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The Grammar & Usage Thread

ClairefromClare said:
Oh God, I'm so embarrassed!

Can we go back to talking about less versus fewer? That one I can at least do.

Or using "me" instead of "I." As in, "it's me!" Nails on the ol' blackboard there...
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Less vs. fewer is one that a lot of people get wrong. Of course a lot of people get "a lot" wrong as well. "It's me" can be correct sometimes. For example:

Which word out of "me" and "I" would be correct to end this sentence: "x happened to John and ..."?
It's me!

And I think most people accept using me with it is, because of common usage. If you say "it is I" you sound a little bit stuck up. There's an interesting discourse on the matter here: AUE: FAQ excerpt: "It's me" vs "It is I"

There have also been a couple of interesting ones about ending sentences with a preposition. Word has it one of Churchill's proof readers read the script of a speech Churchill had written and wrote on it "you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition". Churchill responded with something like "this is the kind of insolence up with which I will not put".
 
Ty_Webb said:
There have also been a couple of interesting ones about ending sentences with a preposition. Word has it one of Churchill's proof readers read the script of a speech Churchill had written and wrote on it "you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition". Churchill responded with something like "this is the kind of insolence up with which I will not put".
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I'm feeling frisky, so apologies. It should be "I shall not put." Will, used in the first or second person, is almost a command. Shall is appropriate. For the third person, it's reversed.
 
ClairefromClare said:
I'm feeling frisky, so apologies. It should be "I shall not put." Will, used in the first or second person, is almost a command. Shall is appropriate. For the third person, it's reversed.
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I would take it up with Mr Churchill then because that's how I've always seen the quote - as per here: http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html

He's been dead some time though, so you may struggle. I must admit though, I am quite a fan of pedantry. When I was at school I once asked my teacher "can I go to the bathroom please?". He said "yes". When I stood up to go, he asked me where on earth I thought I was going. I said I was going to the bathroom. He said I needed to ask for permission. I remember finding that decidedly irritating and I suspect may have been a part of my own pedantry with things.

Out of curiosity, does your comment mean it's incorrect to say "I will not put up with this nonsense"?
 
Ty_Webb said:
I would take it up with Mr Churchill then because that's how I've always seen the quote . . .
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Just because he said it doesn't mean it was correct! (See Claire and proceeds!) And did you hear him say it or was it something you saw in print later? (He may have been misquoted?) Someone should get on this!

(You did say, "Churchill responded with something like . . .")
 
Ty_Webb said:
I must admit though, I am quite a fan of pedantry. When I was at school I once asked my teacher "can I go to the bathroom please?". He said "yes". When I stood up to go, he asked me where on earth I thought I was going. I said I was going to the bathroom. He said I needed to ask for permission. I remember finding that decidedly irritating and I suspect may have been a part of my own pedantry with things.
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Your appropriate action there is all too obvious but no doubt would have been hugely embarrassing.

Ty_Webb said:
Out of curiosity, does your comment mean it's incorrect to say "I will not put up with this nonsense"?
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It depends on how much emphasis he put on "will." Said strongly enough, it's correct.
 
Smallville said:
Just because he said it doesn't mean it was correct! (See Claire and proceeds!) And did you hear him say it or was it something you saw in print later? (He may have been misquoted?) Someone should get on this!

(You did say, "Churchill responded with something like . . .")
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I didn't say it did mean it was correct. What I meant was that the quote was accurate (at least as far as I know). The something like piece referred to the opening part of the sentence. The "up with which I will not put" piece was what he was attributed to have said. No I didn't hear him say it, I read it somewhere. It sounds to me like the kind of thing that Churchill would say (as an aside, my favourite Churchill quote is the one he said to Lady Astor - after she said to him "you, sir, are drunk", he replied "yes, and you are ugly, but in the morning I'll be sober". He did also say another to the same woman - "Winston, if you were my husband I'd put poison in your coffee" "Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it")
 
That particular Churchillian aphorism is one with which I have a bone to pick. In that sentence, "putup" is really being used as a compound verb, rather than a verb followed by a preposition. Splitting the compound so that the second half doesn't end the sentence will of course seem silly.*



* That said, I am aware that the prohibition on end of sentence preps comes from Latin rules that do not really have any place in Enlgish usage, and that we have the silly inflexibility of the Scottish grammarians to thank for it. Regardless, Churchill's quip remains a bit unfair.
 
I think it's with rather than up that is the offending preposition, although the same point probably still stands. "That is the kind of insolence I will not put up with" would be the unadjusted sentence.
 
My heart is broken

My heart is broken

:love-over: One of my standard usage rants is folks who use "they" as a substitute for single, third party pronoun that includes male and female ("Gender" used other than to denote words in romance languages is a different rant, but most people here are tired of that one.)

According to The New York Times, "they" has a long history of precisely that use. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

On Language
All-Purpose Pronoun

By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER and STEWART KELLERMAN

What can you say in 140 characters? On Twitter, that’s your limit per tweet. The Twitterati consider this the last word in writing lite, but they’ve devoted quite a few tweets to a venerable linguistic quest that has long thwarted old-media types: the search for an all-purpose pronoun that’s masculine or feminine, singular or plural. Scores of tweets in recent months — enough to inspire a CNN segment earlier this year — have agonized over the lack of a universal pronoun and bemoaned the verbal acrobatics it takes to say something like this in a nonsexist way: “Everybody thinks he’s hot” or “A texter worships his smart phone.”
Some of the suggestions? Combining his and her into hiser, and he and she into s/he or he/she or shhe. One tweeter asked plaintively, “Can we just accept that ‘they’ can be used as singular?” But another wrote, “I HATE it when people make improper use of plural pronouns for gender neutrality!” Several suggested writing around the problem (“Sometimes I try to alternate he and she, but bleh”). One tweet seemed to sum up the general attitude: “Damn you, English language!”

Traditionalists, of course, find nothing wrong with using he to refer to an anybody or an everybody, male or female. After all, hasn’t he been used for both sexes since time immemorial? Well, no, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t. It’s a relatively recent usage, as these things go. And it wasn’t cooked up by a male sexist grammarian, either.

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

The idea that he, him and his should go both ways caught on and was widely adopted. But how, you might ask, did people refer to an anybody before then? This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.
Paradoxically, the female grammarian who introduced this he business was a feminist if ever there was one. Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.

In other matters, though, Fisher was eminently reasonable. Ever since English grammars began appearing in the late 1500s, for example, they were formed on the Latin model (the very word grammar originally meant the study of Latin). Fisher strongly condemned this classical bias and said that English suffered when it was forced into a Latin mold. She not only defended English against claims of inferiority but also said its lack of inflections and declensions (or, as she wrote, “needless perplexities” and “peculiarities”) was an advantage — a heretical view in its time. What’s more, she used plain words, calling a noun a “name” and an auxiliary verb a “helping verb.”

But alas, in swapping he for they, Fisher replaced a number problem with a gender problem. Since the 1850s, wordies have been dreaming up universal pronouns (thon, ne, heer, ha and others), but attempts to introduce them into the language have all flopped. “Among the many reforms proposed for the English language by its right-minded, upstanding and concerned users,” the linguist Dennis E. Baron has written, “the creation of an epicene or bisexual pronoun stands out as the one most often advocated and attempted, and the one that has most often failed.”
Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians. In fact, so many people now use they in the old singular way that dictionaries and usage guides are taking a critical look at the prohibition against it. R. W. Burchfield, editor of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, has written that it’s only a matter of time before this practice becomes standard English: “The process now seems irreversible.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) already finds the singular they acceptable “even in literary and formal contexts,” but the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) isn’t there yet.

It’s a shame that grammarians ever took umbrage at the singular they. After all, they gave you a slide. It began life as a plural object pronoun and evolved into the whole enchilada: subject and object, singular and plural. But umbrage the grammarians took, and like it or not, the universal they isn’t universally accepted — yet. Its fate is now in the hands of the jury, the people who speak the language. Yes, even those who use only 140 characters a pop.
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Do you suppose it's too late to change my first language?
 
Oh dear, Ms. O'Conner and Mr. Kellermen, is Twitter really worth that long of an article?

Remember my friends, brevity is the soul of wit. :wink:
 
The public radio station to which I listen keeps promoting its series on "uncommon economic indicators." They are forever playing a clip of some woman saying it's easier to get a cab, so "obviously less people can afford cabs."

a) Specious reasoning. There are plenty of other explanations. Maybe more people are driving cabs. Maybe people are taking private car services. Or limos. Or buying cars.

b) Why it's this post is here, and not in "rant of the day": it's FEWER, Lady, not less.
 
ClairefromClare said:
The public radio station to which I listen keeps promoting its series on "uncommon economic indicators." They are forever playing a clip of some woman saying it's easier to get a cab, so "obviously less people can afford cabs."

a) Specious reasoning. There are plenty of other explanations. Maybe more people are driving cabs. Maybe people are taking private car services. Or limos. Or buying cars.

b) Why it's this post is here, and not in "rant of the day": it's FEWER, Lady, not less.
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It does seem more easier to get a cab lately.
 
julie_m said:
It does seem more easier to get a cab lately.
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No argument. It's just that QED isn't the only possible explanation.

The fewever vs. less thing really rankled, though.
 
Claire - no groans for "more easier"?

Diane - correct me if I'm wrong, but can't "less" also refer to the mathematical action? Like, "I am the same age as my boyfriend, less one year," maybe that is part of it?
 
julie_m said:
Claire - no groans for "more easier"?
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Probably should have. Blame it on one too many glasses of wine this evening or that I'm always willing to give you a pass. You want me to be mean to you?
 
ClairefromClare said:
Probably should have. Blame it on one too many glasses of wine this evening or that I'm always willing to give you a pass. You want me to be mean to you?
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Hehe, naw, I just expected a volley with that particular serve...but if you're loving yourself some some fine wine, who am I to speak ill?
smiley_cheers.gif
 
I see this stuff EVERYWHERE Harry. Poor editing and proofreading in professional publications is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've been that way since working on the high school paper that hardly anyone read! LOL It's really a sickness!
 
Smallville said:
I see this stuff EVERYWHERE Harry. Poor editing and proofreading in professional publications is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've been that way since working on the high school paper that hardly anyone read! LOL It's really a sickness!
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Shouldn't that be "Poor editing and proofreading in professional publications are two of my biggest pet peeves."? :eyepoke:
 
bonknhead said:
Shouldn't that be "Poor editing and proofreading in professional publications are two of my biggest pet peeves."? :eyepoke:
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Maybe, but what if I included it as one entity, since they go together? hehe

I actually did ponder on that for a little while before I hit "Submit Reply" but since this is a forum and not a professional publication, I figured it would suffice either way! But yeah, that's probably the correct way to say it!
 
Smallville said:
I see this stuff EVERYWHERE Harry. Poor editing and proofreading in professional publications is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've been that way since working on the high school paper that hardly anyone read! LOL It's really a sickness!
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I even cut them slack for using an abbreviation ("DL") without first defining it ("disabled list"). While that term might be common knowledge to a lot (most?) of us, I suspect there are quite a few golfers who don't necessarily follow football or baseball (particularly in the female demographic) and who may not be familiar with the term in a golf context.
 
I thought DL meant "down low" -- I was wondering what came of being on the down low for so long.
 
worst_shot_ever said:
I thought DL meant "down low" -- I was wondering what came of being on the down low for so long.
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That's what I thought too. I read a NY Times magazine article a few months ago that explained what comes from being on the down low. I'd rather not repeat it here though.
 
They fixed the grammar. Didn't delete my comment this time though. Not yet anyway.
 
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