Posted on 08/20/2010 9:51:07 AM PDT by Daffynition
Yeah, Right < /s>
At last, a constructive outlet for my hostilities and frustrations: I can split infinitives! Thx for the idea.
As someone with a side business of editing/proofreading, I will say one thing in defense of these rules. Many of them many not be formally “wrong,” and English writers often use them, and have for quite a long time. Nevertheless, adhering to these rules will help keep you from sounding like an uneducated dunderhead.
Rules I break because grammar is cheaper that speeding.
My Grammar was no myth, she was a mythuze.
But there are some rules up with which we need not put.
Like a violin, language in the hands of a master is both beautiful and enriching. Though he broke “the rules” from time to time, Winston Churchill is a joy to read.
Today’s TwitSpeak, by contrast, is like the scratching and scraping of a lazy and undisciplined violin student. It doesn’t matter if he IS trying to play a Bach sonata; I won’t waste my time trying to understand him.
YMMV
As a proponent of standard English, I was concerned about the subject matter. Since one of the main authorities in support of the author’s positions is the great Fowler, I relaxed. Unfortunately, dear Mrs. Skubby from 3rd grade is certainly dead by now, so I can’t rebuke her for telling her class not to begin sentences with conjunctions.
I like that! I didn’t think you were supposed to use a comma before “and” at the end of lists though? For example, I thought it was milk, bread and cheese; not milk, bread, and cheese.
How’d you like me slipping in that semicolon? :)
And as Fowler noted, adhering to those rules to produce a clumsy and inexact sentence reveals you as an educated dunderhead.
Actually I think adhering to those rules will more often than not make you sound like an uneducated dunderhead. That’s part of the point of the article, in most of the sample sentences she give trying to follow the bad rules creates unnatural sounding sentences with little flow.
And the use of the colon as a half-stop in a sentence is absolutely dramatic. And effective.
People really don’t have much tolerance for grammatical mistakes in print. Every now and again, OK. Were this not true, Microsoft wouldn’t have constructed the grammar/thesaurus/style check.
Besides, visual thesaurus is a fun site.
Nice parchment.
Today, almost any word beginning with a vowel is morphing to ‘uh’ in common usage. This is very prevalent in all new-casts and other public sources.
immediately = uhmediately
emotional = uhmotional
et al...
Of course, the old standbys are
specifically = pacifically
experiment = exspearmint
I only point these cases out because they span dialect. It is not a southern vs. northern vs. California, thing. It is becoming an accepted part of the English language nationwide. You can even hear irregardless in some news-casts and it even passes most spell checkers. lol
I am having trouble digesting that post; I’m sure it will all come out OK, though.
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