Recipe for a fun weekend
Take 30 EECS majors. Place in a house that "sleeps 8 people". Arm with paraphernalia such as Xboxes, Playstations, DDR mats, chess timers, Set sets, darts, bumper pool tables, etc., as well as necessities such as Costco bags of tortilla chips half the size of my body, vats of salsa, and flats of Coke/Pepsi/Sprite/I dunno what.
Let loose, and enjoy show.
Comments
Just so I get the right image... is it the bag that was half the size of your body, or the chips?
Cos even considering your relatively small size, that's still some damn big chips.
Posted by: Ian Hickson | September 2, 2002 06:13 AM
Care to rephrase that bit so that it's both grammatically elegant and conveys my intended meaning? :)
Posted by: Nadia | September 2, 2002 01:20 PM
Set! I suck at set, but it sure is fun.
And shouldn't those be Xboxen? You know, the same way you pluralize Ox, which is also a big stupid beast of burden. ;-)
Posted by: Benjy | September 2, 2002 03:02 PM
better grammar: English sucks, it has very ambiguous scoping. Use en-US-hixie-scoped. Then it becomes: "as well as necessities such as {{{Costco bags} of {tortilla chips}} {half {the size of my body}}, {vats of salsa}, and {flats of {{Coke}/{Pepsi}/{Sprite}/{I dunno what}}}". ;-)
That reminds me. Didn't we decide that commas shouldn't appear before "and"s and "or"s? Or was I talking with someone else about that.
boxen: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/boxen.html
Posted by: Ian Hickson | September 2, 2002 04:36 PM
Must have been someone else.
On commas in series: http://www.bartleby.com/68/2/5402.html In short, standard practice is to include the last comma, though omission is still acceptable. This is only true for n > 2, though.
Posted by: Nadia | September 2, 2002 07:07 PM
The model that I and whoever it was came up with is that "," and "and" are both list separators, and so it makes no sense to include both. *shrug*
Posted by: Ian Hickson | September 3, 2002 09:12 AM
It's clearer to use both in the case when you want to use "and" in your list: "I want pens and paper, chips and dip, and a glass of fruit juice." I know you can argue the internal "ands" aren't necessary in that example, but there are times when it's useful to have subdivisions. In such cases, I'm glad to have the extra comma to separate the last item from the second-to-last item.
Also, it's a futile exercise to try to get rid of redundancy in the English language. Your time is probably better spent replying to www-style. :)
Posted by: Nadia | September 3, 2002 11:24 AM
Don't worry, I gave up disambiguating English a long time ago...
When you have a list of lists, then:
a and b, c and d, and e
...works better than
a and b, c and d and e
Can we, by extension, say that when you have a list of atoms, we should do something similar?
a, b, c, d, and e
...or:
a, b, c, d and e
In practice, I tend to put commas where I pause. I don't really pause in this case, so I'd go without a comma. But who knows.
In fact, who cares? :-)
Posted by: Ian Hickson | September 3, 2002 06:44 PM