The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Grammatical errors, does they bother anyone else?
Almighty
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
First post, be gentle, I'm a virgin.
Before anyone asks, yes, the title is intentional irony.
So..... did Tycho make the grammatical error in the first sentence of the June 8th post on purpose to annoy me, or was it something more sinister? Just wondering....
Oh, and I did try to look for other posts regarding this before hitting the "New Thread" button, but... searching is disabled.
Before anyone asks, yes, the title is intentional irony.
So..... did Tycho make the grammatical error in the first sentence of the June 8th post on purpose to annoy me, or was it something more sinister? Just wondering....
Oh, and I did try to look for other posts regarding this before hitting the "New Thread" button, but... searching is disabled.
Almighty on
0
Posts
It's past noon and it is still way too early to be dealing with that kind of shit. Ow, my head!
Hell, the "does they" in the OP title is driving me batty.
But seriously, not that anyone notices or cares, but it's at least part of why you'll see "post edited by Forar at ____" on a looooooot of what I write. Noticing a word that's spelt incorrectly, or something that's gramatically incorrect, or just not feeling like having a double post in place so I toss what else I have to say into the same post.
:-)
-Almighty
Yes, exactly like that.
Aside from the pervasive "intensive purposes", seeing things like "rights of passage" instead of 'rites' drives me up the wall.
...Usually.
My Backloggery
It's "should HAVE," not "should OF." "Should of" makes no sense in anyway. If you say "should have" fast enough, it does sound like "should of;" I get that, but that doesn't make it any less retarded.
Another thing I really don't like is ending sentences with 'with,' 'at,' 'to,' or anything of that sort.
EDIT:
The word they're looking for is "should've" which is a legitimate contraction. I don't know if they're just not teaching it in schools or what, but it shows up everywhere.
Doesn't make it any less silly. Like:
Unpossible
adj.; "Possible"
I think there is a sort of nails-on-chalkboard, skincrawling wrongness that strikes the reader in these cases; the error leaps out at you and makes the entire text look ill-conceived and poorly done.
But why is it such a big deal? Most of these errors have zero impact on communication, let's not kid ourselves. Even a radically misused pronoun will cause at most several seconds of puzzlement before the meaning is clear, if that. There is little functional disadvantage to moderate errors of usage. Really the only time errors make a difference to the reader are when there are major syntactical errors that confuse the sentence.
Is it that we are trained to disparage these errors as a sign of uneducated language use, ie, a signifier of class? Discrimination based on language use is as old as language, and such training is deeply ingrained, I think.
But is there anything more to it? Why do we give such a great big smelly shit about it?
I've been trying to break my girlfriend of this habit but now she does it on purpose just to annoy me.
Longer version: In my worldview, ignorance is one of the worst character traits you could have. Blatantly misusing language is a testament to one's apathy or inability to use their brain. When I see "should of" all I can think is "there is someone who has never read a book or newspaper of their own accord in their life."
I feel the same way when I see someone on facebook say "just finished remedial algebra for college juniors -- never have to do math again in my life!!" (followed by a stream of likes)
Is this a serious post?
When we have to mentally correct something we get annoyed, because if something was grammatically correct or spelled correctly, we can understand what is being said much more quickly and with less effort. I have noticed myself resenting "black box" and "bleeping ou"t forms of TV censorship for a similar reason: I know what they are censoring, and my brain automatically fills it in just as everyone's brain does, so why make me fill in the blanks when the result is no different than the original material.
We also use the same kind of peer pressure and social conditioning to transmit grammatical knowledge as other tribal practices, and so a violent reaction may have some roots in pre-historical human societies when much of social conditioning may have carried severe punishment for failure, since people only survived by cooperating in smallish social structures. It might also be the case that good grammar improves group survivability in a hunter-gather society, because faster communication is critical for survival in those scenarios. Good communication might be the difference between eating or not in primitive societies, so those that were passionate about accurate grammar survived in higher numbers, perhaps?
That's all the guesses I've got for now.
Also it annoys me when people pronounce the individual letters of an acronym that easily forms an intelligble word. Why are you taking six syllables to say something that can be done in one?
Example: The Daily Show. Jon swearing (bleepedly) is pretty much always funny, but upon a more than cursory glance I'm not entirely sure why that is even for me.
I suppose a follow up point to this is that I have the Daily Show: Indecision 2004 DVD box set, and those are uncensored. Hearing them actually swear is still funny, but just a tiny bit odd as I do expect the bleeps to be there.
I tend to think that obsession with grammar must be based in utility at some level, because language itself has so much utility for it's users that is destroyed when language is not used in the same way by many people.
Somewhat. More than one syllable per digit seems inefficient, especially when vocalizing long strings of digits. On a related note, "W" seems unwieldy to me, not that I go for "dubya" or anything. I'm also a big fan of contractions.
As far as bleeping out words for comedic effect, I always thought South Park did that well.
I think that pretty much sums it up for me. When someone misuses "literally" (which is more often than not), they're saying, "No, I don't care what words mean."
It bugs me even more, though, when it's coming from semi-official sources. Just the other day, I was watching something on Animal Planet, and the narrator talked about how this lady's collection of cat figurines "literally exploded". All I could think about was how at least one person must have been writing/editing that script, and intentionally chose a word that means the exact opposite of what they want.
And not really a grammatical error, either, but it drives me up the wall when reporters, etc. say that, "it begs the question." I mean, there are plenty of ways to convey what you want to say without co-opting a phrase that doesn't mean anything close to what you want. They try to use certain words and phrases to sound smarter, and in the process end up sounding lazy and/or stupid.
Also, for god's sake.
Literally
Stop using it as a go-to gripe. You know what "literally" means when appended to a non-literal event?
It is hyperbolic. Full stop. It's a completely proper fucking use.
You know what saying "figuratively" would do for any and all of the statements that people are "getting wrong"? The opposite of what is desired. It would, instead of being hyperbolic, be understated.
It's figuratively the silliest goddamn grammar gripe in the world.
"You just literally blew my mind, figuratively"
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I think you're assuming way too much about how it's used. Most people are not being hyperbolic when they use it. They're being lazy.
I'm not saying people should replace "literally" with "figuratively". I'm saying they should drop it altogether. I think that's what bothers me, that people are adding 4 syllables to their sentence that aren't necessary.
"When Mary moved to Japan, her collection of cat figurines literally exploded" would be better (in my opinion) as "When Mary moved to Japan, her collection of cat figurines exploded".
Ignorance is not a bad thing. It is an absence of knowledge. I am ignorant of many everyday useful things, like how to fix the plumbing or how to troubleshoot a network beyond power cycling. This is not a sin.
But ignorance of prescriptive language rules is not even on that level. If someone can't tell your from you're, this really has no impact on the quality of their communication. The meaning of the word is instantly obvious in context.
Likewise, when someone uses "literally" as an intensifier, you know what they mean. Their statement has communicated the intended meaning.
Whatever "ignorance" these people have displayed is entirely superficial and largely arbitrary.
The only reason poor usage on this level is bad is because society at large has decided it's bad, or rather, we have absorbed and propagated the idea that it's bad - that conforming to a system of entirely arbitrary rules, often with no functional benefit, is important. As a result, poor usage that still effectively conveys meaning can lose you a job or embarrass you.
It wasn't too long ago that spelling wasn't even standardized.
I don't buy that conformity to prescriptive grammar is important in itself. I think this is a fiction that has been used as a social tool.
I agree. One of my main gripes with "literally" is that people are using it where it serves no purpose. These are things I've heard (or read on blogs) over the past week (I'm not making this up):
"I'm literally having salad for lunch."
"I literally don't know."
"My gf is literally awesome."
"I'm literally going to see Super 8 this weekend."
What's the point?
That being said, the rules aren't arbitrary. Using literally in that context is "wrong" by the definition of the word "literally." Sure, I can figure out the meaning from context. But that really can't be the goalpost. If that's the case, you can just throw any word in there and I should be able to figure it out from context: "My head ______ exploded." Feel free to use literally, figuratively, vaginally, or any adverb you'd like.
After all, if words have no point in a sentence, why use them? And if we're going to straight up ignore definitions of words, and redefine them as we go*, it can hamper communication in the longterm.
*I know language is a living thing and we change/redefine it all the time, blah blah blah. I'm talking about straight up re-purposing words/prefixes/suffixes to mean total opposites. I'm still not sure why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.
If they are doing this verbally, it sounds silly but it's understandable - they're used to using literally as an intensifier. Replace it with "totally" and suddenly it sounds like normal colloquial speech, and eventually that's what "literally" will mean.
In writing, though, "literally" would be simply poor word choice in those contexts. It would read awkwardly and contribute nothing to the sentence. Nonsensical filler in speech is rampant and normal, but I would object to its written use because it's just silly in those contexts.
Because "in-" doesn't always mean "not".
If I had the opportunity to do some serious linguistic engineering, I'd replace all of the "in-" prefixes that mean "not" with the less ambiguous "un-". Probably unpossible to actually do, but it'd still be an improvement.
The word hasn't ceased to mean anything. It has simply expanded its possible meanings. You can't use other words in its place because they haven't developed that colloquial meaning.
The trajectory of "literally" is quite clear. People hyperbolize words like "exploded," using them metaphorically or poetically. Gradually they lose their denotative potency because of this. So, to clarify and strengthen the word when you really mean exactly what that word means, you say "literally." This emphasizes that you're not speaking figuratively, that what you're saying is raw denotative fact.
This kind of emphatic, intensifying use is now gradually expanding beyond that specific context. People get used to hearing it as an intensifier, and they start using it generically.
Getting mad at this is like yelling at the sun for being too hot.
This isn't some apocalypse of meaning where people are just letting words turn into soup and shrieking random syllables. It's the normal march of language. "hopefully" has entirely changed in meaning and now only the oldest, most stuffy prescriptive usage authoritarians tighten their sphincters when it's used liberally.
I never compared this to some cataclysmic linguistic event, I'm just saying this is why people find it annoying. Words are getting redefined because people are just using them improperly. It's literally "fake it til you make it."