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13 Comments
David Boxcutter says:
Josh, you’ve got your grammatical pendantry all wrong. The title “Leaders Debate” is not referring to any specific Leaders’ Debate, it’s just making a general statement.
Leaders Debate, just like Horses Run and Listeners Listen. It’s just coincidental that it happens to be attached to a specific debate. It’s really just saying that somewhere, sometimes, leaders debate.
Brett says:
But then doesn’t the definite article when anyone mentions it completely destroy the delicate justification?
“The worm was in force at the Leade…”, ow… no, sorry, I can’t do it.
John Richards says:
It’s true, Boxcutters really does make you shout at your computer!
Acon is the AIDS COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES!!!
Thank you.
Josh Kinal says:
@David Boxcutter: That’s why, as a sentence, it needs a full stop. If it doesn’t have the full stop it needs an apostrophe. It needs some sort of punctuation for disambiguation.
@John: But they don’t actually say that anywhere on their website or in their media releases. How is anybody supposed to know that? How do you know that?
Nelly Thomas says:
Yes John, I have to agree with Josh about ACON. I had a press release as well as a print out of several pages from their web-site, and the acronym was not specified anywhere. We did try!
Granted, there was plenty of other things to shout about last night.
Nelly
mordwa says:
Guys, seriously, I have to ask – is everything okay at home?
All I heard was freckle, magic box, savage love, chicken entrails, knobs, wide on, tasting plates…
…this may have been the most sexually frustrated episode of boxcutters ever *shucks*
…oh… and I still laugh along with the video podcast every week. Some jokes are BETTER because they’re crap!
Adam D says:
DaBo: Nah. Nope. By inventing a correct context for ‘Leaders Debate’ you’re consciously ignoring the fact that it simply is not correct.
David Boxcutter says:
“DaBo: Nah. Nope. By inventing a correct context for ‘Leaders Debate’ you’re consciously ignoring the fact that it simply is not correct.”
I wasn’t being serious, I was just ‘nitpicking the nitpickers’. Josh’s point about needing a full stop at the end struck me as a bit weird – titles usually don’t have full stops, even if they are sentences.
But then doesn’t the definite article when anyone mentions it completely destroy the delicate justification?
Nope, even if it is used with the definite article, it could be read that way. “The leaders debate.” It’s valid.
Anyway, nitpicking TV show titles seems a bit pointless, like shooting fish in a barrel. An apostrophe is not much in the scheme of things, when you have abominations like “Numb3rs”.
Josh Kinal says:
@David Boxcutter: I think you’re confusing pointless with fun. I enjoy punctuation pedantry. You should, too. We all should. It’s a game we can all play.
Adam D(oxcutter) says:
Sorry DaBo.
Brett: ‘Quelle surprise’ is only French if you pronounce it in French. Aaaargh. Sorry but it’s pet hate week.
David Boxcutter says:
Hi Josh, of course I enjoy pendantry. Would I attempt to out-pedant you otherwise? I just think there are much more egregious examples to be found.
Anyway, you are wrong. Putting a full-stop on a title would be an error. A full-stop is already implied in titles, so you only use punctuation at the end if you intend something else, such as a question or exclamation.
Peter Milne says:
English is a mongrel language that has no absolute ‘rules’about grammar, syntax, pronunciation etc. The attempts to codify it (in the early decades of the 20th century) were crude, artificial Latinism that actually created a whole new set of inconsistencies.
In the end, I don’t give a damn , but could someone please promise me that Josh will never again eat chocolate confectionery so close to the microphone.
PM
David Boxcutter says:
In the end, I don’t give a damn , but could someone please promise me that Josh will never again eat chocolate confectionery so close to the microphone.
Firmly seconded. Very little irritates me more than people eating on the radio. I had to stop listening to the RRR Breakfasters at certain times, because they do a cooking segment where they’re always making disgusting eating noises while they’re praising the food.
Also, when I’m out and about, I use high-end earphones that insert into the ear canal. Which elevates both bad and good sounds to a new level. In this case, it’s like having my brain raped.