Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

Wait, why is Jesus' correct and James' wrong?

BTW, another one that annoys me is insertion of commas where they don't belong, and leaving them out when they do. For instance, the comma probably doesn't belong in this sentence: "Sean Connery was an actor in the film, Finding Forrester." The comma only belongs there if we were already talking about a film and we're just now saying what the title of the film actually is. It wouldn't surprise me if I have corrected comma errors like this on Wikipedia over 1000 times already. It seems that this particular error is much more common when the title starts with the word "the", but the title should already be set off with italics, quotation marks, or at least the fact that it's a link if nothing else; it doesn't need the help of a comma. Also, commas are rarely ever needed before parentheses, though they are sometimes needed after, and they are never needed both before and after.

Oh, and comma splices really annoy me, too. That's when you use a comma when you really should use a period (splitting the sentences), a semicolon, or at least a conjunction after the comma. Don't use commas to sloppily string loosely related thoughts together.

- Kef

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Well, normally you always use an apostrophe-s for any singular noun, but there's some complicated rule that my English teacher taught me when you can just add an apostrophe. It's something like:

• The word must have at least 2 syllables
• It must end in s
• At least one s sound must be pronounced like a 'z'... I'm not sure if it has to be the last one or not.

So singular some possessives that would follow this rule are Jesus', Hercules', scissors', etc... but not Jones', Charles', or... Unix'. I'm too lazy to check the rule for sure, but that English teacher was possibly the best I ever had, so I probably trust her.

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Sometimes i wonder why grammar and proper punctuation is so important. I mean, if our point gets across, who cares if we messed up on the "proper sentence structure and punctuation" on the way? My goodness.

I can't speak for anyone else, but it just grates on me. The message I get is that the writer didn't care enough about what they were writing to fix the problem(s). Intellectually I know most of it is just trivial and is no big deal, but still. </grammar nazi>

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I guess I'm talking more about oral stuff - I can see how it would bug someone if it was written down though.

I get my words so helplessly mixed up I sound like sometimes.
I once tried to tell my dad "May your strings have come from a cat with distemper" once, but I was angry and said "dyslexia" instead. My parents consequently spent the rest of the evening trying to stitch their sides back together.

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I can only speculate on what possible circumstances could have led you to say this.

Oh gosh, I wasn't very clear was I?
I was in orchestra in high school, and both my dad and I are musically talented. We had a discussion one day about the origins of the various parts of my viola, and that's when he made the comment about the cat. (He loves cats. With ketchup)

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It annoys me because I don't like the idea of so many people in the world not knowing how to write properly.

Of course, if it's obviously a typo, it doesn't bother me. It's people who really actually don't know the difference between "their" and "there".

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NOT A SIGNATURE!

It bothers me when people don't know the difference between "than" and "then".
At first, I thought it was some strange web5p33k or something to write something like "it's better then that"... but no, some people actually don't know that "then" and "than" are two totally separate words.

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…Well, don'tcha learn something new every day.

That was a statement, not a question.

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I guess this is what you're talking about. It's too complicated, if you ask me, and the rule doesn't say that Jesus's is wrong, only that Jesus' is acceptable. I prefer to just always add the S.

- Kef

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I never add the extra s after something like James' or Jesus'. I think it clutters the word and makes it look weird.

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A peeve of mine is when people are peeved about somebody's spelling and grammar.

Actually, I'm kind of the same way, though I do tend to overuse certain punctuation marks--quite odd, actually; I guess that I find dashes and semicolons to be special...especially when you top them with ellipsis, though you then may think that I'm a bit "crazy".

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Yeah well, a pet peeve of mine is when people get peeved about other people being peeved about another person's spelling and grammar.

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I'm peeved that I can't ever seem to get my greasemonkey working like I want it to, and whenever I have the time to fix it, the people who can tell me how aren't around, and when they are, I don't have the time to devote -_-

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One of my pet peeves for a few years has been the C++ programming language. All of it.

But I'm relaxing my attitude and I'm actually currently thinking of voluntarily starting not one, but two projects in C++. The most compelling argument for using C++ even if you don't need the extra performance boost that it offers over scripting languages like Ruby, Python, or Lua is that linking to libraries written in C or especially C++ is soooo much easier. One problem you might end up with in scripting languages is that you have two libraries that can talk to each other in C or C++, but the Ruby/Python/whatever versions of these libraries can't! (I'm currently rewriting Energy Crisis in C++ partly because of this sort of problem.)

I don't really understand people who prefer C over C++, even though I was one of them once. But the fact is, though it often makes sense to write a library in C instead of C++, if you're writing a program, C++ can do everything C can (and a heck of a lot more), and it does it better, too. (EDIT: it turns out that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is one of these "C is better than C++" people -- and rather vehemently so.)

Still, C++ is a royal pain in the butt sometimes, and I still believe that it's also a lot harder to use correctly than a typical university course would have you believe. (And I've known C++ for about a decade, so I'm definitely not saying that from inexperience!)

- Kef

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And another rant related to programming: libraries never get maintained! For instance, I know of two decent music libraries (namely, MikMod and DUMB) that have been mostly unmaintained for a few years. Now, sometimes it happens that a library doesn't need to be updated in that time, but MikMod has a few major problems that make it suck pretty bad as far as practical use is concerned. I haven't had a chance to really use DUMB yet, so I don't know if there are any real problems, but it still hasn't quite made it to version 1.0. Projects shouldn't die before making it to 1.0! I know that often the original author finds other commitments and must stop contributing, but at least pass the torch first!

There are other music libraries, of course, but there are only so many that can handle the sorts of things that I want to do.

- Kef

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Kef, you are so cool. I wish I could be like you.

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Yeah, I bet programmers like you get all the ladies.

"Oh, Kef! Show me that C++ again, oh yeah, that's the code, that's the coooode..

...

...


*moan*"

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All this praise I've been getting lately is starting to creep me out.

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I want to make love to you, Kef.

No, no, see, that was just a joke.

Also, I hate when impatient jerks get behind your group when you play golf. Just today I had some idiot behind me blowing an air horn when I was swinging, then he'd yell, "C'mon kid, get your s*** and f***in' hurry up!" You know what I always do next? I tell the manager about them. The dummy I had today was banned from the course for 25 years by the owner and manager.

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Awww yeah...

Now wait until you BECOME the manager. You'll be the one permabanning people IN REAL LIFE!

Okay, me time. I'm pretty peeved at BitTorrent right now and the people who use torrents. I can only get parts of my files done as long as people are also downloading it also. This is good when there are many, many people involved. However, with no one downloading a file at a particular moment, it could take forever. I had BitTorrent running since about 6 PM tonight, and I only got around 7.5% done of a total 65.3%.

Blargh. This makes illegal downloading NOT worth it.

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Yeah yeah yeah. Don't make me bonk you on the head with my C++.

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Now, now, that's not true. All of the nerdiness making people hot stuff is obviously sarcasm, but when people got sad that he's not gonna post much out of R&P, that was for real.

When people say that NASCAR is just 43 men in cars making left turns.

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That's not what it is?

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"If at first you don't succeed, call in an air strike." -Unknown

You got strategy, your crew chiefs, caution flags, crashes, and all that.

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Yeah, but there are more left turns than all of that.

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"If at first you don't succeed, call in an air strike." -Unknown