Thursday, January 27, 2005

History of Until, Till, 'Til and Til I went to dictionary.com to look up to see if they consider "til" without an apostrophe, to be a proper word (I do; I prefer it sometimes -- I don't like till). They didn't really say, but they directed me to an interesting tidbit -- or, tilbit (thank you, thank you)... til2; prep.; Until.; conj.; Until. See Usage Note at till2... Usage Note: Till and until are generally interchangeable in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is usually preferred: Until you get that paper written, don't even think about going to the movies. ·Till is actually the older word, with until having been formed by the addition to it of the prefix un-, meaning [base "]up to.[per thou] In the 18th century the spelling 'till became fashionable, as if till were a shortened form of until. Although 'till is now nonstandard, 'til is sometimes used in this way and is considered acceptable, though it is etymologically incorrect. Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 12:29:21 PM    comment []

TiVoing Shows That Overlap One or Two Minutes My biggest issue is that I want to TiVo Lost and Alias and Law & Order on Wednesdays. Lost goes until 9:01, Alias until 10:02 and L&O starts at 10. Using a slightly complicated process I can TiVo these shows, but I'll miss either the last two minutes of Alias, or the last minute of Alias and the first minute of L&O, or the first two minutes of L&O. Nothing TiVo can do. It's the evil networks. TiVo is pro-people and pro what those people want to watch; networks are pro numbers and money and keeping people on their networks as much as possible and however sneakily as possible -- whatever. ABC is the main evil corp. for me, although apparently NBC does some of this too. Write your networks. You can manual TiVo ABC from 8 to 10, miss the last two minutes of Alias, and then TiVo L&O. Or, as was pointed out to me, you can record the full Lost, and Alias, then have manually set Law & Order to come on at 10:05. Then under recording options, you can tell TiVo to start the manual recording 3 minutes early. 12:21:31 PM    comment []