Iraqi's celebrate - 09/04/2003 08:31
Iraqi's in Baghdad topple a huge statue of Saddam wednesday evening (baghdad time) with the help of a US armored vehicle.
Did you mean "Iraqi is celebrate"?Iraqis are celibate?
Or did you perhaps mean "The celebrate belonging to Iraqi"?
Your apostrophe license is revoked
The apostrophe and 's' were used to pluralify Iraqi
I don't need a license. It's my God given right to use apostrophe's (apostrophes?)
And I'm sure there are at least a dozen apostrophe's in the Bill of Rights.
You'll have to pry my apostrophe from my cold dead keyboard.
How did this get started (and ended) without me?
However, I believe that apostrophes on plural acronyms are falling out of favour, much as the dots between the letters have.Oh. I would have said that the apostrophe was once used only in specific circumstances (when its absence would cause ambiguity, i.e. when the s would otherwise cleave too closely to the abbreviation: we awarded five MScs this year) but nowadays is increasing in use. The old old way to do it was to repeat the last letter: pp for pages, mss for manuscripts.
In particular, POWs would expand to "Prisoners of War", so why is the "s" at the end, and why the apostrophe?Would you rather write PsOW? As the its-vs-it's thing shows, clarity and lack of ambiguity beat consistency every time in this game.
What is needed is a character (or characters) that indicate(s) that the attached word is pluralized.I coulda sworn that, with a few exceptions, that's what `s' did.
I coulda sworn that, with a few exceptions, that's what `s' did.And it's the reason that there are only four "S"'s (???) in Scrabble, which is very frustrating. They should have just made plurals not count and put in a reasonable number of "S" pieces.
Do they also limit the number of Es and Rs so you can't make dumb -> dumber?Yeah, it's more than just that, though.
Isn't that what we've been doing in Iraq for the last few weeks?You're not bringing us back on topic are you?
I've only ever seen that (never knew it was called a "bingo") a few times.When you start getting into the really hardcore scrabble tournaments, several bingos per game is not uncommon.
Isn't that what we've been doing in Iraq for the last few weeks?
To win really seriously at Scrabble, you need bingos.
You winWoohoo! What do I win?
You need a new knew. Or maybe a gnu.
and pretty much must be used when a simple trailing `s' is unclear.
Yes, I think that's why my subconcious wanted to use it on "Iraqis" and "apostrophes".
So this can be generalized as:
-Do not use apostrophes when pluralizing.
-Do use apostrophes when indicating any singular possessive. (My parent's car, if I had only one parent)
-Do use an apostrophe when indicating a plural possessive, but do not add a trailing s if the word already has an s for pluralization. (My parents' house, if I have more than one parent; The children's room.)
I was also taught to not use apostrophes on possessive pronouns.
Sure, but you already forgot what you were taught, apparently, so why worry about that?
I used apostrophes on two words that otherwise could have been unclear with a trailing 's', like wfaulk said. It's a loophole or an exception.Only on abbreviations. Don't take the rules as I state them out of context.
I would like to hear the opinions of the anti-war people after they see thisI'm sure I haven't really said it, but I do hope that the removal of Saddam helps the general Iraqi populace.
In reply to:I wish that the UN would prosecute the Bush administration for conquest.
but I do hope that the removal of Saddam helps the general Iraqi populace.Clearly, it's helped them out already. They're rioting and looting as we speak.... That's right, we've Americanized 'em!
Arab-American's in Dearborn rejoice at Saddam defeat
Then call it civil disobediance.
In reply to:continuing of Arabic hate towards the US
In reply to:What belongs to "Arab-American"? Or is this "Arab-American is in Dearborn"? If so, I'd like to go see him (or her).
Do they get a little skip in their step everytime the US death toll goes up because it means that Bush looks bad? I swear, some people posting here sound as if they are wishing for our troops to get slaughtered and Iraqi homes to get bombed just so that they can jump around and say "I told you so!"I hate it when anyone dies, including the probably thousands (my bogus estimate) of Iraqis, military and civilian, that died at the US's hands, as well as the US soldiers and international journalists that died. Yes, yes. I know that Saddam was likely to kill that many people on his own, and I'm glad that he's gone.
I'm hoping that comment was just some bitter Bush-hatred leaking out and not an honest opinion on international lawMy opinion on international law is worth nothing, since I know, basically, nothing about it. But it's not just bile. I think that this action was as wrong (I was going to say illegal, but I just said that I have no basis for that) as the bombing of Cambodia. I hope that somehow we can show the US populace that the intentions of this action were, at least, self-serving, beyond the weak ``preemption'' argument.
In reply to:I hate it when anyone dies, including the probably thousands (my bogus estimate) of Iraqis, military and civilian, that died at the US's hands, as well as the US soldiers and international journalists that died. Yes, yes. I know that Saddam was likely to kill that many people on his own, and I'm glad that he's gone.
In reply to:But this whole dog and pony show about humanitarian aid is just a smokescreen. If that's the reason that we were going in there, then that should and would have been the first words out of our administration's mouth. But it was not. It all centered around how Iraq was somehow complicit in the deaths of thousands of people in New York and Washington several years ago, despite the fact that those attacks were demonstrably committed by Saudis, who we support, and supported by Afghanistan, or that they might somehow be complicit in some crime in the future.
In reply to:Again, I'm very happy for the Iraqis who are happy. But I've seen any number of reports of Iraqi civilians who are not happy. It may be that all of these people are friends and family of killed civilians, but even that seems unlikely.
In reply to:Also, the reports of Iraqis in Dearborn who are overjoyed is not surprising. Those people are no longer in Iraq for a reason. They are likely the ones who were oppressed under Saddam. Of course they're glad he's gone. They have a personal interest in it that overshadows any potential international ramifications. So that's certainly a biased sample.
In reply to:Again, I'm glad for the Iraqis. I'm glad that Saddam is, likely, gone. But I'm scared for us. I'm saddened for those that lost loved ones, whether they be Iraqi, US, or anything else. And this is not a wound that will close cleanly. It will leave a scar so big that it may have been better to leave the cancer. And it's all due to an incompetent doctor who wouldn't listen to the rest of the medical community.
In reply to:I hope that I'm wrong. I hope that this isn't the start of more selective ``regime change'' in the Middle East. We'll have to wait and see. But I don't think that we should assume that the ends justify the means or the intent. The ends now exist, and I'm glad of them in and of themselves, but that doesn't excuse the rest.
In addition, it sets a very bad precedent in favor of ``preemptive'' (read ``unprovoked'') invasions.At the risk of replying to my own post ... it continues:
I truely believe that the Iraqi people will see us as liberators and will build a successful democracyWell, I certainly hope so. But I can't help thinking that winning the war was always going to be the easy bit of Operation Iraqi Freedom, compared to the challenge of building a stable country in the place of Saddamite Iraq. And I'm not saying war is particularly easy: I'm sure US and UK forces conducted themselves with skill and heroism all the way. War is hard. But stabilising occupied countries is really, really hard; the British Empire screwed it up literally all over the map, despite having plenty of practice.
(despite France's official stance that the Middle-East is not sofisticated enough for one yet).Is that actually the way they word it? Or have they just had more experience of the immense difficulty of decolonisation, especially Middle-East decolonisation, than the US?
[nytimes reg required]Odd, I had no trouble viewing it.
Does the scene at the right look like the Fall of the Berlin Wall?For one, why is that guy capitalizing "Fall of the Berlin Wall" like he's refering to a book or something? Also, the Berlin Wall was a little bigger.
I believe that many of these people are against Saddam, but how do you tell who's sincere about it when there's still citizens fighting our troops?