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 #17 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 17:08 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
| Alan wrote: |
Hi Alex,
I always associate 'lack/'lack in' with abstract objects/concepts both in simple and continuous forms of the verb. We say - lack anger, humour, enthusiasm and so on. That's why I'm not really happy with 'lacking in brain'. Perhaps you could say - 'lacking in brainpower.'.
Alan |
How about "he's a man of little brain"? That's isn't referring to the actual size of his brain is it? But note also that the question was about "brains" and not "brain". |
You're lacking in the brain departmant.
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 Ralf
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| #18 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 17:16 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| You're lacking in the brain departmant. |
What's a departmant? |
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Molly
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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Ralf
Language Coach
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| #20 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 19:36 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| It's what you make it. |
Poor English? |
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Molly
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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| #21 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 22:03 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
| Ralf wrote: |
| It's what you make it. |
Poor English? |
I wonder why you've never replied to this comment. No, actually I don't.
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Everybody makes mistakes, and I make mistakes because I'm sloppy.
Molly points to "too much native speaker intuition", because she keeps making mistakes she can't avoid. If you criticise her, she bends some corpus or other her way to support her point. If you or Alan or Torsten or anybody makes a mistake, she lifts her disparaging fingers to distract from her own shortcomings.
I would argue that this attitude is both a sign of weakness and ignorance. But it keeps her busy using the English language, and on the long run she'll improve her writing skills. |
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Ralf
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| #22 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 22:33 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Quote: |
| I wonder why you've never replied to this comment. No, actually I don't. |
Sounds like the comment of a nervous teenager. You know teenagers, give 'em an inch and...
Now, Ralf, talking about responding to posts, I wonder why you haven't responded to this one:
| Quote: |
Hello
do the following sentences mean the same and are both grammatically correct?
the lack of notes to the financial statements will not be acceptable
the lacking of notes to the financial statements will not be acceptable
Thanks |
If you open your eyes for a moment, you'll find it above. All that frowning is making you squint.  |
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Molly
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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| #23 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 22:47 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
i.e. (possibles):
The lacking of notes by persons submitting financial statements will not be acceptable.
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Are you sure you meant to present that as a "possible" version, old chap?
It sounds deeply peculiar; Babelfish on a very bad day. (Somewhat lacking, in fact.)
Best wishes,
MrP |
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MrPedantic
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| #24 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 22:50 pm lack vs lacking |
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You missed the point. It was meant to explain the sentence above it, not be a replacement for it.
And why are you back to the, old chap thing? Lost for invention?
Why not turn your mind to these pieces of babble?
At the very edge of the substrate, the deposition or etching plasma non-uniformity increases due to a few factors. For example, during plasma etching, the etching by-product concentration at the substrate edge is different from the center of the substrate due to the lacking of etching by-product source beyond the substrate edge.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/70193688.html
.............
With the thus arrangement of outputting front axle braking force demand increasing quantity Ffd to front axle braking force increasing means 31, the increasing quantity Ffd is added to first braking force F1 as shown by an arrow (4) in FIG. 17, and therefore demand deceleration Gs(0.4 G) is achieved without generating the lacking of deceleration even by executing the front and rear axle braking force distribution which does not generate a rear wheel lock prior to a front wheel lock.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7059691/description.html
Enjoy!
Thermograms of the exosporium-lacking dormant spores of Bacillus megaterium ATCC 33729, obtained by differential scanning calorimetry, showed three major irreversible endothermic transitions with peaks at 56, 100, and 114 degrees C and a major irreversible exothermic transition with a peak at 119 degrees C.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=206233 |
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Molly
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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| #25 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 23:11 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
| If you open your eyes for a moment, you'll find it above. All that frowning is making you squint. |
Don't worry, Molly, I hardly ever frown.
And I did respond to your
| Quote: |
| How about "he's a man of little brain"? That's isn't referring to the actual size of his brain is it? But note also that the question was about "brains" and not "brain". |
Remember the 'brain departmant'? Feel free to pick on it again. You can do it with a 'smile of your face'.
Are you not free to respond to whatever you like in Nigeria? If not, I'd say you clearly enjoy indulging in your newly developed liberties.
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Ralf
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| #26 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 23:26 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Quote: |
| Don't worry, Molly, I hardly ever frown. |
Only when you visit here.
| Quote: |
| Are you not free to respond to whatever you like in Nigeria? |
I see you don't know much about Nigeria, Walfy.
| Quote: |
| I'd say you clearly enjoy indulging in your newly developed liberties. |
You use your liberty to talk about muff, right? Hope you enjoy it. |
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Molly
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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| #27 (permalink) Mon May 26, 2008 23:58 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
Why not turn your mind to these pieces of babble?
At the very edge of the substrate, the deposition or etching plasma non-uniformity increases due to a few factors. For example, during plasma etching, the etching by-product concentration at the substrate edge is different from the center of the substrate due to the lacking of etching by-product source beyond the substrate edge.
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Note the exemplary English elsewhere in the abstract:
| Abstract wrote: |
Broadly speaking, the embodiments of the present invention provides...wherein the tuning gas injection holes supplies a tuning gas to the edge of the substrate during plasma processing of the substrate.
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MrP |
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MrPedantic
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| #28 (permalink) Tue May 27, 2008 4:28 am lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
OMG, what a crime. Do you think the same person read the post from Alan which opened as "Hi Alex"? Shocking behaviour on a PUBLIC forum, eh?  |
Oh, I suspect that good old Alan understood the background to that sentence quite well seeing as he has criticized others for daring to respond to posts addressed specifically to someone else.   Since Alan chose to answer Alex's question for me, I chose simply to give Alex some alternative wording.
If I heard someone say that a person was 'lacking in brains', it would sound like an unusual and very informal way of saying that someone isn't terribly intelligent. I agree with Ralf that you might also hear 'lacking in the brains department'. That also sounds informal to me.
However, saying 'the lacking of' remains just plain weird and unnatural in my book. By the way, where are your BNC and BYU search results for the phrase 'the lacking of'? Or did your searches there result in a complete lack of ammunition for you?
Perhaps you should just accept native-speaker intuition here, Molly. Just accept the fact that saying 'the lacking of' is not idiomatic -- not in BE, and not in AmE. It is neither formal nor informal. It's just weird.
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Yankee
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| #29 (permalink) Tue May 27, 2008 7:38 am lack vs lacking |
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| Quote: |
| If I heard someone say that a person was 'lacking in brains', it would sound like an unusual and very informal way of saying that someone isn't terribly intelligent. I agree with Ralf that you might also hear 'lacking in the brains department'. That also sounds informal to me. |
Again, what is informal about it? Do you have any real examples of where it was used in an informal register?
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| However, saying 'the lacking of' remains just plain weird and unnatural in my book. |
Good answer. Your idiolect, dialect and/or sociolect might be all you have to offer, right?
| Quote: |
| By the way, where are your BNC and BYU search results for the phrase 'the lacking of'? Or did your searches there result in a complete lack of ammunition for you? |
Is this some kind of war for you? I've said many times that students and native-speakers should consult many sources when needing to check out language use.
| Quote: |
| Perhaps you should just accept native-speaker intuition here, Molly. |
Yours seems limited, and Jamie's intuition often fails him. Mr P's replies are perfect, if somewhat amateur, for a linguistics forum, but Alan's replies are clear and relayed in simple language.
Just accept the fact that saying 'the lacking of' is not idiomatic -- not in BE, and not in AmE. It is neither formal nor informal. It's just weird.
Again you base your intuition only upon that with which you are familiar, i.e. certain registers of AmE and, minimally, BrE. There's a world of Englishes out here. "Not idiomatic" in which register, genre, text-type, and so on?
"The lacking of self and the passing of time both happen beneath the surfaces."
Producing American Races, by Patricia McKee. Published 1999. Duke University Press
"I believe any barriers I experience come in forms relating to the lacking of ordination."
The Voice of the Shepherdess. By Peter J. McCord.
"In other words, illiterate people will live under the incomprehension and the lacking of prosperity."
Teaching Academic Literacy. By Katherine L. Weese, Stephen L. Fox, Stuart Greene.
"That was an action against a railroad company to recover for damage from the
lacking of water upon plaintiff's land by reason of an insufficient culvert ..."
United States Supreme Court Reports By United States Supreme Court, Walter Malins Rose, Lawyers Co-operative.
And on. |
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Molly
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Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 4017
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| #30 (permalink) Tue May 27, 2008 14:09 pm lack vs lacking |
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| Molly wrote: |
| Good answer. |
Thank you. Now, why don't you take advantage of my expertise? You might just learn something.
| Molly wrote: |
| Is this some kind of war for you? |
No, but you seem to be at war with English. You've posted lengthy lists of corpus results in the past, and I was just wondering what was preventing you from doing so in this case. Could it be that you got ZERO results for 'the lacking of' from BNC and BYU searches? (Gasp!)
| Molly wrote: |
| Yankee wrote: |
| Perhaps you should just accept native-speaker intuition here, Molly. |
Yours seems limited, and Jamie's intuition often fails him. Mr P's replies are perfect, if somewhat amateur, for a linguistics forum, but Alan's replies are clear and relayed in simple language. |
I interpret that to mean that you prefer British English, and have little knowledge of American English.
By the way, do you see any difference between an 'ESL forum' and a 'linguistics forum'?
| Molly wrote: |
| Again you base your intuition only upon that with which you are familiar, i.e. certain registers of AmE and, minimally, BrE. There's a world of Englishes out here. "Not idiomatic" in which register, genre, text-type, and so on? |
Once again I ask you whether it is your intent to mislead learners of English. Although your advice is sometimes good, too often it is extremely wide of the mark and lacking in common sense.
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Yankee
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Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 8265
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| Sentence correction: I presume that to pursue MBA, experience is not matter. | meaning of "going on seven" |
