Tuesday, December 27, 2005

No Evidence Hangover Cures Work.

The BBC had a great headline today, No evidence hangover cures work.
For a second or so, I thought it odd. After all, if anything, a good hangover makes you work twice as hard the following afternoon.
Well now we can put the punctuation 'No evidence' hangover cures work and if it is still a bit confusing... you need to see that 'cures' is a noun and 'work' is a verb. It is normally a question of stress (When you are speaking English the words you stress can change the underlying meaning of a sentence - see here as well) but of course, it is a different story when you read it.
This shows the importance of punctuation [the quotation marks also called 'inverted commas'] which reminds me of this an old joke based a wildlife manual which claims a panda "eats, shoots and leaves" instead of "eats shoots and leaves.

NOTE: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is also fun book to read (on the importance of puncutation in the English language).

AND by the way, the BBC article actually said the study showed there is no cure for hangover and the research brillantly concludes: "The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of alcohol-induced hangover is thus to practise abstinence or moderation." Duh! I don't know if they got paid a lot for it but apparently they had a lot of fun doing it... so they admit themselves.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

|