Pleasure, it is mine.
1 Like
Not all of it – the “all” is in my sentence, not yours.
Ha! Foliage, it is mine.
(Foliage? Yes. I’m going with foliage.)
Oh, I know? I KNOW?? @popobawa4u
Let there be pleasure in the world.
And let it begin with grammar.
Let a man live quietly by himself, let him commit no grammatical sins, let him have few wants. Like an elephant in the forest.
2 Likes
I heard it first in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, but I do recognize that it’s a Buddhist poem.
Let this be a sign, that while @LDoBe may be an outspoken anti-theist, or possibly an igtheist, he’s willing to see the value in certain religious messages.
How about, “I am most able to like that.”?
The Almighty Wikipedia seems to agree with this general term:
In rhetoric
Further information: Parallelism (rhetoric)
Parallelism is often used as a rhetorical device. Examples:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” — Winston Churchill
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” — John F. Kennedy
“…and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” — Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
“We have petitioned and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer. We entreat no more. We petition no more. We defy them.” — William Jennings Bryan
But I’m inclined to agree with you: there should be a special term when it’s used like this.
3 Likes
Not that you can blame them for what we have, though, which is inherited right from the Germanic languages. If anything, my understanding is that the mixing of Old English, Norman French, and some Norse is the main reason what we have is comparatively gender-free; nobody agreed what tables and chairs were supposed to be any more.
Moving on…I try to be liberal in what I accept from others, but I wanted to think of something I could add here. What for some reason or other suggested itself: the very loose use of “grammar” to mean not syntax, but any kind of preferred speech.
We all know that “I could care less” and “the proof is in the pudding” have perfect grammar, right? Saying I literally have your back, figuratively have your back, genetically have your back, and Platonically have your back are grammatically the same. Pronunciations are right out.
I can’t even tell if this complaint is on-topic or not. That’s how far we’ve fallen. In conclusion, you people are all monsters.
6 Likes
4 Likes
I see Grammar Enthusiast, and I can think of is
1 Like
My Gramma had terrible grammar. And she swore a lot to boot. (And so I miss her all the more.)
2 Likes
The words male and female are adjectives. It drives be batty when they are used as nouns.
“I had a conversation with a female in a red shirt.”
Female what? I assume the sentence refers to a female human, but for the love of dog why is it ok to leave the noun out? Perhaps because this is a construction I associate with police, and I find it to be dehumanizing, I wonder if it’s intentionally dehumanizing (as in literally leaving out the word human.)
Or, maybe the missing noun is keep from voicing what they really think of the human being in the red shirt.
“I had a conversation with a female (perp / suspect / piece-of-shit / something-racist-I-don’t-want-to-contemplate-too-hard) in a red shirt.”
Is it too difficult to say “woman” or “man”, or even “person” when gender is immaterial or not obvious?
Do people need to refer to you as a human, in order for you to feel like one? And does feeling like you are recognized as being human help you to be one? Or do you suppose this might be more a matter of performative expectations?
I suspect that police drop the “human” from the label because it gets redundant for them. If they could be bothered to extend legal due process to other kinds of organisms, this would quickly change.
It’s called a comparative correlative, and is a type of parallelism involving a paired construction of two proportional clauses.
5 Likes
Ah, thanks!
The more I know (ha) about that construction – especially it’s name, yay! – the happier I am.
It’s also good to know that such a weird construction is still considered a “sentence.”
2 Likes
Funnily enough, they seem to be pretty common cross-linguistically (the Spanish one is translated from English):
French: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Spanish: Cuanto más conozco a la gente, más quiero a mi perro.
Mandarin: 其出弥远，其知弥少。
German: Je länger man lebt, je weniger weiß man, warum man lebt.
1 Like
“it’s” used instead of “its” is one of my personally most loathed grammar errors, sorry 
Having spent the summer with a teenager in proximity recently, I was introduced to a whole new swath of phrases that are now all of my least favorite new additions to the language:
“That just happened!”
“MY LIFE!”
“I am salty!”
“That’s so ghetto, it’s ratchet! It’s on fleek!”
2 Likes
Agreed, but I at least award them marks for acknowledging the existence of a possessive apostrophe.
1 Like
It’s not the first infringement in this thread either:
I try to ignore these errors when it’s not my job to pick up on them - they’re generally due to autocorrect errors rather than misunderstanding the grammar in any case. My phone screen is tiny, so I’m sure I’ve made the same error plenty of times. Live by the sword, dye by the sword.
4 Likes
