Amazon mistakenly sends UK student stuff worth 5000$ - he can keep it.

[angus]

I didn't care about the poll asking if a 15 year old girl was hot or not, but I swear to ganesh if you keep putting the dollar sign in the wrong place I'll personally see you get banned so help me

Yeah, I've learned to accept his urge to put a space between the end of the sentence and the punctuation mark :  Know what I mean ?  Sort of like this !  It's a bit like taking a group of Ethiopians out to dinner.  You want to tell them not to do some of the things they do with their fingers at the table, but you know that in their own country it's socially acceptable so you bite your tongue and try to be all politically correct and just write it off as cultural sensitivity.  Still the whole number followed by dollar sign motif crosses just a little bit too far across the line to ignore.  

(As long as we're on this topic, I've seen enough images of old Austrian and German political posters in history textbooks to know that the Austrians also know not to put a space before punctuation marks as well, so it may not really be a cultural thing, just a TenderBranson thing.)



Nein!

[angus]

I'd buy your argument if it weren't for the fact that he knows enough to put the lazy Roman L in front of the number for English currency unit.  ("libra" being latin for "pound".  We use Lbs. in the USA in fact to represent pounds, for example "bananas:  $0.59/Lb")  He also uses no space between the last letter of a sentence and a period, when a period is appropriate, only spacing before questions and exclamations.

In all honesty, I think TenderBranson does actually understand the rules of American/English grammar more than he lets on, and it is in fact all an affectation.  That's the central complaint here.

"Ignorance is not an excuse" is a philosophy with which I really don't agree.  I can forgive unintended ignorance.  What is harder to forgive is willful ignorance.

As for the "cent" sign, it merely represents a fraction.  There's that pesky latin again.  English is weird among Germanic languages owing to its reliance upon latin.  Blame the Saxons and their failure to hold up against the Normans in the Battle of Hastings.  Ah, but that was so long ago.

Anyway, saying 52 percent is like saying "52 divided by 100."  In fact, it is exactly, literally, saying "52 divided by 100" with "per" meaning "by" and "cent" meaning "100"  52 cents is exactly that:  52 parts out of 100.  It would make absolutely no sense (or cents) to anyone to say "cent 52."  Even a hard Germanic like yourself ought to understand that little bit of Latin.

[angus]

What about Ethiopians, angus?

The opposite of Vietnamese, I suppose.  Bangladeshis are like Ethiopians in that regard as well. 

I can go either way, to be honest.  I can also do it Chinese-style.  I just found it a convenient analogy for what TenderBranson was doing.  My personal eating habits at home involve a mixture of Western, Chinese, and Ethiopian, I suppose, although when I'm in public I take a cue from the consensus.