Spoiler = ? ppl =?

because otherwise I shall be much more reluctant

Saying 'much more' is the same as saying 'more'

I assume you're being sarcastic in your continued, wearying campaign against what you consider prescriptivism, JTT,

It's wrong to say 'much more', Contrex, ie. there's a rule that says it's wrong. Saying 'much more' is the same as saying 'more', so just cut out the 'much'.

the only way I've ever heard "denoument" pronounced in English is like the words day-new-ma, maybe with a little bit of nasalization of the final "a", definitely not wth a final ng, as in "sang", as your phonetics would seem to have it, ori.

Set could be because there are a lot of university and college professors of English that make numerous errors in describing the workings of the English language. Set used to be much worse but he took such a shellacking in the Pet Peeves of English thread that he saw the light, though he is loathe to admit it.

There are many professors of English who believe and teach the same nonsense that OmSig has been chiding Set about in your thread,

The most common pronunciation of "would" in "I would like to".

Here's a link to a discussion on what Descriptivism is

http://able2know.org/topic/133633-1

In it there is a link to,

Quote:

There Are No Postmodernists In a Foxhole

Geoff Nunberg
Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," August 20, 2002

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/fish.html

In that commentary, Mr Nunberg takes an English professor to task for spouting similar nonsense about grammar, exactly the same kind of nonsense that OmSig has been trying to pass off.

Here's the pertinent portion, but do read the whole article.

Quote:

Like a lot of my favorite stories, this one begins with a pronoun, this from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted Harvard President Lawrence Summers in an interview saying, "I regret any faculty member leaving a conversation feeling they are not respected"

The sentence was tailor-made to bundle puristic panties, particularly given the context and speaker -- and in fact a few weeks later, the Chronicle ran an extensive diatribe from a professor of English who took exception to Summers' grammar. According to the writer, Summers should have said "I regret any faculty member's leaving," not "any faculty member leaving." And the antecedent "any faculty member" required the pronouns "he or she," not "they," (Modern academics are particularly attached to the "he or she" construction, which enables them to sound politically correct and pedantic in the same breath.)

The professor went on to chide President Summers for contributing to the general decline of precision in language -- all the more distressing in someone who has presented himself as a crusader for scholarly rigor. Indeed, he said, the woeful state of the language is evident to anyone who listens to National Public Radio for 15 minutes or reads a single section of The New York Times. That's what happens when students are taught that writing is a form of pure self-expression, so that students "need never accept correction; for if it is their precious little selves they are expressing, the language of expression is answerable only to the internal judgment of those same selves." We've come to the point, the writer said, where composition teachers have a horror of acting as language police and grammar itself is regarded as a form of reactionary tyranny.

The response went on in this vein for a full 1750 words, and concluded with an insistence that all college composition courses should henceforth teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. In short, it was an utterly routine grammatical harangue, distinguished only by the speciousness of the occasion for it. For example, that business about having to use the possessive "any member's leaving" instead of "any member leaving" is one of those mindless superstitions that have been passed on to generations of schoolchildren at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. As the linguist Geoff Pullum pointed out in a letter to the Chronicle, if you really believed the construction was incorrect, you'd have to take a red pencil to Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and most of the other great figures of English literature. And as for the plural pronoun they, bear in mind that Summers' words were quoted from a spoken interview, and that everybody uses the plural that way in their informal speech.

It's a sort of cultural stereotype. Catholic schools used to be largely taught by nuns. The stereotype was that they were particularly stern taskmasters, who would enforce their rules by corporal punishment, particularly by whacking non-performing students or ones that didn't follow their rules with a ruler--a ruler being a wooden stick a foot long with inches and parts of inches marked on it, for measuring--what else-- a foot(English and American measurement--we don't use the metric system, more fools us). And the implication being that a lot of their rules were arbitrary. Nuns were called "Sister something"--there's a comedy bit about someone's teacher being "Sister Mary Elephant". I'm getting all this secondhand. I went to public schools.

I assume you're being sarcastic in your continued, wearying campaign against what you consider prescriptivism, JTT, but while it's true that a tornado is "more windy" than a spring breeze, it is also true, and probably more accurate, to say it is "much more windy".

So " at the end of Sister Petra's ruler" means "by the beating of Sister Petra's ruler?"

oristar says:

Quote:

So " at the end of Sister Petra's ruler" means "by the beating of Sister Petra's ruler?"

Well, sort of. It's a metaphor for teaching or forcing a particular viewpoint on someone by authority rather than reason--i.e. "you'll do it because I say you have to do it, that's why".