Guess again. Hint: I have an inordinate fondness for parentheses (or “round brackets”, as we like to call them on this side of the pond).
I can’t count well enough to program in LISP.
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I literally don’t know what you mean by that sentence and I’m not pretending.
Is it illustrating that literally can mean figuratively? Are you literally not interested? I have no idea.
ETA: Now if someone says “I literally died laughing!” I do know what they mean for the most part. Either it’s being used for humorous hyperbole (usually the case) or the person just thinks “literally” is an intensifier. Either way I get the gist.
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I don’t understand. Wouldn’t the same objection apply to any spelling? We use letters to awkwardly represent sounds. How is representing one dialect, at an earlier stage, any better than representing our various dialects at the present?
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I recommend you don’t read The Book of Dave.
Two solutions
- paredit (automatically adds closing parens and won’t let you delete them unless you ask really nicely)
- rainbow parens (what it says)
Both available for vim or (shudder) emacs.
(Yes, I’m a vim-lisper. We are a rare and shunned tribe, but history will show us to be right.)
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Ever notice you make the most mistakes in spelling and grammar when responding to posts about it?
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Muphry’s Law.
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Or anything by James Kelman.
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Or worse, you ALWAYS write like that but only noticed because you were extra careful to review because of the subject matter!
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[quote=“Ryuthrowsstuff, post:154, topic:85538, full:true”]Though English isn’t entirely without authorities. There’s no official board, at least not in the US. But the standard is set by various academics publishing, reviewing, and debating just like any other academic field. And multiple organizations publish fixedish standards, usually for specific uses or fields. So it’s softer than French, but hardly a free for all.
[/quote]
OK, I get it, neither of you see it as relevant that English lacks the kind of prescriptive body found in so many other languages.
Does it make much difference to the way ordinary people speak or write? Probably not, so we can all agree on that much.
But really, my only point was that unlike all those other languages, English has never been formally and unanimously codified. Check the list behind the link and tell me otherwise.
In this thread, I’ve been assuming that every typo, misspelling, malapropism, etc. has been completely deliberate.
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Only if the web page doesn’t declare its encoding.
What on earth are you using? WordStar 4.0?
Hah! You are an odd duck, aren’t you?
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I came here to post this. It’s truly the best thing I’ve ever read about grammar.
For those who understandably don’t have the inclination to read the whole mess, here’s a sample, relevant excerpt. (SNOOT is his term for grammar nerd, SWE is Standard Written English.)
A dialect of English is learned and used either
because it’s your native vernacular or because it’s the dialect of a Group by which you wish
(with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted. And although it is the major and arguably
the most important one, SWE is only one dialect. And it is never, or at least hardly ever, anybody’s
only dialect. This is because there are — as you and I both know and yet no one in the Usage Wars
ever seems to mention — situations in which faultlessly correct SWE is clearly not the appropriate dialect.Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTlets tend to have a very hard social time of it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who's wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you've seen them — these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out "How incalculably dreadful!" etc. The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable. But the other children's punishment of the SNOOTIet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion.
They're learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on ... for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn. What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer rapport," which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid's life. This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting dredged up and worked out here; but the stuff is relevant. The point is that the little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class's "slow" kid who can't learn to stop using ain't or bringed. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill — viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of "correctness," the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with Little League coaches and so on. Most of these dialectal adjustments are made below the level of conscious awareness, and our ability to make them seems part psychological and part something else — perhaps something hardwired into the same motherboard as Universal Grammar — and in truth this ability is a far better indicator of a kid's "Verbal I.Q." than test scores or grades, since U.S. English classes do far more to retard dialectal talent than to cultivate it.
And wow, apologies for the bizarre block of text formatting there.
Not laziness but rather a deliberate invocation of a colloquialism for style - at least when I do it. 
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That’s what’s doubly insidious about the entire video.
In the video, we have someone who is capable of switching registers, as evidenced by the fact that they have a job writing for a national newspaper (okay, it is the Guardian, so that last bit is only true for certain values of “write” and “newspaper”), telling people that this sort of thing doesn’t matter.
She is effectively advocating that people cut themselves off from a technique that has allowed her to place herself in an elite position (I’m sure she wouldn’t see it like that, but not only does she have a platform for her ideas, she’s paid to have a platform for her ideas.). What an example of pulling up the drawbridge behind yourself.
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Or Trainspotting.
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I don’t think that I do either!
The same objection does not always apply from my perspective. For example, “Eye doughnt noe” is certainly spelled in a peculiar way, but it preserves more of the sound than “dunno” - the reading of which confronts the reader with the fact that the writer is actually saying something else, when (presumably) intending the same words and meanings. Perhaps because I am a primarily auditory person, it rubs me wrong in a way similar to how eccentric spelling/letter choices might do so for a more visual thinker.
When I think of dialects, this occurs to me more as a matter of word choice and idiom, and not one of enunciation. Perhaps this is different for other people. Having spent my childhood in Massachusetts, I endured many of my family dropping “r” from the ends of words, and I found it bothersome. I pleaded with them to explain why they chose to do so, but was usually laughed off as if I was asking an absurd question. I learned to read so quickly at a young age that perhaps my exposure to written language was more influential than that of spoken language. I never considered my parent’s non-rhoticity to be a dialect, because there did not appear to be a significant difference of meaning. Over the years I have noticed that certain hard consonants at the ends of words tend to be those most often dropped by people in enunciating their speech, such as r, t, and g. What do people have against these letters or sounds? And why are they so reticent to discuss the matter?
I can abide people’s peculiar diction in divers settings and modalities of spoken expression. But I reach a “hard limit” with regards to working these choices into written communications as well. Doing so sets a poor example and creates a more powerful feedback loop where sloppy speech and sloppy writing re-enforce each other. I find such instances counter-intuitive to read and pronounce, which makes reading awkward as I pause to translate corrupted forms of familiar words.
