grammar

To the political analyst who discussed Obama’s campaign this morning on NPR: I’m sorry to say that you lost whatever shred of credibility you had the moment you said that something was furmaliar. Nothing is furmaliar. Lots and lots of things are familiar. There is no r in the middle of that word. It’s not an accent. It’s not “the way we say it here”. It’s not anything other than wrong. You disagree. I know you do. So, Mr. Political Analyst, imagine this: If you and I were engaged in a conversation about Obama and I pronounced his name Orbama, would you correct me? I think you would. If I said, “Oh, that’s just the way I say it,” what would you think? Good day, sir.

I got a new insulated coffee mug a few days ago. There was a little slip of paper inside it with “instructions”. This is a coffee mug. It’s very nice and this morning it did an excellent job of keeping my coffee hot while I drove to the office. Here’s a bit of the writing which was printed on the card:

There is also a prominent reference to “the drinking hole” and a caution to keep it away from children when filled with hot liquid. It’s not really clear whether they are warning me about children who may be filled with hot liquid or if they are warning me about hot liquid in the mug.
I feel compelled to tell you that (a) I cannot guarantee that everything I put in this mug will be delicious, (b) I don’t usually make my coffee using a fire, (c) I don’t really consider coffee “food”, (d) there’s no way to “screw the lid tight” because it just pops on and off, and (e) I hardly ever find myself in a field these days. Oh, those wacky Chinese insulated coffee mug manufacturer instruction translators! They just kill me.

Recently I saw a commercial for Sylvan Learning Centers. This is a company that is selling products to help your children do well in school. The ad showed a teenage girl gabbing on the telephone. The voice-over said, “Sally sure can talk fast. We can help her read fast,” or something like that. Apparently grammar is not one of the subjects that Sylvan covers. How does a company that claims to help educate children manage to let a commercial with such an egregious grammatical error get all the way to the television screen? There must not be any English majors working in the marketing department over at ol’ Sylvan.

Fast is an adjective. You don’t do things “fast”. You do things quickly.

Last night I writhed in agony while watching the 11 o’clock news. The local NBC affiliate was running a story about the Sacramento disc jockeys that were fired recently. (The radio personalities had sponsored a contest which led to the death of a woman.) Behind the anchorman the screen displayed DJ’s Fired. I’m sure that employees at my office are sick of hearing me say, “An apostrophe is never used to indicate a plural.” How can NBC not have someone to check what’s going to be printed in big block letters on screen? Why, NBC? Why?

“The ‘plural apostrophe’ (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, ‘Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.’

Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell ‘dogs’, you’re illiterate.”

The “plural apostrophe” (e.g. no dog’s allowed, sofa’s for sale, UGH) is running rampant these days, and it’s not just my imagination. It’s so wrong that I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone could make such a mistake. I hate it when people dismiss it with, “Oh, not everyone’s a grammar freak.”

Grammar? You think it’s an issue of grammar? I hate to break it to you, but if you can’t spell “dogs,” you’re illiterate.

via strange brew

Someone commented on my mini-rant that the words “itch” and “impact” are not verbs. The reader seemed to suggest that the appearance of these words in “a dictionary” as verbs is a viable argument for them being accepted that way. My reply:

There are many words in “the dictionary” that are not words. You cannot use the fact that hundreds of thousands of people use a word incorrectly as evidence that they are using it correctly. This is a tautology. It is tantamount to saying, “There are hundreds of thousands of murders each year, so we should just accept murder as law.”

Yes, impact likely appears in dictionaries as a verb today. (It didn’t always.) And using it as a verb only displays to those of us with a respect for language and law that a person has a limited vocabulary. One last thing: An itch is a thing. To scratch an itch is to do something. To itch an itch makes no sense. Again, it just shows that the person saying it has a very poor vocabulary (or, alternatively, is extremely lazy … splitting hairs, I know …). It is true that there are a slew of words which are appropriately nouns and verbs. Hammer is a good example. You hammer a nail with a hammer. A knock is another good one. When you knock on a door you are producing a knock. Itch and scratch are not the same, though. You cannot itch an itch. A person saying that sounds about as intelligent as a person saying, “I’m hungry. Let’s go food,” or, “Can you car me to the airport?” So. While I have to admit that you are correct - itch and impact appear in the dictionary as verbs - the point of the entry on which you commented is that no self-respecting writer (or speaker) of English would use them as such.

Ending Lists

Why does it seem that nobody knows the correct way to end a comma-delimited list? Did they stop teaching this after 1980 or something? Let’s review, shall we?

First let me explain the philosophy upon which the correct use of “commas in lists” rests. It’s another topic that I realize they almost definitely stopped teaching after 1980: mathematics. Take the following expression:

1 + 1 x 3

If you studied mathematics in school you should remember the algorithm that is used to resolve it. There are no special characters in this expression, so we evaluate any division or multiplication first, then addition and subtraction, and we go from left to right. So this expression - in your mind - looks like this:

1 + whatever I get when I multiply 1 and 3

The expression evaluates to 4, of course. To make the expression easier, you could add brackets or parentheses.

1 + (1 x 3)

That equals 4 as well, and is, in fact, logically equivalent to the first expression.

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“Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools … for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.”

link via the always delightful Follow Me Here

I just took a verbalIQ test that I found at leuschke.org. My overall score was a depressingly low 87%.
I did well in the Reading Comprehension and Anagrams sections. I had never seen an Anagrams section on a standardized test. It’s an interesting concept, although I think it’s really just another form of a vocabulary test and not really useful in gauging how well a person might solve anagrams. How often are you presented with anagram problems at work? In life? Unless I’m playing a game I don’t think I’m ever faced with one. And does anyone like the Analogy sections on standardized tests? They’re terrible. Even when I see the quote-unquote correct answers I am usually aggravated by what the test designers have considered analogically equivalent.
If you want to see them, the full results of my test are located in the extended text of this entry. How did you do?
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I laughed out loud at #4 on the list of Top Ten Ways to Torture Your Professor:

Hold fast, to your belief that, liberal and seemingly-random, use of, commas in term papers, makes you look, real smart.

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

This is one of my favorite rules. Well. Not really. But I think every high school student should be required to read (and memorize) William Strunk, Jr.’s Elements of Style. I don’t know how you could have possibly made it through high school and college without ever buying this book. If you did, though, don’t worry. The folks at bartleby.com have made the full text available on line. Don’t write anything - ever - without checking Strunk’s rules first. Of course … that’s just my opinion. <grin>

I really get aggravated when people try to argue their way out of what are really meaningless mistakes by saying that the English language is flexible and there aren’t any hard and fast rules and who cares if they’ve spelled something incorrectly because it doesn’t matter as long as you get it and blah, blah, blah.

Please. Just admit that you didn’t know how to use the word or spell it or what it meant and remember the next time. Don’t give me crap for trying to help you improve your understanding of what has become the de facto “language of the net” somehow.

Or maybe it’s just that I feel like such a failure in everything else in my life that I subconsciously take solace in having a better grasp of the language than most.

Instead of reading the boring schlep I’ve been posting here lately, why don’t you go read about some Common Errors in English?

Like all good links, this one was sproinked from z …

A quick lesson on it’s versus its:

• it’s is a contraction of the two words “it” and “is”; if what you are trying to do is say, “it is,” and you want to do it without using that pesky middle i, use it’s
• its is possessive; try to think about how neurotic you would be if you couldn’t have an apostrophe but people were always trying to give you one; its is what to write when you’re talking about something which is owned by something else

“Look! It’s raining!”
That car! Look at its paint job!
This blog … it’s making me sick!
His most recent post? It’s awful!
It’s the economy, stupid!
My computer? Its motherboard is screwed.

Hopefully … someone will care. It’s my goal …

I am also reminded that there is a reason why I don’t like reading run-on sentences. Why do I continue to write them? Control … I must learn control.