Grammar rant

[mamadeb]

This is in regards to my RPG addiction (and the ones I'm following are enough, thank you. :))

I'm seeing a persistent grammatical error in pretty much all of them and it's driving me *nuts*.

Do people not learn about cases in school anymore?

Oh, right. Well, it's actually important.

"I' is subjective, "me" is objective. Now, no one is writing "Me went to class and snogged my boyfriend."

Thank goodness.

What they are writing are "Professor Snape caught Draco and I snogging."

If it's in predicate of the sentence, it's probably objective case.

I can guess what causes the confusion - the fact that it seems that word "me" is outlawed plus adding another person. So, take away the other person. If the pronoun "I" now sounds silly, or doesn't make sense, it's probably meant to be "me". "Professor Snape caught I snogging" doesn't work very well. :) (Even laying aside the action involved.)

This is basic stuff, folks. I can forgive something that happens rarely, but it happens *everywhere*.

/rant

Comments

[reginagiraffe]

I totally agree.

Drives me batty!

[azurelunatic]

No, actually, we don't learn about cases in school anymore.

But I was raised with parents who made an effort to speak correctly around us, so I grew up with instinctive grammar. That means that while I don't know the names of the rules that violation of makes my eyes bleed, my eyes still bleed.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I used to teach this stuff. Really. For a year, I taught actual grammar to a bunch of junior high school students. I don't know if they learned, but I hope some of it stayed in their subconscious.
That was in 1987. Gah. 18 years ago.

But I am aware that grammar is considered irrelevent and disposable these days. I don't understand that at all. I really don't.

No, it's not fun or exciting, but it's vital. If you don't how to use the tools, you're going to build a bad house.

You were trained in the use of the tools, even if you weren't told this a vise and this is a wrench. That puts you miles ahead of the game.

[azurelunatic]

These days it's an uphill battle to get college students to use the right "they're/their/there", much less learn the rules of anything more fancy.

I blame TV. People are learning their language from spoken dialogue being the bulk of their entertainment rather than reading the properly written word. And it's slipping into print. It used to be that you couldn't get things in print without being properly proofed...

*images of bread*

Proofread.

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

I read something horrible the other day. In print. In the Asperger's book I was reading. This book necessarily uses the words 'affect' and 'effect' a helluva lot, and for the most part it gets them right. But it threw me right out of what I was reading when I saw a phrase about how something 'effects the entire family'. *grumble*

And the me/I thing at the end of a sentence? I was never certain about that one until I was an adult and found...exactly the example that Mama is giving here - to try it with the singular to see whether you use me or I, and *then* add the second person.

I'm still not certain how to something is both mine and hers... "Where is my hairbrush?" vs. "Where is her and my hairbrush?" How are you supposed to say that?? Bad example, as one would never actually say *that*, but I couldn't think of the legitimate ones off the top of my head.

[azurelunatic]

"Our."

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

No, I mean when you need to specify...like my and Sheryl's hairbrush, for instance. In conversational language. I could always say 'the hairbrush belonging to me and Sheryl' but that's bloody awkward. I just never could figure out how to say it seamlessly in conversational language.

[azurelunatic]

"The hairbrush that belongs to Sheryl and me." "That hairbrush is Sheryl's and mine."

[azurelunatic]

And, I am doing my bit to pass it on to the Little Fayoumis. I correct his phrasing, and have him repeat it the correct way a few times.

I may be a bit stern, but you should see him some afternoons... I'm busily doing something else, and he asks me if I could tell him about something. I think he's caught on to the fact that asking me to hold forth on a topic to teach him is the way to get my undivided positive attention.

[indigocat.livejournal.com]

Speaking of addictions...

I am blaming you for my addiction to Harry Potter slash. And didn't need another fandom.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Oh, you poor thing.

Good luck finding the needles in *that* haystack.

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Good old hypercorrection. Gets 'em every time.

I sometimes tell my students that if they really want to learn English, they should take a semester of Latin.

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the people who know "I" is incorrect but absolutely cannot bring themselves to use "me," leading to sentences such as "Professor Snape caught Draco and myself snogging."

[cellio]

I see that from a lot of people who should know better. (Also "myself", which is both incorrect there and pretentious-sounding.) I don't know why it's so hard to get people to think it through without the conjunction -- no one would write "...caught I snogging", so they know at some level that it's wrong, but they just don't think about it when writing.

I guess they've internalized a rule of "'me' is wrong", and they only see one other option, so they're just using it without evaluating it.

[ratcreature]

I hate that as well, and really don't get this irrational aversion some people have against using "me." Perhaps some people don't realize English has cases because they're less obvious than with Latin or even German. Perhaps it's somehow harder to realize when cases aren't obvious everywhere because you have four or five forms for each noun (doesn't have Finnish like 15?) and every noun or at least its article sounds different when it's a direct object and different still as an indirect object, and not just the pronouns? But really what I wonder is, shouldn't this *sound* wrong to people, even if they haven't learned about cases formally? Or would they talk like that as well?

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

(a) Yes, they talk like that. *wince*

(b) The "irrational aversion" is hypercorrection-- when they were kids, they'd say stuff like "Me and Jennifer are going to the mall", and their mom (or teacher or whoever) would whap them and say "'Jennifer and I', it's 'Jennifer and I'" and so they dutifully say "Jennifer and I are going to the mall" without realizing /why/, so that then when they want to say "He waved at me and Jennifer", they think, no, that's wrong, must say "He waved at Jennifer and I".

It's directly related to the fact that English doesn't really have cases. As, I think, is the confusion regarding its/it's (which seems straightforward as fuck to me, but then again, I don't have problems with the me/I thing), and when to use an apostrophe with s ("Clam's on Friday's only!") English speakers aren't used to thinking in cases, which means (a lot of the time) they don't understand /why/ something's done the way it's done, so they make a wild guess at the rule, usually overapplying it.

[ratcreature]

I get the its/it's problem even less than the me/I problem (unless when it is just a spelling mistake -- because "it's" seems to occur more often, sometimes I have this muscle memory thing of writing "it's" when it should be "its" that doesn't mean I'm not aware of the difference). I mean, in one case there's a contracted verb, in the other not, it should be easy enough to see which one it is.

OTOH I can understand confusion about cases, after all it's kind of arbitrary how many or how few cases you have, for example, according to my mom my great-grandparents had problems to differentiate between dative and accusative because their dialect just didn't do that (it was like Dutch in that regard) so when talking Standard with my mom (as her parents had mandated because at that time Low German wasn't popular and parents and schools were supposed to root it out -- with some success too, now the local dialect here is all but extinct), they mixed up things like articles and pronouns like "mir" and "mich" (because like the English "me" their dialect only had one word) when speaking standard German. The distinction between direct and indirect object seemed random to them, because their German dialect only had one objective case covering both. Still since English does have different pronouns for subject and object it's not quite the same thing.

I think people should just have to learn some foreign languages in school, and then all the grammar stuff would become much easier for them to understand, because of the compare and contrast effect.

[azurelunatic]

And then there's the bloody painful, the use of quotation marks for emphasis.
For example: Come here for "good" food!


I had to, finally, explain why it was not "veggie's" nor "CD's" to my roommate, when she argued, "Well, you took out some letters, and where you take out the letters it's a contraction and you use the apostrophe," by reminding her that it is most emphatically not "veggie'", nor is it "C'D'", and if you don't use an apostrophe in the shortening of a word that isn't pluralized, you don't use it when making it plural either.

And then there's Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

I love that! I want to buy the poster. I have seen apostrophe errors in major news journals. English wasn't even my first language, and I know how to use my apostrophes. I also find it amusing when the same people who make the apostrophe errors try to correct me for spelling "colour" with a u. Try reading English literature sometime, bozos. Heh. BTW, I love your Grammar Bitch icon.

[azurelunatic]

Thanks!

This is the result of a Google Image Search for a suitably cranky-looking nun, and some slight working-over in Paint.

And Bob the Angry Flower does rock entirely too much. :)

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

Actually, you might be able to help me. I've had trouble getting images into my LJ files. I have several mood icons that I'd like to use in my LJ, but they're too large.

[azurelunatic]

Too large as in over 100x100, or too large as in over 40k?

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

Too large as in over 40K.

[azurelunatic]

Is it animated, then?

English has cases? No, really I knew that, but..

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

Um.... Uh-oh...

*frantically reads back through fics to see how many times she herself has pulled this stupid stunt* though in my fics it's Snape who gets... nevermind...

And what about the subjunctive? I was writing the other day something like "She would finally know what it was to be desired, even though it were by a monster rather than a man." and that sounded wrong, so I changed it to "even though it was" and that STILL sounded wrong so I went with "even though it would be".

Still not sure I did the right thing (the fact that it's some dreadful purple prose aside...)

Re: English has cases? No, really I knew that, but..

[azurelunatic]

Fic? *eyes brighten*

Did you try stripping it down and looking at it?

"She would finally be desired, even though it were by a monster" sounds fairly wrong.

"She would finally be desired, even though it was by a monster" sounds a lot better.

Then, I go by "it sounds right" most times rather than lists of rules, because while I was Taught to Speak Correctly, it was through correct example and correction rather than by a rule book.

*ponders further* Yes, it's "were" for more than one, and "was" for one -- "She would finally be desired, even though they were monsters", so it has to be "was" for one, even though the sentence is undoubtedly purple and edging into the magenta. (I like complex prose.)

Re: English has cases? No, really I knew that, but..

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

...but subjunctive uses "were" even for singular (e.g. "If I were president...")

In this case, I think "was" is right, because it's not subjunctive (not counterfactual, not hypothetical). But the singular/plural distinction isn't always enough.

(and subjunctive is one of these things that I Really Did Not Get At All until I took a foreign language. *snicker*)

Re: English has cases? No, really I knew that, but..

[azurelunatic]

Right. "If I were a rich man..."

Only, the song's got it wrong...

Re: English has cases? No, really I knew that, but..

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're right about it being not counterfactual/hypothetical. The horrible part is that even what I originally put wasn't the whole sentence, and it was far from the worst one in the story.

But, I agree about the foreign language completely. I learned about the subjunctive in Spanish class and only later was able to apply it at all in English.

But speaking of songs, shouldn't it be "Homeward bound, I wish I were"?

(Er, sorry if I'm hijacking the thread, but Paul Simon drives me nuts sometimes.)

[mareklamo.livejournal.com]

In a hundred years, it might be correct to say "Professor Snape caught Draco and I snogging". But we'll all be dead by then, so we won't care.

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

I find those grammatical errors annoying, too. I also find it annoying that most slash writers seem incapable of spelling the word "definitely".

[rosehiptea.livejournal.com]

Definitely? Heck, some of them can't spell "yaoi". (anime slash term). As my friend the yaoi fan says, "It's a four-letter word, if you can't handle spelling it, I'm not reading your fic."

I make some spelling mistakes too I'm sure (I'll probably find one in here when I'm done) but for heaven's sake, you're online! There are so many dictionaries.

Sorry, sorry, just couldn't resist.

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

I find it particularly idiotic given the easily accessible Spell Check option in LJ! *chuckling*

Count your Omer today. ;) hehe

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

Well, tonight if you already counted. lol Shavuot approacheth.

[coltillicit.livejournal.com]

Sorry to monopolise (that's right, British spelling, hah) this thread, but I just discovered the meaning of the term "yaoi" last night. I told my beshert that I had heard the term on LJ, and it turns out there's an entire genre that I never knew existed. Fascinating.