Grammar and spelling
While I do not always write grammatically correct and have the occasional spelling error or typo, it still bothers me to see it in articles and posts. The question is this: does it bother others, and if so, does it lower your opinion of the author and the subject at hand?
ME TOO!
"....does it bother others, and if so, does it lower your opinion....."
YES and YES!
If the author can't take the time to correct his spelling and grammar, he shows little respect for the language in which he writes....and consequently, the intended reader.
That's why The Good Lord gave you all me, to be your editor.
Wasn't it Thomas Wolfe who set out to write the most words of any author in history?
Stormi wrote: "I think I became aware of the similarity while reading Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel" years ago. Each word seems to express a specific emotion which no similar word would quite have expressed in the same way."
rection. For instance, the use of the nominative
where the objective should be used, as in, "You
have to listen to Ed and I." I don't so much mind
honestly ignorant bad grammar, as in "Ain't got none." But ignorance masquerading as erudition is irritating.
from a mistaken notion that Objective case is al-
ways bad, and Nominative is always good, from
years of being corrected for using the objective
pronouns where they don't properly go; the person has gotten the notion that the pronoun
should always be used in the nominative case.
(So maybe parents and teachers were not to
blame for correcting him for saying "me and so-
and-so" as the subject of the sentence; but the
person has gotten the mistaken notion that
nominative is always correct. So maybe I should
not have said "overcorrection" so much as the
person mistakenly applying the rule. Or "over-
correcting" himself).
However, English orthography is a bitch. The spellchecker is a godsend.
Regarding grammar, as English evolved, we shed many rules, but kept many archaisms that we accept without question.
1 hand 2 hands
1 man 2 men
1 deer 2 deer
1 ox 2 oxen
Writing an email, I said, "I will recommend to my wife that she call you." Then I stopped. The grammar is correct, but will sound wrong to anyone who does not understand the grammar.
Far more common - and annoying to me -is the use of the prepositional object as the subject of a sentence. "A group of men are going...." However, it is so common that it would not affect my opinion of a post placed here.
Also, online, even I write off-the-cuff. I do read and edit my posts within the 15-minute window. And I was criticized once for changing my statements while that other person was replying. But, mostly, online writing is informal. Because we all make mistakes, I am bothered only by the most egregious cases.
(I insist to my wife at tax time that the W-2s prove that I am a professional writer. Obviously, I care about grammar, spelling, and syntax. There was one time, my boss made me undo several pages back to the original (wrong) state. I did it. But I came home angry. I took down a dictionary and showed my wife the definition of hack:
"a writer who works for pay without regard for personal or professional standards." She smiled and said, "That's OK, honey, most writers have to quit their jobs to become hacks." )
There's a word for that, using less to get more. Streamlining comes close but I think there's a better world, I mean word.
In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Ayn Rand explains that the function of concepts is to allow us to subsume an unlimited number of examples under one word. Perhaps that is your "less is more" intention.
I caution against Orwellian Newspeak in which fewer and fewer words are employed. English enjoys a vocabulary of almost 1 million words. We cite Aristotle with gay abandon, but his world was described in about 50,000 words.
The Greeks did invent new words for new ideas. "Cosmopolitan" - a citizen of the world, not just one city - is an example. But it is put together from smaller words in their own language.
In modern English, if you let your kids camp out in the back yard, they might build a wigwam behind the verandah, two "Indian" words that have enriched our language and given us more power of thought.
The primary use of language is to enable thinking. Communication with others is a secondary use.
Well, with that (preceding) paragraph, I have managed to detach from the original intent of your comment. I think.
I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say "Orwellian Newspeak".
The enormous number of words (vocabulary) in the English language is due to the constant influx of new cultures and languages into that small island.
I had three years of Latin in high school---figured it would help when I studied anatomy and medicine in Vet School, and was a member of Junior Classical League. It was there I became enamored of word derivation. For example, the word enthralled is derived from I believe Old Norse, "thrall" meaning slave.
Another interesting result of the study of language is its aid in the determination of migration/invasion patterns of the various peoples of the world. Nowadays of course DNA studies are also being used.
Do you know what the word is that I am referring to? Streamline is close, but is not the word I'm looking for.
of "wend" as in "Wend your ways."
word meaning "go". Just to make sure, I looked
it up in The American Heritage Dictionary. (And,
although I do not remember that the Dictionary
listed it as "archaic", it is pretty obvious.)
Wend your way, or mend your ways...
"Yep, Putin released these silly code names just so he (and the rest of the world) could watch the American Liberal Chicken Littles get their panties all in a wad! Am I right?"
Had to add that I likened this story to "The Russkies stole outdated malware from the Ukes in order to penetrate the electric grid in Vermont."
And I still wasn't through. Quoted Mark Twain:
"...the Syrian camel choked on the gentlest fact I ever laid before a trusting public."
As for the history of thought as expressed in language etymologies, it would be helpful to look past the Indo-Europeans, certainly beyond English and Latin, though knowing Latin is extremely helpful. (I am sure that your is far superior to mine.) I grew up with Hungarian, a non-Indo-European language. I also had two semesters of Japanese in college. I do agree with your theory about tense and time. In Turkish, all of the verbs are regular, except the verb "to be." You may be on to something there...
Still, doesn't seem to be word I'm looking for. Maybe I'm being delusional, maybe there isn't such a word. Maybe someone needs to create one!
(Be first on your block to use these words, amaze your friends!!!)
:-)
You don't find that interesting?
I assume that Seer’s “streamlining” is a call to avoid wordiness. Consider these: concise, succinct, brief, terse. Review Shakespeare’s take on the subject in Hamlet, Act II, Scene II. Polonius rambles on and on while including the brilliant nugget, “brevity is the soul of wit,” in his blather. The Queen retorts, “More matter with less art.”
Epistemological concept formation is not a “less is more” device for trimming excess verbiage. It is as expressed, a way to subsume huge quantities of referents via intellectual shorthand; integrating them by their common characteristics and differentiating them by their differences. For example, a “vehicle” integrates the concept of carrying passengers from one place to another. They are differentiated by their form and propulsion: car, bus, wagon, hovercraft.
Orwellian Newspeak is an attempt to limit concept formation and the subtlety of thought by replacing vocabulary with a primitive structure. All very bad things become double-plus ungood, losing all the shades of meaning among: dreadful, awful, terrible, horrendous, catastrophic, atrocious, ghastly, unbearable.
Note MikeMarotta’s example, “I will recommend to my wife that she call you.” Compare with, “I’ll make sure that she calls you.” Those who use good grammar may recognize both as correct, however, only the hard-core grammar nerd would express the difference as a subjunctive (or even jussive) mood vs. indicative mood. “Look up mood!” (That’s an example of imperative mood.)
I strongly recommend a course from “The Great Courses” available as either CD or DVD: The Story of Human Language by Prof. John McWhorter. It’s 36 half-hour lectures, and he is very informative, personable, and entertaining—everything you’d like in an educator. The CD version is great for daily car commuting.
Your examples of wigwam and verandah are two different “Indians.” The first word is North American Algonquian, the second has Indo-European roots from the Indian subcontinent. Veranda goes with shampoo, which is the imperative form of the Hindi champna (to press or knead).
Wigwam is closer kin to the Plains Indian teepee, as in the joke:
Doctor, I’m having recurring dreams where first I’m a teepee, then I’m a wigwam, then I’m a teepee, then I’m a wigwam. The doctor says to me, “You’re two tents!” (too tense)
Are you a student of dialectics, by any chance?
By the way, Mike can sometimes slyly slip in a few tongue-in-cheek conceptual formations. You gotta watch out for that.
A traveling salesman who was a seafood lover finally got sent to Boston. Deplaning at Logan, he got his bags and made for the taxi stands. He jumped in the first one. "Do you know where I can get scrod in Boston?" he asked. The driver turned around and said, "Mister, I've been asked that question a million times, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive."
I was quite familiar with your appropriate scrod joke from when I lived in Boston. Back then, if the cab driver drove to the noun instead of the pluperfect subjunctive, it would have been to Anthony’s Pier Four (to which I had been several times) or Jimmy’s Harborside (I had one dinner there.) Anthony’s was torn down and replaced by condos, and Jimmy’s is now Legal Harborside. That’s okay—the only seafood I eat is saltwater taffy. Only ten years to go for the bicentennial birthday of Durgin-Park restaurant (in Boston). I’ve been making their Baked Indian Pudding at least once a year for the past 40 years. I use their recipe published in Collier's Magazine many decades earlier.
Neither the people of India nor Native Americans settled in England to bring those words in.
That is, the emotion was there, human awareness developed later.
So it could be "A parliament of owls is going to vote..."
I insisted that regardless of what their friends did, whenever they communicated electronically, they must always use proper English, full sentences, correct spelling and punctuation.
Years later, they actually thanked me for insisting on these things when they were young, citing their observations that many of their friends and others seem "dumbed down" and even incapable of formulating coherent messages when communicating electronically.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting post that allowed me the opprtunity to wdml (walk down memory lane).
CLIENT IN NY AGREED TO DEAL STOP AWAITS YOUR APPROVAL STOP
Di-di-dit da-da-dah Di-di-dit. SOS Save Our Ship.
get in a hurry, am allowed only a limited time on
these library computers. As to grammar, I do
occasionally split an infinitive, for the purpose of
clarity. (And use "ain't" for emphasis, as in "Ain't
it the truth!")
Connor. She deals with such nonsense as the
horror of split infinitives.
stage; the biker fell off OF his bike. The "of" is
totally unnecessary. And the misuse of "ITS" and "IT IS" is another error to see.
Autocorrect is often responsible for seemingly incongruent words popping up in sentences. I've grown sick and tired of changing the auto-corrected word 'do' or 'go' when I've used 'to' to use a verb's infinitive. But just as often the autocorrect will subtract a 't' from 'the', as it just did to me as I typed this sentence.
As for articles; that's a whole different set of rules. When I read an article with ANY errors, I do consider the author to have been lazy. And if the article was also edited, then the error reflects badly on the whole publication!
Of course there is that contemptible language with a bizarre grammar known as 'news-speak' which is intended to grab eyeballs. We kinda havta overlook the atrocities committed in the novelty lede and bylines of that vernacular.
The redundant word he hated the most, and I can't think of it right now, but it had something to do with near. Maybe it will come to me.
For sophisticated words (mixed with redundancy), think of using "pleonasm" to describe "tautological taxemics".
Never use a big word when exiguous terminology suffices.
Signed: Department of Redundancy Department
I have a collection of video snips I saved from Fox News anchors actually screwing up their own names.
A related favorite item is a late night plug line after a brief news flash: "The most powerful lame in news—Fox News." At least the teleprompter reader was very pretty.
I have just about given up not typing "goto" for "go to" because it is so deeply engrained:
ON SWITCH(1) GOTO ROUTINE(1)
IF KOUNT = 0 GOTO TO END
I have the problem of changing word spellings while reading with regard to words next to the word or from sentences above or below the word. That makes for slow reading when one reads a sentence over and over without meaning and finally checks it word for word only to find a made up reading of some word. That limits me to about ten pages an hour for literature and does not matter much for math, physics, and chemistry.
Eye bee leave ewe cant all weighs halve it write buy yore spell Czech. Summary: Summery whether, theirs nose know.
Though it all passes the spell checker, he thought I was writing gibberish until he tried to say it aloud, Then he called me a "smart ass" but laughed about it in good spirited fun.
I suspect we all hacks to a degree.
Thanks for responding; greatly appreciated.
MS Word has a Grammar checker also. I worked a project in factory automation with a young colleague who just came from an advertising agency. Our manager insisted that we use the grammar checker in Word. We immediately made it fail half a dozen times. That said, I still use it. It is hard to proofread your own work.
(I can't believe that you got two plusses for that. I took one away.)
I was getting too many points, so thanks.
Remember the book: "Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation". by Lynne Truss? Where I first found out about the Oxford comma. This is a case where you might want grammar checker to be able to read your mind.
Waiting on cashier.
This is the South. It would say waiting for in the Midwest, but we never see it b/c the cashier would be moving fast. You'd hear him say the word "you-wanna-beg-for-that?" and then he'd be on to the next customer. Just say "thanks", and he'll say, "Ye-becha."
It's a joke, but there's some truth to things moving much slower in the South. I don't just belittle it. I actually admire their patience.
This is only heard in the South. I never hear it in the Midwest. Our favorite error is ending sentences with prepositions: "You're coming with? Okay, where's your coat at?" From Germanic roots we confuse yet/still, lend/borrow, and like/as.
The things that stand out from my time in Florida are whenever/when, anymore/now, double modal verbs (e.g. I might could...), and fixing to / immediately going to. That last one is actually useful. Fixing to is sooner than going to.
We all agree in the US, though, on the need for less, okay, fewer grammatical mistakes.
But we have a rich vocabulary, perhaps the largest on the planet.
It might be argued that in order to achieve a truly free society, we need to re-instantiate a more complex grammar, such as that of Ancient Greek with not just one, but two aorist cases. After all, politics rests on ethics, and ethics depends on epistemology. Improve the thinking, and we improve the behaviors.
In language, what we gain through proper grammar and a larger vocabulary is precision and efficiency in language, I agree. I was reading Common Sense and it dismays me that we have lost so much of the clear and precise language of our Founding Fathers. I dare say that the majority of the grade school-educated of that time could run circles around the vast majority of college-educated in our day - even though Daniel Webster's work wouldn't become popular for several decades!
Daniel Webster was a strong state's rights advocate. He sought an interpretation of the Constitution that would allow nullification. Failing that, however, he refused to condone the Hartford Convention which argued for the secession of New England from the United States over the War of 1812. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty set the current border with Canada. (We had wanted it to be the St. Lawrence River.) That laid the ground for the State of Maine to be created from the northern part of Massachusetts.
I have a facsimile edition of the Noah Webster dictionary. I bought it from a Christian firm with e-gold that earned writing content for a libertarian website. I have relied on it when discussing the "true meaning" of the Constitution, Declaration, and other documents. I realize that a full lifetime separates the Dictionary from those, but it is closer than any modern dictionary. I also like his etymologies.
Do you know if there are other published versions of Noah Webster's work? They sound fascinating.
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