… only a little.

My points are:
1. The relative difficulty of English contributes to the illiteracy issue … some other languages don’t encounter this problem to the same extent.
2. For most of it’s “life” English has not been bound by fixed/common spelling and gramatical rules, that is a recent phenomenon … that may not last.

As a related aside, another digression 😉 others above have commented on this … the advent of the ‘net, and Google in particular, adds further to the wider literacy context. I was talking to my 16 yo son a couple of days ago about his high school maths curriculum. I made the observation that later in life, in work, one nearly never uses all that algebra etc. But it sets a basis for comprehension. I told him I’d spent 5-10 minutes, on a whiteboard, reverse engineering a cagr equation to solve a growth rate puzzle I had re. our revenues and market share. You know that thing you do where you spin the equation around to figure out a different component of it? Anyway he looked at me amazed and said “why didn’t you Google it?”. Bloody hell! I Google a lot of things … but an equation? To my mind … that is an outrage! Where is the spirit of enquiry? Figure something out for heaven’s sake!

Do you not think that your points have been trotted out by the kan’t spel brigade, to justify their own inadequacies? This is actually how standards drop in the first place.
To ba5tardise Mr Burke…
“All that is necessary for the triumph of illiteracy is that good men do nothing”

As for the maths, my algebra has long been forgotten as I have not really ever used it since school 34 years ago…..(Only in the simplest form such as I=V/r for calculating fuse sizes or similar)
Oh, and I do my statistics (S. Error, S deviation etc.) long hand but in MS Excel. The in-built formulae for such things tells lies (The wrong kind of lies).
I always throw a Z test Hypothesis into the discussion when somebody quotes me an average.

Remember, when your wife tells you you are the best lover, consider the sample size before feeling smug. 🙂

Trigonometry however has stuck with me, simply because I need some form of it every day.

Accountancy, that winds me up because it is basic sums made difficult by a list of disguised lies hidden amongst latin. And a closed shop of Accountants Charters which ensure mere mathematicians cannot understand the construction of the books…thereby ensuring the Accountants get full employment at £200 per hour. Which, is a good protectionist method while it lasts.

My ex mother in law was a head teacher at a primary school and she told me that a large part of the problem was the old methods of phonetics (or phonics as it is referred to now in the teaching profession) and learning by rote was done away with for being ‘right wing’. Unfortunately, it was replaced with a method which is mainly responsible for the reading and writing problems encountered by universities and employers. When they are learning to read, the children are given the first letter and last letter of a word and have to guess what the word means from that. Many schools are now going back to phonics or phonetics – unfortunately, more than one generation of children has now been let down by trendy teaching methods.
I attended a Jesuit school in Ireland. Each night we were given ten words to learn and in the morning we were tested on them. Anyone who got less than seven correct was sent out into the corridor to await a patrolling Priest who would administer five cuts of a ruler across your hand. It sounds rather brutal and I would not have wished it on my children but my whole class were very good at spelling.

Sigh. 🙂

A “more correct method” ?

Funnily enough I was going to to give the example of Luftwaffe (given this forum and being by definition a fairly recent concept) … obviously made up of luft (air) and waffe (fighting force). Think here also of Lufthansa and Nina Hagen’s wonderful 99 Luftbalons and Waffen SS … and etc.

So I reached for the more correct English form to create the counter-point … and lo and behold, it’s Airforce.

Perhaps English is now also adopting the logical form?

The literal translation of Luftwaffe would be Air Fighting Force. This would disinguish it correctly from the Air Police Force, or even the Air Ambulance.
OK, I know the Copper Choppers are just a sub-division of the Police Force….but the Air Force is also a sub-division of the Army Air Corps.
(Ducks from incoming) 🙂

…measuring stick? :confused:

Sorry. 😮

That’s not evolving, that’s corrupting a word which already had a true and proper meaning.
“Texting”, a fair and just word that has evolved into use in the last decade for example. One can’t really use SMS ing

Chatting with an American friend this afternoon, the tanker topic came up since we both work in the defence industry.

The suggestion was raised that the reason Boeing is making such a stink might not be so much about the change in the RFP (it seems to be the politicians that are banging the non-Amerincan drum) but rather after Boeing lost the last big USAF aircraft contract the JSF/F35, Boeing felt that they were “due” the next one…that being this Tanker contract.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with that, though three may be an element of truth in there somewhere.

Does anyone else have a view on this?

I thought they were due a contract because they were paid to lose the JSF…..IMO.
Their attempt at the JSF competition was so abysmal it was hard to believe that the designers of the most successful A/c company on earth could be so out of touch with the needs and indeed the Statement of Work for the comp.
It looks like they had the tanker in the bag, but they broke the 11th Commandment. Got caught. Got caught in public (Commandment 11A – Special addendum).
Airbus will have put a price to DoD for the A330 Tanker that will possibly lose them money, but it will be seen as “Seedcorn” cost for future sales, and it has sure given Boeing a black eye.

Best female pilot of all time, my vote goes to Svetlana Kapanina.

Svetlana in her office. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y8s1burq3M&feature=related

Fantastic flying, irritating soundtrack.
The performance of the purpose built aerobatics craft just keeps getting more and more outrageous! The machines are stressed to something like 30G, far in excess of a human. They are not going to break though!
At air shows, I look out for such displays these days, more so than the big jets parade.

This “Experiment” has been done many times before, with the same results. Only “The nose” (That’s his job title) from a vinyard can tell the difference in quality.
What people are doing is matching their own taste, which is fickle at best. I could possibly tell the difference between £2.39 wine and £15 wine, but there is no way I could tell £15 to £500. However, last years Cab Sauv at about £3.00 form Lidle’s was magnificent.
AND, furthermore, most people drink wine with dinner, and that dinner is often Spag Bog, Curry, Chile. It really doesn’t matter what you are drinking if the food is so rich!
Finally, the british approach to wine selection usually involves rotating the bottle 90 degrees on the shelf, so that you can see if it’s 13% or a measely 9% 🙂

Yes that they do! and yes they should! 😉 :diablo:

LoL. They are the “Trophies”. I can’t see HM pinning those on yer chest.
I’ve got a depleted Uranium projectile somewhere, it was a door stop, I think I left it at an ex employers.

As for the VC, surely there must be another Sebastopol cannon lurking in somebodies museum that we can plunder. And, the cannon was Chinese made!!! LoL at my comments at the Chinese making nothing but accurate shyte in another thread.

Is the German Iron Cross steeped in any tradition as to what it is made of?