Posted on 11/23/2013 8:44:31 AM PST by ilovesarah2012
Edited on 11/23/2013 8:46:39 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Current and former students in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies expressed their support for professor emeritus Val Rust following a demonstration in one of his graduate classes last Thursday.
Student demonstrators alleged that there is a
(Excerpt) Read more at nation.foxnews.com ...
Yo, mentioning Ebonics is rasis.
There, fixed it.
Only grammar Nazis are anti-semantic.
Well played!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
-PJ
I look at it from the perspective of language being a tool to help us convey information. It needs rules, like any standard. But it also must be flexible enough to allow the expression of as many ideas as possible. (Think about Orwell's Newspeak as the opposite of this.)
I don't actually see any fundamental harm if someone says "He yelled at Brian and I," although that does break the rules as you and I understand them, and I certainly would not say it myself and would mark it on a student paper. I think what is happening in your examples is that linguistic competition is stripping out that which is unneeded. Eventually, people may use objective and subjective pronouns interchangeably without anyone caring. But at any moment in history an individual using the King's English lets other people know that he is serious about communicating effectively, so it is important.
But there is always linguistic change. No one says "thou" and "thee" any more. Few know the meaning of the adjective "ruth" anymore, even though it is obvious once we see "ruthless." OTOH, "Google" as a verb is now growing in usage. So as I said change per se doesn't bother me. What bothers me is people whose English is so incompetent that they can't communicate what they wish to communicate. They are the people who most need to get drilled in the rules.
BTW, for language nerds, a really cool new tool is Google Ngrams, which allows the user to trace changes over time in the use of any phrase in books that Google has scanned. For example, you can enter "if i was going," which most of the time is probably a misuse of the subjunctive. This phrase has been getting more popular since the early 1960s, which I think will accord with the belief of many Freepers that this was when civilization began to come apart. :)
In the 50s and 60s I learned all of those grammar learning tools and more. If you look at the history of english language usage in this country you find that proper spelling and grammar were not all that common in the 1700s and early to mid-1800s. It was somewhat freeform in many ways. From about the mid-1800s to the 60s the rules of language, spelling and English in general were brought into formalized education and a larger portion of the population were going through this formalized education system. We now seem to be moving back toward the freeform writing and language era. This is not good. Many of my students cannnot critically read, interpret, or communicate. We’re not approaching idiocracy, we have crossed that line and are moving deeper into it.
I never did learn the ten parts of speech.
Hmmmm....hopefully Economics is a more practical subject than English and garners more respect. Having been an English major (at UC Berkeley, pre-campus riots) there is nothing more ridiculed than an English major. But, we did learn proper forms of speech and writing and learned when it was permissable to break the rules, such as starting a sentence with But.
However, I am dead serious. When do you abandon those forms we learned in the 1950s? I NEVER hear, nor see, “whom” used any more. Nor, “were” in the subjunctive. Nor, “nor”. Nor, the appropriate use of the objective and the subjective personal pronouns.
About 10 years ago I re-entered college to earn a Business Management degree. The course was created for working adult students, and we often were required to work in groups. I appointed myself as the language monitor, pulling together our group projects and making sure that we used the proper forms of end notes, grammar, spelling, margins, etc. Otherwise, we would have never earned our A grades. My group members (all much younger than I) just didn’t care; and neither did some of our professors. ‘Tis a pity!
I’m wondering which reason they are using to get a pass on this. There are three options that I see.
1. I don’t have to because I’m Black.
2. I don’t have to because I’m stupid.
3. I don’t have to because I’ve been to stupid and to dumb to learn what I was supposed to before I got to this point in my education.
I HAVE TO ADD ONE MORE
4. ALL OF THE ABOVE.
So wordophiles, I frequently see this choice of wording, and I'd like to ask "those a you" (<---- I see this a lot, too) to comment... Is it:
"What bothers me is people whose English is so..."
- or -
"What bothers me are people whose English is so..."
and why.
When the Secretary of Education can’t speak proper English, all is lost.
I still use the phrase “To Whom It May Concern” when appropriate, I think about my grammar when composing an estimate, a bid, or an invoice, because I don’t want to look like a dumbass to a customer-that is bad for business.
Don’t mind at all. I had saw it awhile back and found it on flikr.
So do I. As a matter of fact “To Whom it May Concern” is one of the last places you ever see the word “whom”. I’d forgotten about that.
It sho do! I was looking at a reproduction of an early 15th century bible, hand written in English. Unrecognizable as English.
The “+” is reminiscent of a burning cross, and the carat is similar to a KKK hood.
The essence of RACISM! is imparting and enforcing Western (i.e. White Christian) Civilization. The English language is a pillar of Western Civilization therefore teaching and enforcing the rules of the English language is RACIST! I am not being sarcastic.
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