National Inventor’s Month: You Can Make It If You Try

Keep company with some of the greatest minds in history

Wed, 05/18/2016 - 13:37

Depending on whom you ask, May (or August or April—it would be great if someone were to standardize this, but we’re going with May) is National Inventor’s Month. Lots of people have dreams of being a famous inventor. Even I’ve had “ideas” for inventions before.

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For instance, during the 1990s, after finally finding my keys in the refrigerator more than once and spending more time looking for the remote than I care to admit, I thought it would be great if I could build a little alarm that you could attach to such easily misplaced items that would beep incessantly until you were able to find them.

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Comments

Submitted by dkhays on Thu, 05/19/2016 - 08:00

"When his father died in 1921, the family immigrated to New York."  The word is emigrate.  Immigrate is from the New York point of view.  Emigrate is what they did leaving the other country to come here.

Good point of view--keep on trying and make the world better when you succeed.

Thanks for the story of the inventor.  Now, if I could invent something to autocorrect my typing!

Hi DKHAYS. Glad you liked the story.

You made me rush to my grammar sources :-). The author has it correct. I looked at several online grammar sources and each has their own way of explaining the difference. However, they all agree. The most clear example is from http://writingexplained.org/immigrate-vs-emigrate-what-are-the-differen…

    My grandparents immigrated to the United States.
    My grandparents emigrated from Norway.

So you immigrate "to" someplace
But you emmigrate "from" where you are

Other grammar sources include:

http://grammarist.com/usage/emigrate-immigrate/
"Immigrate is usually followed by to, and emigrate is usually followed by from."
"To escape torture, persecution, and societal and religious conflict, Iraqi refugees have been immigrating to America by the thousands for the last few years. [Boston Globe]"

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/emigrate-immigrate-…
"Citizens from 17 European Union countries were given freedom to immigrate to Switzerland in 2007. (Business Week)"

Thanks

Dirk

In high school and today I am horrid with grammar and punctuation. My teacher explained that the point of writing was to convey your message so the reader can understand it. My response was to point out, if she was able to correct it then she could understand the message and therefore it was conveyed. 

So I would think English teachers celebrate the inventor of spell check,….. but NOT auto correct *stupid smart phone*.

I enjoyed the article but would have liked to also know how many ideas had flopped. 

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