5 Cases of Erroneous Usage

5 Cases of Erroneous Usage 5 Cases of Erroneous Usage 5 Cases of Erroneous Usage By Mark Nichol Writers who have misheard words and expressions or remember them imperfectly are prone to misrepresenting them in their prose. The following sentences include examples of such errors, followed by discussion and revision. 1. Trustees- jail inmates selected for jobs like food preparation and garbage collection- were sneaking drugs in on food trays. A trustee is a person or organization that manages money or property for someone else or a person who serves on a board. The appropriate term in this sentence is the plural of the noun trusty: â€Å"Trusties- jail inmates selected for jobs like food preparation and garbage collection- were sneaking drugs in on food trays.† 2. Her tongue-and-cheek  comment was inappropriate for the occasion. A writer unfamiliar with the idiomatic phrase denoting irony, insincerity, or whimsy has mistaken one of the words in the phrase for another: â€Å"Her tongue-in-cheek  comment was inappropriate for the occasion.† 3. The galley on this sailboat looks as if it could be a kitchen in a home in a housing track. Here, a writer has presumably misheard the term tract- referring in this context to a housing development, as track- and is unaware of the distinction: â€Å"The galley on this sailboat looks as if it could be a kitchen in a home in a housing tract.† 4. In this type of story, the hero undergoes a right of passage. This sentence refers to a ritual, not something one is entitled to: â€Å"In this type of story, the hero undergoes a rite of passage.† 5. Smith has a Masters of education and spent several decades as a schoolteacher. Masters is the plural form of master. Master’s is the possessive form, which is what is appropriate here. Also, though it is implicit that degree is what â€Å"belongs† to the master, it’s best to include the word and to use the pertinent preposition: â€Å"Smith has a master’s degree in education and spent several decades as a schoolteacher.† (Also, as shown in the revision, a word denoting a level of degree is not capitalized.) Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Usage Review category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:30 Religious Terms You Should KnowComma Before ButUsing "zeitgeist" Coherently

A Modest Proposal Essays

A Modest Proposal Essays A Modest Proposal Paper A Modest Proposal Paper Swift creates a narrator in order to satirize the intellectual hypocrisy, arrogance, and moral depravity of the landlords who paper over greed and prejudice with scientific rationalizations about the causes of Irelands poverty. Englishmen of that era frequently attributed Irelands poverty to its backward Catholic faith, not to English policies. Swifts narrator mocks, of all things, Irish eating habits and cites a French physician who attributes the seasonal surplus of Irish infants to the Catholic practice of eating fish during lent which the expert claims make Catholics more fertile. He claims that this backward Catholic practice of fish-eating can actually be turned into a financial windfall because the Irish children can be butchered and eaten during religious holidays and after christenings. It never even occurs to the narrator that eating human beings is more barbaric than eating fish. And this is where the similarity becomes evident. For in Alive, Read has made it reasonable to eat flesh, and in a similar manner to Swift, uses impersonal vocabulary, such as carcass rather than body. Although there is a strong moral tone throughout, the text remains neutral and dispassionate in Alive. In both, the authors have not tried to make their voices sensational, but rather like arguing their cases by presenting evidence. We can see this on page 62, where the survivors are still indecisive. Both sides of opinions are given, one perhaps slightly stronger than the other, and the reader is allowed to decide for himself what is right. I think most readers, due to the biased nature of the script, and the conditions mentioned before hand, tend to agree with the eventuality. P P Read has taken care to point out via his characters, that social taboo is not a sin of God, and differentiates between sin and physical revulsion. No one of the survivors proclaims that what they are doing, or might do is wrong! but each argues for himself, for personal reasons. Read suggests that there is no moral indecision, as there is in Swifts Modest Proposal, but there is a distinction between what is accepted by social conventions and what is right in the name of God. As well as using motives and social issues, there are a variety of literary techniques used by both the narrator in A Modest Proposal, and P P Read. The narrators well structured, almost business like approach, in A Modest Proposal, that has the posterity of a politicians, such as, I propose to provide for them, and careful selection of words, nutrient rather than food is one example or yield to compare human flesh to crops to be harvested, becomes apparent only when the article is understood for its real meaning. This mix of both an apparently shielded, as well as a grotesquely open approach to cannibalism, for example, a healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, wholesome food, in A Modest Proposal, confounds the reader. Read, often to make a point, will isolate sentences, such as The truth was incontestable, and like Swift, writes his piece in a detached manner. Although he does sometimes generate empathy, for example from the letters that were never sent home, it is interesting to note that the detail and description is economised, saved for particular occasions, for example, the crash itself, or as the survivors watched as a far away, disorientated Valeta stumbled down a valley: his body slithered helplessly down the side of the mountain There is also a regular use of short, sharp sentences that are used for a similar effect as the above. Combined with very minimal writing, P P read presents an argument that is guided by him, yet is left to the reader- one that seems sensible, scientific, and pragmatic. With a similar purpose, although with a contrasting approach, Swift too teaches his confused readers an important object lesson about how easy it is to be taken in, about how easy it is to become perplexed and morally confused when faced with clever, but false, reasoning. For example, while most readers will recognize that Swift is not seriously advocating cannibalism, many will mistakenly attribute the narrators anti-Catholic ravings to the Anglican clergyman, Swift. Perhaps Swift wants to show readers that their own religious prejudices make them easy targets for manipulation and make their reason an unreliable instrument for clearly differentiating between the rationalizations of Swifts morally degenerate narrator and a truly enlightened Christian perspective (his own? )- In the same way that Read questions whether the fact that the survivors of the Fairchild are Christians make them differentiate between society and religion, or whether they become cannibals because of their own instincts, in mind of the Survival of the Fittest. In a similar way, Read approaches religion almost dismissively, yet takes it into special account. His story is very much about spirituality, and throughout, the characters are often speaking the Hail Mary, but continuing to eat flesh, in religious confusion. The barren lifeless environment that they inhabit seems to give them a particular closeness to God. Yet, they challenge century old ideas of respect for dead bodies, of the linkage of body and soul, and their thoughts of the dead as simply meat is a very radical idea in the Christian world. Whether the survivors of the Fairchild convince themselves or actually believe in what they are doing is another matter. It is clear to me that Read has used wine in particular to signify the Holy Communion in connection to the blood of Christ, yet this time, it seems that they have taken a step further, substituting bread for the body itself. Another survivor, Delgado: we thought to ourselves, that if Jesus at His last supper had shared His flesh and blood with his apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all. Although Swifts grotesque narrator, with his reasoned proposal for cannibalism, his suggestion that childrens skin be manufactured into ladies gloves or gentlemens boots, and his grisly recipe collection is probably the literary antecedent of Hannibal Lecter, he states his piece so calmly, that one can sometimes wonder where the blood and gore has gone. The narrators moral confusion is also mirrored in Swifts readers. Swift entangles not only his narrator, but also his readers, possibly deliberately, in faulty reasoning. To most readers, the reasonable narrator appears completely irrational in suggesting cannibalism as a modest and reasonable solution to the problem of Irish poverty. Yet this cannibal professes Christianity and concern for the poor; he champions progress. An effective technique that Swift uses is verisimilitude. He quotes scientific experts such as a French doctor, and another cannibal, Psalmanazar, and manipulates reason and science to justify not only cannibalism, but ignorance, unemployment, exploitation, and anti-Catholic bigotry. However, the conditions which Swift or Read describes are not hyperbole, for the Great Potato Famine ravaged Ireland, and the moral dilemmas faced by the Argentinean Rugby Team were ones that had never been addressed in the society of the day. Only, in Modest Proposal does the projector exaggerate, and perhaps only a little. Instead, Swift has used savage irony to wield his powerful writing skills, and here lies the success of his article. By writing of cannibalism and its meaning in society as an antithesis, in an masterminded satirized form, Swift makes his work all the more poignant, while his projector appears cold, mechanical, his thoughts computed and wicked, his words spoken, rather, with the banality of evil in mind. However, in Alive, the reader learns that decisions of an extreme nature shall always have opposition, whichever answer is given. The author, while remaining detached and reporting only through the survivors journey and speech, I feel creates a similar narrator as in A Modest Proposal, only not quite as directly. There is certainly the voice of Pier Paul Read in the book, and although he is not quite as direct or inhumane as his counterpart in A Modest Proposal, his detachment creates a sense of fear and bewilderment in the reader, as they envision what they themselves might have don in a similar situation. When Alive and A Modest Proposal are compared, although I found this difficult considering they are not easily paralleled, I preferred Jonathan Swifts satirical piece, for this reason. It was short, ridiculous, and although not originally intended, humorous in its madness. On the other hand, I found Pier Paul Reads work tedious and too questioning of a topic, cannibalism, that many today have made their firm minds up about, and of decisions that may only be changed if they were faced with such terrible situations.

Efficiency of Cloud Computing Data Centers Thesis

Efficiency of Cloud Computing Data Centers - Thesis Example the respective organization, whereas, cloud computing is referred to as the ‘public cloud’ since it is available for use by any individual who might need instantaneous computing capability. This innovative concept has even leaped the performance level of data centers to a new level and has reduced costs for independent developers and organizations. 2. Background Information Warr (2009) stated that cloud computing is also referred to as ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) since developers use it as a platform to run their applications or even develop them from scratch without investing in the acquisition of the required operating system or server hardware. Another name that is used for this concept is ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS); it includes the dynamic usage of CPUs, virtual servers, network, storage, systems software etc. Software as a service (SaaS) is another type of cloud computing that provides access to software to users on their need basis while the software runs on the vendor’s side of the data centers. The conventional mode of using the software requires the installation of the software on the user’s computer but this latest technology requires no such installation. Since many decades, internet users have been availing the service of uploading their documents and pictures on the internet by different services like Flickr, Snapfish etc; this concept has enabled the people to save their data ‘on the cloud’. The latest concept of cloud computing is far more usable, scalable and efficient for individual developers and organizations. 2.1 Criteria of Effective Performance Rajan (2011) provided some relevant characteristics that can be helpful to... This paper stresses that the conventional enterprise data centers have been found to possess several limitations and constraints that make their adoption difficult. Enterprise data centers constitute a limited storage capacity and much capital is needed to increase the scale of the data centers. Cloud computing data centers offer the level of scalability that facilitates almost unlimited expansion of the IT infrastructure. The cost of the cloud computing service is dependent on the usage of the requested resources therefore proves to cut costs by significant numbers. The adoption of this technology provides freedom in terms of maintenance and regular updates of the data center software and platforms. This report makes a conclusion that cloud computing data centers promote mobility since they can be accessed from anywhere on the web. Therefore, it can be concluded that cloud computing data centers prove to be effective in typical and atypical business conditions but fall short in the security area. The innovative techniques to improve the physical conditions of the data centers have benefitted the organizations, as well as the society since lesser energy is being consumed from the resources of the planet. Containerized servers, innovative data center designs, evaporative cooling, free-cooling are some of the techniques that have played their role in the reduction of PUE. The uauthor talks that the security standards of cloud computing shall be analyzed in detail for their effectiveness and the rate at which they are being adapted by the respective providers. Data encryption mechanisms shall also be studied that have been adapted by different organizations to improve the cloud comp uting services.