Supergrunch

So wait, you can repeat the -n't clitic? That means sentences can be constructed with arbitrary numbers of negations. Without repeating it: "Nope," John denied, "I've never not thought that nobody hasn't done nothing that none of them wanted to change nowhere." If you allow denied (which is stretching things a bit), that makes nine. And it's quite easy to add more negative concord items like no-one and so on even now. Are you defining "negative construction" at the word or morpheme level? *wonders if he should sit this game out without objecting *

To be fair, it's a lot easier to publicise extreme and controversial ideas than it is detail the moderate policies typical of the Lib Dems. Indeed, even the negative publicity for the BNP has caused them to be a lot more (in)famous of late. And they're currently on a publicity drive and have been since the European elections, so I'd imagine they're spending an awful lot on publicity; the Lib Dems are already better known and better liked and so don't need to take similar measures.

Lol, can't say I see the resemblance myself...

Both of mine are crap: First: Last:

Happy birthday Dante! Shame on you for not already knowing the birthday paradox Ashley! I have a friend studying maths who claimed he only found his girlfriend attractive once he realised they shared a birthday...

So I looked up the UKIP educational policy in its entirety. There's a lot of good stuff (like the higher education reform, higher standards for exams, and scrapping of all unnecessary coursework), but also some really batshit stuff especially relating to sex, like scrapping sex education below the age of 10 (i.e. when it's actually necessary), and advocacy of US-style abstinence education. So they're not getting my vote, especially coupled with the fact that I'm pro...ish Europe these days.

Try refreshing the test a few times, that made it work for me. And yep, it's a little like the American system but not quite as bad. Parliament (or more specifically, the House of Commons) is split into around 650 seats (it was 646 for the last general election, not sure how many it'll be for this one), each of which represents a geographical area, known as a constituency. Each party then puts forward candidates for each seat, and you vote for the candidate you want for your constituency, although in practice people instead tend to vote based on the government that they want. The winning candidate in each constituency then gets a seat in parliament, representing their party. After all constituencies have been counted, the party with the majority of seats wins - with a majority, any proposal can be put through parliament as they have the majority of the vote. If there's no majority, then you get what's called a hung parliament, and things all get more complicated. So yes, many constituencies are, say, invariably Labour, and so if you're in that constituency and vote Conservative but Labour still get in, your vote will have no influence on the overall result of the election, though it will of course unsuccessfully influence the choice of candidate for your constituency.

Happy birthday. This is all for you. I went to your soon-to-be town today.

I got a bit of everything on that quiz also (although no BNP ), although it turns out I love the UKIP education policy, which suprises me. I'm not so keen on their views on Europe, however... Anyway, I have a bit of a problem because I want to vote for neither Conservative nor Labour, yet am not totally enamoured with the Lib Dems either. However, if voting based on constituency (which is what you're supposed to do), then I like the look of them, although my constituency is a permanent Lib Dem seat anyway. I basically want lots of educational reform along the lines of UKIP, including an increase in vocational courses and reduction of academic ones. The problem, however, is that I also think the academic higher eduction that remains needs a much better distribution of funding, less along the use-based lines in which it seems to be heading, and I doubt UKIP are hugely for that. Furthermore, I want us to stay in Europe (with certain reservations) and have very liberal immigration policies. I'd like a hung parliament, to be honest.

Happy belated birthday to you.

Happy belated EEVILday.

Meh, it's like brand names. Baileys is called Baileys without an apostrophe, but they can get away with it for the same reasons.

Well that's fair enough then, as far as I can tell I agree with that policy. Well, it really depends on the GM crop in question. I have nothing against sensible restrictions of GM usage, I just think the attitude that GM = bad for no real reasons isn't a very good thing. I would expect the Green Party to hold a view like this, and they definitely have done, although may have now changed. And I can't find much about their current views on alternative medicine, but what I have found seems to be accepting of it but at least willing to use restrictions and checks. But we're way off the topic of sexuality now...

I suggest that before you do that you take a very good look at their views on science. Unless they've changed significantly since the European elections (see, for instance, here), I very much doubt anyone remotely pro-science would want to vote for them. And that's not just me complaining about unchecked support for alternative medicine - they also reject genetic modification and stem cell research.

I picked up Battlestar Galactica season 1 for £6, and have now watched the miniseries and the first few episodes... good stuff. It's sapping away revision time however. In other news, I have something of a lonely Easter, although thankfully the lack of train strike means it won't stay that way forever.

Yeah whoever put the names back (I'm looking at you Ashley! ) has a capitalisation fetish: Raining_again → Raining_Again nightwolf → Nightwolf chairdriver → Chairdriver And probably some others.

How do you know "could care less" isn't sarcastic? It's probably used that way in some cases, and Goafers example definitely shows evidence of an understanding of the composite meaning of the phrase - how can it have a surface meaning anything other than "I care very little"?: However, it's probably also the case that people have started to use this new form as an unanalysed whole, without thinking about the composite meaning, and I guess it's up to you whether or not to find that annoying. Similar things happen with lots of idioms - look at how " he kicked the bucket" is interpreted as "he died", and not broken down any further, as (partly) evidenced by the fact that you can't passivise it - "the bucket was kicked by him" only makes sense non-idiomatically. As you've alluded to, this started out as something written, rather than spoken at all, and so it was more a case of bad spelling than anything else. I suppose it's a bit up for debate as to whether this has ended up actually influencing pronunciation, as it might be that the "of" pronunciation is just a dialectal form of the "'ve" clitic. Either way, I'm pretty sure it remains the same syntactically, with the auxiliary verb having a pronunciation that happens to be the same as a preposition. In popular usage? This is just weird, as it's really hard to define exactly what it means. It's definitely related to but very much distinct from the mathematical sense of the word. That's by no means specific to American dialects, or even the English language in general. Some languages, such as French, exhibit what's called "negative concord" - in "Je ne suis pas" ("I am not") both "ne" and "pas" are negative, and (in formal speech), obligatory, yet nobody complains there. English, by contrast, is what's called "semi-negative concord", in that negative concord is possible to an extent in some dialects. English and French are considered to be like this because they're both at different stages in a general process of language change called Jespersen's cycle, and French is further on, so like it or not, English is probably going to become fully negative concord in the future. Loads of common sayings are tautologies, like "boys will be boys", with information being added pragmatically. A great example of this is "people who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like". And in the case of "literally", I guess it's becoming semantically bleached and turning into a more functionalish intensifier. Like Chair says, with the sentence you give, you can't rule out "banter" being treated as a determiner-less noun, c.f. with "It was London." Even in this case it could still arguably be a noun - c.f. with "Are we going to London today?" "No, yesterday was London." Admittedly, however, it seems much more likely that it's just a straightforward adjective. But then people verb nouns all the time, so why shouldn't they make them adjective? (this of course works better when there isn't a convenient standard adjectival form, such as... "adjectival" in this case ) Well, it might make things clearer in some cases, but English does have a little bit of inflection. Furthermore, it overtly exhibits derivation (e.g. the conversion of a word into a different grammatical class, such as from noun to verb) a lot more often, as in the case of "adjectival" above. My intuitions suggest that to adjectivise (the -ise suffix indicating verbing (here a null derivaiton affix, but the -ing inflection demonstrating the new class)) "banter" I'd use the suffix "-ous" (banterous), but it seems that people are happy to use a null suffix to indicate the derivation too. As in the case of verbing!

What about Magaret Thatcher as a fashion icon? Anyway, filled it in, was quite interesting. I didn't know most of the magazines in the design section so I googled them to see what the covers looked like. Also you spelt appealing wrong in question 7.

Cool cool! Other than missing posts (which I've backed up and sent to Ashley), the only thing I've noticed is that N-Europe Stretchable seems to instead be the default theme. Edit: The go to last post thing doesn't seem to be working correctly, and the Self Improvement thread thinks the last post is by Ashley, but I can't view it.

Pyxis, I think your misunderstandings of evolution centre around the incorrect assumption that it's a teleological process. Yes, selection pressures (combined with many other things, like random genetic drift and polymorphism) can combine to produce interesting effects in response to environments, but this doesn't mean there's some kind of grand evolutionary Gaia-type plan that's being followed - in fact, it's quite the opposite.

'tis indeed the case. I think I've walked pretty nearby that area, seems my fantasies of bumping into the Sheffield crew were not so fantastic...

Crazyness Dan, you're like 10 minutes walk from my girlfriend's old house.

It really does look like some kind of sex toy and/or female urinal attachment.

Happy birthday and all the accompaniments.