Why Grammar Matters: A Place To Discuss Matters Of Grammar

[nokat]

I thought this belonged here. We need the occasional laugh.

 

[Leeds]

"Prolly."

Gah, gah, and more gah.  This will never be a real word for me.  (And "gah" isn't a real word either.)

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Leeds

[Bastet]

Twice this week, I have come across - in writing - "unforch" to mean unfortunately.  If it happens a third time, it's been nice knowing everyone, as my head is probably going to explode.

[Leeds]

"Imma."

How and why did this become a thing?

[BlueSkies]

I still recall in school learning to diagram a sentence.

 

Is that a thing anymore? 

[nokat]

To make everyone's eyes twitch, here is a gooder ad.

 

Edited May 6, 2023 by nokat

[nokat]

NM.

Edited May 6, 2023 by nokat

[StatisticalOutlier]

3 hours ago, nokat said:

To make everyone's eyes twitch, here is a gooder ad.

I'm not that troubled by the use of "gooder" in an advertising slogan like this.  What I am troubled about is capitalizing it in the ad. 

[Bastet]

50 minutes ago, StatisticalOutlier said:

I'm not that troubled by the use of "gooder" in an advertising slogan like this.  What I am troubled about is capitalizing it in the ad. 

I thought it was capitalized because it's the name of a line of shoes from that brand, but it turns out I gave them too much credit.

[SoMuchTV]

I think this would fall under grammar.  Please permit me to gripe about authors (and their editors) who don't understand how years work.  For the umpteenth time, I just read about a character who is about to turn 13, described as being at the end of her twelfth year.  No, think about it! You turn one at the end of your first year.  You turn two at the end of your second year.  There's not some magical time jump happening!  And these are best-selling, well-reviewed authors whose work presumably gets well scrutinized before it's published!

Same goes for decades.  Someone who's turning ninety is not entering their ninth decade, they're finishing it!

Thank you.  I'll now try to enjoy the rest of my book.

[nokat]

Be careful how you correct somebody!

 

[Lugal]

On 4/12/2023 at 7:36 AM, nokat said:

A word that has its own useful meaning should not be substituted, such as loose for lose.

This one I can forgive (and not just because I used to make it all the time) because it seems designed to trip us up.

Here's my theory: I think we all remember, even if subconsciously, our First Grade spelling lessons about two vowels next to each other are "long" and one vowel is "short" (despite the fact that English has not had phonemic vowel length for centuries).  Loose and Lose are pronounced the same (with actual long vowels) /luːs/ and /luːz/ with one key difference, the second consonant in Lose is voiced.  So that long vowel in Lose blends into that voiced consonant making it seem longer than the vowel next to the unvoiced consonant in Loose, and that spelling rule kicks in and we end up getting them reversed.

[supposebly]

English has one of the most inconsistent letter-to-sound correspondences in its spelling among the languages that use alphabets for writing. Not only do we get different words spelled identically (bat (animal) vs bat (for hitting things)) but also different words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently (weak vs week), the same sounds corresponding to different letters or letter combinations (tough fast philosophy) or the same letter or letter combination representing different sounds (fear bear).

I always felt sorry for all children having to learn to read and write in English. Only French is worse. 

So why do we spell it moose instead of mose?

Why is lose pronounced like loose but rose like toes?

It rarely makes sense.

[partofme]

37 minutes ago, Lugal said:

Loose and Lose are pronounced the same

Not when I say them they're not.  Loose is more like luce and lose is like luze.

[supposebly]

But that's the last consonant that's different, not the vowel represented by either oo or o.

loose - goose

lose - terrible twos

I think the problem for many is the vowel that gets two different spellings. I wonder if there are dialects where even the consonant at the end is the same for both words.

[GHScorpiosRule]

16 minutes ago, supposebly said:

English has one of the most inconsistent letter-to-sound correspondences in its spelling among the languages that use alphabets for writing. Not only do we get different words spelled identically (bat (animal) vs bat (for hitting things)) but also different words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently (weak vs week), the same sounds corresponding to different letters or letter combinations (tough fast philosophy) or the same letter or letter combination representing different sounds (fear bear).

I always felt sorry for all children having to learn to read and write in English. Only French is worse. 

So why do we spell it moose instead of mose?

Why is lose pronounced like loose but rose like toes?

It rarely makes sense.

HAH! This reminds me of a classic Bollywood movie Chupke Chupke from the early 70s. Wonderful family comedy, where the hero pretends to be a cab driver who  wants to learn English. He asks his brother-in-law (wife’s sister’s hubby who he’s never met):

If “to” is pronounced “too” and “do” is pronounced “doo”, then shouldn’t “go” be pronounced “goo?”😂😂😂

It’s all asked in Hindi, but it’s hilarious! Drives the brother-in-law crazy!

[Lugal]

3 hours ago, supposebly said:

English has one of the most inconsistent letter-to-sound correspondences in its spelling among the languages that use alphabets for writing. Not only do we get different words spelled identically (bat (animal) vs bat (for hitting things)) but also different words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently (weak vs week), the same sounds corresponding to different letters or letter combinations (tough fast philosophy) or the same letter or letter combination representing different sounds (fear bear).

English spelling is something else.  Where everything just comes together to make it more confusing.  Partly it reflects the way it was pronounced centuries ago. Tough was originally pronounced with a sound at the end similar to the /x/ sound in Scottish loch (And tough is still pronounced that way in Scots).  Then you had grammarians who thought spelling should be more like Latin which is how we ended up with the /s/ in island (from insula) even though it was never pronounced there, and island is not derived from insula.  And finally there is the fact that English has something like 12 vowel sounds but only 5 letters to write them with.

Too many cooks I guess you could say.

[Leeds]

15 hours ago, supposebly said:

English has one of the most inconsistent letter-to-sound correspondences in its spelling among the languages that use alphabets for writing. Not only do we get different words spelled identically (bat (animal) vs bat (for hitting things)) but also different words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently (weak vs week), the same sounds corresponding to different letters or letter combinations (tough fast philosophy) or the same letter or letter combination representing different sounds (fear bear).

I always felt sorry for all children having to learn to read and write in English. Only French is worse. 

 

I love the English language, written and spoken, with all its eccentricities and nuance.

French makes much more sense than English.  It's a beautiful language, but missing some of the madness of English.  If you want a language that abides by rules, I can point you in a couple of directions.

[SuprSuprElevated]

2 hours ago, Leeds said:

a language that abides by rules, I can point you in a couple of directions.

I know of one for sure; Pig Latin

[PRgal]

15 minutes ago, SuprSuprElevated said:

I know of one for sure; Pig Latin

I haven’t heard that since I was 12!  

[Browncoat]

I am tired of people confusing "cue" and "queue", and even worse, spelling either one "que", which just makes me say, "What?"

[SoMuchTV]

4 hours ago, Browncoat said:

I am tired of people confusing "cue" and "queue", and even worse, spelling either one "que", which just makes me say, "What?"

Every time I see “barbeque” my mind says “bar-BECK”. 

[Browncoat]

9 minutes ago, SoMuchTV said:

Every time I see “barbeque” my mind says “bar-BECK”. 

I came in second in a spelling bee when I was about nine because of the prevalence of that misspelling!  Well, and because I didn't stop to think about it and blurted out the wrong thing.

[nokat]

3 hours ago, SoMuchTV said:

Every time I see “barbeque” my mind says “bar-BECK”. 

Calling it BBQ doesn't help with the spelling issue. 

[SoMuchTV]

2 minutes ago, nokat said:

Calling it BBQ doesn't help with the spelling issue. 

For sure. And there’s a very popular local place near me that has Bar-B-Que as part of their name. 

[StatisticalOutlier]

On 5/9/2023 at 1:35 PM, supposebly said:

I always felt sorry for all children having to learn to read and write in English.

I feel sorrier for adults having to learn to read and write in English.  I can't even begin to imagine how hard that would be.

[PRgal]

1 hour ago, StatisticalOutlier said:

I feel sorrier for adults having to learn to read and write in English.  I can't even begin to imagine how hard that would be.

This is why I don't want my parents to help with the supplementary learning for my son when it comes to reading/writing.  They learned English by memorization rather than sounding things out like my son is taught at school.  He's also taught that the language can be tricky with letters having different sounds sometimes.  That's how I was taught as well - and I did well, probably better than other aspects of language arts (as they called English in elementary school).  And this was without the help of my parents, who focused on math.  With memorization, he's picking up my parents' accents because they tell him what a word is.  Or letter.  He's still saying ickch rather than aych for the letter h.

[MaryMitch]

I used to work with a woman who had immigrated from China. She actually learned written English in school before she heard English spoken. Her written English was excellent but we could hardly understand her speech!

[isalicat]

Yesterday I was flabbergasted to see a formal notification at a high school signed by the Principal, and "Principal" was spelled:

"Principle"

There is a principle: a rule, tenet or basic truth (a noun)

There is a principal: (a noun) the head of an organization, usually a school (in England I gather they just call them "Head")

and there is a principal: the main or primary (used as an adjective)

This really bugged me because it was in an educational context. Yes, I am a spelling Nazi. 😺

[SoMuchTV]

50 minutes ago, isalicat said:

Yesterday I was flabbergasted to see a formal notification at a high school signed by the Principal, and "Principal" was spelled:

"Principle"

There is a principle: a rule, tenet or basic truth (a noun)

There is a principal: (a noun) the head of an organization, usually a school (in England I gather they just call them "Head")

and there is a principal: the main or primary (used as an adjective)

This really bugged me because it was in an educational context. Yes, I am a spelling Nazi. 😺

Well, that principle was not your pal!

[Browncoat]

Wondering does not equal wandering.

[LexieLily]

I was half-listening to the local news last night when I heard the on-air reporter read the copy that said "this senseless crime made no sense."

Me: That...would be the definition of the word 'senseless', yes.

[Cobalt Stargazer]

4 hours ago, LexieLily said:

Me: That...would be the definition of the word 'senseless', yes.

Show of hands for those who heard that in Peter Dinklage's voice.

[nokat]

[Bastet]

Is making a meme celebrating pedants while eschewing capitalization a statement, or just stupidity?

[nokat]

Or using a phone where capitalizing sentences is a lost art. I still found it funny.

[nokat]

I checked my "Woe Is I" book and I've been using "different than" rather than "different from." Okay, either one before a clause. "Respectability is different than/from it was fifty years ago." So different from is always correct. I admit to always trying to remember which is correct.

[Browncoat]

Is it wrong of me to expect journalists not to say things like "You might have saw something."?  Or, "We seen this other thing."?

[Quof]

In my experience, we can't even expect teachers not to say them. 

[SuprSuprElevated]

Not so much grammar as spelling, but...

[chitowngirl]

[shapeshifter]

Is “on through” likely just a typo here, in which one of the two prepositions should have been deleted?

• “We’re not sure what’s going on through each member of the [******] family’s head…”  
  (Delilah Gray, June 17, 2023,  sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/2792858...).

Or is it a grammatical error? 
Or would we have to get inside the heads of the Rolling Stone author and editors to know for sure? 

Edited June 23, 2023 by shapeshifter

[nokat]

1 hour ago, shapeshifter said:

Is “on through” likely just a typo here, in which one of the two prepositions should have been deleted?

• “We’re not sure what’s going on through each member of the [******] family’s head…”  
  (Delilah Gray, June 17, 2023,  sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/2792858...).

Or is it a grammatical error? 
Or would we have to get inside the heads of the Rolling Stone author and editors to know for sure? 

I've seen it used this way; it is unnecessary but common usage.  I would certainly understand "We're not sure what's going through" each member.... It does seem to be an awkward sentence.

[Mondrianyone]

It's not a grammatical error, more an error in word choice and word order. Normally it would be something like "We're not sure what's going on inside [or within, or some other preposition] the head of each member of the ***** family."

[Browncoat]

Does pronunciation count as grammar?  The constant mispronunciation of "fentanyl" is driving me insane.  It has been in the news a lot lately, and of all the news readers and rehab workers and all the other people talking about it, exactly one has pronounced it correctly.  It is not "fentan-all," which implies a spelling of "fentanol."  That -yl at the end is more of an "ill" sound.

[StatisticalOutlier]

3 hours ago, Browncoat said:

Does pronunciation count as grammar?  The constant mispronunciation of "fentanyl" is driving me insane.  

Thank you thank you thank you.  It's gotten to the point that if a story about it is coming up, I have to gird myself for the assault.  And it's all too common among people at the top of the food chain who should know better.  Have none of these people ever seen the word written down?

But I think it's going to be a "nuclear" "nucular" thing, and we're gonna lose.

[JTMacc99]

22 hours ago, Browncoat said:

It is not "fentan-all," which implies a spelling of "fentanol."  That -yl at the end is more of an "ill" sound.

The VAST majority of us have to rely on hearing somebody who knows what the heck it is to say it correctly. It's not like fentanyl was a word that you would run across in literature or your SAT vocabulary studies when you were growing up.

It one of those things that just showed up in the news one day, and we had to learn about it. If EVERYBODY reporting on it pronounce it incorrectly, it's a safe bet that everybody who heard that news story will also say it that way. 

It never crossed my mind that the 100 times I've heard somebody talking about fentanyl and pronouncing it fentanol was incorrect. And if it were 95 times and 5 times somebody said it correctly, it wouldn't have even registered that they said it differently. 

[Browncoat]

9 minutes ago, JTMacc99 said:

It one of those things that just showed up in the news one day, and we had to learn about it. If EVERYBODY reporting on it pronounce it incorrectly, it's a safe bet that everybody who heard that news story will also say it that way. 

Agreed, but perhaps the news readers and all the other folks who are talking about it should have learned to pronounce it correctly in the first place.  Just because news readers and reporters are not scientists (and are proud of not being scientists!) doesn't mean they shouldn't make an effort.  

 

 

[shapeshifter]

20 hours ago, StatisticalOutlier said:

And it's all too common among people at the top of the food chain who should know better.  Have none of these people ever seen the word written down?

Apparently the overnight meteorologist for Rochester NY had never seen “percolate” written; at the midnight report, he pronounced it as “perculate,” with a long U. His grammar was otherwise flawless.

28 minutes ago, Browncoat said:

Agreed, but perhaps the news readers and all the other folks who are talking about it should have learned to pronounce it correctly in the first place.  Just because news readers and reporters are not scientists (and are proud of not being scientists!) doesn't mean they shouldn't make an effort.  

I happened to tune in again around 3am; he did not use “percolate” again to describe the weather, even though the forecast was the same.  
Kudos to the station’s weather team's shift workers for noticing and fixing it.

Edited July 18, 2023 by shapeshifter

[Bastet]

Beyond not understanding failing to ascertain the correct pronunciation of something previously unfamiliar to you if you're going to report on it, I don't understand looking at the spelling and assuming -yl is an all, rather than ill, sound.  I'd expect that if the spelling was -ol instead of -yl.

Edited July 21, 2023 by Bastet