User talk:Bacteria boy

Hi Bacteria boy, and welcome to Wikipedia.

Thanks for your message on my talk page about the spelling of dependent/dependant in the Bwamba Fever article. Well, I don't want to make a big thing of this, but according to The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993 the adjective is always spelt with an e. The Guide also says (though not relevant here) that the noun - usually spelt with an a in British English - is nearly always spelt with an e too. Only a minority of sources disagree with this opinion.

I should say that the corrections were made using Lupin's Live spellcheck tool, which uses Lists of common misspellings/For machines. If you think that the entry in that list is incorrect you can (in the spirit of Wikipedia) remove it.

By the way, I'm British too (see my User page). Every time I see or have to write Wikipedia, it hurts, but I do it :-) --Smalljim 16:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Dependent or dependant, continued
Good point, BB! I hadn't considered that it might be part of a recognised biological term. In that case I must bow to your specialist knowledge. But I do also have to point out that on Google:

"RNA dependant RNA polymerase" gives about 398 hits whereas "RNA dependent RNA polymerase" gives about 294,000 hits.

And I've just discovered that there is an entry in this very encyclopedia for RNA dependent RNA polymerase (we should both have checked for that first!).

Anyway, as you say, enough of such trivia - let's get back to doing some "useful" work on the encyclopædia!

Good luck --Smalljim 20:13, 27 February 2007 (UTC)