An article to put grammar nazis in their place

mosaix said:
My pet hate:

"I would of thought..."

Instead of

"I would've thought..."

My blood boils every time. :mad:
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The problem is that through pronunciation people translate the 've into of instead of have. I suppose, ultimately, most of these come down to that. Is it a sign that we are changing into a nation that is so focused on the spoken word we've forgotten the written one? If you think about it we now get much of our news spoken through radio and TV where once it was all read and we now talk on the telephone where once we wrote letters and when we do write it's generally texts and emails where so many of us now switch to 'txt spk.'

As an aside I wonder how careful people are being at proofreading their posts in this thread.... :p
 
Phyrebrat said:
when our software often makes the most egregious substitutions on 'autocorrect'.
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I have, quite naturally, developed a defence against most of the autocorrections.

My words now get so mangled in their passage from the bit of my brain coming up with them to the tips of my fingers, the resulting "word" is beyond the autocorrect function's ability to provide any sort of substitute. :)
 
To take this back to the OP's original article (appropriate since I'm the one that is guilty of side-tracking it into personal grammatical rants) I thought it was interesting that it claims to be debunking the most famous grammatical 'error' in SF: "to boldy go..." The article states:

“Most mythical usage rules are merely harmless,” Pinker writes, but the “prohibition of split infinitives … is downright pernicious.” According to this pseudo-rule, you can’t split the word to from its verb, as in to surrender. Once again, Pinker says, this is based on incorrectly equating Latin with English.
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I keep my life simple by reminding myself language is an art, not a science. Like painting, sculpture or music (themselves all languages) it has some fundamental rules but is not locked into rigid grammatical structures. If a construction is effective and pleases Joe Public to the extent it becomes widely adopted, then it is right. And being an art it necessarily has to find fresh ways of saying things. Rules of grammar start becoming outdated almost as soon as they are formulated. I suspect grammarians are part of a secret society plotting the ruin of human happiness.

Having said that I note for the record that word order is important in English, more so than for inflected languages, and needs care.

So:

"I only wrote telling her the facts" does not equal "I wrote only telling her the facts" does not equal "I wrote telling her only the facts".
 
Justin Swanton said:
I keep my life simple by reminding myself language is an art, not a science. Like painting, sculpture or music (themselves all languages)
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Well that's not quite true. They are arts that are made by humans that each employ different conventions and have what could be described as 'a language'. But saying 'Painting is a language' or 'Music is a Language' is like saying 'Writing is a language', or Declaiming poetry is a language'.

And music, like all human activities, has more than one 'language'. After half a century of listening to the stuff I barely understand the language traditional Western musical forms - music from other cultures (Indian, Japanese, or Balinese for example) is incomprehensible to me. Sounds interesting but I have no idea what it all means. (I'm not talking about the lyrics of songs here but the Twing Plang Plonk of weirdly tuned stringed things.)
 
JunkMonkey said:
Well that's not quite true. They are arts that are made by humans that each employ different conventions and have what could be described as 'a language'. But saying 'Painting is a language' or 'Music is a Language' is like saying 'Writing is a language', or Declaiming poetry is a language'.

And music, like all human activities, has more than one 'language'. After half a century of listening to the stuff I barely understand the language traditional Western musical forms - music from other cultures (Indian, Japanese, or Balinese for example) is incomprehensible to me. Sounds interesting but I have no idea what it all means. (I'm not talking about the lyrics of songs here but the Twing Plang Plonk of weirdly tuned stringed things.)
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You mean.....you don't comprehend the sublime emotional heights reached by Twing Plang Plonk? What a pity...

Actually, my point about painting, music and sculpture being languages is that language is a means by which one individual communicates ideas and emotions (the two are interlinked) to others. A musician intends to say something as does an artist or anyone who opens his mouth and starts talking. That being the case the common denominator of these means of communication is that they vary enormously in their techniques from place to another and from one time to another. Hence our difficulty in understanding a foreign language just as much as a foreign art form.
 
Regarding prepositions, I've always been fond of a story in Elizabeth Nel's book on being one of Churchill's secretaries during WW2 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0006AVM88/?tag=brite-21). Churchill is of course famous for writing dramatic, quotable speeches. When working, writing letters, memos, speeches, he dictated to one of the team of secretaries, who would type up and bring back for his approval. As I recall it (a while since I last read the book) one secretary corrected his grammar, rather than putting it down verbatim, and changed a sentence so it didn't end with a preposition. Churchill lobbed the typed pages back with the comment written on "This is pedantry, up with which I will not put."
 
Whether you chose to use it or not, correct grammar is the foundation to any well-told story. It’s the structural support…the base on which everything must be built.

It’s similar to the foundation of a house. If the strength of the foundation is insufficient to carry the load it supports, then the final structure is doomed to eventual failure.

Correct grammar is the primary tool a writer uses if he/she wishes to create a world filled with characters and action that readers will enjoy. It’s the tool that allows a writer to disappear even as they boldly lead the reader along a well thought-out and interesting path.

Reading is supposed to be an exciting and pleasurable journey. But how pleasurable can it be if the reader is constantly stumbling over abrupt, mind-jarring obstacles that make travel difficult?

Remove the obstacles and learn correct grammar. Be kind. Give your reader a fun and subconsciously comfortable tour they won’t soon forget.
 
Hey, Montero. I see no reason to bring Ben Affleck or Keith Olberman into this conversation. Just leave 'em alone. :)

Oh, great! Now I've inserted unnecessary aspects of a different late-night show. Will this twisted humor never end?
 
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I've tried to reduce the number of commas I use as I began to feel I was overdoing it.

I love to tease a friend who regularly uses less instead of fewer, but there are times when using fewer sounds wrong even though its use is correct.

With pronunciation I've decided that, rather than agonise over which way I should be saying schedule etc., I'll use both randomly and no longer worry.
 
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