General Philatelic/Gen. Discussion : It's amazing how different we are!
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Harvey I think, therefore I am - I think! 14 May 2020 04:33:21pm
I quite often check the appraisal books and the auction lists to get an idea what is popular. For the areas I collect I have cut off dates because I really prefer the older material over the newer. I much prefer the engraving of many of the older stamps and don't usually like the photographic newer stuff. I think there are an awful lot of collectors who feel the exact opposite. The newer material, depending on the country of course, tends to sell very well. I really am surprised, there are so many stamps being produced now that I think of them as being "useless". I still don't want to collect them but at least now I realize that there is value in them, not value as in money but value as in interest. I just wanted to pass this on.
Another point: How many people read their material over for mistakes before they post? I always do and always find mistakes that spell checker doesn't catch.
My typing looks like what Ian typed, because of the arthritis in my fingers has a few no longer straight, but pointing to the next key to the left or right. It's the same with me and elevator (lift for the Brits) buttons. I usually aim at the right floor button, but hit a different one.
Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy.. 15 May 2020 10:55:05pm
re: It's amazing how different we are!
I have a "learner's keyboard" which has
larger keys and is color coded;
Red - Top line numbers,
Green - Consonants,
Violet - Vowels,
Yellow - Punctuation marks, :?%7E_+|"=-';.,`/,
Blue - Control keys.
I still type in what my grand children call,
"Grandpa speak." It takes me longer to translate
sentences to basic English, removing typos and
untangling my often convoluted syntax than it
took to pound out the original text.
" .... I ...... always find mistakes
that spell checker doesn't catch. ...."
I do not know who wrote the original spellcheck
list or where they copied it from, but it could r
not have been anyone who ever entered a college
or wrote a "paper." I am always adding words to
the spellcheck dictionary.
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".... You may think you understood what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you think you heard is not what I thought I meant. .... "
"Popeles komand off de Englisz kan bee werry offsputinz."
You sometimes wonder why in a rich language there are so many words that sound the same but have different meanings or even have the same spelling while being different.
You also wonder why you need three or four characters for a sound that can be identified by a single character.
No doubt present day iPhone texting will fix these English language deficiencies soon.
" I much prefer the engraving of many of the older stamps and don't usually like the photographic newer stuff. I think there are an awful lot of collectors who feel the exact opposite. The newer material, depending on the country of course, tends to sell very well. I really am surprised, there are so many stamps being produced now that I think of them as being "useless". "
I think it's the evolution of culture. I feel the same way you do, that subjects on stamps should be meaningful and stamp design should look "official" and important.
But I'm finding that the modern stamps of pop culture are very popular with the general public. I get a lot of mail from my car collector and model car friends with the car stamps, pickup trucks and Hot Wheels cars. They notice stamps and use ones meaningful to them. That's the first step to being a collector!
Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy.. 17 May 2020 11:19:46pm
re: It's amazing how different we are!
" .... You sometimes wonder why in a rich language
there are so many words that sound the same but
have different meanings or even have the same
spelling while being different. ...."
I suspect that much of that can be traced ton two
things, the first being the varied and different
sources of our deep reservoir of words.Latin,
French, Spanish are balanced by Scandinavian and
Germanic sources. Then they are lightly sprinkled
with a global medley of borrowed, or perhaps stolen,
words, phrases and idiomatic usages that have become
useful and thus permanent fixtures of the English
language.
The second consideration is that an English speaker
often will take a base word that is rooted in a simple
noun or verb and use it in multiple ways as new uses
are developed. In book I used for an English class it
was estimated that English had about 500,000 words
available. Also that over 150,000 were in common usage,
and an English speaker generally used about 25,000 to
30,000 words in normal conversation.
Added to that it held that there we another 500,000
technical, medical and scientific words available to
certain specialists. (Like stamp collectors.) They
all came from somewhere and
fill a need in speaking or writing.
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".... You may think you understood what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you think you heard is not what I thought I meant. .... "
Charlie is spot on for the reason English is so, um, inconsistent. It came from multiple sources, and often kept those sources' sounds and/or spellings or, in the case of Greek, what passed for them.
And, in the US, the reasons we sound so different, Louisiana from Brooklyn, is our ancestors' speech patterns, many of which survive, modified, today.
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