The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: wombat on December 19, 2011, 09:36:03 pm
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Why don't we just have a thread for this here and when other threads wanted onto this topic we'll send them over here.
In the meantime I'll put this here:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2011/11/17/the-phenomenology-of-error/ (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2011/11/17/the-phenomenology-of-error/)
It's about this paper, which is worth clicking through to after you read the column.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/schaffner/Williams%20Error.pdf (http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/schaffner/Williams%20Error.pdf)
Here's an excerpt of the column:
Williams’s article isn’t really a treatise. It’s more of a travelogue. And as guide, Williams is less a Dante than a Darwin. He wanders through the errorscape, wondering at the curious flora and fauna that have evolved.
But he does have a Dantesque vision as he circles ever closer to error proscribed and obliviously performed by the same authors. First there is the writer who performs in his fiction what he proscribes in his textbook. (E.B. White, to be specific.) Then he finds usage handbooks themselves violating the rules they present, even to the point of rules broken in their very presentation. The culminating example comes from a 1972 style manual for technical writers:
Emphasis is often achieved by the use of verbs rather than nouns formed from them, and by the use of verbs in the active rather than in the passive voice.
If you don't understand why that should make you laugh, you should hesitate next time you're inclined to correct someone else's use of language.
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An interesting explanation of why prescriptive grammar is important, despite the fact that at some level it is also stupid. (The attention to detail that this author praises should probably have been applied to the URL the article ended up with.)
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html)
On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?
Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with.
...I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don't think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren't important.
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Had an argument with my business-school-educated roommate where he said that this article is stupid, and I defended it despite having not read it. It was bizarre because usually he is into the idea that anything a business person does is clearly based on purely rational decision making, and it is their goddamn right to do it. Bah.
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I'm betting your friend can never remember how to use "it's" properly.
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he is into the idea that anything a business person does is clearly based on purely rational decision making, and it is their goddamn right to do it. Bah.
It appears your friend has never worked at an actual business.
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It appears your friend has never worked at an actual business.
I had a war with my TA at the school in new york about this. He argued that he doesn't think about every step he takes so the whole "rational actor" part of economics should be dismissed. I tried to convince him that the rational actor stuff is contingent on the information available. Asymmetric and insufficient information are failures that are responsible for many decisions. They are still rational decisions.
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Yes, I was taught in anthropology that rational choice theory is the bullshittiest bullshit in the world.
Also, he sent our house email thread an email wanting to keep discussing this, and so far the only response is "dude, it's spelled GRAMMAR, not GRAMMER."
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I had a war with my TA at the school in new york about this. He argued that he doesn't think about every step he takes so the whole "rational actor" part of economics should be dismissed. I tried to convince him that the rational actor stuff is contingent on the information available. Asymmetric and insufficient information are failures that are responsible for many decisions. They are still rational decisions.
What about decisions based on emotion? Or ego? Or to further personal ends rather than the needs of the organization? Do you think those things ever happen in large organizations?
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I can't figure out the difference between its and it's? I know that it's is it is, but every instance of its/it's that I encounter in my writing sounds like it is to me. Is it subtle or am I just dense?
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if it works as it is or it has then you use it's.
if you can substitute his or her for the word than it is its.
The bird used its (her) wings.
What it's (it is).
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The way I always remember it is that it's "its" when it's not "it is" and it's "it's" when its meaning is "it is".
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Keith has a good strategy but I feel compelled to copyedit the presentation a bit:
"The bird used its wings" is right because it could be "The bird used his wings" and that would still be an English sentence.
"The bird used it's wings" is wrong because it could not be "The bird used it is wings" - that is not even English.
"It's time for bed" is right because it could be "It is time for bed."
"Its time for bed" is wrong, because "His time for bed" is no longer an English sentence.
I think there may be cases where you'll feel it is awkward to substitute another posessive pronoun for "its" so that test might not work all the time. But if you can substitute "it is", you can be sure you need the apostrophe.
By the way, it might help to realize that there is no logic to this, the language is just fuck*ng with you. In other cases you need the apostrophe to make a possessive, like "Wombat's pugs," whereas in this case you have to leave it out. It doesn't make sense, it's just a way for a guy like the one in my link to screen resumes, basically. So don't try to make sense of it, just memorize the tests for which one to use.
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I think I see my problem. I rarely use its instead of his/her.
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The truck had a problem with its brakes.
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The truck had a problem with its brakes.
Do you think Paul would refer to his artcar as an "it"?
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(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8f15yTLOp1qkvbwso1_500.png)
Every reference I can find to this device uses the same "Anti-Date Rape Straw" construction. Meaning, the straw is to prevent the date and get right to the rape?
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Long-dead patriarchal assholes! (http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/151416)
Lazy shorthand! (http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/151111)
Folk gotta make do. (http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/148729)
(this post brought to you by metafilter)
wombat, something tells me these pages deal with what kept you in academia for so long, not what made you leave
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so you know how your brain just kind of goes on autopilot for the first couple minutes after you wake up? mine usually lasts about fifteen minutes, during which i'm gruffling down a piece of bread and trying to mainline some coffee. the missus can't help but talk at me (i'd say "to me" but i'm in no condition for conversation at this point) when she describes a dog she dreamt of as shaggy but not fluffy, and my brain leaps around making random connections. it lands on a linguistic oddity that's never occurred to me before, and if it's ever occurred to anyone i'd be kind of amazed.
we have suffixes that correlate to 'more' and 'most' (-er and -est, obviously) and they're pretty strongly required for some words, and totally off-limits for others. you wouldn't describe anything as 'more pretty,' you'd say 'prettier;' conversely, you wouldn't say 'delightfulest,' you'd say 'most delightful'.
why then isn't there a pair of suffixes that correlate to 'less' and 'least' with any kind of similar grammatic usage to -er and -est? you could say 'less pretty' and 'least delightful' but there's nothing to transform any phrase with a lesser-comparison into a single suffixed word. this kind of conjugation feels like it absolutely must exist in some language on the planet. i'm not familiar enough with enough languages to say whether or not it does.
anyway, just a musing. anybody got any thoughts on this silliness?
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If only we had a member who was a professionally trained linguist.
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I don't know anything off the top of my head about this, and honestly I was not all fired up to look into it, because I figured odds are the answer would be that it is a boring historical accident of some kind. And then when I figured it couldn't hurt to spend five minutes Googling once I remembered the technical term I needed, I almost didn't look at this paper because I vaguely remember the author as being annoying. But in fact it says that no language has that kind of morpheme. Generalization labelled (5) on page 6.
http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/ucm201107.pdf (http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/ucm201107.pdf)
It looks like he actually got this shit published so maybe it's not totally bogus
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/universals-comparative-morphology-0 (http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/universals-comparative-morphology-0)
I seriously need to not spend any more time on this right now, that's the best I can do. I am sorry, I was a phonologist. Ask me something about consonants.
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Ask me something about consonants.
You should get this on a T-shirt.
Cool link.
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wow, that's crazy. 300 languages and none of them supports that (awesome! new word!) morpheme. thanks for the links - i tried to read the chapter on it but got so lost in the jargon it made no sense to me. i wonder if he analyzed klingon (or for that matter any other invented language). i suppose i can check that out myself, but i probably won't.
hm. something about consonants? okay, why do we have the letter C? we have K and S, which are how it can sound; maybe a better question is, why doesn't "C" solely represent the sound "ch"? where's that conflation come from?
or: why does "th" represent two sounds? as in thick vs. as in the, i mean. why don't we have letters for each of those sounds?
why doesn't english use diacriticals of any sort? where'd they go?
"ask me something about consonants" is opening a can of worms.
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or: why does "th" represent two sounds? as in thick vs. as in the, i mean. why don't we have letters for each of those sounds?
We sure as fuck used to: Þ,þ, and Ð,ð, respectively.
P.S. Not really, though.
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There is no reason anyone should expect to be able to make sense of that paper without a couple of years of grad school behind them, something I would not wish on any of you. I can pretty much guarantee he didn't talk about Klingon.
Those aren't really questions about consonants, those are questions about spelling, and the history of spelling. (I know that sounds like nitpicking but academics are nothing if not specialists.) On the bright side you can find plenty of stuff to read about the history of the English alphabet and spelling system without me.
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It would be a fair question to ask "if that's not a question about consonants, what is?"
It would be a question about consonants independent of how they are spelled, and these things are hard to notice. Most of what I studied and taught is stuff that the writing system is designed to gloss over. Also, most of it is stuff that most normal humans would never have a question about sort of by definition, because it works below your conscious awareness of how you speak. For instance, people make a fuss about the spelling inconsistencies in Choop's post, but are not bothered by a whole lot of other pretty profound systematic inconsistencies, like how the plural is spelled -s all the time but is often prounounced as z, because mostly they don't really even notice.
The only thing I can think of that a normal person might have a question about that I am especially qualified to answer might be a question about foriegn accents - why people who speak some language can't pronounce something in English correctly.
I never said that what I did was useful.
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Who else listened to the podcast about "vocal fry" on Slate?
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html)
I want to talk about this, but I can't right now.
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i just thought the s->z slide on plurals was good old fashioned germanic laziness seeping through and ruining crispness of pronunciation found in the romance group due to the hybridization of the two from which our ridiculous language stems. hey check out that verb there that looks and sounds like a plural noun, including the slid lazy final s.
and you study why japanese people can't pronounce R and L the right way? do i have that right? if so, dude, that sounds so racist. but then, it's postgrad shit so what do i know
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Vocal fry used to be diagnostic of some developmental disorder. Now its the way young women talk. I kind of like the way it sounds though. I must not be a curmudgeon yet.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html)
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that has noticed this. So annoying.
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I am a huge fan of women with abrasive voices, but I am not in love with vocal fry.
...yet.
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...yet.
That's my boy!
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Who else listened to the podcast about "vocal fry" on Slate?
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html)
I want to talk about this, but I can't right now.
i'm listening to it right now. before your post i hadn't ever heard the phrase "vocal fry" but damn if i didn't know exactly what it was as soon as i read it. i think i might have to listen to more of these.
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i just thought the s->z slide on plurals was good old fashioned germanic laziness seeping through and ruining crispness of pronunciation found in the romance group due to the hybridization of the two from which our ridiculous language stems.
Nope, not at all. It is a consistent and regular process. I'll let you go and try to figure out the generalization for yourself, how about it? No Googling.
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Who else listened to the podcast about "vocal fry" on Slate?
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html)
Bob Garfield can be such an irritating, arrogant fuck. I usually like both On the Media and Lexicon Valley, though sometimes I just want to curb-stomp the motherfucker. This article (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/07/vocal_fry_and_valley_girls_why_old_men_find_young_women_s_voices_so_annoying.html) on Slate was written in response to the podcast, and I like the commentary on Garfield's way of speaking:
Of course, young women could work to flatten their speech patterns to conform to Garfield’s own NPRish affectation, which one commenter describes as “Richard Pryor making fun of WASPs."
Totally unrelated. Wombat, is there an American regional variation in the pronunciation of 'human'? I just heard two people on the radio, and one pronounced it with the 'h' and the other pronounced it 'you-man'. I wondered if they even realized that they were pronouncing it differently. Both are American, but I don't know what regions either are from.
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My roommates make fun of me for "cran" (for crayon) and "harrible" (horrible). At work I get grief for the way I say "toddy"--I guess I say it with the same sound I use for horrible.
There are definitely americans who say you-man, my Human Evolution professor was one. He was from somewhere in the north-east.
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i'm listening to it right now. before your post i hadn't ever heard the phrase "vocal fry" but damn if i didn't know exactly what it was as soon as i read it. i think i might have to listen to more of these.
I have never heard of "creaky voice" or "vocal fry" until now. I guess I never noticed it, but on recollection I do remember young women and girls doing it. It doesn't really bother me that much but maybe I've only been exposed to specimens who display minimum annoyance.
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I don't know if that variation is regional. This here reliable source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0)
says that pronouncing the h in human originated as a spelling pronunciation, but it doesn't say if it's more common some places than others.
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Ever since listening to that podcast I can't not hear it. There was even someone on the radio yesterday, a reporter who was doing it.
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Ever since listening to that podcast I can't not hear it. There was even someone on the radio yesterday, a reporter who was doing it.
Yeah, I agree, now that I know there's a name for it. Ever since I was a little girl, it seems like I have been surrounded by others who liked to do funny vocal sound effects everywhere, all the time. I figured that the vocal fry was just another sound effect to convey an additional layer of meaning. Now that I know how often I do it, I had better watch it, say during interviews. I never realized that people would take offense to it.
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I listened to that podcast and still don't know what it is. I don't particularly care though, so I have that going for me.
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It might actually be a good thing to do in an interview. According to that podcast studies show that women who use it are perceived as more successful.
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It might actually be a good thing to do in an interview. According to that podcast studies show that women who use it are perceived as more successful.
I think the people that were polled were young college students. Since the old white guys seem to hate the hell out of vocal fry, maybe I ought to lay off it.
I listened to that podcast and still don't know what it is. I don't particularly care though, so I have that going for me.
Did you hear when the little girl Ida did the upspeak, and then the lowered her voice to almost a growl? It's the lowering the voice and making it sound gruff/rumbly that is vocal fry.
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Yeah, since she did those other vocal things I couldn't really tell. Also, it wasn't only women in those studies, but it was based on age range. So if this guy is under 30 try it maybe?
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Search for it on the Youtubes and you'll have no trouble finding examples.
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My daughter does the vocal fry thing. It's...disconcerting.
I get the tendency to drop one's voice to try to sound authoritative, though. I have to pull this at work all the time -- if I speak in my natural timbre, it's impossible to make myself heard in a crowd.
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I think it's called Authoritah
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OMG guys I finally got a chance to listen to the Lexicon Valley podcast, which I had never heard of before, and it is so irritating I wanted to throw my computer across the room.
I listen to On the Media and Bob Garfield is OK there, but I guess this is what happens when he doesn't have an editor? And also, how did it take them two whole episodes to explain the New York r-dropping stuff? I feel like even the longest possible explanation I could give of that research would take five minutes.
Maybe it was a mistake to start with a topic that I have known all about for as long as I have known about anything, but I guess I though that with two whole episodes, they must be bringing something new to it. But SO NOT, except for a whole lot of OMG PLEASE DUCT TAPE HIS MOUTH SHUT.
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So are you going to explain the new york r dropping stuff or just leave me hanging?
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Go listen to the podcast. I could be wrong, it might be totally fascinating.
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am i just going to have to get used to people saying "[blank] and I" whenever they should be saying "[blank] and me" or is it just a passing fad to phrase this wrong or is education really failing us that bad. would you say "look at this picture of I" unless you were a rastafarian.
the rule "avoid 'and me' " has been so overtaught people are afraid to use it when it's proper to do so
"jimmy and i went to the lake"
"aunt helen left julie and me the china set in her will"
there's a place for the first person object pronoun and it's being completely abandoned by people years out of school and still afraid of detention
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You think that's annoying? I work with someone who doesn't know how to use effect/affect so he finds other constructions. Usually by using the word "impact"
"Powerpoint is a really impactive presentation tool"
"The terrorist attack impacted Boston"
"The consequential impact of coffee is that I poop more"
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am i just going to have to get used to people saying "[blank] and I" whenever they should be saying "[blank] and me" or is it just a passing fad to phrase this wrong or is education really failing us that bad. would you say "look at this picture of I" unless you were a rastafarian.
the rule "avoid 'and me' " has been so overtaught people are afraid to use it when it's proper to do so
Yeah, you're just going to have to get used to it. I think the thing is that English has too little case-marking left for the pronouns to resist this kind of change.
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Hell, people don't understand the difference between "your" and "you're," I have no hope that they'll figure out "Fred and I" vs. "me and Fred."
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You think that's annoying? I work with someone who doesn't know how to use effect/affect so he finds other constructions. Usually by using the word "impact"
"Powerpoint is a really impactive presentation tool"
"The terrorist attack impacted Boston"
"The consequential impact of coffee is that I poop more"
I think if somebody said the word "impactive" in my presence I would be hard pressed to keep myself from laughing. The eye-roll would be reflexive.
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I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't understand what Choop is saying. For your well being would you please try to explain it to me and I'll try to use it properly.
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Yesterday I commented (in jest) on Pedro ending a sentence with a preposition, and it led to him "correcting" himself by misusing the word "whom." I'm not sure which is worse.
OK, yes I am. "Whom is the owner of this" is much worse than "Who does this belong to?"
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paul: these are correct sentences.
"jimmy and i went to the lake"
"aunt helen left julie and me the china set in her will"
these are incorrect sentences.
"jimmy and me went to the lake"
"aunt helen left julie and i the china set in her will"
capisce?
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Yesterday I commented (in jest) on Pedro ending a sentence with a preposition
"Where's the library at, asshole?"
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Yesterday I commented (in jest) on Pedro ending a sentence with a preposition, and it led to him "correcting" himself by misusing the word "whom." I'm not sure which is worse.
OK, yes I am. "Whom is the owner of this" is much worse than "Who does this belong to?"
If this doesn't convince people to just shut up and let other people talk, I don't know what can.
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paul: these are correct sentences.
The way to break it down and figure out which one is correct is to eliminate the person objects in the sentence other than yourself. "Aunt Helen left Julie and me the china set in her will."
I think if somebody said the word "impactive" in my presence I would be hard pressed to keep myself from laughing."
Yeah, it sounds like something that would require a high fiber diet and plenty of alone time to get through. I used to laugh when I'd hear grownups say they were "excited" by a work project, or hearing a proposal, or meeting someone. It just seemed like an inappropriate use of the work; more emotional than the circumstance called for. Now I find myself using it like that. Part of it is workspeak, and part of it is putting yourself in a positive affective state regarding your professional obligations, I think. It is still overused though.
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I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I don't understand what Choop is saying. For your well being would you please try to explain it to me and I'll try to use it properly.
Not sure if serious or meta-joke.
Can.
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For your well being would you please try to explain it to I...
Would clearly have been the meta-joke. :)
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No, I'm being serious. What I know about writing I know mostly from what I've read. Most of what I learned in English class has blown away. I know what nouns and verbs are, but I think most of that I learned from Schoolhouse Rock (http://youtu.be/kfnXUWJz0sE). The rest gets a little jumbled in my head.
So I'll study those examples some more and hopefully I'll be able to use them correctly in a sentence.
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sometimes i feel like i'm the only person in the world who remembers sentence diagrams, where you draw out the structure of the sentence according to only the specific words therein, placing the words in the diagram to find the correct ones and flaws in the structure. are they still taught? were they taught anywhere to anybody but the thirty kids in my class that year? did i have some kind of miracle teacher that invented a crazy great tool that got lost in some black hole of innovation? nope. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram) looks like they were invented 99 years before i was born. -- ah, it "has not been much in vogue as a pedagogical device for the past thirty years or so." (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm) well goddamnit, WHY NOT
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In 7th grade the non-remedial but not advanced placement english class did sentence diagrams for a whole semester. For whatever they didn't think the ap kids needed to know how grammar worked so I didn't learn anything about grammar until 10th grade german.
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it "has not been much in vogue as a pedagogical device for the past thirty years or so." (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm) well goddamnit, WHY NOT
You seem to forget that I am waaay older than you are. Yes they taught us sentence structure, I just didn't learn sentence structure. At any rate, I think I've learned to write fairly proficiently anyway even without knowing all the rules.
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you write absolutely well, paul. i'm dismayed at how awful grammar is everywhere on the internet other than touamb. i must have had a holdout from when those pedagogical devices were in vogue, because i wasn't diagramming sentences thirty years ago - probably more like twenty-five. and yes, i know my grammar automatically has strikes against it due to my stylistic decision rarely to capitalize proper nouns or sentences; instead, i use capitalization like bold and italics, to indicate emphasis, timing, stress of voice, or humorous intent. that said, it's a rule i'm breaking on purpose, as a decision. i know when not to use this rule, for example, when i wrote a letter of complaint to the new york times today about their terrible new daily headlines email formatting. (wtf is wrong with plaintext? it formats itself perfectly on my phone and desktop.) but i digress.
i break this rule, and others when applicable, with a complete understanding of what the rule is, what it's meant to enforce, and what i'm losing by breaking it. my word choice and sentence structure, and therefor the communicability of what i write, tend not to suffer for it. people making the wrong call on pronouns or homophones or what have you don't appear to understand how their intent gets lost in the levels of "oh you're a dummy" that occur in the brains of people that know the rules and can tell that they're breaking the rules unintentionally.
i am the product of a public school system. my college experience had very little bearing on how i communicate, other than vocabulary. the tax-funded, free-to-participate education available to all and mandated to most might not be the best in the world, but goddamn it, it HAS to be better than what i'm seeing all over the web.
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sometimes i feel like i'm the only person in the world who remembers sentence diagrams, where you draw out the structure of the sentence according to only the specific words therein, placing the words in the diagram to find the correct ones and flaws in the structure. are they still taught? were they taught anywhere to anybody but the thirty kids in my class that year? did i have some kind of miracle teacher that invented a crazy great tool that got lost in some black hole of innovation? nope. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram) looks like they were invented 99 years before i was born. -- ah, it "has not been much in vogue as a pedagogical device for the past thirty years or so." (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm) well goddamnit, WHY NOT
They taught us diagramming when I was in elementary school...12 years ago? criminy. It didn't last long past that though.
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Probably my very favorite class as an undergraduate was essentially on diagramming sentences. Not sure why, but it struck a chord with me and the fellow teaching it did a great job.
Paul, the easy way to check whether to use "I" or "me" in a phrase like "Fred and I/me" is to just drop Fred. If you'd use "me" if the "Fred and" wasn't there, you still use "me". So:
(Fred and) I will be going to the grocery to purchase a rabbit. Agnes is making hasenpfeffer for (Fred and) me.
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(Fred and) I will be going to the grocery to purchase a rabbit. Agnes is making hasenpfeffer for (Fred and) me.
Fred and I think we can do that. Thank you for helping Fred and me.
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Fred and I think we can do that. Thank you for helping Fred and me.
Your welcome.
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sometimes i feel like i'm the only person in the world who remembers sentence diagrams, where you draw out the structure of the sentence according to only the specific words therein, placing the words in the diagram to find the correct ones and flaws in the structure. are they still taught? were they taught anywhere to anybody but the thirty kids in my class that year?
We diagrammed sentences back in my day. One of those things that a lot of people whined "When will this ever apply in the real world?" but I actually sort of enjoyed it.
Your welcome.
I will drive to Kentucky RIGHT NOW and kick you in the shins.
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hey wombat did you hear about this one yet (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/24/slash-not-just-a-punctuation-mark-anymore/)
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You know what else is interesting about that? Old people are always saying that the younguns are illiterate, they don't read, they can't write... but in fact they're so steeped in written language that they've turned a punctuation mark into speech. Beat that, previous generations.
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Curious. I guess I have heard it used that way, but the two novel uses I have seen for the term are "slashfic", indicating a subgenre of fan fiction, and as a markup for a pseudo-html phrasing of online commenting
/pedant off
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I can explain why they type slash instead of using the punctuation. If they have an old style phone like I do the slash requires pushing the button 10 damn times.
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How about the use of "however comma?" I can see it every once in a blue moon when you are trying to be particularly dramatic or foreboding when dropping a qualifier. But there's this one woman I know via work who I think is incapable of saying "however" without saying "however comma." She once said it four times in a presentation of about 30 minutes.
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Wait wait wait.
You're saying that she actually speaks the word "comma" after saying "however"?
No way. I think that would be sufficient cause for a throat punching.
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You're saying that she actually speaks the word "comma" after saying "however"?
That is precisely what I'm saying. And it's to the point where she either doesn't realize she's doing it, or maybe she actually thinks that's what you're supposed to say.
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No way. I think that would be sufficient cause for a throat punching.
Especially four times in half an hour.
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I'm going to dinner with some friends tonight. I'm gonna see how many times I can get away with saying it before they tell me to stop.
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We are adopting a puppy. His name is Samson. We're considering making his official name on the AKC paperwork "Samson Comma Brock"
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So if I call people out, say on Twitter, for screamingly obvious grammar fouls (in this case "your" vs "you're," by responding with "What about my golden?"), am I a dick or performing a public service?
In the grand scheme of things, I think people who can't figure out "your" vs. "you're" deserve to be called out, so maybe they'll fuck*ng learn. On the other hand, I can see people going "Christ, what an asshole."
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So if I call people out, say on Twitter, for screamingly obvious grammar fouls (in this case "your" vs "you're," by responding with "What about my golden?"), am I a dick or performing a public service?
In the grand scheme of things, I think people who can't figure out "your" vs. "you're" deserve to be called out, so maybe they'll fuck*ng learn. On the other hand, I can see people going "Christ, what an asshole."
I probably make most of my errors on FB and Twitter due to swipe-based typing where your/you're and I'll/ill are exactly the same input. I fix those when I notice but if I'm tweeting from my phone then I'm doing something and not looking at my feed at all which means I likely won't spot the error for hours.
I don't really get reading Twitter on a phone. The client never seems to be able to pull all the tweets since I last logged in only the last 200 or so and so many of the tweets are links I don't have time to follow/don't have a mobile site/have flash/etc.
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You are actually doing a public service, but will be viewed as a dick.
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Sorry, you're a dick. Public shaming is not a useful technique for teaching writing. Or anything, probably.
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Spelling stuff is cool here right?
I find I'm increasingly irritated by seeing "ya" in place of "yeah" in texts and stuff. I'm also a bit irritated at myself for being irritated by that.
I'm irritable these days.
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Spelling stuff is cool here right?
I find I'm increasingly irritated by seeing "ya" in place of "yeah" in texts and stuff. I'm also a bit irritated at myself for being irritated by that.
I'm irritable these days.
Ya and Yeah have essentially the same meaning. I get irritable at people who use yeah when they mean yay!
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Sometimes I get irritated with that and sometimes I do it.
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there's a moron on one of my facebook groups who, when meaning "yum" in response to a photo of food, alwaysALWAYS types "ummm." this bothers me perhaps more than it should. strike that - far more than it should.
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Ya and Yeah have essentially the same meaning. I get irritable at people who use yeah when they mean yay!
I mean they spell 'yeah' y-a. To me they are two words that mean the same thing. They are treating ya as an alternate spelling of yeah. Don't ask why this bothers me.
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my friends and I often literally say "yeah!" when we mean "yay." Like, "oh yeah!"
Or do you mean like in court proceedings where they say "yeah (pronounced yay)" or "nay."
all of this typing of the word has made me decide that "yeah" is a really good word.
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I mean like "Did you wash the dishes?" "Yeah." "We're having ice cream for dessert." "Yay!" In that scenario those words have different meanings are are pronounced differently. I don't think they are interchangeable, but I see people frequently using yeah when they mean yay.
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I have always assumed that it was a spelling error when I saw "yeah" when I expected "yay" - if an understandable one because we don't get taught to spell stuff that's that colloquial - but now from what Inev says, it looks like some people are actually using those words in a way I don't, so those people could mean exactly what they're spelling.
It is amazing what a mess English spelling is. We really didn't deserve to be the dominant world language, exactly how Microsoft didn't deserve to be the dominant world operating system. It has nothing to do with being well-designed for the task, it's just an accident of history. Oh well, at least it isn't Japanese.
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lexicon valley came back from hiatus recently. there's an episode on language weirdness, and it doesn't involve bob garfield. it's a good episode.
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Or do you mean like in court proceedings where they say "yeah (pronounced yay)" or "nay."
That word is yea, right? It means the same thing as yeah but pronounced yay.
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That word is yea, right? It means the same thing as yeah but pronounced yay.
It rhymes with "Jough".
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Maybe there is a continuum of affirmative enthusiasm.
"Did you know the New York Times has decreased the white space in their layouts?"
"Yeah"
"There are still some seats available in the 8:30 showing of Despicable Me"
"Yay!"
"You've won an all-expenses paid trip to see U2 perform in Munich!"
"Yeah!" (Also spelled Jeah! if you're a douche Olympic swimmer (http://themeatlockersports.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/original.jpg)).
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"Ya" is for when you're pretending to be German or Swedish.
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isn't that "Ja" ? not "Jah" that's jamaican. "Ya" is shorthand for "you" as in "how ya doin"
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Jahmaica my friend.
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It rhymes with "Jough".
Jough like slough or Jough like slough? I always forget.
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Careful, don't look in the mirror when you're typing like that.
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Two really great links that belong here.
We need to talk about literally (http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/08/literally/)
How To Be A Reasonable Prescriptivist (http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/a-compromise-how-to-be-a-reasonable-prescriptivist/)
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"Comment below with your best caption for adoptable Taffy. The comment with the most likes by noon this Friday will be made into a meme"
No. You can't make a meme, something becomes a meme. Like you can't make a viral video, you make a video and maybe it becomes viral. But apparently this has become the word for "photo with caption pasted on it."
OK I know language change is inevitable but sometimes even I get pissed off. No. Just no.
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I want to know who made the first misinterpretation of captioned photos, go back in time, and drop an education beatdown on their ignorant ass. Memes (were) a neat part of the increasing interconnection of Internet users through the mid 2000's. They obviously still exist, but talking about them is endlessly complicated by this glitch.
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I want to know who made the first misinterpretation of captioned photos, go back in time, and drop an education beatdown on their ignorant ass.
You'd be all, "know your meme, motherfucker."
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Survey: "On" like "Dawn" or like "Con" ?
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Do you know that there is a complication to your question, which is that in many dialects of American English, the vowel in "Dawn" and "Con" - to make it more confusing, "Dawn" and "Don" - are the same? Or are you perfectly well aware of that and trying to mess with those people's minds?
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Where I'm from Dawn and Don are not the same and On is not like either one of them. On is the same as own.
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none of the above. all three vowels are slightly different:
Con (Don) is a flat "ah" sound (tonge forward, mouth wide)
On is a rounder "aw" sound (lips and mouth relaxed, tongue floating)
Dawn is a very tall, almost purely "ww" sound with an "ah" underneath (jaw low, lips far apart, corners of mouth close together, tongue back)
Own is completely different, a dipthongy tightening starting with a flat "oh" and ending with a tight "ww" - but i'm not from texas.
do those position descriptions make sense?
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On is the same as own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKPoHgKcqag&t=0m20s
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http://xkcd.com/1285/
This has become a point of contention among some of my spaceface friends. I'm a single spacer all day long and after looking at the MLA and APA recommendations, it is conclusive that the rule is single space after a period. The Bedford Handbook (MLA) we used in Rhetoric class itself uses only one space after every period. APA calls for a double space only in drafts to make editing easier. Double spacing is only for papers you intend to correct later or college students trying to tease out a paper's length to meet minimum requirements. Double spacers are trying to tear us apart with their hollow vanity. Monospacers are bringing us all closer together.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKPoHgKcqag&t=0m20s
Marvin Gaye said it, I believe it, that settles it!
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Marvin Gaye said it, I believe it, that settles it!
If there was a church that based all their services around the music of Marvin Gaye, I would totally go to that church.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Noo6dxBaE
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APA calls for a double space only in drafts to make editing easier. Double spacing is only for papers you intend to correct later or college students trying to tease out a paper's length to meet minimum requirements. Double spacers are trying to tear us apart with their hollow vanity.
I double space by habit, but if I want to switch to single space, a Find/Replace with " " to " " does the trick nicely.
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If there was a church that based all their services around the music of Marvin Gaye, I would totally go to that church.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Noo6dxBaE
Would you settle for Saint John Coltrane (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/us/01religion.html?_r=0)?
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If there was a church that based all their services around the music of Marvin Gaye, I would totally go to that church.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Noo6dxBaE
Praise the Lord!
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I mean they spell 'yeah' y-a. To me they are two words that mean the same thing. They are treating ya as an alternate spelling of yeah. Don't ask why this bothers me.
I identified why this bothers me. If I text someone a question like 'would you like me to bring some beer to go with the nachos?' and they reply 'Fuck ya!' I don't know if they are replying emphatically in the affirmative or telling me to fuck off.
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And if anyone questions whether anyone would actually say or write 'fuck ya' in place of 'fuck you' I offer this as a source: http://rapgenius.com/66278
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I have a friend who persists in spelling it "yhea" online. This drives me briefly batty whenever I see it. Even looking at it here where I just wrote it.
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"yhea"
That's just... misspelled.