@Ionus,
Quote:it is not enough and you want a greater quantity of it .
And yet you can't describe what quantity that is. Did you also constantly shoot yourself in the foot when you were an active grunt?
Sunk your little "rule" again.
Quote:... then went on about how there are no rules in the English language .
Major reading comprehension problems or another example of your proclivity to lying. I never said there were no rules in the English language, you bumbling idiot. I stated clearly that these two abominations that you think are "rules" aren't.
Where did/do you come up with such nonsense? You still haven't provided a source that backs your "rules".
Possibly, you once read something in some silly style manual and you've so badly botched up the meaning [your reading comprehension is abysmal], that you are too embarrassed to quote it. But as you embarrass yourself constantly, one wonders why you would worry about this one.
Quote:
Grammar Puss
...
The contradiction begins in the fact that the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson. The rules people learn (or more likely, fail to learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought" to talk.
Scientists studying language propose [descriptive] rules, describing how people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely different things, and there is a good reason that scientists focus on the descriptive rules.
...
Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.
Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.
So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations.
The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system.
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
...
For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.
All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all.
Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
[added emphasis is mine]
You definitely are oblivious, to much more than language and how it works. Your nonsense "rules" have, as far as I know, never even existed. I say "as far as I know" because I'm not into the habit of reading every silly little prescriptive style manual that has ever been written.
Your "source", the one that you just threw out there as a smoke screen, one of your numerous illogical tangents, you know, the one that you didn't even bother to check to see if it discussed your "rules".
How intellectually dishonest is that? Actually this is not worth discussing as you have never shown anything remotely connected to intelligent.
The first rule I checked for your "source", in another thread, when another poster cited it, she had botched it up. Bad start. [Dollars to donuts, you can't even state the name for YOUR source without going back and checking.]
But still, go ahead and find your "rules" there or wherever. You've sunk your rules so many times now that I've lost count. Maybe, somewhere, there's a prescriptive wag that can help you bury yourself deeper.
