Square Brackets in American English

[Macbeth]

Murphy will always get you in the end.

Yeah, I HATE that guy! 

I know, he is such a feckin' looser! [sic] I bet he could[n't] care less 

[Cubdriver]

... but irritating non-the-less!

That should be "none-the-less". 

Doh! 

Missed that one (and I do proofread them before I post!  ).

Murphy will always get you in the end.

I find that to be the case with drawings, too - I can spend an hour looking it over on the computer screen, checking and rechecking.  As soon as I print it out (especially if it's an 11 x 17), there, glaringly, is something blatantly obvious that I stared at and overlooked a dozen times staring back and taunting me.  A stupid typo, a missed rev number, something.  Almost without fail.   

-Pat

[MarvinTheMartian]

The one that repeatedly pops up is "noone" for "no one".

Oh thank you, thank you, thank you vk6zgo - I've been trying to work out what that acronym stood for (was it maybe a version of newbie?) 

Didn't even occur to me that it was no one!!!

[tooki]

This thread is amazing!

<3

[tooki]

Every language borrows from other languages. For example, look at how upset the French and German speaking worlds are that English words keep infiltrating their vocabulary! What's weird about it is that is that they blame us English speakers for it, even though they're the ones voluntarily using our words! We didn't ask, never mind force, them to use them!

Japanese solves this problem in an elegant way: foreign (loan words) are often written in a phonetic-only script that is roughly similar to capital letters. This makes them immediately identifiable, and easily kept out of things that are expected to be written in "pure" Japanese, which itself is a combination of the old "Yamato" language and imported court Chinese from a long time ago. Even with that it's easy to distinguish between the Chinese source and the old Japanese source.

In everyday language one can get a collection of words within a single sentence that are:
1. Originally Chinese and written in kanji
2. Originally Japanese and written in kanji
3. Originally Japanese and written in hiragana (curvy) phonetics
4. Originally Japanese and written in katakana (squarish) phonetics
5. Originally foreign (English, etc.) and written in hiragana (curvy) phonetics
6. Originally foreign (English, etc.) and written in katakana (squarish) phonetics
7. Originally foreign (English, etc.) and written in roma-ji (English letters) as phonetics
8. Originally foreign (English, etc.) and written in English, etc. letters as the word itself

Yes!! That's something I love about Japanese, even if it's not a language I speak. (Korean is also special, in that it uses the only alphabet custom-designed for its language. Such things have been designed for English, but never caught on.)