"To boldly go where no man has gone before" is almost iambic pentameter, which is why the split infinitive sounds good. Likewise, "To be or not to be, that is the question" is iambic pentameter, which is why not splitting sounds good. If you habitually speak in meter, I'm willing to let you break whichever style guidelines stand in your way!

Prescriptivist joke:

Noah Webster's wife came back from town and caught him dallying with the maid. "Mr. Webster!" she exclaimed, "I am surprised!"

To which the great lexicographer replied, "Why, no, my dear. You are shocked. I am surprised."





The apparent loss of ability to communicate with their staff is a feature, not a bug. By becoming difficult to understand, the superior {sic!} emphasizes that he belongs to a club that his subordinates do not. Language is used to divide.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Which brings us back to the ebonics issue. I firmly believe that those behind the idea had good intentions, to want to repair the divide between poor, black Americans who speak in a different dialect from the "standard" dialect.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Ah, but Dutch is just German with a really bad accent and spelling.

Seriously, I found having a good grasp of English grammar a big help when I learned German, and having that plus the knowledge of German grammar (especially the cases) a help when studying Russian.

Of course, the minute I finally learned everything there was to learn about the German language, they introduced the Verdammte neue Rechtschreibung. Somewhere along the way I obtained a German dictionary from before the previous orthographic reform at the beginning of the last century, which still lists the h in verbs like "thun" and which is in Fraktur. Sometimes I think I should use that dictionary if I have to write in German....

I may be wrong, but I always thought Dutch for closer to English than German.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

To me, Dutch is what I like to call "almost comprehensible". That is, I recognize many words, sometimes enough to understand fragments of the text. Still, I couldn't formulate even a very simple sentence because I don't actually know any words, I can just guess their meaning when I see them.

Linguistically speaking, it is closely related to both German and English, all three of them are West Germanic languages. If you think of it as a spectrum of languages with English on the left and Austro-Bavarian on the right, standard German would be somewhere in the middle, and Dutch would be a bit to the left of it, right next to the northern German dialects. Not surprisingly, that strongly correlates with the geographic distribution

A bit tangentially to the current topic:

I type (here/casually) in exactly the same manner as I speak (with maybe a little more confusion about affects and effects thrown in). I use comparatively a lot've apostrophes for that reason. Should I've been writing in the style of an essay or formal letter ?

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

...why would you?

Everything is correct vs. nothing is relevant.

I can't decide if I have anything of my own to add, but this is one of the nicest attempts to lay out a descriptivist account of what (some) grammatical norms are. Unfortunately it's part of an ongoing discussion, so it references a few other blog posts in a way that's not entirely transparent.

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Occupy Babel!