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If I was CEO of Posterous

tawheedkader.com

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#21
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this bugs me too, it's not incorrect. It's perfectly understandable in American English, and "correct" in other varieties of English.

They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.

Yes, they do, it's the "subjunctive":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood

And it's one of those cases where knowing a foreign language can help you think about English a bit more clearly. It's mostly vestigial in English (which is why "if I was rich" is so common), but in a language like Italian, it's much more widely used (I think that ..., I believe that ..., I want ... and similar sentiments all require that you use the subjunctive), and it has obviously different verb forms: "penso che sia" instead of "penso che e`". It appears from that wikipedia article that Spanish is similar.

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#22
post #21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.

Yes, they do, it's the "subjunctive": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood And it's one of those cases where knowing a foreign language can help you think about English a bit more clearly. It's mostly vestigial in English (which is why "if I was rich" is so common), but in a language like Italian, it's much more widely used (I think that ..., I believe that ..., I want ... and similar sentiments all require…

You're right, we are dealing with two different moods. I'd argue that in this case the clause is subjunctive (contrary to fact) rendered with the indicative mood. This is increasingly common, and in many dialects standard. The question then is: do people really mean this in a "subjunctive way" or if the mood has disappeared entirely?

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.

I'd say you'd have a bright future as a copy editor waiting for you if you desired, but I don't think there are any bright futures left in publishing.

What about that big furnace up ahead? Seems pretty bright from here. It's getting nearer/brighter all the time, too!

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#24
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this bugs me too, it's not incorrect. It's perfectly understandable in American English, and "correct" in other varieties of English.

They mean different things, no? If I were CEO, I'd do things differently. If I was CEO, I don't remember it.

In the UK this makes perfect sense. (thinking about it I would probably us "were" but a lot of my generation would use "was")

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#25

Posterous is blogging that just f'n works. My mom uses it and it suits her great. Wordpress was just a bit much for her. The support is great too. I actually got a kick when she said: "That nice fella Gary helped me out". Wordpress rocks too, but they're different things. I feel like there are a lot of people out there using Wordpress that would love something simpler like what Posterous offers, but just don't know i…

This agrees with the OP. As I understand it, he's basically saying "don't go after people who have blogs and convert them, go after people who would start a blog if it wasn't so complicated".

Re: If I was CEO of Posterous

#26

What I find most useful about Posterous is how dead simple it is to share media from email for virtually painless hosting! The only way anyone could beat that is to use Dropbox!! Now, imagine if you could just post to your blog by putting something in your Dropbox folder. Hmmm, I hope you posterous guys are listening.

You can post photos to http://ourdoings.com/ via dropbox. It's a blog-like photo sharing site.
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