Tuesday, October 26, 2010

"There are people who take care of an infirmed person"

It's "infirm", Prager.

You love to say, "I'm extremely precise in my language."

Yes, you TRY to be, but you make many flubs, and some of them are big flubs. The flubs add up; there are many, many of them. It is to your credit that you work at it and you even take input from people who want to correct you. Except for me. I spend time reading books on English for pleasure. When I was a teenager I sat with my mother's Random House Unabridged Dictionary (copyright date was about 1963, when they were still a prescriptive dictionary, unlike today when they have turned into a descriptive dictionary) in my lap while reading literature and made vocabulary lists from words I needed to learn. I also studied several languages as I grew up, and expanded my vocabulary that way. I loved grammar as a hobby, and had a blast diagramming sentences for fun. All I'm missing is the proper terms for various grammatica. For instance, my elementary and beginning high school grammar texts referred to such verbs as "to be" as "linking verbs." The proper term is "copulative verb", but maybe in the Sixties that term was too risué for public school use.

Back to my point. You're just a wee tad short of the "extremely precise" area and must drop down into the "I TRY to be extremely precise" area. But since you try to be extremely precise, you'd want to use that wording anyway, right?

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