On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 18:19 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Affect, either to aim at, have affection for, put on a pretense or tend towards.
You are looking at the wrong definition of 'affect'.
www.m-w.com (from
which you paraphrased) has three. Try the one which says 'to produce an
effect upon', 'to produce a material influence upon or alteration in'
and 'to act upon ... so as to effect a response'.
> Effect, basic meaning, anecotal following, outward sign, *power to bring
> abount a result*, movable property, *distiveive impression* or *quality or
> state of being*.
You are _also_ looking at the wrong definition of 'effect'. This time
you're not even looking at a different verb definition; you're looking
at the definition of the _noun_!. Try the _verb_ which says 'to cause to
come into being', 'to bring about' and 'to put into operation'
> No, I don't think he mean affected since I don't think spam had anything
> to do with his aim, his affection or made him put on a pretense. However I'd
> wager it certainly brougt about a result (of clogging his mail), gave him the
> distictive impression that Microsoft is shite and certainly did something to
> his quality or state of being.
And now, if picking the noun from the list wasn't enough of an error,
you wildly misinterpret the definition you found, without even
_noticing_ that it's a noun.
Main Entry: verb
: a word that characteristically is the grammatical center of a
predicate and expresses an act, occurrence, or mode of being
Main Entry: noun
: any member of a class of words that typically can be combined with
determiners to serve as the subject of a verb, can be interpreted as
singular or plural, can be replaced with a pronoun, and refer to an
entity, quality, state, action, or concept
Sorry to be quite so harsh in response to what seems to have been a
genuine error -- but to leave your mail undisputed wouldn't be fair to
any observing non-native speakers, who actually have an _excuse_ for not
instinctively knowing the difference between "effect" and "affect", or
"your" and "you're", etc.
--
dwmw2
