Man in a Shed: Chemical Engineering

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Grasp of English

Man in a Shed's chosen career has been in Chemical Engineering. This is down to an enthusiasm for science at school and then the realisation that applied science and engineering were a lot of fun. ( Burning motors at that back of the lab as you rewire them, re-routing oxygen to your bunsen burner to get better combustion, spending 2 days rewiring a combination switch - just to prove that an extra digit could be used and seeing just how many of the power cells you can wire up in series before the physics teacher catches you ).

However - the English language continues to be a bit of a mystery. A case in point here has been my use of the term ex-patriot rather than expatriate to describe PragueTory, IstanbulTory and The Last Ditch. Firstly my apologies to all three - their patriotism is not in question ! And I'd have to ask for previous offences to be taken into consideration, specifically when taking a school entrance exam at 11 when is mistook the words corporal and capital punishment and wrote an essay which had, in effect, executions being handed out for dropping litter. ( The exam did not go well - but if enacted it would have kept the pavements clear ! )

Man in a Shed takes the view that he must try harder - and is quite happy to be corrected. We all have weak points and I'd like to improve on mine. Though I do believe English is an evolving language - and I'm quite happy to contribute to that evolution ;-)

When at school I was diagnosed with dyslexia, and had a note to hand into the exam board (made no difference that I could tell - there were no concessions from the Oxford Delegation Board in those days ). At 'A'-levels I refused to hand it in ( much to my mothers disapproval ) - my reasoning was I had to compete in the outside world on the same basis as everyone else, and would just need to work harder at the language aspect.

Now if I can only get my daughters teacher to start correcting her spelling and mirror writing ....

PS There's a limit of course. Marks out of Ten, and notes to see me later" in comments will just get deleted ....

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman