The positive anymore? Well, on one hand this is just etymology, which is a very difficult problem. I don’t know the specifics, but it’s always possible that the form was brought to the midwest by immigrants, then lost in the homeland. This wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.
On the other hand, people are generally pretty terrible at reporting language use accurately.
Mostly objecting to the strict pedantic position that sees all grammar rules (IE the ones known to the enforcer), clear or not valid or not as enforceable in all situations and on all language used.
So as the title indicates she’s objecting to snobbery. And in the context of how the practice of that snobbery is typically used to speak down to others based on class gender or race.
Which I feel is self evidently true. The guy replying to you online with his “there” to correct a typo. Or exasperatedly blurting out “well actually that’s not what literally means” isnt enforcing grammar or interested in what you’re saying. They’re dismissing or ignoring the substance of what you’ve said on a technicality.
As a relatively recent arrival to the South, I was shocked to hear “All y’all’ll need to come back tomorrow when they open,” slip effortlessly from my mouth a few years ago. And while I think English would benefit from an unambiguous pronoun for second-person singular and second-person plural, but I had to sit down for a moment after that caught me flat footed.
I only really know England through literature, pop culture and the individual English people I’ve known, but my impression is that she may actually be launching a full frontal assault on the Queen’s English, couched in polite-not-really-polite terms. (I want to say passive-aggressive but I don’t think it’s quite that.) Then again, maybe I’m all wet.
“Zombie-rules” is right. They keep getting killed, and keep coming back. I have to hand a copy of Fowler’s Modern English, first published in 1926:
On split infinitives:
We maintain, however, that a real [split infinitive], though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality.
On starting a sentence with “and”:
That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with and is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives example ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.
A valid point. I’m a member of a web forum where criticism of typos and/or grammar is prohibited for just that reason. However, there are many instances where a poster’s writing is, if not completely incomprehensible, is nearly so due to bad grammar. A prime example being people who use little if any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Huge blocks of infrequently punctuated text are sort of a hallmark of a disorganized rant. Even in an “informal” web forum, non-standard grammar can make clear communication more difficult.
This is what I see at the top of the video: "Grammar snobs are patronising, pretentious and just plain wrong – Mona Chalabi | Comment is Free"
Please allow me to point out the missing comma that should follow the word “pretentious” in that sentence (which also frustratingly lacks a period).
While it is clearly wrong and wrong-headed not to use the Oxford comma, I would never judge the perpetrator.
Apologies, I was unclear. I did not mean that I would silence or grammar-splain to a person if they didn’t meet my arbitrary guidelines. The guidelines are for me.
Exception, if I was teaching or in a employment capacity, I would probably discuss editing for grammar, not to silence their speech, but to clarify it and prevent others from taking issue with it.
The irony being that: if the listener had the opportunity and / or impetus to correct ambiguous grammar, then they could have just as easily gotten clarification through discourse.
Not necessarily. If one has to constantly seek “clarification through discourse” rather than just gettting everyone to use clear language and reasonably standard grammar in the first place then one certainly isn’t getting that information “just as easily”.
This is actually a good point. We create rules in order to create understanding. There are cases where the meaning is ambiguous (“Let’s eat Grandma”), but there are also cases where it isn’t. The problem is predicting how a given person will read a sentence. Rules ensure that we all read the sentence the same way.
Also, to be pedantic, Chalabi is really talking about usage, not grammar. Whether we use “literally” to mean “figuratively” isn’t a grammar issue.
I’m willing to bet even with some grammar enforcement those people wouldn’t be very clear. Though mechanical concerns of grammar exasperate it. But that’s less an issue of language use than (most often) one of tech literacy. Those people don’t speak that way.
But it does underline something important. These are rules for written language. Not for spoken language. They’re imposed after the fact in an attempt to build on, change, or represent a language that primarily lives and developed as a spoken language.
A lot of the point of conflict (preposition and where they go!) arise from the difference between spoken and written language. And many of the rules are obtuse because they’re essentially arbitrary. A lot of English’s weirder rules were the results of trying to latinize, or impose Greek grammar onto what is fundamentally a Germanic language. In a given case written Formal English might get a Latin structure one rule, where spoken English stuck with a Germanic one. Because intellectuals at the time thought of Greek and Latin as better, in terms of class and importance.
Urrgh, punctuation. That really is a red-buttton issue for me. Defenders of its absence typically fall into two camps.
“I can read English just as well whether it’s punctuated or not.” Bully for you. I can’t. Lack of punctuation halves my reading speed. English is also more-or-less comprehensible whn ll th vwls r rmvd, but that doesn’t make reading it a pleasant or easy experience.
“I don’t have time to punctuate. My thoughts come out too fast.” (Genuine excuse offered by someone infamous for their word-salad posts on an internal discussion board.) So what you’re saying is that the time it would take you to punctuate properly is worth more than all the extra time incurred by everyone who has to try and parse your unbroken stream of text.
