The Grammar Vigilante

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

Please, if you take away vaguely pissing about with repeating stuff we hear, we're left with nothing.

[Lang Spoon]

The Grammar Vigilante

Fussbudget wrote:

If Shaw somehow got his wish and apostrophes were chucked, and spelling maid simpl, would it still look ugly as fuck, or would we now find pre Shavian sp and gramur to be madly archaic? Would we have massive problems with ambiguity getting rid of the '? It'd be a fuckload easier for non-native speakers to comprehend or write.

Bit late to this, but I'm pretty sure that non-native speakers are significantly less likely to misplace apostrophes, or do the classic their/there/they're-style switcheroos, as when you learn a foreign language properly you actually have to learn the basic grammatical rules, rather than vaguely piss about with repeating stuff you hear. They/we obviously make mistakes, but not generally of that kind unless we've seen enough native speakers make them.

And removing apostrophes would actually make English more difficult to understand due to the added ambiguity, especially as it's a very loosely structured language to begin with.

I wasn't really so concerned about Shaw's attacks on punctuation etc as the unphonetic insane classist nature of English spelling. All those archaic spellings from Norman French/Middle English that bear no relation to the spoken word as of now.

I found Spanish quite easy to pronounce from reading on sight. Each vowel has one value, except for a couple of combined vowels that stretch out the sound. Once you learn the corresponding vowel to printed letter, you're way more set than I found in Catalan or French, where the precise sound of 'e' can be almost as nebulous and infinite to the neophyte as English must seem to some non-native speakers.

When I was a burnt out joke of a TEFL teacher, my Spanish and Italian students especially complained about the slippery and unpredictable lack of correlation between English spelling and the spoken word. Shaw's ungainly spellings may have mitigated that.

[NickSTFU]

The Grammar Vigilante

Benjm wrote: It is a form of one-upmanship, assuming superiority over people for reasons that may not be their fault.

This, and in my experience this type of person is usually lacking in other areas.

[Jah Womble]

The Grammar Vigilante

While of course I agree that there's a time and a place for all this, how very parochial to view it as some kind of 'victimisation'. Correcting errors exists elsewhere, so why are people always so touchy as regards grammar and punctuation? Reluctance to amend errors for fear of hurting someone's feelings here seems to parallel with this 'new' school thinking of everybody having to be a winner on sports afternoons.

Look at it as though learning a new language - you'd want and expect to have mistakes corrected there, wouldn't you?

By and large I'm in agreement with Fussbudget. Slippery-slopesville, in my opinion.

[treibeis]

The Grammar Vigilante

Last summer, some twat defaced one of the chalkboards outside my golf hut with what he thought was a correction. (What he wrote was, in fact, wrong; what I'd written was, in fact, right.)

Normally, I have neither the time nor energy to react to twats in summer, but I made an exception in his case. After I'd threatened to deface his house, his car and his face with a pot of paint and a great big brush, The Lady I Walked To The Registry Office With poured his drink away, gave him his money back and told him to fuck off.

His wife thought it was great. He's not been back, but she's become a semi-regular. Glass of Riesling on a Friday afternoon after work.

[NickSTFU]

The Grammar Vigilante

Jah Womble wrote: While of course I agree that there's a time and a place for all this, how very parochial to view it as some kind of 'victimisation'. Correcting errors exists elsewhere, so why are people always so touchy as regards grammar and punctuation? Reluctance to amend errors for fear of hurting someone's feelings here seems to parallel with this 'new' school thinking of everybody having to be a winner on sports afternoons.

Look at it as though learning a new language - you'd want and expect to have mistakes corrected there, wouldn't you?

By and large I'm in agreement with Fussbudget. Slippery-slopesville, in my opinion.

I can't speak for Benjm, but I'm not talking about feeling victimised.

I'm talking about a lack of self-awareness in certain cases and situations.

[Fussbudget]

The Grammar Vigilante

Lang Spoon wrote: When I was a burnt out joke of a TEFL teacher, my Spanish and Italian students especially complained about the slippery and unpredictable lack of correlation between English spelling and the spoken word. Shaw's ungainly spellings may have mitigated that.

Aye, gotcha. I was indeed taught that English is one of those languages where it's impossible to tell from reading a word how it'll be pronounced unless you already know it. Particularly awkward when you come across unusual last names.

French is of course terrible for this too, as sw2boro's doomed attempts to master nasal vowels and silent letters have proved over the years (it turns out that about 75% of consonants can be silent in French given the right context), but that's mostly due to having too many fairly byzantine rules rather than not enough of them (none?): it's generally much more consistent in how combinations of letters are pronounced (you just don't get horrors like Reading/reading, record/record etc. which plague the English language.)

[Toby Gymshorts]

The Grammar Vigilante

treibeis wrote: Last summer, some twat defaced one of the chalkboards outside my golf hut with what he thought was a correction. (What he wrote was, in fact, wrong; what I'd written was, in fact, right.)

Normally, I have neither the time nor energy to react to twats in summer, but I made an exception in his case. After I'd threatened to deface his house, his car and his face with a pot of paint and a great big brush, The Lady I Walked To The Registry Office With poured his drink away, gave him his money back and told him to fuck off.

His wife thought it was great. He's not been back, but she's become a semi-regular. Glass of Riesling on a Friday afternoon after work.

Brilliant.

[WOM]

The Grammar Vigilante

Jah Womble wrote: While of course I agree that there's a time and a place for all this, how very parochial to view it as some kind of 'victimisation'. Correcting errors exists elsewhere, so why are people always so touchy as regards grammar and punctuation? Reluctance to amend errors for fear of hurting someone's feelings here seems to parallel with this 'new' school thinking of everybody having to be a winner on sports afternoons.

This. Math, history and (one guesses) biology are all fact-based, with right and wrong answers. But English is apparently a liberal art and 'better then' is close enough to 'better than' and any 'your/you're/yore' that conveys the general idea is sufficient.

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

I don't think that anyone has suggested that a linguistic free-for-all is a desirable state of affairs. The point is that if you are minded to offer advice to someone, particularly when it is unsolicited, it is probably better to try to be less of a wanker about it than some grammar enthusiasts seem to believe is acceptable.

[WOM]

The Grammar Vigilante

I don't disagree, I guess. But the thing is, if you offered someone an unsolicited correction to their math, they'd likely go "Oh, shit. Thanks for catching that." But do the same with their grammar or spelling and it's "Oh, lovely, the grammar police are here" or some such.

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

It does seem to be a touchier subject. Can that partly be because, particularly for the spoken word, it carries stronger class connotations than maths and other subjects? Also it is an inescapable part of everyday life in that you are doing it even when it is not your main focus, so when apparent criticism appears out of the blue, so to speak, the instinctive response is a defensive one.

[WOM]

The Grammar Vigilante

Quite likely. Catch a math error and you're correcting my skills. Catch a grammar error and you're correcting *me*.

Also, I'd very rarely correct what someone says, but I'm likely to correct what someone writes. Unless they say "risk adverse"...and then it's open season.

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

Excerpt from first draft of presentation to WOM:

'...risk averse advertisers...'

Excerpt from final draft of presentation to WOM:

'...cautious advertisers...'

Final sentence of presentation to WOM:

'And let's face it, those sea shells won't sell themselves.'

[WOM]

The Grammar Vigilante

Welcome to my world. I spent the early part of last week following the client's direction to "push the language further" and "really push it" and "take some chances" and the latter part of the week "walk it back a bit...as per the comments from Legal".

Uh huh.

[Fussbudget]

The Grammar Vigilante

Some of my work involves reviewing internal guidance and communications, and as a result I spend a fair amount of time correcting grammar, spelling and punctuation*. Not because I am a dick (well...), but because it really makes a difference to how easily the text can be read and understood by the target audience, which is the bloody point of it.

But I always feel bad about telling the writers what I've changed (and try to avoid doing that as much as possible), because I'm well aware that most people don't see grammar and spelling as all that important, and consider that type of correction to be pedantic nitpicking at best and smug one-upmanship at worst. And I really shouldn't have to feel bad, because being able to write correctly and intelligibly is their fucking job.

*(Don't get me started on the gradual disappearance of commas, turning any longer-than-average sentence into incoherent word soup. Other people don't live in your head! They don't know where your clauses are meant to start or end!)

[WOM]

The Grammar Vigilante

Indeed. Lately, when I write email subject lines and preheaders and other dead-short copy, I'm forever being asked to remove words solely for the sake of brevity.

Made up example...
'It's the kind of convenience that customers will love.' becomes 'It's the kind of convenience customers love.' The words 'which', 'that' and 'the' are rapidly disappearing in the name of character count.

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

I don't think that there is any reason to feel guilty about correcting mistakes in copy in a workplace setting, unless it is done in a gratuitously nasty or humiliating way. It was a large part of my job for about fifteen years.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

The Grammar Vigilante

Lang Spoon wrote:

If Shaw somehow got his wish and apostrophes were chucked, and spelling maid simpl, would it still look ugly as fuck, or would we now find pre Shavian sp and gramur to be madly archaic? Would we have massive problems with ambiguity getting rid of the '? It'd be a fuckload easier for non-native speakers to comprehend or write.

Bit late to this, but I'm pretty sure that non-native speakers are significantly less likely to misplace apostrophes, or do the classic their/there/they're-style switcheroos, as when you learn a foreign language properly you actually have to learn the basic grammatical rules, rather than vaguely piss about with repeating stuff you hear. They/we obviously make mistakes, but not generally of that kind unless we've seen enough native speakers make them.

And removing apostrophes would actually make English more difficult to understand due to the added ambiguity, especially as it's a very loosely structured language to begin with.

I wasn't really so concerned about Shaw's attacks on punctuation etc as the unphonetic insane classist nature of English spelling. All those archaic spellings from Norman French/Middle English that bear no relation to the spoken word as of now.

[...]

When I was a burnt out joke of a TEFL teacher, my Spanish and Italian students especially complained about the slippery and unpredictable lack of correlation between English spelling and the spoken word. Shaw's ungainly spellings may have mitigated that.

As per the (apocryphal) other Shaw's (George Bernard) facetious observation about ghoti fish... An amusing linguistic practical joke that my sadistic university professors of English phonetics (this was in France) used to delight in playing on us poor victims of the tricky English pronunciation…



And what about the grapheme "-ough", there are no fewer than 10 mind-bogglingly different ways to pronounce it in British English! The rotters had a field day with that! (and with so many other pronunciation pitfalls… The language games we played were such good fun though, I couldn't get enough of them).

[Lang Spoon]

The Grammar Vigilante

Yeah that's exactly the kind of nonsense that makes English a class ridden nightmare. It'd be handy to have a good working knowledge of Latin, medieval French, Greek, Italian, Norse, Parsi and Sanskrit if you want to be able to guess how spellings correlate to pronunciation.

I guess this is the downside of having no Academy that would otherwise be hobbling the vibrancy and New! of the language. There's also no one there to systematically unify the spellings, so new words often preserve their origin in spelling as foreign loan words that make no sense in English rules, and the whole free jazz attitude to spelling before set type couldn't have helped either.

Btw, I meant Bernard Shaw earlier, is there another Shaw spelling obsessive?

[Auntie Beryl]

The Grammar Vigilante

Is that "Prounced" in the Ghoti attachment deliberate?

[Pérou Flaquettes]

The Grammar Vigilante

Lang Spoon wrote: Yeah that's exactly the kind of nonsense that makes English a class ridden nightmare. It'd be handy to have a good working knowledge of Latin, medieval French, Greek, Italian, Norse, Parsi and Sanskrit if you want to be able to guess how spellings correlate to pronunciation.

I guess this is the downside of having no Academy that would otherwise be hobbling the vibrancy and New! of the language. There's also no one there to systematically unify the spellings, so new words often preserve their origin in spelling as foreign loan words that make no sense in English rules, and the whole free jazz attitude to spelling before set type couldn't have helped either.

Btw, I meant Bernard Shaw earlier, is there another Shaw spelling obsessive?

I agree. I, as a linguist and lover of words, loved that aspect of thing in my formative language High school and then university years (and before even, I started visited England regularly in the late 1970’s aged 14-15, mainly through football, with my pen-pals – Wimbledon, Portsmouth etc.) and saw/still see it as a challenge and consequently probably found it easier than most (since it’s always been a passion of mine) to learn to love the quirkiness and idiosyncrasies of the English language, but it certainly is tricky.

No sure about our "vibrant" Académie Française, they're all so ancient! But yes granted, by and large they play a useful unifying and harmonising role re the French language, and at a practical level some of their committees do a decent job, such as the creation of the FranceTerme website by their Commission de terminologie et néologie, headed by the excellent Henriette Walter and Alain Rey, both well-known writers of best sellers on language – the only thing is that they're respectively 87 and 88, it would be good to inject some new blood in there from time to time…

Yeah, sorry re GB Shaw I thought you were talking about another Shaw, one closely related to the Apostrophiser.

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

Martin 'I'm Not Doyle' Shaw of TV's The Professional's?

[treibeis]

The Grammar Vigilante

Didn't Shaw Taylor once kick a trainee scriptwriter in the bollocks on live TV for writing "Keep 'em peeled!" without an apostrophe?

[Benjm]

The Grammar Vigilante

Nik Kershaw pulled a gun on the unfortunate record company employee who showed him the early sleeve design for I Wo'nt Let The Sun Go Down On Me. Luckily Howard Jones' mate was standing nearby and knocked the piece out of his hand by swinging his mime chain.