Yeah, I'm not buying it either. 'Raced' is not usually passive. It's probably one of them ergative verb thingies.
The horse that raced past the barn fell, fine. That has horse as the subject of raced. But making raced weirdly passive and then some participial clause fun to disguise it.... hmmm.
But apart from that, Mr Mr is quite right about idioms and so on.
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
that annoys me. can one even GO ape shit, literally or not?
USE YOUR ADVERBS, PEOPLE.
Hello, PA, my name is idiom.
Consider this sentence: the horse raced past the barn fell.
It's grammatical. Using language effectively is more than just applying strict recursive and computational rules to a set of words. It also often includes idiom, figures of speech, sarcasm, exaggeration, implication, and so on.
Er... no, no it's not. What the hell is "fell" doing on the end there? Did it race past the barn and FALL? That's just not a sentence. Strunk & White, all English teachers in my department, and everybody I've been able to corner and ask has said "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" There's no idiom in that, either.
It's just as silly as saying "The robot ate the fruit chimpanzee adversarial time!" That's not grammatical either.
You're the worst english teacher ever.
Alternative explanation: English teachers are not equipped to make definitive statements about computational linguistics.
Wow. That's terrifying. I can understand that sentence, and all the concepts that make it understandable, but I hate it with a startling passion.
Also, after reading the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo," I know how people feel when they see Cthulu.
Oh god that one confused the hell out of me when I first saw it. I seriously had to reread the wiki page about it like ten times before I finally understood it.
A common misconception among American drivers:
Slamming on the brakes is always the best and only way to avoid hitting something, and should also be done whenever anything shiny distracts you.
3. All black people in the United States are African-Americans. Just because someone is black doesn't mean that they are from Africa.
My favorite is when overly-PC Americans are abroad and they refer to black people living in England or something as "African Americans." I guess everywhere outside of Africa is America now.
Actually, the term "African-American" is intended describe American blacks that are descended from Africans brought to the US as slaves. The people you are referring to (African Immigrants and immediate generations afterwards) have been described as "African African-American". Really, there is a significant cultural difference between the two groups and some sociologists have even suggested that African Immigrants have recently become the new "Model Minority" which, if you're familiar with higher educational statistics, is far from the truth for African-Americans.
that annoys me. can one even GO ape shit, literally or not?
USE YOUR ADVERBS, PEOPLE.
Hello, PA, my name is idiom.
Consider this sentence: the horse raced past the barn fell.
It's grammatical. Using language effectively is more than just applying strict recursive and computational rules to a set of words. It also often includes idiom, figures of speech, sarcasm, exaggeration, implication, and so on.
Er... no, no it's not. What the hell is "fell" doing on the end there? Did it race past the barn and FALL? That's just not a sentence. Strunk & White, all English teachers in my department, and everybody I've been able to corner and ask has said "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" There's no idiom in that, either.
It's just as silly as saying "The robot ate the fruit chimpanzee adversarial time!" That's not grammatical either.
You're the worst english teacher ever.
Alternative explanation: English teachers are not equipped to make definitive statements about computational linguistics.
Also, I raise you
"The man, the boy, the girl, hit, kissed, ran."
See the problem with all this is that sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell are only marginally correct.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'. So it fails as a means to point out the inherent craziness of the English language, where as Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo works perfectly, because it actually makes sense once you realise that buffalo is also a verb.
PS: Misconceptions thread, I thought of you drinking Powerade coming back from the gym the other day.
I hate this one:
'Water conducts electricity.'
NO IT DOES NOT. Things that conduct electricity do it because of spare electrons or other random things chilling out up in their valences or makeups and stuff like that. Did you ever take a high school chemistry class? Ever draw a water molecule? Show me where the extra electrons are.
Water does not conduct electricity, random shit floating around in water conducts electricity. Electrolytes.
Try killing yourself by chucking a hair dryer in a bathtub full of distilled water. It won't work too well.
See the problem with all this is that sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell are only marginally correct.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'.
You mean with a "that was".
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
See the problem with all this is that sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell are only marginally correct.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'.
That's part of the point. There are ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of grammar without satisfying the rules of comprehension. Furthermore, there are also ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of comprehension without satisfying the rules of grammar or making use of literal meaning.
This isn't even getting into things like how we sometimes mean the opposite of what we say, or something entirely unrelated. Imagine that I interview a candidate for a job. Afterwards, my boss asks me how it went, and I say "Well, he had a nice tie." What I mean by that is that he was unsuitable for the job--but that's certainly not how my sentence parses when you deconstruct it grammatically and run it through a dictionary.
In short, getting up in arms about someone who says "I could care less" is silly. Untwist your panties.
See the problem with all this is that sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell are only marginally correct.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'.
That's part of the point. There are ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of grammar without satisfying the rules of comprehension. Furthermore, there are also ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of comprehension without satisfying the rules of grammar or making use of literal meaning.
This isn't even getting into things like how we sometimes mean the opposite of what we say, or something entirely unrelated. Imagine that I interview a candidate for a job. Afterwards, my boss asks me how it went, and I say "Well, he had a nice tie." What I mean by that is that he was unsuitable for the job--but that's certainly not how my sentence parses when you deconstruct it grammatically and run it through a dictionary.
In short, getting up in arms about someone who says "I could care less" is silly. Untwist your panties.
Those are all excellent points which we agree with completely, but the horse race sentence is a terrible example because grammatically raced is an ergative verb and you'd only ever use it in the passive (with 'that was', which can be dropped, as opposed to 'that', which can't in this sentence) in a super-formal register, and if you were using a super-formal register you wouldn't be allowed to drop the 'that was'.
I'm such a grammarnazi. Maybe I should get a job where I teach English teachers?
See the problem with all this is that sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell are only marginally correct.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'.
That's part of the point. There are ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of grammar without satisfying the rules of comprehension. Furthermore, there are also ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of comprehension without satisfying the rules of grammar or making use of literal meaning.
This isn't even getting into things like how we sometimes mean the opposite of what we say, or something entirely unrelated. Imagine that I interview a candidate for a job. Afterwards, my boss asks me how it went, and I say "Well, he had a nice tie." What I mean by that is that he was unsuitable for the job--but that's certainly not how my sentence parses when you deconstruct it grammatically and run it through a dictionary.
In short, getting up in arms about someone who says "I could care less" is silly. Untwist your panties.
Those are all excellent points which we agree with completely, but the horse race sentence is a terrible example because grammatically raced is an ergative verb and you'd only ever use it in the passive (with 'that was', which can be dropped, as opposed to 'that', which can't in this sentence) in a super-formal register, and if you were using a super-formal register you wouldn't be allowed to drop the 'that was'.
I'm such a grammarnazi. Maybe I should get a job where I teach English teachers?
Extremely anal english teachers can be awful.
My Freshman English teacher marked anytime we had a VPC. I know college English professors who aren't aware that those are "improper" English.
It's a pretty obscure grammar point, though. I was surprised to find a wiki about it - when I was studying that kind of thing a few years ago, I couldn't find anything useful on the net.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited September 2007
I'm not sure why dropping the "that was" is illegal. Regardless, we appear to agree on the basic point that communication is more than a set of grammatical and lexical rules.
Actually this stuff about computational grammat reminds me of a time one of my teachers (by which I mean one of the teachers I train, rather than the other way around) asked me this:
"My school teacher used to say that double negatives made a positive, so 'I haven't done nothing' means 'I have done something' and then it's wrong.
But then my PGCE trainer told me that there's nothing wrong with it and it's perfectly OK to say 'I haven't done nothing and it means 'I haven't done anything'.
Who should I believe when I'm teaching my Japanese students?"
To avoid the OT curse - which do you think holds a misconception?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited September 2007
I think it depends on which dialect of english you're speaking. If you're speaking standard, affluent english, then "I haven't done nothing" means that you're silly and ignorant. If you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then "I haven't done nothing" is synonymous with "I haven't done anything."
I think it depends on which dialect of english you're speaking. If you're speaking standard, affluent english, then "I haven't done nothing" means that you're silly and ignorant. If you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then "I haven't done nothing" is synonymous with "I haven't done anything."
Yeah, the fact of the matter is that regardless of how it functions "logically", people know what you mean even if they turn up their noses and point out that it's a double negative (which, along with triples and even quads, have existed as a means of emphasis for centuries). The trainee would be best teaching his students to speak "Standard English", but explaining a few of the quirks would help out in the long run. A lack of standardised spelling and grammar never stopped Chaucer or Shakespeare...
...not that I'm suggesting people should start typing pho-en-etic-lee or anything...
I imagine no-one here actually cares about people "misusing" phrases- they're saying that it's a common misconception, for example, that decimate means (or rather always meant) "to destroy everything".
We should totally have another one of those threads where we argue about whether or not there is such thing as "proper" English and how to determine whether or not something is indeed a "word."
I think it depends on which dialect of english you're speaking. If you're speaking standard, affluent english, then "I haven't done nothing" means that you're silly and ignorant. If you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then "I haven't done nothing" is synonymous with "I haven't done anything."
Of course, there's also the common assumption that if you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then you're silly and ignorant.
I think it depends on which dialect of english you're speaking. If you're speaking standard, affluent english, then "I haven't done nothing" means that you're silly and ignorant. If you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then "I haven't done nothing" is synonymous with "I haven't done anything."
Of course, there's also the common assumption that if you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then you're silly and ignorant.
this.
There are some grammatically acceptable American dialects that more closely mirror the alternate dialects that other countries (such as China) have, that hinge more upon alternate pronunciation and conscious word-tweaking to get an identical point across. Think of the flat American dialect as compared to British - our vocabulary is subtly but undeniably different.
It's when you start to get into deep southern accents and such that the acceptable bounds of intelligent speaking are passed. I'm not saying southern people are unintelligent, but many south-isms perpetuate an uneducated manner of speaking. Pronouncing "you" as "yew" rather than "yoo" is fine, as is "I" as "ah" instead of "I". "Ain't" is, within an extent, an allowable transgression - it's an entirely new word, just like Santa Fe's (my hometown) use of the words "pull", "bo", "fletch", etc.
The problem arises with actual misuse of pre-existing words. "How are you?" "I'm doing real good" is the classic example (albeit one that is not restricted to a dialect), alongside the above-mentioned "I haven't done nothing".
Just because people weren't taught their own language well enough to learn how to speak correctly does not mean we can start making their bad grammar acceptable. 'Slovenliness of the English language', to quote Orwell, even though this isn't exactly the same thing as what he was talking about. Still, it stands.
Just because tons of people say 'I'm doing good' (hell, even I do it sometimes), does not mean it is an acceptable 'dialect'. It is wrong.
PS, I'm making a Godwin's-like prediction.
I think it depends on which dialect of english you're speaking. If you're speaking standard, affluent english, then "I haven't done nothing" means that you're silly and ignorant. If you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then "I haven't done nothing" is synonymous with "I haven't done anything."
Of course, there's also the common assumption that if you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then you're silly and ignorant.
Yeah that was my answer - they were both wrong. The first for the obvious assumption that grammar=maths, and the second for being a pseud who's willing to let his students believe that less-powerful dialects of English will work fine when they go for an interview for tertiary education or a good job.
Just because people weren't taught their own language well enough to learn how to speak correctly does not mean we can start making their bad grammar acceptable. 'Slovenliness of the English language', to quote Orwell, even though this isn't exactly the same thing as what he was talking about. Still, it stands.
Just because tons of people say 'I'm doing good' (hell, even I do it sometimes), does not mean it is an acceptable 'dialect'. It is wrong.
PS, I'm making a Godwin's-like prediction.
One more page until someone brings up Ebonics.
Why does it matter? Language is flexible. It cannot be "wrong".
Just because people weren't taught their own language well enough to learn how to speak correctly does not mean we can start making their bad grammar acceptable. 'Slovenliness of the English language', to quote Orwell, even though this isn't exactly the same thing as what he was talking about. Still, it stands.
Just because tons of people say 'I'm doing good' (hell, even I do it sometimes), does not mean it is an acceptable 'dialect'. It is wrong.
PS, I'm making a Godwin's-like prediction.
One more page until someone brings up Ebonics.
Personally, I don't like it when people use words like 'acceptable' without saying who they're acceptable to.
I find 'I'm doing good' perfectly acceptable. You don't. Many snobs don't, and so it's important to know when to use that kind of English and when not to.
Socio-linguistic versatility is what's needed, not value rigidity.
...I'm at a loss. The way I was raised and the accent I have in northern NJ, I see "yoo," "yew," and "you" as all being pronounced the same way. I honestly neither can pronounce those differently nor can see how one might pronounce them differently. "Yew" is how I pronounce "Yoo."
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
...I'm at a loss. The way I was raised and the accent I have in northern NJ, I see "yoo," "yew," and "you" as all being pronounced the same way. I honestly neither can pronounce those differently nor can see how one might pronounce them differently. "Yew" is how I pronounce "Yoo."
I think "yew" might have a bit more of an "ee" sound at the beginning, while the others just have a hint of it to start off the word? I'm not sure, but there is something of a subtle difference between "yew" and "you" (for me).
...I'm at a loss. The way I was raised and the accent I have in northern NJ, I see "yoo," "yew," and "you" as all being pronounced the same way. I honestly neither can pronounce those differently nor can see how one might pronounce them differently. "Yew" is how I pronounce "Yoo."
Huh, I see what you mean. Thinking about it, thanks to the 'y' on the beginning of the word I can't actually pronounce 'yoo' without it sounding like 'yew'.
...I'm retarded. I was thinking of the 'oo' vs 'ew' sound as you can hear it in other words.
Sorry to swing off topic, but the subject just came to mind..
Does anyone believe in curses, or superstition? Or just mere coincidence?
Because there is not a day where when I glance at the time, it says 9:11 since 2001. I live in New York City, and that freaks the hell out of me. I know its silly but its just weird.
Just because people weren't taught their own language well enough to learn how to speak correctly does not mean we can start making their bad grammar acceptable. 'Slovenliness of the English language', to quote Orwell, even though this isn't exactly the same thing as what he was talking about. Still, it stands.
Just because tons of people say 'I'm doing good' (hell, even I do it sometimes), does not mean it is an acceptable 'dialect'. It is wrong.
PS, I'm making a Godwin's-like prediction.
One more page until someone brings up Ebonics.
Why does it matter? Language is flexible. It cannot be "wrong".
Media and politicians butcher the language far worse since their goals are often to obfuscate real meaning(the actual goal of language) with false meaning and deception. In a sense it's turning language on it's ear and using it to actively limit communication. Orwell wrote some really great stuff on that too.
"I ain't gonna do nothin" isn't deliberately misleading it's simply a poor expression of an idea.
Media and politicians butcher the language far worse since their goals are often to obfuscate real meaning(the actual goal of language) with false meaning and deception. In a sense it's turning language on it's ear and using it to actively limit communication. Orwell wrote some really great stuff on that too.
"I ain't gonna do nothin" isn't deliberately misleading it's simply a poor expression of an idea.
Posts
The horse that raced past the barn fell, fine. That has horse as the subject of raced. But making raced weirdly passive and then some participial clause fun to disguise it.... hmmm.
But apart from that, Mr Mr is quite right about idioms and so on.
You're the worst english teacher ever.
Alternative explanation: English teachers are not equipped to make definitive statements about computational linguistics.
Also, I raise you
"The man, the boy, the girl, hit, kissed, ran."
Oh god that one confused the hell out of me when I first saw it. I seriously had to reread the wiki page about it like ten times before I finally understood it.
Slamming on the brakes is always the best and only way to avoid hitting something, and should also be done whenever anything shiny distracts you.
Actually, the term "African-American" is intended describe American blacks that are descended from Africans brought to the US as slaves. The people you are referring to (African Immigrants and immediate generations afterwards) have been described as "African African-American". Really, there is a significant cultural difference between the two groups and some sociologists have even suggested that African Immigrants have recently become the new "Model Minority" which, if you're familiar with higher educational statistics, is far from the truth for African-Americans.
Nobody actually would use 'raced' in that manner without clarifying it with a 'that'. So it fails as a means to point out the inherent craziness of the English language, where as Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo works perfectly, because it actually makes sense once you realise that buffalo is also a verb.
PS: Misconceptions thread, I thought of you drinking Powerade coming back from the gym the other day.
I hate this one:
'Water conducts electricity.'
NO IT DOES NOT. Things that conduct electricity do it because of spare electrons or other random things chilling out up in their valences or makeups and stuff like that. Did you ever take a high school chemistry class? Ever draw a water molecule? Show me where the extra electrons are.
Water does not conduct electricity, random shit floating around in water conducts electricity. Electrolytes.
Try killing yourself by chucking a hair dryer in a bathtub full of distilled water. It won't work too well.
pleasepaypreacher.net
You mean with a "that was".
That's part of the point. There are ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of grammar without satisfying the rules of comprehension. Furthermore, there are also ways to put words together that satisfy the rules of comprehension without satisfying the rules of grammar or making use of literal meaning.
This isn't even getting into things like how we sometimes mean the opposite of what we say, or something entirely unrelated. Imagine that I interview a candidate for a job. Afterwards, my boss asks me how it went, and I say "Well, he had a nice tie." What I mean by that is that he was unsuitable for the job--but that's certainly not how my sentence parses when you deconstruct it grammatically and run it through a dictionary.
In short, getting up in arms about someone who says "I could care less" is silly. Untwist your panties.
Those are all excellent points which we agree with completely, but the horse race sentence is a terrible example because grammatically raced is an ergative verb and you'd only ever use it in the passive (with 'that was', which can be dropped, as opposed to 'that', which can't in this sentence) in a super-formal register, and if you were using a super-formal register you wouldn't be allowed to drop the 'that was'.
I'm such a grammarnazi. Maybe I should get a job where I teach English teachers?
Extremely anal english teachers can be awful.
My Freshman English teacher marked anytime we had a VPC. I know college English professors who aren't aware that those are "improper" English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_verb
It's a pretty obscure grammar point, though. I was surprised to find a wiki about it - when I was studying that kind of thing a few years ago, I couldn't find anything useful on the net.
"My school teacher used to say that double negatives made a positive, so 'I haven't done nothing' means 'I have done something' and then it's wrong.
But then my PGCE trainer told me that there's nothing wrong with it and it's perfectly OK to say 'I haven't done nothing and it means 'I haven't done anything'.
Who should I believe when I'm teaching my Japanese students?"
To avoid the OT curse - which do you think holds a misconception?
Yeah, the fact of the matter is that regardless of how it functions "logically", people know what you mean even if they turn up their noses and point out that it's a double negative (which, along with triples and even quads, have existed as a means of emphasis for centuries). The trainee would be best teaching his students to speak "Standard English", but explaining a few of the quirks would help out in the long run. A lack of standardised spelling and grammar never stopped Chaucer or Shakespeare...
...not that I'm suggesting people should start typing pho-en-etic-lee or anything...
I imagine no-one here actually cares about people "misusing" phrases- they're saying that it's a common misconception, for example, that decimate means (or rather always meant) "to destroy everything".
Of course, there's also the common assumption that if you're speaking a less well-off dialect of english, then you're silly and ignorant.
this.
There are some grammatically acceptable American dialects that more closely mirror the alternate dialects that other countries (such as China) have, that hinge more upon alternate pronunciation and conscious word-tweaking to get an identical point across. Think of the flat American dialect as compared to British - our vocabulary is subtly but undeniably different.
It's when you start to get into deep southern accents and such that the acceptable bounds of intelligent speaking are passed. I'm not saying southern people are unintelligent, but many south-isms perpetuate an uneducated manner of speaking. Pronouncing "you" as "yew" rather than "yoo" is fine, as is "I" as "ah" instead of "I". "Ain't" is, within an extent, an allowable transgression - it's an entirely new word, just like Santa Fe's (my hometown) use of the words "pull", "bo", "fletch", etc.
The problem arises with actual misuse of pre-existing words. "How are you?" "I'm doing real good" is the classic example (albeit one that is not restricted to a dialect), alongside the above-mentioned "I haven't done nothing".
Just because tons of people say 'I'm doing good' (hell, even I do it sometimes), does not mean it is an acceptable 'dialect'. It is wrong.
PS, I'm making a Godwin's-like prediction.
Yeah that was my answer - they were both wrong. The first for the obvious assumption that grammar=maths, and the second for being a pseud who's willing to let his students believe that less-powerful dialects of English will work fine when they go for an interview for tertiary education or a good job.
Why does it matter? Language is flexible. It cannot be "wrong".
Personally, I don't like it when people use words like 'acceptable' without saying who they're acceptable to.
I find 'I'm doing good' perfectly acceptable. You don't. Many snobs don't, and so it's important to know when to use that kind of English and when not to.
Socio-linguistic versatility is what's needed, not value rigidity.
And is standard in British English
...I'm at a loss. The way I was raised and the accent I have in northern NJ, I see "yoo," "yew," and "you" as all being pronounced the same way. I honestly neither can pronounce those differently nor can see how one might pronounce them differently. "Yew" is how I pronounce "Yoo."
I think "yew" might have a bit more of an "ee" sound at the beginning, while the others just have a hint of it to start off the word? I'm not sure, but there is something of a subtle difference between "yew" and "you" (for me).
Huh, I see what you mean. Thinking about it, thanks to the 'y' on the beginning of the word I can't actually pronounce 'yoo' without it sounding like 'yew'.
...I'm retarded. I was thinking of the 'oo' vs 'ew' sound as you can hear it in other words.
Does anyone believe in curses, or superstition? Or just mere coincidence?
Because there is not a day where when I glance at the time, it says 9:11 since 2001. I live in New York City, and that freaks the hell out of me. I know its silly but its just weird.
Okay fine, but grammar can be wrong.
And that kind of does matter.
"I ain't gonna do nothin" isn't deliberately misleading it's simply a poor expression of an idea.
Right?
BC is Before Christ, AD is After Death!
They never, never understand why that doesn't make sense
pleasepaypreacher.net
IIRC it's BCE and CE.
Before the Common Era and the Common Era.
Most of my college books use it now to.