The $%*! frustration thread

[Thought]

My thoughts on the Bible: It is the Word of God, presented to the 12 disciples by Jesus.

What about the letters of Paul?

Okay, sorry, I'm just being argumentative now.

EDIT: Current frustration is that there is no good gender-neutral singular pronoun. "It" really just doesn't work in the modern English language, it has negative connotations, but at the same time is seems sexist to use "he" or "she" if the gender is unknown. "They" works very nicely for the plural, but is grammatically incorrect for the singular.

[FaustWolf]

I hate how "they" is grammatically incorrect for singular usage. That tripped me up so many times in eighth grade. A nice amalgamation nowadays is "S/He." I guess that's cheating or something though.

[Acacia Sgt]

What about using ''that''?

[ZombieBucky]

yes but 's/he' is very difficult to say. i talked to a friend who studied foreign languages and they said this:

When you're conjugating a verb in an inflected language, like English or Latin or French, you tack on endings at the end of the root. Like for Latin, you put '-s' for a singular second person verb (you did something). [...]
Usually, the ways you can translate those verbs with endings are simple. I ___, you ___, he/she/it/they ___, we ___, you ___, and they ___. [...]

i trust this persons judgement, even though she says shes only a second year student.
right now im frustrated because my dog chrisie piddled on one of the key pillows for fort antibubble; we have to wash the cover for it. in the meantime my dad wont let me use the coverless pillow, so fort antibubble has fallen.
to think it would fall to the likes of a lassiedog! lol

[Delta Dragon]

My current frustration, how it seems like half the time I read this thread someone like Z or someone else like that starts a moral/religious (or something else like that) conversation which goes on for several pages and reading it will often frustrate me, but I know if I get involved I'll just get caught up in the debating and flaming which will just make the frustration worse and no opinions will be changed.

[Truthordeal]

That's correct, Bucky, for English anyways. From what little I understand about the French language, verb conjugation is a bit easier than, say, the German language, where the conjugation looks more like this:

ich(I) -e                                                                   wir(we)-(e)n

du(you)-st                                                               ihr(you, you guys, you all, y'all)-t

er(he, it)
sie(she, it)-t                                                             sie(they)-(e)n
es(he, she or it)

                                   Plus the Formal "You," Sie-(e)n

In English, it looks something more like this:

I                                                       we

you                                                   you

he
she -s                                                they
it

That's for regular verbs though. The English way to conjugate is far easier, either way.

EDIT: I use the German language here to show the difference between the "inflected languages," Bucky mentioned and others. I was merely completing his idea.

But what Thought is having a problem with is gender in grammar. Unlike most other languages, we give gender to individuals, but never to objects.

For example, in German, tables are masculine(der Tisch) cows are feminine(die Kuh) and windows are neuter(das Fenster), and are referred to in the third person as er(he), sie(she) and es(it) respectively.

In English, however, all objects and even non-human animals are all referred to as "it."

I'm assuming here that Thought is talking about referring to people in the third person.

Take for instance the sentence, "Someone dropped their pencil." This sentence is incorrect grammatically because only one person dropped a pencil. You could say "Someone dropped his pencil," "Someone dropped her pencil," or "Someone dropped it's pencil," and it would be grammatically correct, but it might be considered offensive to refer to a person as "it," a man as "she" or a woman as "he." Without prior knowledge  of the person's gender, this can get a bit confusing and awkward. You could say "Someone dropped his or her pencil," but this sounds a bit awkward to the ear, and is a bit wordy.

I love this type of analysis though. I used to hate grammar, but since learning German I've found it fascinating to study and compare to various foreign languages.

My current frustration, how it seems like half the time I read this thread someone like Z or someone else like that starts a moral/religious (or something else like that) conversation which goes on for several pages and reading it will often frustrate me, but I know if I get involved I'll just get caught up in the debating and flaming which will just make the frustration worse and no opinions will be changed.

*Nervous chuckle* My bad Delta Dragon. I suppose I do carry on without regard to others here on the forum.

[ZombieBucky]

an inflected language is a language with different forms of verbs and some kind of declension system, i guess. the romance languages, i assume.
religious debates scare me, and we often have them in the house. dad and my sister are catholic while my mother and brother are protestant. im happily agnostic but they keep trying to turn me to one side or the other.
i guess thats my current frustration lol

[Truthordeal]

Well, to show that I'm not completely humorless on the topic, here's a random Uncyclopedia picture to settle things down a bit.

[V_Translanka]

Microsoft Word's auto-format features.

As this is an affront to sanity, I turn it off. However, others do not and so I am still faced with this plague. If the auto-format features were good, I wouldn't mind, but generally if you want a document to look half-way decent, auto-format gets in the way.

I know I'm a little late on the reply, but...Google docs, man! All the Word w/o the hassle!

[Mr Bekkler]

Microsoft Word's auto-format features.

As this is an affront to sanity, I turn it off. However, others do not and so I am still faced with this plague. If the auto-format features were good, I wouldn't mind, but generally if you want a document to look half-way decent, auto-format gets in the way.

I know I'm a little late on the reply, but...Google docs, man! All the Word w/o the hassle!

Open Office FTW! Portable apps FTW. On the other hand, down with frustrating slow USB! You may have something there.

[Lord J Esq]

I've used all three extensively, and I have to say that MS Word beats Open Office and Google Docs by a mile. As a writer, I spend more time in the word processor than I do on any other application other than Firefox. I use Google Docs at work (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my team uses Google Docs), and I have Open Office on the laptop...and, frankly, it's not even close. Word is a pleasure to work with; the other two just can't deliver the functionality I've come to expect. And they're slower, to boot!

This is one time when Microsoft wins.

So I suppose this should have gone in the Stuff I Love thread instead. Heh...

[Zephira]

Microsoft Word is definitely the bet word processor, BUT it doesn't come standard on Vistas (I suppose that's my frustration). I can't open any of my rubrics or lectures from online classes unless I first email it to myself to open in google docs.
Also .docx is retarded. Sure it's smaller than .doc, but most people haven't picked up the latest MSWord yet and can't open it. I had a semi-online english class a couple quarters ago in which all the assignments, lectures, rubrics, and required reading pages were .docx files.

[Uboa]

The worst thing about Word... is Windows.

[Mr Bekkler]

iGrenades and companywide Brain Vacations. Microsoft isn't the only computer company that makes screwy things happen.


Also, I do prefer MS Office, but I was talking about alternatives to the program, which will not auto-format your document all funky, and are free. V suggested a cloud-computing piece of software, and I suggested an open source alternative. If all you want is no auto formatting, give it a go. If you want something that will open word documents on your comp for free that you can keep forever(also other MS Office stuff) then, again, give it a shot. If you're professionally writing a novel you plan to sell and are Microsoft certified and expect MS Word, don't use Open Office or Google Docs. Simple as that.

[Truthordeal]

If you're writing a short script or fanfic, use Wordpad. It saves in .rtf which is a fairly universal document format. You can open it in all of those, without the auto-formatting.

And it just looks less menacing.