What’s the difference?
Irony: a figure of speech in which you say (or write) the opposite of what you mean in such a manner that your listener (or reader) can tell what you actually mean.
This statement (last panel) is an example of irony.
Sarcasm: A subset of irony. Making an ironic statement in a way to intend some kind of rebuke.
The guy’s first statement in this comic is sarcasm:
And there you have it! Personally, I prefer irony to sarcasm. I think it’s my Minnesota background.
We normally expect adjectives to have a noun that they refer to; however, some adjectives get their noun from the context, and we are expected to supply it ourselves. I recommend that you supply the noun anyway, particularly when you write expositorily (when you’re explaining something). In English, using “many” without its noun assumes you’re referring to people. Sentences such as these are taken to refer to people:
How many died in the hurricane?
How many came to your party?
But we use the noun when we’re not referring to people:
So, pardner, how many head of cattle yeh got out back?
How many pages in your term paper?
So I suppose these guys have a point.
So put in the noun!
Sorry for the pretentiousism—I thought using “virgule” might make the headline more interesting. A virgule is a slash, (also unnecessarily called a forward slash.)
Most of the time when people use a slash, it’s because they don’t want to have to think and actually choose a word, so they use both, separated by a slash. Something like
Ask the manager/owner of the document about its history.
Here’s another example, perhaps a bit more legitimate:
Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.
In the footnotes of an interesting article about US land use. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?srnd=premium
The first example could replace the slash with “or,” and the second example could use “and” instead of the slash. (By the way, pastures are fenced, and range is not.)
I admit, a slash is shorter than a whole word, and I generally recommend making the shorter choice, other things being equal. But a slash is a lazy person’s way out. Rather like “etc.,” but that’s another story.
People sometimes use “as” when they mean “because.” Well, don’t. Use “because.”
“As” means something like “at the same time as,” and here’s an example of how “as” should be used:
Now the company has removed a link from its download site, and updated a support page to say “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating.”
This is The trade rag Engadget quoting Microsoft. Guess Microsoft got something right, eh?
A common complaint by grammarians is about verbing nouns (meaning using a noun as if it were a verb), which you can actually do in English. For example, you can say “Let’s table the motion.”
Looks like you can noun a verb, too. Here’s what I mean:
We think of “much” as a measure of part of a group of things, so it has a plural feel to it, but it’s a singular! (The equivalent plural is “many.”) So we ask, “How much is enough?” But take a look at this sentence, taken from Bruce Schneier’s book on cyber security, Click Here to Kill Everybody, page 147.
So much of Internet+ hardware, software, protocols, and systems overlaps between wildly different applications.
Shouldn’t that be “overlap”? Nope. Look closely. That list of things, two of which are plurals, is the object of “of.” The subject of the sentence is “much”! My compliments to Bruce for getting this sentence right; it would be an easy sentence to get wrong.
It’s an old joke, and people are generally amused that they can’t think of a good answer. The guy in the comic has a good answer, though.
Of course English does have a couple synonyms for “synonym;” they just aren’t in common usage.
For example, you have “metonym,” a type of synonym where you refer to part of something to mean all of it. When you say “wheels” to refer to your car, that’s a metonym.
“Analog” can be used to mean “synonym. ” Not very often, though. I suggest you make it into a phrase, such as:
“Beater” is a noun analog for “car.”
Sorry for spoiling the joke.
I don’t know whether you’ll get the allusion to the two famous movie critics, but I thought the comic was cute.
The best way to treat a grammar lesson, by the way, is to soak it all up!
(n.b.: When you say “another repeat,” you’re implying the existence of at least three of whatever you’re talking about, the original, the repeat, and the another.) Anyway, I’m sure I mentioned this solecism in the past, but I can’t find a single post about it. So maybe I need to, um, repeat the lesson!
Don’t say, “try and [do something]”
Say “try to [do the something].”
Here are a couple comics. One gets it right and one gets it wrong.
Maybe the rabbit needs better grammar more than he needs a shower!
Try to google n.b. if you don’t know what it means.
Been a while since I mentioned this fairly common error (but I have mentioned it. More than once.).
When you compare two things, use the form that ends in -er: steeper, sweeter, longer.
When you compare three or more, the winner gets the -est form: steepest, sweetest, longest.
That makes it easy to tell what form they should have used in the last panel:
Unless maybe they’re including the rest of the world???