The Law of Unintended Consequences in action. Your ideas have been discounted and the thread moved in its own direction.
Good point! [Y]
False analogy. Nobody is suggesting we revert to archaic 15th C. constructions. Could you kindly desist from imputing your words to others?
I actually think it’s far from a false analogy; in fact, I think it is only less pronounced in some areas because the ‘flattening’ of the world through increased communications and trade (cf. Friedman) has reduced the tendencies that induced language drift.
Much of what made 15th-century literature excruciating is the same thing that makes much of the Bible hard to read: expressions and circumstances that would be familiar to contemporaries, but long changed for us. And it could just as easily be added that much of the poetry of the 18th Century, and prose of the Victorians, is excruciating to try to get through now… as very well may be our current styles of writing no more, perhaps, than a generation or two hence. (And that’s before you get into things like Twitter than don’t follow some of the conventions of SWE)
I find it a little amusing that our culture venerates Shakespeare as one of the Big Writers, and most people can’t read him ‘happily’ in the original, let alone act his plays compellingly (or, taking Patrick Stewart as an example) even watchably. (Oddly enough that isn’t the case with Henry Winkler)
While I don’t think that either the fundamental structure of English as evolved from Addison and Steele or the adoption of different types of jargon will move the language to relative incomprehensibility … it’s a VERY long time in cultural years between now and the 25th Century.
And I can’t argue that maintaining current linguistic ‘precision’ is important in English. It starts when we don’t have an ‘Academie Angleterrienne’ that defines precisely and exactly what is, and more importantly perhaps what isn’t, officially “English”. And then veers and wobbles as various practitioners emphasize or downplay things
Awfully high up on that horse aren’t you?
Paraphrasing Joe McMahon’s applicable, enduring words, high praise indeed from our resident “desk jockey.”
Which would be OK if this was your personal website and you could police speech.
It’s not and the discussion here is supposed to be informal, not papers for publication. And I will keep using the word ‘your’ just because I know it gets under a few peoples skins that need to learn tolerance of others.
I can actually write pretty well and have been published. I don’t do so in my free time posting on a website that has nothing to do with grammar or the English language.
I’ll never correct that either because there are two people that it really bothers and there is just too much entertainment value here to abandon the improper usage.
You might start by reading others’s posts more carefully. In no way were either of us acting as syntactical enforcers. Mostly it was a rather private joke. People who write well do so naturally in all settings, obvious typos excluded.
Your sloppy writing does not bother me one jot, but is good for a laugh along with your inaccuracies.
Oh thats news to me as I am sure it is to others. I can prove that wrong at any book store. The question is, can you prove it is correct?
Here we go again, argue, argue, argue. Nothing about trains just what you think is another persons short commings. And we got off the subject of Trains how? Was it me or you attempting to police other peoples posts.
You do know that is the role of Forum Moderator…right?
A feeble try at damage control.
You sound like Trump saying he’s going to build a wall in Colorado and then said he was only kidding. Weak very weak.
You apparently can’t comprehend simple, declarative sentences. I was explaining what Overmod and I were and were not doing. Your shortcomings are manifest.
My shortcomings?, you said earlier your a former shrink and your running around the internet putting other people down constantly or picking fights over minute items that the majority of the readership could care less about. I’d call it malpractice. What happened to you in your past that you feel so inferior to everyone? Maybe your treatment was a little off and you lost all your business or… Was it life as a flatlander? Hell, I never had to change my screen name and reintroduce myself.
…and it’s working, score for me![:D] I guess your going to have to figure out how to live with this.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Amtrak has more than one person or department implementing its “discounting” policies, and perhaps different ones involved in promoting them.
There’s a variety of available discounts (see the left bar at for example https://www.amtrak.com/deals-discounts/everyday-discounts.html, some of which appear attractive … take the 50% nominal discount for kids as an example … but the effect of which is largely ruined by the fine print, restrictions, and problems. Note that the military children’s discount looks as if it saves even more, 10% over the 'everyday 50% children’s discount, but note that it carefully doesn’t mention or repeat that the limitations of the basic children’s discount also apply.
The basic option starts by saying “Children 2 through 12 years old ride half-price every day” and “Infants under 2 ride free”. Go to “learn more” and almost immediately you see that you will ‘make memories and save money when you take the kids on a journey they’ll never forget’. What you’ll want to forget is that immediately following this, Amtrak notes that the 50% only applies to one child; for additional children “the full adult fare will be charged.” And it’s figured not on the fare you’re paying but on the ‘lowest available adult rail fare’ – note how cleverly this avoids asking if ‘available’ means 'available for actual purchase at the time of “booking”.
Then we see that “Infants ride free”. Pretty straightforward English there, right? But wait… it’s only one child under the age of 2, and they or their carrier can’t occupy a seat. Then the semantic fun begins. A ‘second’ child under 2 can be booked as a “Child” and 'receive the 50% disc
I think we all know what you are. You can’t handle being called out. Consequently you need to attempt ad hominem attacks. Typical and lame.
My professional career was and remains beyond your inane and ignorant comments.
Amtrak certainly has cracked down on reduced fares. This not allowing children under two years to occupy seats seems a bit much for me.
I wonder if Amtrak employees may travel on passes. It used to be that employees could obtain passes for their own and their families, including dependent children, travel on railroads within the areas of their company’s travel. Since my father worked for the ACL, my mother could obtain passes within the southern area (east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers, which did allow travel into Cincinnati and Washington). As a result, when we moved from Florida to South Carolina (where my mother’s parents lived), we (mother and six sons) traveled at no cost for transportation.
Also, Amtrak’s regulations for minors unaccompanied by a guardian are really restricting. When I was 15 and my youngest brother was almost 17, he and I took a trip that Amtrak would not allow; the two of rode a bus to Charlotte, and boarded there; we changed trains in Atlanta and spent the night between there and Birmingham, where we again changed trains to go to New Orleans–and took a bus to Baton Rouge. Our oldest brother did take us down to New Orleans where we boarded for an overnightg trip to Chattanooga, where we were met by our uncle there; he took us back to the station, where we boarded for Atlanta and spent the night between there and Charlotte, whereupon we took a bus home (though I hitchehiked the last ten miles because I had a dental appointment that morning in the city ten miles from home). I recall one question asked by a conductor–the conductor who boarded in Birmingham the next morning after leaving New Orleans asked, as he took our pass, “You two twins?”
Here’s a PDF of what the policy was in the late Boardman years:
https://docplayer.net/docview/71/64650247/#file=/storage/71/64650247/64650247.pdf
Note that you will have to follow up ‘detailed procedures’ in the Reference section (p.44) which, to my knowledge, are not on the greater Internet. Perhaps someone here knows them and can summarize, or knows how to provide relevant sections to read here.