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Switzerland bores underground
- OJFord 10y agoIt is, is it?
- merraksh 10y agoThe original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for nitpicking.
- raverbashing 10y agoWhen I saw the title and the domain I knew the title had been changed because no average Swiss would do such a stupid mistake as to get its and it's confused
- gpvos 10y agoIt is indeed a mistake that is almost only made by native English speakers, which is in itself an interesting phenomenon.
- dnet 10y agoIMHO it's because you learn your first language spoken first, written after -- and most people learn further languages after they learned writing, so they can learn to differentiate between words that sound similar/same.
- wolfgke 10y agoAnother hypothesis could be that in the culture surrounding other languages (as Russian or German) grammar and spelling mistakes are much more frowned upon than in the English-speaking countries.
- nerdponx 10y agoAnti-intellectualism in general is an old and interesting phenomenon in English-speaking countries.
- lazyjones 10y agoPerhaps it's because native English speakers more frequently communicate with English-speaking people in an informal setting (where such mistakes happen more often and are copied), whereas non-native speakers tend to read English mostly in edited publications etc. and (more sloppily) communicate with friends in their native language.
- raverbashing 10y agoWhile it is true that yes, people in general communicate more sloppily in informal settings it doesn't mean they don't know the formal way of writing (at least for common terms) German dialects are pretty far from the "official" language, but everybody knows that
- sievebrain 10y agoYou're assuming its vs it's is always due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it's just a brainfart. I noticed today that I had sent an email that used the wrong form of "to" ("too" instead). This isn't because I don't know English. It's just that what came out of my fingers was wrong. Mea culpa, it happens. The way English uses the apostrophe is especially tedious and offers no value: it'd be no real shame if the distinction between "its" and "it's" disappeared over time, just like English lost gendered nouns and words like thy and thine.
- raverbashing 10y agoOh brainfarts and autocorrects do happen, but by the frequency I see this mistake happening I see it's not just a regular slip
- sievebrain 10y agoYou probably see a lot more English than other languages, so you'll see a proportionally higher number of mistakes too.
- GirlsCanCode 10y agoWell @dang didn't notice or care.
- ghaff 10y agoNote that even people who fully know correct usage do type the wrong thing now and then. It's particularly easy to do when you're basically transcribing a sentence that you're verbalizing silently to type the wrong homonym. I very rarely to never mix up things like loose and lose but I will mistype things like its and it's from time to time even though I fully know the correct one.
- lazyjones 10y agoThanks for nitpicking. I'm always tempted to do this, but reluctant because most people probably don't care. I'm a firm believer in the hypothesis that such mistakes are "contagious" and thus more harmful than one would think.
- CalRobert 10y agoThey are indeed. I find myself inadvertently typing "loose" when I mean "lose" and it's absolutely maddening. Similarly, I do a double-take when I see "effect" used properly.
- solipsism 10y agoThe problem is that English overloads the apostrophe for possession and contraction. It's annoying.
- speps 10y agoThe amount of traffic they're getting from that Newsletter will look insane on their dashboard. URL has : ?utm_source=Newsletter42016&utm_medium=E-Mail
- jsingleton 10y agoIt would do if the site was up. HN hug of death?
- 131hn 10y agoAm i reading right ? 17b € for a 57km tunnel (on an existing railway, only to flatter trajectory a little) just to save a little time ? That seems expensive..
- lrusnac 10y agothat is Switzerland :D
- allendoerfer 10y agoConsider that above the tunnel there are the Alps. What else should a society, that has almost everything, invest in? It's not like they are neglecting anything for it, they literally sit on gold.
- nickik 10y agoBy that logic you could just tax less. That was definitely not the reason this was built.
- allendoerfer 10y agoI was referring to society, not the Swiss state. I don't think that they could have spend that money better individually. The tunnel will be there for a while, so you have to write off these billions over decades. After you divide the remaining by a few million Swiss people, there isn't much money left.
- sievebrain 10y agoDecades? Why not centuries!
- thallian 10y agoThe trajectory is flatter with the new tunnel and freight trains can be longer and carry more weight. This is one of the elements in trying to shift more freight from the street to the trains (which is one of the two points of the Alpen-Initiative, a popular initiative from 1994 to protect the Alpine Environment).
- jsingleton 10y agoAppears to be down and I couldn't find a cached copy.
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoShould it be "its" instead of "it's" in the title? At least that's the way they taught me English in high school (in Italy).
- bogomipz 10y ago"According to a study conducted under the leadership of the Federal Office for Spatial Development, the new alpine tunnel will hardly relieve any pressure on the roads but instead create new rail traffic, as the newspaper “Der Bund” reports." Isn't the environmental impact of 1000 people traveling from point A to point B via rail far preferable to than 1000 people making the same journey by car? The quote above seems to imply that rail provides no appreciable environmental benefit, I'm finding that hard to believe.
- tallowen 10y agoWhat they're saying is that there will be just as many cars on the road as before and therefore not reducing the environmental impact of the road. I imagined it to be something like this: Old: - Road: 1000 users - Train tunnel: 1000 users New: - Road: 1000 users - Train: 2000 users Although the train is more environmentally friendly than the road, I think the article is saying the impact of adding it is just that more people make the trip rather than the same number of people doing it in a more environmentally friendly way. This is basically the concept of induced demand i.e. build it and they will come.
- spacemanmatt 10y ago...but above ground, they're killing
- clifanatic 10y agoSwitzerland bores pretty much everybody.