This is what was crammed into us at the snooty prep school. I still have my copy, and it also lives on my machine, against memory lapses of the lessons learned between 1978-81.
Looks brutal. I hope you nevertheless split your infinitives and ended sentences with prepositions.
I’m merely human as well, but I’ve always tried to avoid them in my writing.
I used to do that, until I realized that it’s quite all right to boldly go where my English teachers told me not to.
An unique comic indeed.
Because the Great Vowel Shift turned three vowels into dipthongs (ā → /ei/, ī → /ai/, ō → /oʊ/), one into a different long vowel (ē → /i:/), and gave one into a semivowel onset (ū → /ju:/).
The semivowel onset to ū means it isn’t pronounced with an initial vowel, even if it’s spelled with one.
Thus “an unkind …”, “an uncle”, “an understanding”, but “a unicorn”, “a unique …”, “a universe”.
That semivowel also tends to palatalise preceding consonants, which is why in some accents “tub” and “tooth” have plosive consonants /tʌb/, /tu:θ/ (well, actually more like [tʰʌb] and [tʰu:θ], but that’s a different lecture), but “tube” and “dune” are palatalised and slightly lenited to /tʃʲu:b/ and /dʒʲu:n/. This is not universal: there are some accents where “tunes” and “toons” are homophones, and some where they are distinct: /tʃʲu:nz/ and /tu:nz/.
Dawling, would yew please open a can of chuna fish?
Well it is true that my anal is a terrible place to put them.
I’m impressed they managed to spell nicotine properly
Minimum wage, poorly educated worker whose job is made more unpleasant by thoughtless behaviour?
Lucky they bothered to start with PlZ…
Coulda saved a lotta ink, too, also.