Thread: Not AGAIN !!!
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Old 06-27-2006, 08:18 PM   #45
Urbane Guerrilla
Person who doesn't update the user title
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
Well, well, well. Beestie, a sentence fragment is an elliptical construction -- look the idea up if you need to. It is so used here, and elliptical constructions, while clearly not properly called sentences, are not ungrammatical, any more than this one is. They merely don't need to mention what is already understood.

It is surprising, indeed, not to find an obvious and readily understood compound word like "mushmouthed" to have its own entry in a Webster's -- but no one except somebody frantic for some excuse, any excuse, any wispy excuse, to round on me will fault me for it. Your actions, sir, betray you. No editor on Earth would fault me for using it in a newspaper column. Whenever Webster's catches up is fine by me. Remember, too, that many compounds beginning as hyphenated pairs of words lose their hyphens in shortish order, and in no defined nor authorized order.

"Nothing imbecilic to" is used to point directly at that which has the property of not being imbecilic. "Nothing imbecilic in" might perhaps have been better style. Don't try so hard at making mountains of molehills. I limited my effort in that direction to one sentence! How many paragraphs did you use here to heap Pelion upon Ossa?

The comma splice is correct. In that sentence, a semicolon would be too much, and a colon right out. Stylistically rather than grammatically, the comma could go and the sentence would still work well, but the sentence isn't scrambled by its presence.

Ideological notions of which ideas are worthless are, well, notional. I draw your attention in particular to definition 3a under "notional" in the Webster's Third .

Yeah, I'm having fun yet, and probably more than you. :p At least use a spellchecker, wetware or software, but be wary of the software tool as it can't distinguish either homonyms or meanings.

Vixen: no.
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Last edited by Urbane Guerrilla; 06-27-2006 at 08:27 PM.
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