Obligatory Grammar Rant

[EdLee]

Let me diselaborate.

Thanks, Bill.

[jts]

I don't see what's wrong with "I'll be with you momentarily." What is momentary in this sentence? My absence. It's an example of paronymy. We refer to food as healthy (it causes health) and to someone's complexion as healthy (it is caused by health); in the same way, the momentary quality of my absence causes my being with you.

Follow out the logic of the position that we should exclusively use "momentarily" to mean "for a very short time." In that case, "I can't be with you momentarily" would be an acceptable substitute for "I'll be with you very soon". Not even the most arch prescriptivists would understand you if you tried to use the former interchangeably with the later.

[gaius]

LOL, this threat is sooo useles!!1!1 wocares if u dont write proprly - cant people read? or r they not smart enough? grammr is 4 n00bs ! OMG i cant bilieve im even resp[onding to this, this forum is so st00pid!!

[robinz]

I tend to look at "rules" such as "don't end a sentence with a preposition" or "never split an infinitive" more like proverbs; you should probably think about them, but don't follow them blindly.

I quite agree. I tend more towards the "prescriptive" end of this debate, although I certainly do recognise that language does change - I just think that shouldn't stop me fighting against changes that make the language less useful

However, I strongly resist people who insist that split infinitives are some kind of crime against language, and even more so those that say the same about beginning and ending sentences with prepositions. The latter, in particular, is simply normal language, and you'll find lots of examples in virtually any book or article you pick up. Split infinitives, as far as I am aware, were only ever regarded as somehow "bad" simply because it wasn't done in Latin (or various modern European languages based on Latin, notably French) - but this is for no more profound reason than that the infinitive is a single word in all these languages! (EDIT: I now see Dr Straw has already made this point - apologies, I managed to miss a whole page of posts before starting my reply.) So I am more than happy to naturally split infinitives. And to choose prepositions to start and finish sentences with.

But most of those on judicata's list I do have problems with. Some of them seem to be particular to America - one other that particularly bugs me is Americans saying "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less". The latter is universally used in British English, and it actually makes sense - the former seems to me to only have arisen because some Americans (although I am sure not any readers of this forum, of any nationality) are too stupid to actually know what they are saying.

And a final grammar-specific one to add to the list - people who say "less" when they mean "fewer". (The former only applies to continuous quantities, but the latter to discrete ones.) This has sadly become almost universal - I am forever correcting even my own wife about this one, but the more I do so the more she delights in using it incorrectly and implying that I am some kind of dinosaur

[DrStraw]

I don't feel that I should correct those who aren't good at grammar - I just feel a bit sorry for them.
I work for a company who use email and write a lot of letters.

Which of the following is best (in terms of grammar and style) and which did you mean?
I work for a company who use email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company who uses email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company who use email and writes a lot of letters.
I work for a company that use email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company that uses email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company that uses email and writes a lot of letters.
I work for a company which use email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company which uses email and write a lot of letters.
I work for a company which uses email and writes a lot of letters.
I work for a company that uses email and I write a lot of letters.
I work for a company which uses email and I write a lot of letters.
I work for a company; I use email and write a lot of letters.

This just emphasizes (emphasises?) the difference between American and British. Having spent approximately half of my live in each country I sometimes get confused as to which is the British usage and which is the American usage. This is an example. One country's reporting will refer to a team or a company in the singular, the other in the plural. And, for the life of me, I cannot remember which is which right now. Another example is the doubling of final consonanats before adding -ed. One country does, the other does, and I can never remember which is which.

[kirkmc]

But most of those on judicata's list I do have problems with. Some of them seem to be particular to America - one other that particularly bugs me is Americans saying "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less". The latter is universally used in British English, and it actually makes sense - the former seems to me to only have arisen because some Americans (although I am sure not any readers of this forum, of any nationality) are too stupid to actually know what they are saying.

This sort of elitist attitude makes you wonder who the stupid are. Those who allow that language changes, and expressions evolve, or those who call "stupid" the people who accept the change...?

[kirkmc]

This just emphasizes (emphasises?) the difference between American and British. Having spent approximately half of my live in each country I sometimes get confused as to which is the British usage and which is the American usage. This is an example. One country's reporting will refer to a team or a company in the singular, the other in the plural. And, for the life of me, I cannot remember which is which right now. Another example is the doubling of final consonanats before adding -ed. One country does, the other does, and I can never remember which is which.

"The team are" is British; "the team is" is American.

This said, I've started seeing the former appear in American publications recently, so I think there's a shift occurring with this usage.

[mohsart]

"Should of" doesn't really belong here, I think, the use of such spelled out spoken English can be used just fine in eg conversations in a novel or on a chat server.
Or even in semi formal emails, for stylistic reasons.
The problem is when people start mixing formal and casual language without any reason.

I'll contribute with a really common mistake by us Swedish noob wannabe English masters:
Loose is the oposite of tight while lose is the oposite of win.
"Stones placed far apart form a loose framework that can be invaded."
"If you don't win a game of Go you lose."

/Mats

[amnal]

I don't see what's wrong with "I'll be with you momentarily." What is momentary in this sentence? My absence. It's an example of paronymy. We refer to food as healthy (it causes health) and to someone's complexion as healthy (it is caused by health); in the same way, the momentary quality of my absence causes my being with you.

Well, because, as you say next, the momentarily strictly refers to the length of time you will be with the person - not the length of time until you are with them. I don't know which is historically the correct usage, but I don't like it anyway, since I do read it as meaning 'not with you for very long'.

Follow out the logic of the position that we should exclusively use "momentarily" to mean "for a very short time." In that case, "I can't be with you momentarily" would be an acceptable substitute for "I'll be with you very soon". Not even the most arch prescriptivists would understand you if you tried to use the former interchangeably with the later.

I don't entirely understand what you mean here, but it does seem like a false argument. There is no rule or convention that sentences meaning the same thing must be equally usable.

[John Fairbairn]

But most of those on judicata's list I do have problems with. Some of them seem to be particular to America - one other that particularly bugs me is Americans saying "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less". The latter is universally used in British English, and it actually makes sense - the former seems to me to only have arisen because some Americans (although I am sure not any readers of this forum, of any nationality) are too stupid to actually know what they are saying.

I thoroughly deprecate this gratuitous slur on Americans, as if they are the only ones to make mistakes, and for it to come from a country where we have people forever saying "innit" just makes it twice as bad.

As to the actual usage, since even Americans discuss it as a possible mistake, I suppose we have to deprecate it too, although I have always tried to treat the American usage as meaning "I could care less if I really, really tried, but..." In other words, irony. But as many Brits grow up with a peculiar and almost pathological belief that Americans are incapable of understanding irony, I suppose I can see how there may be an unwillingness to accept that interpretation. A further irony is that the Americans apparently adopted the expression from Brits.

You can have a more reasonable and potentially useful discussion about American vs. British English if you discuss the obnoxious language of political correctness, or the popularity of deformed language such as the US "at this moment in time" for "now" or the Brit penchant for intellectually camp phrases such as "terminological inexactitudes". These may usefully tell us something about national attitudes. Grammar rants tend only to tell us something about individuals such as "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells". (What is the US equivalent of that?)

Alternatively, of more interest to me, could we discuss whether other languages have Knock Knock jokes. One that went down well at my grandsons' pantomime yesterday was:

Knock, knock
Who's there?
Who?
Who who
Sorry, I don't speak to owls.

But the joke that really had hundreds of kids rolling in the aisles was:

What do you call two robbers? A pair of knickers.

I realised with a start that appreciating that joke shows amazing linguistic sophistication for six and seven year olds. Since little ones can have such intricate mastery of language so young, I must admit I'm inclined to be in the judicata camp of being a bit impatient with grown-ups who show they could [not] care less about their language.

[robinz]

That passage certainly wasn't meant as a slur on Americans, and I apologise unreservedly if it came across in that way. Certainly, as John points out, there are plenty of stupidities produced by British English speakers. I was just pointing out a particular example of language usage that I have only ever come across from Americans, and which thoroughly confuses me.

[kirkmc]

That passage certainly wasn't meant as a slur on Americans, and I apologise unreservedly if it came across in that way. Certainly, as John points out, there are plenty of stupidities produced by British English speakers. I was just pointing out a particular example of language usage that I have only ever come across from Americans, and which thoroughly confuses me.

Your feeling of superiority is exactly that which is often seen in discussions about language, when people defend their way of speaking as "correct" and call the others "stupid." It shows a total insensitivity and a lack of awareness of the extent of language differences. It also shows that sometimes it's better to look in a dictionary (I'm sure you can find an American English dictionary on line, if you don't have one) before saying that people are "too stupid to actually know what they are saying." In fact, that comment is one of the most arrogant I've seen in a long time regarding language...

[Bill Spight]

But the joke that really had hundreds of kids rolling in the aisles was:

What do you call two robbers? A pair of knickers.

I realised with a start that appreciating that joke shows amazing linguistic sophistication for six and seven year olds. Since little ones can have such intricate mastery of language so young, I must admit I'm inclined to be in the judicata camp of being a bit impatient with grown-ups who show they could [not] care less about their language.

Did that linguistic sophistication disappear when the kiddies grew up? I think not.

As for caring about language, there are different ways to care about language. I am all for caring about language as a study in itself. I am all for caring about language in terms of clarity, grace, and effectiveness. But to care about another person's grammar is to deny the linguistic sophistication of six year olds. "Wassamalla you?" is perfectly good Hawai'ian dialect. Get over it. Every child who learns their {sic} native tongue acquires a sophisticated grammar. Nobody, not even Noam Chomsky, fully knows his own grammar, in the sense of being able to fully {sic} articulate it, but everybody knows it in the sense of being able to detect ungrammatical utterances -- in other people.

"Good" grammar is socially acceptable grammar. And people certainly do care about social acceptability, at least for other people. There was a big flap in the 80s {sic} about teaching subjects in Oakland, CA, schools using Ebonics, the dialect of many of the school children. Critics were livid about not teaching "correct" English and encouraging ignorance. The Oakland School Board mounted a silly defense. But it seems to me that if you are teaching arithmetic to a child who says twice as less instead of half as much, why not speak to him in his own language? Why make your task more difficult?

It is common in the U. S. for standardized tests to include questions of the form, A is to B as C is to <blank> . Minority children do not usually do so well on such questions. However, research going back to the 50s or 60s shows that the difference in performance between minority kids and others disappears when the questions are of the form, A goes with B like C goes with <blank> . One might think that the test makers would switch to the latter form. But no! After all, what is the point of the test? The latter form is socially unacceptable.

[Kirby]

LOL, this threat is sooo useles!!1!1 wocares if u dont write proprly - cant people read? or r they not smart enough? grammr is 4 n00bs ! OMG i cant bilieve im even resp[onding to this, this forum is so st00pid!!

This thread makes me think a little bit about my job. I work at a software company, and to help people to be more efficient, we have coding standards that people are intended to adhere to. The purpose of having coding standards is to let everybody be on the same page, and to make it so that programmers are more efficient at work. If a block of code is really hard to understand, it takes time to decipher the author's intent - time that could be better spent solving problems. Because of this, it's important to try to make your code easy to understand, following the coding standards that have been defined for us.

More important than that, though, is to have code that works. If we're nearing the deadline for a software release, and somebody hacks out some obfuscated code that's hard to understand, it might still save the day if it makes the software better in quality. So, in my mind, functional software trumps "prettily written" software.

Coming back to the topic at hand, I think that it's all well and good to use proper grammar and to write easy-to-understand sentences... But I don't think that's nearly as important as good, functional content in a post.

To give an example, though he doesn't always use "standard" grammar (perhaps intentionally), I'd take Magicwand's Malkovich game analysis over the game analysis of a 30k that uses perfect English grammar any day. That's because the content of what he is saying is more important than the style in which he uses to convey it.

It's nice to use a standard grammar that everyone finds easy to understand. But it's secondary to good post content... At least that's what Kerby thinks.

[robinz]

That passage certainly wasn't meant as a slur on Americans, and I apologise unreservedly if it came across in that way. Certainly, as John points out, there are plenty of stupidities produced by British English speakers. I was just pointing out a particular example of language usage that I have only ever come across from Americans, and which thoroughly confuses me.

Your feeling of superiority is exactly that which is often seen in discussions about language, when people defend their way of speaking as "correct" and call the others "stupid." It shows a total insensitivity and a lack of awareness of the extent of language differences. It also shows that sometimes it's better to look in a dictionary (I'm sure you can find an American English dictionary on line, if you don't have one) before saying that people are "too stupid to actually know what they are saying." In fact, that comment is one of the most arrogant I've seen in a long time regarding language...

OK, that's fair criticism - looking back now, my post does come across as a bit insensitive, and I can only apologise for that. I certainly shouldn't have used the word "stupid" - a definite case of "post first, think later" (I would like now to edit it out of my original post, but will keep it in so that the subsequent posts make sense.)

I was more motivated by the fact that I first became aware that this was a common American usage was when I was chatting online to a (very intelligent) friend from the US, and happened to casually use the phrase "I couldn't care less that ...", which prompted him to point out that this was the correct usage but that he rarely heard it, everyone else around him used the other form. This debate has now got me genuinely interested in how this phrase came to be used so commonly (and I am very interested in language in general, despite having no qualifications in this area).