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Fake Bill Gates Quotes More Boring Than The Real Thing
from the he-didn't-say-what-now? dept
In the Jayson Blair era it's not so surprising to hear about some ethically challenged reporters completely making up stories, but generally when you do that you try to avoid quoting someone who might actually notice you didn't really quote them. That's why it's somewhat surprising to see that a reporter in Norway apparently faked an entire interview with Bill Gates. Of course, the interview sounds pretty mundane: "Google have been smart," Gates supposedly said in response to a question about the big search engine -- apparently showing how the fake Bill Gates is now affecting English speech patterns, using the British "have" rather than the American "has." There's also some random fake anecdote about he doesn't carry cash. If you're going to fake an interview, you'd think you'd have the guy come up with something interesting to say -- though, perhaps the fabricator figured the more quoteworthy the interview, the more likely he'd get caught. Either way, it's hard to believe he didn't figure sooner or later someone might notice that Bill Gates had nothing to do with the actual interview.
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a much better interview with Gates
http://users.rosenet.net/handy/notebooks/incoming/ChewFatBill.html
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English
I belive you mean, "using the correct, British, "have" rather than the American "has""
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He did say one of those things
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Re: English
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Re: Re: English
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$$$
Warlike? We can't say the sun never set on our empire (yet).
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English Lesson
Google is a company... a single entity. It's singular therefore you use has. If it were the people at google then you would use have because people is plural. A team is singular though it has many players (plural). Teams would be the plural of team. The team has.. the players have... the teams have.
Notice I used "If it were" and not "If it was" This has nothing to do with singular or plural but it is the subjunctive form.
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Re: $$$
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Re: English Lesson
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Inferiority complex?
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Re: English
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Re: Re: English Lesson
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Re: English
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"That laugh was less evil than usual.." - flatmate
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Haywood360: nice.
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Re: English
Besides, it has always been my view that "British" and "American" are the respective dialects of English spoken in Britain and America. Any time someone gives me crap about using improper English, I tell them that it is because I speak "American".
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Re: English Lesson
Go ahead and look it up if you don't believe me.
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English
Look at old English. We certainly don't speak like that anymore, do we?
In the grand scheme of things, languages are man-made and as long as your fellow man can understand you, things like subject/verb agreement and who/whom are trivial.
Isn't there a war or something on which we can focus our attention?
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Re:
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Re: Re: Sorry
Heh. subject/verb agreement: something optional in that quaint but warlike country across the pond.
Bush and Blair have been holding hands throughout the entire war.
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Funny :)
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Re: English
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Re: Re:
Actually, Bill's personal programming skills were limited to the creation of Microsoft BASIC on various 8-bit platforms. He used the money he made from that to buy in an OS, then sheer dumb luck to sell it to IBM for inclusion with their new PC range. If Gary Kildall had shown up for his appointment they would have gone with CP/M-86.
And as for Microsoft BASIC, it followed much of the specification of BASIC as laid down by Kemnay(sp?) and Kurtz, except he omitted the "MAT()" command because he didn't understand it. This omission meant that "proper" 3D graphics took ten years longer to emerge than would otherwise have been the case. That's why I hate Bill Gates.
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Re: American Language
American and English are distinct languages each with it's own lexicon and grammar rules.
not only are a huge percentage of the "common" words spelled and pronounced completely differently, phonetically and with different syllable emphasis, but a distinctly different set of words are also used, these differences have all the features that define a language.
English as spoken in England is refered to as "Received English", and very many americans (apparently) have some difficulty understanding this language, and are virtually incapable of speaking it, since they do not know the words, specific grammar rules, and the phonetics also elude them.
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Re: American Language
*note spelling of Encyclopædea (English) compaired to Encyclopedia (American)
language
System of conventional spoken or written symbols used by people in a shared culture to communicate with each other. A language both reflects and affects a culture's way of thinking, and changes in a culture influence the development of its language. Related languages become more differentiated when their speakers are isolated from each other. When speech communities come into contact (e.g., through trade or conquest), their languages influence each other. Most existing languages are grouped with other languages descended “genetically” from a common ancestral language (see historical linguistics).
Americans and Britons do not share a common culture - not even remotely
and much more than the Atlantic separates the two cultures
as reflected by our distinctly different languages, world views, and ways of thinking
English is the language of England
American is the language of America
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