Fritz Anderson's Weblog

Observations and Emendations

Title: I'll say this once.
Category: general
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Next: Bad questions to ask

A distressed writer to a mailing list says of a debugger, 

 
I can set the word size to 1 and the column count to 16, then resize the window and columns but then I loose the grouping of bytes and it becomes tedious to count out to the middle of a line. 
 
It must be tiresome to "loose the grouping of bytes." Once they get loose, there's no telling where they'll get to. A grouping of bytes, once set loose, may lodge under the '?' key, and where would you be then? How would you indicate that you really want an answer to a question by putting three or four question marks at the end? 
 
Many's the time I wouldn't answer a question, but gosh darn it, it was asked with five question marks, and how can you resist that? 
     
  1. If you come upon an event whereby something is lost (not loost), you say you lose it. Not loose it.
  2.  
  3. If you are counterfeiting a ten-dollar bill, you do not make it more of a ten-dollar bill, as I supposed when I was five, by writing lots of "10"s all over it. By the same token, you cannot increase the question-ness of a sentence by appending lots of question marks. One per sentence gets you all the question you're going to get.
 
Thank you for your attention. 

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