In thae days there wis a hermit hecht Chen Tuan bydin on the Wastlin Tap o Mount Glore: he wis a kennin an gracie sowl at bi glamourie cud guide the wind an wather. Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae ti the Gloresheddae Road he heard an outlan bodie sayin “Richt nou in the Eastren Capital Chai Shizong hes reteirit an Gaird-Marischal Zhao hes taen the throne”.

Here's a translation of the original Chinese into Standard English:

At that time on Huashan, the West Sacred Mountain, lived a Taoist hermit named Chen Tuan. A virtuous man, he could foretell the future by the weather. One day as he was riding his donkey down the mountain towards the county town of Huayin he heard a traveller on the road say: "Emperor Chai Shi Zong has surrendered his throne to Marshal Zhao in the Eastern Capital."

Your choice of style limits the life of what you say. It's vernacular. The language of the streets, but not *your* streets. It's what happens when you don't think about how short a time we spend on earth and how fragile is our communication between one another.

For curious ones:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003919.php

(Edited by Mr. Meyers - original submission Monday, 26 July 2010, 11:20 AM)

I have set the color scheme to the most generic layout and color scheme prior to upgrading to the latest release. Teachers with administrator access, please leave it as is. After upgrade, there will be more flexibility for individual customization, but the layout will be very, very different.

Here's a quote from a programmer:

When I learned about UNIX and C, I spent most of my free coding time coding C on UNIX. A couple of the teachers noticed this and said I was "wasting my time" pursuing UNIX, as it would never last, and if I wanted to get jobs, I should stick to the mainframe, and PASCAL, FORTRAN, and COBOL.

Few of our students have heard of some of these languages. Fewer will encounter them. So if we teach what is in vogue today, we take a risk.