The Acrimony That Comes With Being Dropped

...seems more intense than ever before. Definitions of acrimony on the Web:

bitterness: a rough and bitter manner
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Acrimony was a Welsh stoner metal band who were active during the 1990s. Although the band never achieved mainstream success, during its career it received much critical acclaim and developed a cult following in the British underground metal scene.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrimony

Source: Google

Are You Still Learning?

I do. I learn all the time. Right now I'm reading "The Element of Style" by William Strunk Jr and EB White. It's an old book, revised many times by White, Strunk's trusted disciple. Mine is the fourth edition.

And I must admit I'm a Strunkian convert although I'm not yet a good devotee. Here's the principle of Strunkian, in 59 words:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

But as much as I admire the wisdom of Stunk, I won't do one thing and that is to write Charles's friend or Burns's poem. I think I'll stick with Charles' friend and Burns' poem.

Does It Matter Whether Or Not I'm Right And You're Wrong?

No it doesn't. The only things that matters here is whether or not the or not should be there in the first place!

I've been trying to find a solution to this problem of how to correctly put two conflicting scenarios where one is the alternate to the other, in one sentence. Can I actually use "whether or not" and get away with it without suffering any repercussions from the grammar police?

Somehow it doesn't feel right to say whether or not I'm right. It sounds gramatically correct with whether I'm right or not but still it's mouthful. Then I just realise that it sounds even better with the plain whether I'm right. I'm not sure if I'm right though.

Apparently, the or not issue has been discussed and debated all this while. Columbia Journalism Review has a brief but very informative article on this issue.

It says, among other things, that, "At times, though, balance, euphony and even logic demand `or not' or something else to specify the alternative outcome."

But even then, from now on, I shall try no to use or not after the word whether if that is possible.

One more thing, can I say whether I'm right or otherwise instead? Hmmm... I guess not. Imagine having to write whether or otherwise I'm right... Ah, Shakespeare is turning in his grave again!

The Last English Train Has Left When I Arrived

The last English train had already left when I arrived as village boy at the door of the country's education system.

So I'd just hopped in on the bandwagon of the new education policy and embraced the systems, not knowing whether I should have questioned them or whether I had missed something important.

When I was in Form One, my seniors of three years still had their lessons taught in English, except for Bahasa Malaysia, that is. They had their mathematics, science, history, geography, even arts and literature in English.

I could still remember them talking to each other very fluently in English. Some with British accent.

Somehow, somewhere, sometime in the past, the Malaysian government decided to do away with English as the medium of instruction. When I started Primary One, the medium of instruction had already been switch to Bahasa Malaysia and the English system was all but gone for a couple of years already.

Ah, I had missed the last English train. Things could be different if only they had delayed the train's departure just so that I could hop in and join the ride. Things could have been different today.

Things could not have been this hard. I could have been a man of letters already!

Online English Learning Resource

I can safely say now that I've improved a lot since I started to seriously learn English three years ago, albeit on a self-taught basis. The Internet has been an invaluabe resource in my quest to at least be comfortable with the language if mastering it prove to be too difficult.

The Internet, the greatest invention of our times, not only provided me with reference on the way certain words and phrases live in their natural habitats, but also housed what seemingly an inexaustible English learning resource.

Askoxford.com one of the websites I came across recently which I found to be extremely useful.

By the way, do you know the answer to this question: The city of Siena, in the Tuscany region of Italy, has two horse races each summer that clatter through the city streets. On what dates do the races take place?

If you do, then head over to Askoxford.com quiz and answer the question correctly. You could win a copy of Oxford Beginner's Bilingual Dictionary! Closing date is on Feb 17.

Ah, Experties, Privelege -- What Was I Thinking?

Sometimes it was not because you don't know the spelling of certain words. For instance, I know exactly how to spell expertise and privilege, but somehow misspellings as embarrassing as experties and privelege can still creep into a copy.

It's okay -- at least, it's okay -- if the copies are for your own consumption. But what if they are sent out to your company's subscribers? Imagine having to pay for a service that contain kindergarten errors! Ah, you'd be disgracing to the whole organisation!

Perhaps it's a wise thing not to take for granted that you have check everything before sending out a copy. Here's what I'm going to do each time I work on a copy after those two embarrassing incidents -- check every word, check every sentence from top to bottom and then check again after corrections are made. Then repeat the process 10 times.

Entertain even the slighest doubt that you might have gotton things wrong. Here are some of the most commonly misspelled words according to Paul Brians:

absence, abundance, accessible, accidentally, acclaim, accommodate, accomplish, accordion, accumulate, achievement, acquaintance, across, address, advertisement, aggravate, alleged, amend, amendment, annual, apparent, appearance, argument, atheist, athletics, attendance, auxiliary, balloon, barbecue, barbiturate, bargain, basically, beggar, beginning, believe, biscuit, bouillon, boundary, Britain, Buddha, business, calendar, camouflage, cantaloupe, category, cemetery, chagrined, challenge, characteristic, changing, chief, cigarette, climbed, collectible, colonel, colossal, column, coming, committee, commitment, comparative, competent, completely, concede, conceive, condemn, condescend, conscientious, consciousness, consistent, continuous, controlled, convenient, coolly, corollary, correlate, correspondence, counselor, courteous, courtesy, criticize, deceive, defendant...

Click on the Paul Brians' link for the complete list.