[SeSawaya]

Real simple (I think) but I have nothing that will do the job for me. Pages's 'instant Alpha' will do some of it, but by no means all of it. I just want the drum/stand. Kill the kitchen!!!
http://gallery.me.com/sonordrum/100241/DSC00797/web.jpg
Help??

thanks
Kent Arnsbarger

(P.S. for my new steel drum CD cover.)

[andi*pandi]

Before masking I'd try to take another shot against a solid background. Possible?

[SeSawaya]

I was tying to do that, but then I was using the only sun I had. I'll try again tomorrow. I hate winter!

thanks for the tip!

[Laminar]

Done.

[SeSawaya]

Bahhh!!!! Lol!

[SeSawaya]

got it guys, thanks!

[ort888]

Can someone come mow my lawn?

[Dakar V]

Originally Posted by ort888 

Can someone come mow my lawn?

[sek929]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

Done.

The masked MS Paint bandit strikes again.

[SeSawaya]

Originally Posted by ort888 

Can someone come mow my lawn?

Wow, you brought back a nearly 3 month old thread to write THAT? Slow day huh?

[Spheric Harlot]

Well, there's not much point in having someone mow the lawn in winter, is there?

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by ort888 

Can someone come mow my lawn?

(If I weren't at school and lazy, I'd make a version of that that doesn't contribute to the death of the subjunctive mood.)

[mattyb]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

If I weren't at school and lazy, I'd make a version of that that doesn't contribute to the death of the subjunctive mood.

If I wasn't lazy at school, I'd have an idea what you were talking about.

[Spheric Harlot]

"I wish my lawn WERE emo"


You don't have to know what "subjunctive" is in order to tell correct from incorrect grammar.

[Dakar V]

I find it telling that the two people who find error with it studied english as an additional language, though.

I don't understand the problem.

[Spheric Harlot]

I'm a native speaker.

[Dakar V]

My mistake. Either way, it seems like those who deal with more than one language (In general I tend to see foreigners point them out on the internet) tend to pick up on these types of issues.

So what's the problem with 'was'?

[Spheric Harlot]

It's incorrect; that's what's wrong with it.

"Was" is past tense and not a verb form used to signify something dependent on certain conditions being met.

It works with "have" ("If I had a bigger penis, I wouldn't drive an SUV" vs. "I once had a Porsche") and "go" ("If I went any faster, the car would lift clear off the ground" vs. "We went to the zoo in my sister's Fiat Punto") and many many other verbs because the subjunctive and past tense look the same, so people who never actually stop to think about what they're really saying, and why, never notice that gramatically, they are completely different functions.

[Dakar V]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

It's incorrect; that's what's wrong with it.

Wow, thanks for starting me off on the right foot. Were you purposely trying to be off-putting?

[Spheric Harlot]

Sorry I wasted my effort on trying to explain it.

Had I known that a flippant one-liner would be enough to extinguish your curiosity entirely, I would have left it at that.

[Dakar V]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Had I known that a flippant one-liner would be enough to extinguish your curiosity entirely, I would have left it at that.

An eccentricity of mine, I'm sure.

I read it anyway, but nothing short of a chalkboard and a heavy ruler is going to make me understand.

Part of me wants to attribute not recognizing the problem with the statement to it being a common mistake.

[Spheric Harlot]

Basically, a chalkboard isn't gonna do it.

I really don't mean to be condescending:

You do "get" (i.e. know in your gut or somesuch?) that the "had" in "If I had a hammer" and "I had a hammer" mean two almost entirely opposite things, right?

In the first, it means that I DON'T have a hammer, and in the second, it means that I DID have one.

But both are based around not/having, so the root word is the same. It's pure coincidence that such wildly varying meanings should result in two variations of the word that look the same. By all logic, they should at least have different endings or something - even if just because the tenses are different (one is present conditional; the other is simple past).

And in the case of "If I were a teenage werewolf" and "I was a teenage werewolf", the verb actually *does* look as different as it rightfully ought to.


I admit that it's probably a lot more "intuitive" if you're used to dealing with another language that is utterly rife with more conjugated and what-have-you verb forms than you can shake a stick at, but listening around in the German vernacular, a lot of people will tend to be just as careless and imprecise in everyday conversation as many Americans do.

I just happen to enjoy the precision that the language allows, occasionally.

I'm not *quite* as passionate about it as Oisín—I couldn't have told you that that particular form is called "subjunctive", for example (like I said, you don't have to know what it's called to know that it's wrong)—, but hey, you asked.

[Thorzdad]

Play nice, kids.

[Dakar V]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

You do "get" (i.e. know in your gut or somesuch?) that the "had" in "If I had a hammer" and "I had a hammer" mean two almost entirely opposite things, right?

And in the case of "If I were a teenage werewolf" and "I was a teenage werewolf", the verb actually *does* look as different as it rightfully ought to.

Alright, I see what you're saying in the first example. But in the second one, would using "If I was a teenage werewolf" be incorrect in the same manner as the emo shirt?

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Dakar V 

Alright, I see what you're saying in the first example. But in the second one, would using "If I was a teenage werewolf" be incorrect in the same manner as the emo shirt?

Exactly.

Because "I was a teenage werewolf" means I actually WAS a teenage werewolf, whereas "If I were a teenage werewolf" means I AIN'T.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Dakar V 

Alright, I see what you're saying in the first example. But in the second one, would using "If I was a teenage werewolf" be incorrect in the same manner as the emo shirt?

Depends on whether we’re talking prescriptive or descriptive grammar. Prescriptively, yes, it would. When ‘if’ has a sense of hypothesis and non-realisation (i.e., the clause that ‘if’ governs is not a real, tangible thing—it hasn’t happened or is hypothetical), then ‘if’ should, prescriptively, govern the subjunctive mood in the past tense. The same goes for other instances where the verb describes something that hasn’t actually happened, but in fact underlines that it hasn’t happened, e.g., “Wish it were true”.

Descriptively, though, as you’ve noticed, there are lots of people who don’t know this and don’t feel instinctively that it’s wrong not to do it. A big part of the reason for this (if not the reason) is that the past subjunctive and the past indicative [=the ‘normal’ mood] have merged completely in modern English, with the one singular exception of ‘to be’ that still distinguishes them in the first and third person singular (‘I was/he was’, but ‘if I were/if he were’).

Sometimes, though, the subjunctive can actually help make a point clearer. Imagine two neighbours talking. Neighbour one is complaining that neighbour two’s son took some apples from his apple tree or something. He’s listing the bad things sonny-boy did, so far saying he took an apple and then he threw a ball into neighbour one’s garden. At this point, neighbour one says, “Well, if it was just that …”, to which neighbour two replies, “Hah! Yeah, well, if it were only that …” and goes on listing more things the juvenile delinquent to be did.

Do you see the difference here between these two sentences? In the first one (neighbour one’s sentence), the ‘if’ doesn’t mean that the verb (‘was’) refers to something hypothetical that hasn’t happened—it’s referring to the very real thing that his neighbour is talking about: an apple taken, a ball thrown. The meaning is, of course, “Well, if that’s all he did, then [that’s not so bad, or something]”. Since ‘if’ here refers to something that’s real and has actually happened, it’s followed by a regular indicative (‘was’).

In neighbour two’s line, however, ‘if’ indicates that the verb (‘were’) is referring to something that’s not real, but something hypothetical: if that (which I’ve just told you of) were the whole story … but oh no, it’s not. As Chris said, the ‘were’ here means that ‘that’ was absolutely not ‘it’. Therefore, the ‘if’ is followed by a subjunctive. See the difference a little thing like the form of the verb has in a case like this?

I admit that it's probably a lot more "intuitive" if you're used to dealing with another language that is utterly rife with more conjugated and what-have-you verb forms than you can shake a stick at, but listening around in the German vernacular, a lot of people will tend to be just as careless and imprecise in everyday conversation as many Americans do.

Sloppy, careless, imprecise—yes. But even in sloppy speech, the subjunctive still forms a much larger part in the German vernacular than in English.

Danish, like English, has all but done away with the subjunctive altogether (actually, we’ve done away with it more than English has—the past subjunctive is completely gone and the present subjunctive only lives on in fixed phrases as a jussive subjunctive, as in “God help us” or “Long live England”), and I’m always fascinated to hear German (or French, Spanish, Italian, Icelandic, Portuguese, you name it) teenagers speaking their sloppy, lazy, careless, worn-out street talk—and still managing to use the subjunctive mood in all the right places and with all the right forms. Since the subjunctive is something I’ve had to force my brain to learn, rather than something that I instinctively know, I still consider this somewhat of a ‘feat’, since properly using the subjunctive still seems like something that’s inherently ‘difficult’ in my brain.


As I suspected it would, this turned into half a War and Peace, but once I get started with this stuff … well, let’s just say, Dakar, that you’re not the only one to whom she said, “Please stop”. I’m most pleased analogika chose to describe me as ‘passionate’, rather than the (probably far more accurate) ‘obsessed’.

[Rumor]

See what happens when you disturb the Dane?

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Rumor 

See what happens when you disturb the Dane?

There should be a time-controlled lock on my keyboard or something …

[MacMurphy]