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...

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

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.

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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.

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.

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be immersed

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).

Grammar is quite important to computer software. If the obfuscated code is ungrammatical, it will not work correctly.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I think we have a couple of different "grammars" that we are talking about the grammar of the coding standards, and the grammar that the computer cares about. I was addressing the former.

As for the latter grammar, it's just as possible that obfuscated code is more "grammatical" than code that follows the coding standards that we have.

I suppose, on a similar note, it's easy for somebody to speak illogically and without providing much useful content to the forum, while maintaining good English grammar.

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be immersed

Speaking of bad grammar, I once bought a home computer that came with its own language. One little quirk of the language that was not well documented was that each program had to end with a carriage return (!).

It took me a couple of days to figure that one out.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I always thought that with was just a lazy politician's abbreviation for "at this present ongoing moment in time,"

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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).

I think there's quite a lot questionable with this, Bill. It's almost as if you want to be prosecutor, defence, judge and jury, which is of course a good way to win a case. But the proponents of "good" grammar may not have been saying (or intending) what you say they said at all. For example, perhaps they regarded good grammar not so much as "socially acceptable" as "socially useful " or "economically desirable" - or even "economically essential". Maybe, heaven forfend, they even had the kids' interests more at heart rather than a love of grammar.

As to teaching in Ebonics, I view that through my own experience. When I was young, my native dialect was very different from standard English, probably as much as Ebonics is different from standard American (it's all changed now, though). At primary school we were taught by teachers who didn't try to make us dialect kids change our way of speaking, or at least not directly. They spoke to us in a sort of halfway house language - standard English with a local accent and local idioms. There were also middle class kids who spoke in rather the same way, but they also understood the working class kids. But at that level language wasn't a major issue, and certainly not a class issue.

It changed when I went to grammar school (age 11). There, most of the teachers were graduates from other parts of the country, teaching specialist subjects. They just couldn't understand people like me. I still remember scenes where a history teacher had to get one of the middle-class kids to interpret for me whenever I answered one of his questions. What I never understood was how he couldn't understand me but I could understand him. We didn't have tv in those days and most radio I listened to was in the local dialect, so I had no strong outside influences - I assume I picked things up from the posh kids, or maybe kids are just more flexible.

I don't think that my experience harmed me, so to that extent I wouldn't object to some teaching in Ebonics. But if I'd had to wait for a dialect speaker at grammar school level, I would never have got a higher education. People like me had to adapt to the teaching available. I don't recall anyone ever thinking that was an imposition or a hardship, so I have to conclude that asking Ebonics speakers also to adapt (at some age or other) is perfectly reasonable. There may even be an argument that says the sooner the better. I would imagine that there may be among our readers some older Germans or Italians, whose regional languages used to be very different, who have had a similar experience. Maybe modern Norwegians still have similar problems with bokmal and nynorsk. At any rate, I'm sure it's not just a black/white/Latino issue, an assumption which tends to charge debates with an unhealthy air.

As to the "A is to" as opposed "A goes with" business, I'm not sure that that is a grammar thing at all. It sounds to me more like people with a maths background assuming or insisting that we all have to think like them, which, as you well know, is an old but still buzzing bee in my bonnet.

I agree with Kirby that content is very important, and that we should not exalt form over substance. But the two are not mutually exclusive, and I think good grammar is also very important, at least in some contexts.

Good grammar is important when you are trying to communicate with strangers who do not share your background and with whom you do not have an immediate connection. It is also important when you are trying to express complicated or subtle thoughts.

Even though we are separated by several centuries, I can read and appreciate the first paragraph of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/savage.html) precisely because we share a common understanding of formal English grammar. Would this same paragraph give the impression of a powerful mind ranging over its subject if it were written in London street slang of Johnson's era? I have my doubts that I would even be able to understand it.

My job involves a lot of reading and analyzing other people's writing. My experience has been that the best, clearest, and most graceful writers usually have an excellent command of formal English grammar. There are some exceptions, but they are rare and usually involve people with unusual gifts of communication.

Not anymore, actually. The SAT test (the standard test for college-bound students in America) dropped analogies in 2005. Now that they don't have them, I think most other testers have dropped them as well. I think they were removed at least in part due to the concern you stated.

http://www.collegeboard.com/newsat/

The SATs have been getting dumbed down for decades. How hard is it to have a lesson on analogies (A is to B as C is to X" with some valid examples so the kids understand? If anyone gets to the point that they're taking SATs, and the don't get that, there's a bigger problem than one of culture.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

I well remember the Ebonics flap, and the extremely heated online discussions at that time. Few argued that minority kids should be taught standard English so that they could get jobs, the kind of argument in the 70s that led some schools to teach English as a Second Language in some big city high schools to minority children. Speaking Ebonics was taken as a sign of ignorance or stupidity, and feelings ran high. This was a time when in other places in the U. S. legislators were debating making English the official language, in part to prevent teaching of school subjects in Spanish. The debates were quite heated and caustic.

In my primary and secondary school experience, the problematic dialect was not Ebonics but the redneck dialect (Rubonics, anyone?). I observed, with painful repetitiveness, year after year, children made to feel stupid because how they spoke at home was not acceptable at school. There was no question of translation, only of embarrassment and shame. (And poor grades in English.) Even today, in the larger culture of America, there is the image of the redneck as a fat and stupid, backward and ignorant backwoodsman, like the toothless villain in "Deliverance". And the redneck's speech is taken as proof.

Example stupid redneck language joke:

TV reporter: Here we are at the local nativity scene, with a local spokesman. (To spokesman): This is a beautiful scene, but I have a question. Why are the wise men wearing fire helmets?

Spokesman: Well, the Bible says they come from a far.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

The dialect discussion brings to mind the Led Zeppelin song "D'yer Mak'er," which I had no idea how to pronounce until fairly recently.

Thanks for the correction, emeraldemon.

I agree with kirkmc that it is not good to dumb down the SATs. Particularly as IQs have been going up. (See the Flynn Effect.)

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Does this mean the US does not share British music hall/holiday postcard "jokes" such as: My wife's gone on holiday. Jamaica? No, she went of her own accord.

Spelling's not grammar, but a related bugbear, and that reminds me of an old joke that resurfaced on tv here a couple of nights ago: I can't spell Armageddon. So what, it's not the end of the world.

Some people in this thread have hinted at it but in my opinion the bottom line is communication. How many non-native speakers of English we have in this forum? I suspect it is a significant percentage. Several have admitted here that their command of written English is better than their spoken English. Is it not considerate, then, to attempt to write in a standard form so as make oneself clearly understood. I have no problems with spoken dialects. Nor do I have problems with trying to preserve those dialects in written form. But for successful communications it is essential to have an accepted "correct grammar".

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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).

Har Megiddo?

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

There was a crossword puzzle in the Guardian about 35 years ago. 1 across was exactly that (without the word Jamaica, of course). It think it was the very next day, but certainly very soon thereafter, that the clue for 1 across was identical. Except that this time the answer was Leeward. It was set up so that lots of the clues could be made to fit until the very end - where some impossible letter combination occurred. People were very annoyed, calling foul because a clue is not supposed to have two possible answer in a cryptic crossword.

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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).