>>>>>>>>Additions encouraged!
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Thanks, but it still doesn't feel courageous. I mean, the one addition I had - I asked it if it was encouraged, and it just shied away into the dark corner below the deskbottom (of course, as desktop has its own light source, deskbottom has a [s]heavy[/s] darkness source).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>update: ooooops... I was wrong. Scratch that last paragraph.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Whom did the additions encourage?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Encourage
>>>>>>Definition:
>>>>>>1. give somebody hope or confidence: to give somebody hope, confidence, or courage
>>>>>>2. urge somebody to do something: to motivate somebody to take a course of action or continue "doing something encouraged me to finish the course"
>>>>>>3. foster something: to assist something to occur or increase encourage new solutions to traffic problems
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I think you should have specified 'Encourage 2'
>>>>>
>>>>>Without any verb, "additions encouraged" is missing the object - i.e. is it "additions [are] encouraged", or "additions encouraged [whom?]", no matter which meaning you take. In each case it's a transitive verb, but with -ed suffix it can become either past tense, or the passive adjective. There's no morphological distinction (written and pronounced the same) which then creates ambiguity, which is, so I'm told, easy to distinguish from the context. Well, I find the context insufficient.
>>>>>
>>>>>Worse case of it is when you have an ambiguous verb. Which of these is the proper meaning of "hero remembered" (a news article heading):
>>>>>
>>>>>- the hero memorized [something]
>>>>>- the hero recollected [something]
>>>>>- the hero didn't forget
>>>>>- the hero reminisced
>>>>>- the hero was remembered
>>>>>
>>>>>Not really nitpicking. I come from a language (actually, more than one) where there are distinct words for each of these meanings.
>>>>
>>>>It is time for you to advance to the next level. We are sending you to the Canadian Arctic where you will learn the 356 different eskimo words for snow.
>>>
>>>I read somewhere that that is an urban legend.
>>>
>>>This is not really definitive but here is what the Wikipedia has to say.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
>>>
>>>It doesn't sound like several hundred words by anyone's count.
>>I guessed at the number - Turns out I was wrong.
>
>You are in good company there ;-)
>
>It's interesting to me how I have come to check the Wikipedia as a first reference. In the early days I was one of the skeptics, considering it less than scholarly. If anyone can contribute, aren't you getting the opinion of the man on the street? Maybe that was never the case, but IAC over time they have developed checks and balances which make it reliable. And you sure can't beat its immediacy. Even if it happened last week, it's on the Wiki. Try getting that with the encyclopedias we grew up with, which were updated once a year and delivered on a forklift.
>
>Have a great day, Grady. At my AA meeting yesterday someone said, "Thank someone." She said it didn't have to be another alcoholic, just someone you enjoy and have never thanked. So here you go!

Thank you for your thank you and your IBM story.