
Drat. I have to subscribe to the WaPo. Must've used up my free passes.
You know, I seem to be seeing a lot more of such ambiguity lately (although it might have been there all along and I've only just started really noticing it) and find myself confronted more and more with the inadequacies of language. I like to tell myself that in conventional matters there's always a way to make yourself 100% clear, and maybe there is, but there was one sentence I recently came across that could have been read either way, and it struck me, because out of context the sentence was completely rudderless and for the life of me, try as I might I couldn't see how to make it better! I wish I could remember it so you could see what I was up against.
Most of the time, though, it's hard for me to give journalists a pass on the basis of supposedly being under the gun; some of the least clear writing I've seen floated in a soup of self-absorbed and chatty glibness, so the old ideal of striving for concision can't be the culprit.
