Smiles
June 22nd, 2008, 00:28
Had the occasion this morning to go back and edit a post of mine ... twice. I do this fairly frequently, almost exclusively for a self-discovered grammatical or spelling mistake: I just can't stand them in my own posts, though strangely I have no knee-jerk criticisms when other posters do it, and easily accept them as being part of the message board game. (Except for when Baziel is concerned ... that's a whole other issue :blackeye: But forget that.)
So this morning I changed (as noted) "swog" to "slog" ... there being no such word as "swog" as far as I know. And secondly, I changed "amongst" to "among" ... because the former just didn't sound right.
But in fact, I don't know whether it actually needed to be changed. So here's the Sawatdee Anal Retentive question #1: do you use "amongst" and "among" interchangeably no matter the sentence context? Do you use one or the other depending on a specific context? Or do you use just one all the time . . . presumably "among"?
I should add that I Googled this burning question and came up with a number of anally retentive websites, but please don't let the results influence your vote.
The heavy consensus came down on the side that in modern English it is quite acceptable to use the two words interchangeably. There was an interesting comment that using the word 'amongst' denoted a certain minor pretentiousness in some contexts, but that at any rate, it's use has a rather "dusty-genteel" sound to it.
Cheers ...
So this morning I changed (as noted) "swog" to "slog" ... there being no such word as "swog" as far as I know. And secondly, I changed "amongst" to "among" ... because the former just didn't sound right.
But in fact, I don't know whether it actually needed to be changed. So here's the Sawatdee Anal Retentive question #1: do you use "amongst" and "among" interchangeably no matter the sentence context? Do you use one or the other depending on a specific context? Or do you use just one all the time . . . presumably "among"?
I should add that I Googled this burning question and came up with a number of anally retentive websites, but please don't let the results influence your vote.
The heavy consensus came down on the side that in modern English it is quite acceptable to use the two words interchangeably. There was an interesting comment that using the word 'amongst' denoted a certain minor pretentiousness in some contexts, but that at any rate, it's use has a rather "dusty-genteel" sound to it.
Cheers ...