Why you shouldn't be a grammar snob

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Which was not an issue I intended to get into when I pointed out that English has never been truly, formally codified like many other languages have. Everyone agrees that speakers of French, German, etc. don’t always follow their own language’s universal standard, but the only point was that they have universal standards, even if not everyone follows them perfectly (which is an impossibly high bar, really).

It really was as simple as: English isn’t standardized even though most users (and most people considered “authorities”) agree on most things, and there’s no single authority to settle disputes. It’s easy enough to see in our own exchange, as we are using different spelling systems and yet we’re both correct.

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This video just literally kills me.
(As does Boing-Boing’s decision to remap CTRL-F, preventing me from identifying all instances of “literally” on this page)

Also:

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Catchy, ain’t it?

*lolz

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Well RIP to you, dude.

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Last time I visited my grandmother (98yo) I quizzed her on Yucatecan Spanish slang – I had found a website with a whole big list. She grew up there, mostly, but has not lived there in over 60 years. She got every single one right – knew them all. I had also read on there that sometimes, in that area, they use the Spanish word “buscar” (to search for) when they really should be using “encontrar” (to find). My uncle said nope, no way, that is not true. When we asked her what “lo encontré” (I found it) means she said “I found it”. And when we asked her what “lo busqué” (I searched for it) meant she paused and said “I looked for it … Or I found it – depends on the context”. My uncle couldn’t believe it. Well, I later asked my cousin who lives there what the deal is and he explained that in Mayan, which still has a strong presence there, there is only one word for “search for” and “find”. So many of those who grew up speaking Mayan primarily confuse the two Spanish words. And you do here people use both but one usage is not proper usage. My cousin was definitely more uptight about it than my grandmother. At 98 she figures it’s all out of her hands I suppose!

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The canonical reply to “who gives a fuck about the Oxford comma” is, or should be “My parents, Ayn Rand, and God”, though I don’t know if Ayn Rand actually cared.

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Some decades ago, when I started working at Bell Labs, the company required new hires to take a business writing course (along with various baseline technical courses, some of which I could have taught.) Best course ever!

One of the first rules was “Stop writing like academics. Write like journalists. If the subject’s complicated, your writing should be simple and direct. Put the important stuff up front so your reader can tell whether to read the rest or not.” Some types of academic writing are entirely wrong for most audiences (probably even the academic audiences they’re written for.)

OTOH, while I’d expect computer programmers to be grammatically flawless, at least in their native language, apparently not everybody’s brains instinctively generate “fingernails screeching on a blackboard” sounds as a compiler error for natural language processing. I still don’t comprehend it, but I’ve learned to accept it.

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Man, I love Boing Boing!

Fuck you, Oxford comma!

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four grams is not five grams etcetera

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I’m mildly amused that this is coming from The Guardian, a paper with a history of being mocked for it’s spelling mistakes.

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irony.jpg640×640 82.5 KB

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But it is, especially when english isn’t your first language.
Even more relevant on the internet, where that’s quite often the case.

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Pressing Ctrl-F twice works as it should, at least on Chromium.

EDIT: so far only 6 instances of ‘literally’. I expected more, given the topic.

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I feel the exact same way. Because I take shits when I want to. Places that don’t offer bathrooms are absurd.

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D’you know, I think a huge problem with this is English. English, oddly for an Indo-European language, is basically isolating in its grammar. Of course, what with the waterbed hypothesis this doesn’t mean it has less grammar, it just means that a lot of it is in context, subtle, and sort of… analog?

Let me explain: My native language (as well as one or two others I’ve some passing proficiency in) is heavily inflected. It has loads of very strict grammar rules and if you ignore them you don’t sound uneducated, you are simply very difficult to comprehend. Cases, agreements, and such are very important.

This means that there’s really no such thing as a grammar snob, though orthography does attract the errant busybody from time to time.

Now, English has rules but these are socially determined (English has no standards body which is by no means usual), and they are fuzzy and context sensitive and as a result not using them doesn’t just lead to gibberish but instead degrades the expressiveness of language smoothly (analog, y’see) more and more the fewer rules get used.

Now, I’m a foreigner and English is, evidently, my second language and this no doubt has a severe influence on what the Germans call Sprachgefühl: my sense of the language may not be the sense a native speaker has. That said, I find the stilted ungrammatical English that the grammar snob decries to be, ah, poorer in meaning? Less expressive.

Certainly, there are rules that are arbitrary and noisome to the linguaphile: the splitting of infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions are two standard examples. Not all rules improve language. But some are of crucial importance. The semantic drift that destroyed the word ‘awesome’ for instance, and reduced to a synonym for ‘good,’ has left us with no word meaning ‘awesome’ as it once stood. That, I think, is an unmitigated ill.

But, ultimately, I think that grammar snobbery isn’t about that. In some instances it is about exerting social power and using correct (or ‘correct’) grammar as a shibboleth to distinguish class, certainly. But in a lot it is simply about an aesthetic sense of language: certain ungrammatical forms, certain misuses of words, certain ways of crafting a sentence simply strike people as ugly. I find bureaucratic English almost painfully hideous, for instance, and I’ve a similarly visceral reaction to your average YouTube comment.

I think language should be beautiful and saying nothing as it gets mutilated just so you can expiate the guilt of your own privilege to no actual benefit of the underprivileged strikes me as selfish myopia.

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Actually literally.

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Wait is that how you spell dumbening?

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You may chose to interpret ‘literally’ as ‘I am that sure I would put it in writing’. This is perhaps the the sense behind its use, though I have never heard this expressed. If it is ‘Elizabethan’, then Elizabeth II is still on the throne, so that’s OK.

Compare and contrast, as they used to say in exam papers, with “Hopefully they will…” which is taken as meaning “I hope they will…” rather than “They will do it, and furthermore they will do it filled with hope”.

The modern use of ‘irony’ I can accept because I don’t know of another good word that packs so much meaning. I have heard it said that ‘Isn’t it ironic when it rains on your wedding day?’ is only valid if you are marrying the God of Clement Weather. But that’s a bit silly. You could imagine Nemesis, or some fancied Spirit of Ornery Things doing you a bad turn, rather than a real person such as the God of Clement Weather, yeah, right.

I has the ‘fewer not less people’ given to me last night in a bar. ‘Less’ is better because it has the same meaning in the sentence and it has less syllables. Yes, I know what I just did, thank you.

I have my limits, though. I cannot read things like “your wrong” without feeling that I have just tripped over the edge of a paving slab.

“Rules are meant for the guidance of wise men, and the obedience of fools” - Douglas Bader.

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Surely you mean “Literally-literally. Literally-literally, literally-literally.”?

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Because it belongs in the same group as “hers”, “his” and “theirs” (hang on, sudden doubt, is that last one right? Yes, “their’s” is not a thing.). For whatever reason, we don’t put a grocers’ apostrophe in those three, so we don’t put it in “its” either.

Edit: “ours” and “yours”, too, of course.

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