Obligatory posting of an overused grammarian meme
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Your example of formal writing was journal submissions, not for a newspaper. If you meant your definition of “formal” writing to be broad you should have used the a more representative example than “journal submissions”.
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Hence the qualifier, “such as”:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/such%20as
I honestly don’t know how you got that out of what @Melizmatic actually said there. I think she’s arguing for context dictating the type of grammar and language we use, not that precision in academic writing isn’t important…
Or… wait, did you mean to reply to @popobawa4u, because I think they were the first to mention the academic/street language divide…
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I suspect Mona Chalabi has done her own share of language policing in the past. Lots of girls like her do.
Incidentally, I want to go on record as objecting to her use of the word “academic” as a pejorative.
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I think the problem with the video is that she is trying to address the issue obliquely. With her emphasis on rich, educated white people being oppressive through grammar snobbery, yet pointing to fewer vs. less and starting sentences with conjunctions she’s fudging. Point to some racist examples of grammar snobbery if that’s her point. The grocery store express lane signs don’t even come close to that issue.
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Fifteen years ago David Foster Wallace touched on almost all these issues in an essay for Harpers. Ostensibly written as a review of a pile of english usage guidebooks, he discusses the complexities of prescriptivism vs objectivism with detail and nuance that would not fit into a 5 minute video.
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"—used to introduce an example or series of examples "
Hence why I said "If you meant your definition of “formal” writing to be broad you should
have used the a more representative example than “journal submissions”.
What is incorrect?
That’s actually a good example of mis-grammar. Just because “less” is used with continuous quantities doesn’t mean it’s not also appropriate with discrete quantities. People have used “less” this way for a thousand years, and only objected for a few hundred.
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She’s doing it in this video. She’s just being a grammar snob in the opposite direction. She’s still telling people what to do.
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Welcome to the pedantic expressway, destination: the irrelevant tangent of your worst nightmares.
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Not in Scotland, it’s not.
Oh, and then when he comes out of the vault after the apocalypse he drops his proof-reading glasses and breaks them… Sad.
However, if the “Why you shouldn’t be a grammar snob” topic doesn’t lead to pedantry then there is something wrong with the internet.
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We also can probably blame the Scots for “positive anymore”:
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I’d have to dig into the OED but I wouldn’t be surprised. Same with the use of the gender-neutral third-person pronoun as either singular or collective. That use goes back centuries.
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A proposal:
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In any given context, there are rules about ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways to express things. These rules serve not only to aid clarity of meaning, but also to convey tone: academic rigour in a scholarly paper, informality and warmth in colloquial conversation.
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These rules are not and cannot be 100% precise. In particular, they evolve over time, and there will always be those who adhere to the older rules and those who advocate the newer.
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It is rarely your job to correct other people’s grammar. Exceptions:
- You’re a teacher and they’re your student.
- You’re an editor and they’re one of your contributors.
- They’ve explicitly asked you to do so: e.g., they’re a non-native speaker seeking to improve their command of the language.
- You’re deliberately trying to annoy them.
In most other cases, you’re just being a dick. (OK, technically in #4 you’re also being a dick, but at least you’re being a dick on purpose.)
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I still use ‘less’ as a synonym for ‘fewer’. I don’t know if there’s a pattern to my use of the word. Never really gave it much thought, though. So far, no one has corrected me or misunderstood what I meant, so I’ve never bothered to ‘correct’ myself.
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Either way, my point was: formal grammar can be useful. It can codify expression, which may be helpful in certain settings. It can also indicate standing within a community, such as between journalists, researchers, or politicians, so that participants can easily make identity judgements.
But it also can have a social function which emphasizes social or educational stratification. This is frequently removed from communicative function and serves partially to emphasize speaker differences.
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I have lived in Scotland on and off for more than a quarter of a century, and I have literally never heard anyone use that.
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What if, at some point, language becomes incomprehensible because you don’t speak the hyper-localized patois?
Suppose your physician’s medical texts and research papers are written in language that was comprehensible, up to five minutes ago when ‘whole’ suddenly meant ‘more than half’.
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