BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@bluesqueakpip

Where is pedant and what have you done with him??

He’s doing what he always does – grasping the distinction between manners and courtesy and why there is no such thing as a Comedy of Courtesy.

@jimthefish et all

Yeah, I saw that and thought Gattiss was kind of missing the point.

Indeed – sometimes it is more positive than mere pedantic adherence to form, as posted by pal a few hours after the JW reveal:

When your daughter spontaneously begins shouting "Help! I'm falling out of the TARDIS!" #DoctorWho #RepresentationMatters pic.twitter.com/CwbRTYueTD

— Iain Clark (@iainjclark) January 3, 2018

Move t’pub

@bluesqueakpip @thane16 @missy

some small minded racism, try following Tracy Ann Oberman on Twitter. She was Yvonne Hartman in both Torchwood and Doctor Who.

I have followed this. There is nothing small-minded about it; it is ideological and hate-fuelled with a massive does of sexism.

A world of a difference from getting uppity when…[Read more]

@missy

misunderstand what I mean

What is there to understand about small-minded racism?

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@missy @tempusfugit @thane16 @bluesqueakpip

Also, given that Othello was Moor, there’s no particular reason to suppose that he would be black in the sense that we use that term today. To Shakespeare’s “black” would refer to anyone darker than and Englishmen, at a time when sun-tanning was definitely not A Thing.

So anyone from Turkey to the…[Read more]

@missy

Look in the bright side Missy. At least its not a “brown person”.

@TempusFugit

I remember hardcore fans saying they could never imagine David Tennant being replaced. Then Matt Smith ate fish fingers and custard…

@all

Over to you. I got a slightly disappointing 25/30:

Doctor Who quiz (modern)

And a truly catastrophic 14/25 for this:

Doctor Who quiz (classic)

@mudlark @thane16

So my newly acquired 4th edition pops some glorious snark at grammarian pedants, while accepting that the less/ fewer distinction has become A Thing That Is Generally Accepted.

However, in it’s (new in this edition) specific entry on the matter it notes that the whole thing derives from a tentative opinion of a single 18th…[Read more]

And it took the BBC the fat end of 12 hours to get a story up.

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

LOL “stan pit”

@thane16

As @mudlark says there is a lot of unnecessary fuss and no small amount of mythology about tea. Most of it is nonsense. the only truly important thing to remember is to pour the water onto the tea (whether in pot or a tea bag) before it has finished going off the boil. Everything else is a matter of personal taste.

The Space Captain…[Read more]

@Mudlark

Oh, I think the idea that it is a rule is very modern, an artefact of the age of memes and other easy aphorism. I have the 4th Edition on order now to check what current thinking – well, three years ago thinking – is. Hopefully some of the worse damage done by Burchfield will be undone.

What Fowler did – and I suspect this was more by…[Read more]

@thane16 @mudlark

Curious factette: The much touted and meme-worthy distinction between less and fewer is a modern thing. Grammatically, either is acceptable in most cases. The first edition of Fowler (1927) notes the then-new tendency to use fewer (and other words, such as smaller) where less or lesser might previously have been deployed.…[Read more]

@thane16

THAAAAAAAANE! Your mum’s freebasing her meds again!