Pierre Abbat wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Again, nobody mentioned anything about "removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code". But I realise that you're joking; it's a nice pun. Especially when Pierre is ignoring the subject, it's easy to pretend that he's ignoring articles too. At least you had the presence of mind to not be offended by your own pun this time.
I wasn't ignoring the subject. I was at a friend's house getting his USB DSL modem to work with his new Linux box. It's a recent Mandrake distro, and there should have been instructions on how to make it work with Mandrake, but weren't. So I had to figure out which instructions were irrelevant (don't need to compile the module) and which had to be done differently.
And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?
Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked, I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults relies on their also omitting articles ("the"). (These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their technical grammatical senses here.)
-- Toby