What interesting creatures live in your garden?

[digitS']

Let me quote wiki ... :

"Males groups number up to 19 individuals who are not related and are not agnostic."

Wikiwrong.

digitS'

 

[sumi]

Nyboy, we do have crocodiles in some of our rivers and sharks in some coastal rivers, but these smaller inland ones are fairly safe, except for the odd snake.

 

[thistlebloom]

Let me quote wiki ... :

"Males groups number up to 19 individuals who are not related and are not agnostic."

Wikiwrong.

digitS'

That's what I thought it said.

You just restored my confidence in my reading ability Steve.

 

[Smart Red]

@thistlebloom, I always had confidence in your reading ability. It is the veracity of the internet that stands in questions. Wikipedia is one of the sites that needs be used with a grain of doubt. And, I suppose, spell check programs often fail with scientific (and botanical) words that are Greek (or Latin) to me.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

One I loved was on a section on abalones which said

"Abalones belong to the genus Halitosis (should be Haliotis)"

I went back to the page, and corrected the spelling. The editing function of Wikipedia is open, so ANYONE can write anything (that's probably sort of the problem).

 

[sumi]

What I find interesting is: Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The spell checker keeps changing it to "encyclopaedia", so I typed "Encyclopedia" into my Mac's dictionary and found...

 

[digitS']

I use Wikipedia every day and have no idea of what could possibly match it. It has been a wonderful resource.

The doubt should be reserved for everything. A grain of salt for doctrine and notions alike.

Some birds deserve a sprinkle. Beware of those who would choose to pour salt on the bird's tail, however.

Steve

 

[digitS']

, @sumi !

I very much enjoy seeing different, correct spellings and wonder how folks in distant communities view my word use. Especially, my use of idioms!

I would be rendered nearly mute without them! They are the meat and potatoes of my communication.

Steve
evolving, i promise

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I remember spending several hours tinkering with the spell check to explain to it that "cowrie" is a perfectly acceptable spelling for the shell (it wanted the one with the "y")

I'm worse than you on the idioms, since I like translated versions of foreign ones. To me "even experts make mistakes" can NEVER express my feelings as well as Saru mo ki kara ochiru ,"Even monkeys fall out of trees" ( I like Kappa no kawa nagare ("Even a kappa can drown" even better, but I stopped using it, as it got tedious explaining to people what a kappa was."

Ad then there are all the ones I made up when I was writing one or more of my fantasy/sci-fi stories, which become so familiar to me from having done all the writing that I forget that I'm the one who created them, and so they have meaning only to me. Oftimes I've been talking and suddenly gotten a perplexed look, then realized that I said something like "don't hire a wolf to protect your chicken yard from the fox" (Don't try and solve a problem with a solution that is actually a bigger problem) or "a fox's master" (an eminence grise ) or "But who made the wind?" (who actually solved the problem)

 

[sumi]

I love wikipedia and used it loads in the past when researching for articles, etc.

The spelling of stuff is a jammy one for me though, since my English husband explained that the English have a way of spelling certain words and the Americans have another... And me being neither borrow from each and often end up arguing with the spell checker, which I lost faith in forever the other day when it tried to convince me there was no such word as "hope"

Idioms are wonderful and have a wealth of them in my mother tongue, Afrikaans, which I often translate into english, much to the amusement of one of my BYC friends. That came back to bite me in the backside once or twice...