My Pet Peeve in Internet Forums...

[Mark]

Posessive nouns ALWAYS HAVE APOSTROPHES.

It's an interesting statement that you make above. Are you sure of its correctness. English is hard, isn't it?

"It" is a pronoun, not a noun.

Yes, I thought someone would call me on that. However, it's and exception to the rule for posessives.

[lgb&dtuba]

It's an interesting statement that you make above. Are you sure of its correctness. English is hard, isn't it?

"It" is a pronoun, not a noun.

Yes, I thought someone would call me on that. However, it's and exception to the rule for posessives.

His exception duly noted.

[Mark]

..."hoisted on his own petard".

Ouch! That must hurt even more worser than being hoisted by his own petard. (Reference viewtopic.php?p=179889&highlight=#179889)

[windshieldbug]

http://www.lyricsondemand.com/w/waynesi ... yrics.html

Wayne Sid Lyrics

Its Impossible Lyrics

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE
It's impossible tell the sun to leave the sky,
it's just impossible.

[Allen]

What a great topic for rants and trotting out pet peeves!

Rick Denney had given us an excellent description of present-day linguistic issues. I'd like to add a bit to it.

English is an unusual language in that Latin-favoring academics and intellectuals tried to impose Latin grammar onto English back in the eighteenth century, and we are still suffering from the mess they created. In Latin, syntactical relations are indicated by word morphology (that is, a word's role in a sentence is shown by the ending on the word). In English, syntatical relations in a sentence are indicated by word order ("Dog bites man." and "Man bites dog." are quite different). The Latinists thought that Latin grammar was universal truth, and should be applied to English. No other language has had to suffer the indignity of having the rules of an entirely different language imposed upon it. [The modern scholarly view is that the grammar of a language is something that should be discovered by actually studying the language as it is spoken and written.]

Since English had no need of different word forms to indicate grammatical meaning, by the early eighteenth century, the word "whom" had been lost, and "who" was used for all instances of the interrogative pronoun. The Latinists would have none of that. They re-introduced whom, and got people to believe in its usage as a bit of a litmus test for one's culture level.

There's yet more, such as the distinction between "It is I." versus "It's me." I generally say, "It's me," because I think the rule of "nominative case after copulative verb" is nonsense. However, I admit to sometimes using "whom," as that makes people think I'm not entirely uneducated.

Here's my criterion for grammatical writing: Is it easy to read, and can I understand the writer without having to ponder? Of course elements of style enter into it, such as making paragraphs.

Cheers,
Allen

[TubaRay]

[
Dam, your/you're/yewer good. Gooder then thee wrest.
Dawk

Whale, Dawk, ah guess u no that Rick is the goodest their e-yes.

[TubaRay]

Here's my criterion for grammatical writing: Is it easy to read, and can I understand the writer without having to ponder? Of course elements of style enter into it, such as making paragraphs.
Cheers,
Allen

I believe this is a reasonable standard for TubeNet writing.

[Chuck(G)]

Since English had no need of different word forms to indicate grammatical meaning, by the early eighteenth century, the word "whom" had been lost, and "who" was used for all instances of the interrogative pronoun.

Perhaps "whom" was lost as the interrogative pronoun, but it was far from lost as the object of a preposition. It'll be a cold day in Hades when you'll catch me quoting Donne as "Send not to ask for who the bell tolls".

Even so, "whom" is a special case with plenty of attendant oddities. For example, the KJV has "He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? (Matthew 16:15). And "whomsoever" is often used as a subject.

The Latinists invented such interesting conventions as "never end a sentence with a preposition"--a wonderful non-rule up with which I will not put (to quote Sir Winston). But then, neither did the Romans who walked the via Appia in ancient times speak the formal Latin of Cicero.

If one is going to violate conventions of accepted grammar, one should at least be aware of them. Like it or not, when one speaks and writes, one is frequently judged by the grace and eloquence of one's expression.

else me Not gots nuffin moar to say, yo.

[Allen]

Since English had no need of different word forms to indicate grammatical meaning, by the early eighteenth century, the word "whom" had been lost, and "who" was used for all instances of the interrogative pronoun.

Perhaps "whom" was lost as the interrogative pronoun, but it was far from lost as the object of a preposition. It'll be a cold day in Hades when you'll catch me quoting Donne as "Send not to ask for who the bell tolls".

Even so, "whom" is a special case with plenty of attendant oddities. For example, the KJV has "He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? (Matthew 16:15). And "whomsoever" is often used as a subject.
...

Your examples are from the early seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, "whom" was gone, gone, gone, until the Latinists exhumed its corpse. Of course, when quoting earlier works that used whom and its variations, one should quote them accurately. There are those who think that any old stuff should be translated into modern dialect, but I don't think that either one of us would have anything to do with such nonsense.

I think I'd better stop now. It's too tempting to rant on about those pompous scholars that have muddied the teaching of good English. There's enough bad usage of our language without such scholarly "help."

Cheers,
Allen

[LoyalTubist]

I guess I am tired of grading papers. I don't think that reading posts in a forum should be anything like reading my students' essays. My students are learning English as a foreign language and want to do well in a school in which English is the only language of instruction--I am the teacher they take if they are deficient in an area of speaking or writing English. Some of my students are better spellers than what I have seen in some of the forums. It should be pointed out that it doesn't matter to me if British, American, or Australian spellings are used (yes, Australian English is different from British English), so long as they stay consistent and write so we all can understand. I am the only American on the faculty of a school that also has 1 British, 1 Singaporean, 2 Indian, and 4 Australian members.

[Chuck(G)]

Your examples are from the early seventeenth century. By the early eighteenth century, "whom" was gone, gone, gone, until the Latinists exhumed its corpse.

How many counter-examples would it take from eighteenth century literature to disprove your statement? I can find an ample number of passages containing "whom" in Gibbon, Hume, Walpole and a host of others. Are you arguing that "whom" had vanished from spoken vernacular? I suppose I could believe that.

But "whom" never really departed the language.

[Allen]

OK, I exaggerated. I should have said that "whom" was moribund, not dead. There was definitely a (undeserved, I think) rescue operation for that word.

My interest in linguistics has been long dormant. It's been interesting thinking about the topic again.

Cheers,
Allen

[tubeast]

Maybe I as a non-native speaker am in a position to post on this subject. It´s pretty reassuring to have reliable guidelines as to what exactly is meant by a sentence I read.

When I learned about the english use of apostrophes I felt proud when I got used to the possessive use of ´s in English. Simply because in our language it´s just the other way around: Meines Vaters Schuhe (My father´s shoes).

The disturbing thing is, that over the last couple of years we have started to adapt the ´s to express possession.
"Michael´s Schuhladen" is WRONG German for Michael´s shoe shop, but turns out to be very common nowadays.

To those of you that advocate loose standards of grammar and pronunciation on the internet, here´s a little riddle for you:
What´s the difference between

"Das macht die Gewohnheit"
and
"Die Macht der Gewohnheit" ?

[lgb&dtuba]

Maybe I as a non-native speaker am in a position to post on this subject.

If the native English speakers here posted with grammar and spelling as good as yours, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

[LoyalTubist]

The problem is when my remedial English-as-a-foreign-language students, who hail from Vietnam, are easier to understand than some of the native English speakers in this forum.