[Gllug] Monthly GLLUG grammar report (Seriously OT now!)

[Mark Preston]

Hi all,
John Hearns wrote:-
>Free drink from me at the next GLLUG for the person who spells and
>correctly explains the spelling of the major teaching hospital across
>the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.

It may well have been called St. Thomas' Hospital when it was built,
but it's now called Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital NHS Trust. This fits in 
very nicely with this thread I think.

John Southern wrote:-
>whereas, English has always prided itself on the ability to evolve and steal 
>from other cultures. Is it right that we do so?

Of course it is right. Stealing is a bit harsh. Borrowing may be a better 
term. The whole free software philosophy is based on this - "free as in 
speech". The reason that English is the most likely to become the global 
language is not because it is the most precise language. The reason is more 
likely to be the opposite - it can be completely mangled and yet still impart 
some useful meaning. This is especially so for ESL types. What do I mean by 
meaning, well that's a whole new topic.
BTW thanks for those wonderful German links. I didn't understand much when I 
visited them, but they are obviously the leading Linux dental users in Europe 
and probably the world. I have tried Odontolinux which is an Italian Debian 
based package which uses PHP4 and PostgreSQL. I have even contributed some 
ideas and bug fixes to this project. I wonder if you could get a German 
dental software supplier or dentist to say why they prefer Linux to Windows 
as a platform for dental software. I could do with a quote.


-- 
Regards from 
Mark Preston
For my GnuPG public key visit
http://www.markpreston.uklinux.net/MarkPreston.asc
or send email with subject "send key pub" for public key.



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