A Happy New year to _ALL_ our readers....

.....presumably of the "I can call you childish but you mustn't call me childish because I am a mature adult" variety?

Note for the group: Mr Bean has now gone over to a broadband connection. The tale of this can be followed in a series of postings on uk.radio.amateur, starting with the thread entitled - perhaps not surprisingly - "Broadband sorted out - a BT fault from day one" (5/12/03), and proceding on to interesting divertisements such as 'port scanning' and the Computer Misuse Act.

Doubtless his new facility of web access will enable him to check facts via the WWW before posting. At least we can hope so.

Gareth,

When you were sacked for not making the grade as a real engineer, did you decide to try something less demanding? Why else are you sulking down here?

Maybe, just maybe, your skills are up to a clockwork train set. One with the little faces on the trains.

DMS

In article , David Sausins writes

(Snipped)

Hi David,

*Please* don't feed the trolls. The only time I see Gareth's blatherings is when someone quotes him. And the only way he'll *ever* go away is if we starve him out.

Happy new year.

I apologise to readers of this group for having to suffer Mr Bean, aka Gareth Evans.

You guys have had it lucky - he's plagued the uk.radio.amateur newsgroup for years with his s**te.

As my father says - he's the sort of person who knows nothing about everything and everything about nothing.

Happy New Year to all except him.

I am not a troll.

I have genuine interest in all the NG to which I contribute, and a genuine stance against those who demonstrate infantile behaviour in public fora.

If you, or anyone, wishes to bury their head in the sand then that is your/their loss.

My remarks are not in any case intended for the bigoted.

I wish you every success with your policy. I suspect that the technical nature of this ng is such that very few youngsters or newcomers will appear on here. However, the current 'incentive licensing' for amateur radio means that uk.radio.amateur has many more newcomers on it who have yet to build their skills by means of the 'self-training in communications' that is the reason for the Amateur Licence. That ng probably has more posters than uk.r.m.e, and this means that such a policy would not be effective there as someone is sure to respond to his postings.

Gareth posts frequently on ukra, and from a study of his posting history it would not be unreasonable to suggest that some of his postings contain material that could either mislead the unwary or contain technical or scientific inaccuracies. I have taken it upon myself, for some years now, as a general policy, to correct Gareth's postings where they could be seen as misleading or technically wrong, and others have taken the same approach. Perhaps one measure of the success of this is when Gareth says he has placed such a poster in his kill-file, as I among others have been so honoured, but there are other measures too, such as when Gareth stops, for example, posting inaccuracies.

Good luck with your group and its policy. I hope it works out for you.

Please define what you mean by "infantile behaviour", then I can ensure that I avoid it so as not to upset you. The only infants I know are unable to write, let alone post to usenet groups.

BTW, it may be a good idea if you were to avoid using incorrect plurals. 'Fora' is the Latin plural of the Latin word "Forum", which as I would imagine you're aware doesn't have the same meaning as the English word "Forum" (which of course takes the plural form "Forums"). From the context of your sentence I assume that you were using the word with its English meaning rather than the Latin, so it is inappropriate to use the Latin form of the plural.

This kind of malapropism tends to give an impression of pretentiousness, which I'm sure was not your intention....

That's all right then....

The gratuitous and unnecessary use of foul language and name-calling.

It does not upset me; I simply refuse to have anything to do with those who demonstrate such childishness.

I did not refer to infants. I referred to infantile behaviour.

English has assimilated many foreign words and it is normal practice to use the foreign plural. Ignoramuses start to use an English plural form and so that becomes extant in the language.

The larger the version of the OED, or its dimunitives, that you consult, the greater the likelihood of the foreign plural being also given and given first.

IGNORAMI you twit !

1. Misrepresentation of what I posted corrected.

1. In response to your infantile outburst, (You are John Stevenson and I claim my £5?) you are wrong. I was once wrong in making such an assertion on the Internet and was corrected.

The word, "ignoramus" comes from a Latin verb, "ignorare" and is the first person plural and means/meant, "We are ignorant". It was a legal term used a few hundred years ago.

There never was a Latin noun.

Its use as a noun was entirely English in origin, and therefore the plural has always had the English form

Mr.Mawson, you stand corrected both on etymological grounds and also on grounds of civilized behaviour.

Normal practice is to only use the foreign plural form where the word being referred to is being used in its original meaning. Most contemporary lexicographers agree that where the modern meaning is a long way from the original, then conventional English plurals should be used - "forum" being a good example of this usage.

English is of course a language that is almost totally constructed of assimilated foreign words, and as we have no official body to determine correctness, the only yardstick that can be used to judge correct usage is the ubiquity of the form. If 57 million people use the construction "forums", and you think that "fora" should be used, then I'm afraid that it's you that are in the wrong. But then I see from your posting history that this is a position with which you are hardly unfamiliar...

You are John Stevenson, and I claim my £5!

Alas not, I wish that I were, or at least had a small part of that gentleman's engineering skills. But at least I've got some floor space free in my workshop!

Tim (Saving hard for a vertical mill)

You forgot to mention 'gentlemanly traditions'....

And I have commended to you on other newsgroups why you should ignore what you perceive as 'infantile' behaviour, and instead deal with the content of the posting related to the topic under discussion. If you feel the need, you can always dress up this action as 'gentlemanly behaviour'. HTH.