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I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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In this day and age, it seems, an injunction against splitting infinitives is one of those shibboleths whose only reason for survival is to give increased meaning to the lives of those who can both identify by name a discrete grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic entity and notice when that entity has been somehow besmirched.

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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

Totals
Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,721,357

Averages
Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 346

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 12:19 PM Pacific


  12:14 PM

Here's an odd sentence that I found in a chemistry textbook (2003 edition):
Today there are approximately 109 different kinds of atoms, each with its own unique composition.

So many things. Like:

  • "Today": My admittedly imperfect understanding of the physical world is that elements are elements, and they exist outside of our understanding of time.

  • "Approximately" 109? Not approximately 108? Not approximately 110? Not exactly 109?

  • There are "109 different kinds" of atoms? Not just "109 kinds of"? You mean, each kind is different from the others?

  • Each different kind of atom is moreover distinguished by having its own unique composition? (Isn't uniqueness already part of "different kind of"?)

  • Each atom has "its own" unique composition, and not the composition of some other atom?
Dunno, seemed a bit ... sloppy ... to me.

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