When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "British accent"...

[Steve Holden]

Steve Horsley wrote:
[...]

The one that always makes me grit my teeth is "You have got to,
don't you?". Well no, I do NOT got to, actually. Shudder!

Shouldn't that be "I don't have to got to"?

regards
Steve

 

[Steve Horsley]

Steve Horsley wrote:
[...]

The one that always makes me grit my teeth is "You have got to, don't
you?". Well no, I do NOT got to, actually. Shudder!

Shouldn't that be "I don't have to got to"?

regards
Steve

Yes it should.

 

[Rocco Moretti]

Yes, although I'm not actually sure where the 'royal we' comes from;

I was under the (probably misinformed) impression that since the
King/Queen is the representative of the entire nation, they use the
first person plural, because when they speak they speak for the all the
(multiple) people in the land. I'm unaware of what term a monarch uses
in a private, rather than public, context. (Never having had the
opportunity to drink a pint with Lizzie, Chuck, and Cammie.

 

[Terry Hancock]

I must have been working at NASA at the time; they are well known for
embiggening prices.

Not nearly as much as the DoD, from what I hear.

Truthfully, I think those stories are bit exaggerated -- I think the
real problem is somebody making a bad make/buy decision. They decide
to make something that they could easily have bought at the hardware
store.

Naturally, any time you make a one-off part, it costs something awful.

That's the real reason that, say, Apollo was so expensive. Nearly
every part was a one-off prototype. If you get used to that almost
always being the case, it shouldn't be so surprising that somebody
forgets to check to see if the odd part *can* be sourced commercially.

Of course, making one-off parts isn't nearly as hard today as it
was in 1965, so that's interesting too.

Sorry for the digression, but the real story behind things like
that is kind of interesting, IMHO. ;-)

And I think the original joke is pretty dead by now. ;-)

 

[Terry Hancock]

Cool. While we're on the topic, has anybody else noticed that
"guys" is acceptible and commonly used to refer to a group of
women,

Yeah, though it depends on where you are.

but the singular "guy" is never used to refer to a
single woman (and most of the women I've asked think that "gal"
or "gals" is insulting).

Again, that depends on where you're at, I think.

Likewise, "dude" is often used when
addressing a female but almost never

This I have never witnessed. That's bizarre.

when speaking about one in
the third person.

I don't think "all y'all" is really a plural you form -- it's just
agreement between modifier and pronoun. Since "all" describes a
group, the 2nd person pronoun must be plural "y'all". Now, I obviously
haven't been everywhere (;-)), but in my experience, "All y'all" is
used only to explicitly include a larger group, rather than a smaller
one. In other words, it's just as you would use "all of you" in
"proper" English.

;-)

 

[Terry Hancock]

Yes, although I'm not actually sure where the 'royal we' comes from;

I have heard the explanation, that the "royal we" refers to two people,
the office of the monarch being one, and the person of the monarch
being the other. But I only report what has been told to me.

 

[DaveM]

In a Texas dialect, "their" is construed to mean "singular third person
of indeterminate gender". It's considered rude to use "it" to apply to
a sentient, and "his or her" is "PC" (and therefore a great sin ;-) ).

Working in a hospital, it always jars when a patient of unknown sex is
referred to as "It". I always use they/them/their, so it's not unique to
Texas.


DaveM

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

Not nearly as much as the DoD, from what I hear.

Truthfully, I think those stories are bit exaggerated -- I think the
real problem is somebody making a bad make/buy decision. They decide
to make something that they could easily have bought at the hardware
store.

Part of the problem is certification... Sure, you can buy ten torque
wrenches at Sears... But if your requirements state that they MUST be
repeatably accurate and calibrated to, say a tenth of a foot-pound,
you've likely just had to buy 100 wrenches so you can test and reject 90
of them.

So the net cost for the ten you keep becomes ten times shelf
price... not to mention the cost of the technicians doing the
calibration/testing.
--

 

[Charles Krug]

Not nearly as much as the DoD, from what I hear.

Truthfully, I think those stories are bit exaggerated -- I think the
real problem is somebody making a bad make/buy decision. They decide
to make something that they could easily have bought at the hardware
store.

Typically, it was a $30 hammer with $270 worth of paperwork attached.

The famous "$10k Toilet Seat" is actually a bit of an interesting tale.

The part in question is the toilet from a C5A transport . . not
something you can purchase at the local Home Depot.

Being an aircraft toilet, it's crammed into a tiny space and has to be
as light as possible and all the things you associate with aircraft
toilets.

When they were speccing the project, the airframe manufacturer included
some number of spare toilet seats in the bid, given the expected life of
the airframe. Some faceless bureaucrat decided that they didn't NEED
any spare toilet seats and cancelled that line item.

Lo and Behold, they eventually needed spare toilet seats. But because
of Another Good Regulation (tm) the tooling had been recycled.

Recreating the tooling to make the spares was, amortized over the number
ordered, around $10k/seat. Compared to the tooling costs, subsequent
orders of the same seat are pretty much "free" . . . at least until some
bozo in Ring A decides to toss the tooling again.

 

[Grant Edwards]

Not nearly as much as the DoD, from what I hear.

Truthfully, I think those stories are bit exaggerated -- I think the
real problem is somebody making a bad make/buy decision. They decide
to make something that they could easily have bought at the hardware
store.

That and the combination of low volumes and the cost of
testing. They want something seemingly simple (say a hammer),
but they want it tested and certified to a particular set of
functional and environmental specs. That takes literally
man-years of effort, and then they only end up buying 3 of
them. The cost of the testing gets divided by three and added
onto the unit cost.

 

[Grant Edwards]

Yeah, though it depends on where you are.

I assumed you could tell that from my accent.

This I have never witnessed. That's bizarre.

At least in the upper midwest it seems quite common for
teen-age boys/girls to address each other as "dude". For
example

"Dude, you have got to go to the concert with us".

But, if somebody refers to "that dude over there in the blue
jaket," the "dude" is invariably a male.

 

[Terry Hancock]

At least in the upper midwest it seems quite common for
teen-age boys/girls to address each other as "dude". For
example

"Dude, you have got to go to the concert with us".

Ah, well, isn't that just replacing "man"? It's not really
a form of address at all -- it's an emphasis particle, like
"yo" in Japanese, or any number of curse words in English.

I bet you'll find sentences where an address doesn't make
sense at all.

"Hell no!"

for example, has nothing to do with Christian mythology, it's
just a lot stronger than "No!". When you translate that into
Japanese, might you use "Dame yo!" instead of "Dame!" for example,
Japanese recognizes these as part of its formal grammar,
but ISTM that they exist informally in English, too.

 

[Bengt Richter]

In America, anyway, "savings" is a collective abstract noun
(like "physics" or "mechanics"), there's no such
noun as "saving" (that's present participle of "to save"
only). How did you expect that sentence to be rendered?
Why is it an "execresence"?

By the way, dict.org doesn't think "execresence" is a word,
although I interpret the neologism as meaning something like
"execrable utterance":

dict.org said:

Gotta be something to do with .exe ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter

 

[Bengt Richter]

It gets even stranger...

"One should be prompt in mailing their warranty registration"

That comes after parents buy some toys for their children, and the
children have posession of both the toys and the associated warranty cards.

Of course if one is a parent who worries about warranties in a circumstance such as this,

"One should be prompt in mailing their[1] warranty registration"

[1] The childrens' ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

"One should be prompt in mailing their[1] warranty registration"

[1] The childrens' ;-)