Posted on 06/23/2016 8:54:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
Makes sense since all Oz immigrants were from the UK so they kept some of the accent. I’m sure other UK colonies contributed people to Oz which change it some but not all. Then there’s NZ.
“Police Shoot Gunman Dead. . . .”
That certainly makes things clearer.................... Why not, “Shoot Dead the gunman they did”?
There’s a new trend in copyediting to move the second part of the verb back to the first part if words lie in between. It’s not colloquial, or vernacular, and the author usually has it right, but the copyeditor moves it. Maybe it’s in some style book somewhere, maybe the same style book that says adjectives that follow the verb shouldn’t be hyphenated.
When I proofread, I always change them back so that it sounds like English—with a question mark, of course.
They get lots of jollies over the word “gotten.” You have to watch that novelists don’t have Brits using that word.
No witnesses silly.
This was yet another Vast Right Wing Conspiracy action meant to distract attention from Hillary’s plan to fix the economy.
Everybody has pet peeves, when it comes to English grammar.
Mine is “The Case of the Wandering Onlies”.......................
But Fowler says we shouldn’t be pedantic about the use of “only.” It doesn’t always have to appear right before what it modifies. Sometimes its appearance earlier in the sentence aids comprehension—in other words, we know what’s coming as soon as we see it.
She only picked the fruit that was ripe, versus She picked only the fruit that was ripe. Both are grammatically acceptable, but the first one is colloquial/vernacular and so it flows better.
Like I said, personal pet peeve, mine only.............B^)
GSG 9?
Although it's grammatically acceptable in the vernacular or spoken language, his could be confusing to a foreign listener.
1. It could mean that 'She' was the 'only' picker of the fruit.
2. It could mean that She 'only picked the fruit' and did nothing else to the fruit, like eat, cook or sell it.
Whereas the second sentence would not be confusing, suggesting that the fruit she picked was the ripe ones in particular......................
Not yours only. A lot of copyeditors move it around to its “logical” place.
It’s only confusing if you start checking out every possible meaning. If you do that, everything can be confusing. Foreign readers have a hard time with English. It’s a tough language to really know.
In nonfiction, you can be more logical and precise. In fiction, you don’t want anything to bring the reader up short and hamper his enjoyment. The more it sounds like the English you hear around you, the easier it is to understand.
Even my friend the script doctor doesn’t have the ear that I do. It takes a deep, focused caring about the reader and a reluctance to go pedantic on him.
Of course there’s British fiction, and there you have to trust the author almost completely. We don’t REALLY know how they talk the way a Brit does.
LOL!..................
I’ve read Jane Austin and Charles Dickens and didn’t have a problem.
I read a modern British crime/mystery novel and there were so many idioms in it that I had to look up stuff just to know what they were saying...........................
Only the educated ones.......................B^)
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