Rudynate

Shame on him. There's a special place in Hell for people who subject job applicants to that sort of degradation.

In a soft job market such as we have been in, employers resort to these pathologic hiring criteria because they can. In the developing soft labor market they will find the applicant pool has dried up and instead of rejecting an outstanding applicant because he/she is period challenged, they will have to pay that same applicant a fat signing bonus in order to get them to accept a job.

That's one of those situations that can't help but work out perfectly, even when it looks like it didn't. Nobody ever likes to be screened out. But in screening someone out as a prospective employee over something niggling like one or two spaces after a period, they have also done the prospect a favor by screening themselves out as possible employer for the applicant, because, who, in their right mind, would want to work in an organization that gets hung up on details like that. Fortunately, with a soft labor market, employers are going to have relax some of those pathological employment criteria.

When I was in high school, our Health class, taught by a block-headed PE teacher with a room temperature IQ required a paper.

I would be happy to have a guest bring a well-behaved dog along - if they had checked with me first. I have two cats, so the dog might end up with a scratched nose.

They say that your resume has about x seconds to make an impression. you really think that during those x seconds the reviewer is checking the spacing after a period? I learned 2 spaces, and then, sometime in the 90s, stopped using 2 spaces. I went back to 2 spaces after a client asked me to use 2 spaces in my work product for them. When I bother to notice, it's mostly two spaces but I see a fair amount of work with single spaces after the period. If we are moving to a single space after a period, it's only because people don't receive formal training in keyboarding anymore so aren't familiar with that convention. So it's actually a result of having a marketplace full of poorly trained keyboardists.

All those rules can found in a style guide like Strunk and White. Since I write for a living and it as to be right, I use mine a lot.

The college bound all took typing because they expected to have to do a lot of writing in college. Nearly all the girls who weren't college-bound took it because they were expecting some sort of office employment after graduation.

My grandmother made bread and butter pickles. She used small pickling cucumbers and sliced them paper thin. They only came out at holidays. She even had a special dish with a little gold fork that she served them in

My father grew up speaking German in a Volga German community in Kansas.

We had that for dinner frequently when I was a kid. My father usually made it. He cut the ribs into sections, put them in a dutch oven, covered them with the sauerkraut and braised until the meat was ready to come off the bones. Nothing else added. It was really good.

I like it in a vinaigrette dressing instead of vinegar.

I think a BFE should include generous amounts of affection.

I almost never offer unsolicited advice. For that reason alone, I would never make a recommendation that they lose weight. Addionally, with somebody fat, I would assume that they had already heard anything I could possibly tell them, so why bother. On the rare occasion when someone solicits my advice on a persistent problem like weight, I say something like, "This probably isn't anything that you don't already know. . ."

I enjoy a fair degree of discomfort when bottoming. I encourage the top to lube with just spit.

I like dogs. I've never had one because they require more care and attention than I'm willing to provide. And I can't see how it can be good for the dog to leave it alone in a cage all day while its owner is at work and to get out twice a day for a short walk. I wouldn't find it objectionable to see well behaved dogs in restaurants. There is a certain type of dog owner, that I associate with California, who assumes that their dog is welcome anywhere and they bring their dog along without even thinking to ask if it's ok.

If ADC doesn't ship to Belgium, others may not also. If they don't ship to a particular country it is usually because of prohibitive laws in that country.

I misidentified the articles. "The" is the definite article. "These" is a demonstrative article.

In American English, we make distinctions that they don't seem to in British English. "The people" is an assortment, "the University" is a corporate body. In French, they say, "les gens, " but in German, they say "das Volk." But even in German, when they're just talking about a bunch of people, they say "die Leute" rather than das Volk. Das Volk is more like a body - the population, the German People, the community.

I think it is still fairly common to refer to the United States in the plural. I don't understand why the definite article "these" would have to precede it. Why couldn't the indefinite article "the" precede it?

Money is mostly a collective noun. As you note, The Brits treat collective nouns differently from Americans. We say, "The council is . . .." They say, "The council are . . . ." Not sure because I'm not around British English every day, but I believe even the Brits say "money is." But money doesn't always need to be a collective noun. As noted above thread, money can have a plural form when referring to funding sources or financial instruments or particular accounts. Since we grew up with the occasional inconsistency and illogic of English, it doesn't bother us. It must be disconcerting to native speakers of languages like French and German that are so logical.

Years ago, hospitals used reusable glass straws.

It's a good start, but when you think about the multipicity of single-use plastic containers in our lives, it is really discouraging.

I don't much anymore, but I always used to use a straw with coffee. I didn't like the feel of the sharp edges of plastic caps on my lips, so I used straws. They don't seem to have sharp edges on them anymore.

That's how I experienced it. We got out of the car to see just how hot it was. I don't think we were out of the car for even five minutes.