51–60 of 68 posts
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> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. It's not so easy. it's = contraction of it is or it has its = possessive form of it
I've never seen "it has" written "it's". Or maybe I didn't understand those correctly.
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It's not in the control of the conscious mind. It is controlled by the body (or, you might say, by an evolutionary adaptation instantiated in the linkages of hormonal pathways in the brain.) Note that miscarriage and spontaneous abortion are separate things. Miscarriage happens because the foetus dies in the womb, or the womb is ruptured, and the mother's body detects this. Any other cause is spontaneous abortion—eff…
That is a poor explanation given that extreme stress is known to have all sorts of physiological effects and is noted to negatively effect reproductive success in numerous species. But not all those species menstruate as noted by the article.
I'm unaware of whether there has been the study of the effects of purely psychological (or synthetic, using injected epinephrine) stress on spontaneous abortion rates.
It's much clearer with fear, though; things that cause a fear response don't tend to harm you (in fact, in an adaptive environment, to the degree that a fear response is created, you tend to avoid harm you would otherwise succumb to) but do trigger spontaneous abortion anyway. This would be much simpler to prove/disprove a purely-hormonal effect.
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> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. It's not so easy. it's = contraction of it is or it has its = possessive form of it
I've never seen "it has" written "it's". Or maybe I didn't understand those correctly.
[0] http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tuto...
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> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. You could easily repeat that for plenty of native speakers. It's one of the most common mistakes in written English.
Isn't it sad? It's such a frustrating mistake. There's a bar that we drive past frequently that does it with everything. They're "Now accepting application's" and their "Burger's are $2" Sad.
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> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. It's not so easy. it's = contraction of it is or it has its = possessive form of it
I've never seen "it has" written "it's". Or maybe I didn't understand those correctly.
But it is a real thing.
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You should understand that "my mom" and "my grandmother" are commonly used to denote technical illiteracy/incompetence and inability to keep up with the latest technological advances. This usage remans an unchallenged bastion of both sexism AND ageism -- a double whammy! Proper usage: * This app is so easy, my mom could use it! * This article is easy to follow and avoids too much jargon -- my grandma would even under…
You should understand that jacquesm made a pretty sweet joke.
> HN lately reads like newsclippings sent to me by my grandma
which continues to propagate the insidious, ageist and sexist assertion that older women don't get high technology.
tl;dr: What we know for sure: foetuses produce hormones to keep the endometrial tissue from thinning. Once a zygote has implanted, the mother's hormones are thus no longer in control of whether her uterus will support its growth or not. Menstruation, when it happens, forcefully cleans out implanted zygotes, returning the uterine hormonal balance to normal. What we guess that that implies: menstruation is a side-effec…
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Isn't it sad? It's such a frustrating mistake. There's a bar that we drive past frequently that does it with everything. They're "Now accepting application's" and their "Burger's are $2" Sad.
Since I moved to Missouri, I've been upset by a similar grammatical error: quotation marks used for emphasis. You would expect, say, all-capitals or an underline or italics, but you instead see 'Come taste the "best" burger in Missouri,' which is awful. In New York, where I grew up, that use of quotation marks is called "scare quotes": quotation marks in all cases signal that you're detaching a text fragment from its…
My pet theory is that quotes for emphasis were popularized in 20th century movie posters, where it was common to surround the movie title in quotations (this is still the accepted citation style in, say MLA style). This is probably wrong, of course.
Italics or bold for emphasis can be hard to hand-write, and the quotation marks for emphasis probably look more legible on chalk signs.
Please fix the apostrophe in "animal's" It is annoying and leads non-native speakers on the board astray. Thank you. To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural.
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> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. You could easily repeat that for plenty of native speakers. It's one of the most common mistakes in written English.
Isn't it sad? It's such a frustrating mistake. There's a bar that we drive past frequently that does it with everything. They're "Now accepting application's" and their "Burger's are $2" Sad.
Apostrophe's represent plural's in one of the languages most closely related to English, i.e. this has changed in the recent past, and will change again.