No it isn't, not on any part of the earth you or I have visited. Unless you have been to the edge of space or beyond - You are quite wrong.
That's okay, I sometimes sound like that myself. My beef is seeing that in writing from people who should know better - used car sa-, er, newswriters, for instance.
As an engineer, I'm always amused when I hear someone order 20 tons of "crush-and-run" for their driveway. If somebody ordered that for mine, I'd call the police. It's crusher run, i.e. crushed stone of random gradation.
Perhaps I should have stated 'the effect of the curvature of the earth'. The masts of approaching tall ships are visible before the hull and vice versa when departing.
My pet beef is the increasing use of 'there' to also infer 'their' and 'they're'. With the increased use of texting the insertion of an apostrophe appears to be too arduous a task. Or perhaps the application of deadly yellow snow crystals has impaired many texters' sight.
I wonder whether 100 years hence this use will be deemed acceptable, together with many abbreviated forms of English inspired by sight impaired texting.
I wonder whether 100 years hence this use will be deemed acceptable, together with many abbreviated forms of English inspired by sight impaired texting.
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I wouldn't call 30,000 feet the edge of space, but IME the earth's curvature is pretty plain to see from a jet on a clear day from that height. This somewhat depends on the land below - water or flat land makes the curvature easier to see, but mountains and hills can obscure it.
http://thulescientific.com/Lynch%20Curvature%202008.pdf
"In view of the agreement between the visual observations,
measurements of the photographs, and the
theoretical curvatures, it seems well established that
the curvature of the Earth is reasonably well understood
and can be measured from photographs. The
threshold elevation for detecting curvature would
seem to be somewhat less than 35 000 ft but not
as low as 14,000 ft. Photographically, curvature may
be measurable as low as 20,000 ft"
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It bothers me as well and in all honesty anybody who can write english should really know better than to write 'should of'.
I am sure the human eyes have lots of distortion. Now that I think of it during the sail across the Pacific Ocean...
For me it is the use of "infer" to mean "imply".
...and I should have read the next page before posting!
Work-related annoyance is the use of "revert" to mean "reply". I see it every day and it drives me nuts!
'Your' used to imply 'you're'.
Never heard 'revert' used to imply 'reply'. Maybe it's a localised corruption.
Never heard 'revert' used to imply 'reply'. Maybe it's a localised corruption.
And college teachers! I once had a 'teacher' write "could of" in a comment he wrote on my assignment. To make matters worse, when I challenged him on this he assured me that he was right. This was a PhD chemist trying to teach electronics, so one must make allowances I suppose.Mr_Zenith said:
I fear that English will have lost all its subtle nuances in much less than 100 years. Some years ago a major British university had to start remedial English classes for its law students. This was a 'real' university, not a jumped-up technical college.mach1 said:
Of course, here on DIYaudio we sometimes have to put on remedial electronics classes for audio 'professionals'.
A common error, often heard/seen in news reports, is "refute" when they mean 'reject'. "I refute that" is not a refutation!
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