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The Real P5 ?

Ty

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Phrased simply, it doesn't matter whether you read the complete works of William Shakespeare , the complete works of E. E. 'Doc' Smith, the complete works of Robert Heinlein, or the complete works Henry Beam Piper. Any of those four can write circles around most people and have the ability and vocabulary to draw you into the worlds / stories that they create.
It's sad that written communication is being compressed into 140 character groups.
You blew past that by 230 characters! I agree. I think that what we are witnessing is part of the great dumbing down of America. How many people realize even that you can't BRING something to another location but only to your CURRENT location? You have to TAKE something to a different location. Further, how many times have you seen something like "The Elio has less parts than..."? It's FEWER if you can count them, people!

And now, I've busted that 140 Character cap as well.
 

KD

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Regarding language. Yes, it morphs. The Academie Francaise, which was founded to stabilize French, failed utterly in that task. Only the most foolish of school teachers think the language can be caged without change. English has the astonishing ability to absorb nouns, verbs, and concepts from other languages, sometimes taking them in entirely, other times taking roots and anglicizing them by adding the appropriate grammatical designators that identify them as nouns, verbs, etc. So it grows and flexes and becomes richer in vocabulary.

Excluding purely technical terminology, English has a vocabulary of about 150,000 words (more or less). Most people use 700 to 1000 in ordinary living (active vocabulary) and may have 10,000 or more in passive vocabulary -- words we recognize and understand when we see or hear them, but don't use ourselves in ordinary circumstances. Foreigners can get by with about 200 words for most purposes.

People who love and have really mastered the language may have thousands of words in their active vocabularies ... but can only use them with other language-lovers because people who don't grow up as readers, and so don't possess larger vocabularies, won't understand or appreciate them.

Why so many words? Partly because English forms new words readily, and partly, since the arrival of printing, it's easier to keep words around. Structurally English hasn't changed since Shakespeare's day and had barely changed since 100 years before that. Prior to 1300, English was a developing smorgasbord of English, French, Latin, Norse, Gaelic, and other romance (European) languages. Old English was used by a limited number of people (it's very close cousin is still spoken in Iceland). Its structure was much more complicated than our own version, using numerous verb forms and grammatical endings as well as word order to determine meaning and grammar. We have lost most of the endings but have kept the concept of complicated time relationships (tenses), but that's now leaving us.

Another reason we have so many words, many of them synonyms of each other, is that English is incredibly rich in contextual, historical, and other subtleties. The dictionary meaning of a word gives its denotative value, but all words have connotative values (emotional and historical freight) that they carry with them. A flower is not a bloom nor a blossom. Those three words have roughly the same denotation, but all carry different connotations. The ability to choose the right word with the right connotations marks the gifted user of English from the merely competent.

English has one other truly wonderful trait which is now being lost. That's the complex set of time relationships marked by the number of past, present and future tenses available, plus the various moods: indicative (ordinary), subjunctive, conditional, vocative (as in "O God").

Take, for instance, this thought: "Had I understood the full implications of Elio's all-in terms, I might not have spent $1000. Of course, were they to default, I would lose it all. But since they may be successful, I'm figuring they will have returned my money in the form of a terrific car by the end of 2016. Should this prove to be a bad judgement, I will have been screwed, and nothing can be done about THAT."

Just consider what's going on here: stuff in the past that didn't happen, stuff in the future that may happen, stuff in the present ("I'm figuring"), future stuff that may not happen, and the future results of that future action.

What a complicated set of relationships -- and all perfectly clear. Alas, most of that clarity is being tossed overboard as schools and teachers (themselves largely dullards) fail to teach the rich nuance and structure of our mother tongue.

Whey does this matter? With linguistic richness comes sophisticated, intelligent, subtle thought. We could use some of that. Mastery of English lies in knowing the RIGHT word to use for the specific occasion, thought, or purpose at hand -- and how to structure a sentence or paragraph so that that word will have the desired effect.

Damn few people can really do that these days. Even fewer care.
Wow. Just wow. But I like it! :cool:
 
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Coss

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Strange, I don't see anything "peachy" about it. Just a good deep red. Maybe one of us has a monitor color calibration issue?

I like that color a lot more than the previous Red Hot renderings. Still, I might prefer a slightly darker shade, but I'll have to see it in person in proper lighting to be sure.
I was talking about the color on top of the hood, the lower grill I do see as Red; I do agree, I would have liked to see a deeper (darker) Red: more along the almost Burgandy/Dark Cherry Red
 

pistonboy

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I could live with this red better than I could live with the green they have chosen, even though green is my favorite color. It is the green color that really needs to be darker!
 
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