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Weird calendars

or is that wired colanders?

Computer passwords are a serious matter, so don't choose easy ones. It's been suggested that you shouldn't use a dictionary word or a name for a password, making attractive passwords from things that are nearly words, so that people suggest such abominations as t0ast, f1nger, a11b1ack... other suggest words with numbers attached, such as 3sunflower, 7grass, egg8, deviant1...

I have found another approach works, though I don't useit much these days. It's unusual in that it doesn't keep your password secret at all! You can tell your password to a lot of people who still won't be able to access your account! How can this be possible?

All you have to do is choose a word that nobody can spell. They will try it without success and call you a lier. They mean "liar", of course, but they can't spell it...

My favourite of all words is "calendar" and I have seen it mis-spelt in much more famous places than this. "Calender" seems the most popular, though "callander" and "callendar" deserve a dishonourable mention too.

A famous calendar(1) program is the one on a UNIX system of which I have heard it said "They use the American spelling, of course". They do indeed, largely because it's the only correct spelling. This systems administrator and trainer seemed to think that on this side of the ocean the word has some other spelling.

While I am on the subject of calendars, here are some facts about the current calendar we use, the Gregorian calendar.

But that isn't grammar. Neither is the fact that our calendar recurs exactly every 400 years (20871 weeks) or that the 13th day of the month occurs on a Friday more frequently than any other day. I'll probably get hate mail about this, so here's a handy link for you to use.

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, the idea that Friday 13th should be so common is probably something weird and not wired (a word, but not the right one) and not wierd (not correct at all).

You may have heard the scurrilous rumour about "I before E, except after C" but there are so many exceptions that you must wonder if it's even close to useful. Certainly weird is one of these exceptions.

Is this stuff relevant to the topic? Probably it has some relevance, but all things are relative. Don't confuse these two either... Relevant means that something is appropriate and useful - relative compares it to something else. I'd often seen this duo listed in books of "common grammatical mistakes" but it wan't until recently that I heard it happen. Over and over again, on the radio, in print, in speeches...


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