Periods Meeting Quotes

What's wrong with "it"? Apropos on several levels.

Though not proscribed, the use of BUT or AND in sentences has seen its useage decline in narrative writing.
It hd been a popular tool to show emphasis at the front of a sentence.
using AND to open sentence is often reqd as if someone were "flaming" or speking loudly.

At this point (at least from my perspective) this has become less a discussion about grammar, proscriptionists, descriptionists and such...and more a discussion about how differences, even significant differences, can be discussed on the Internet without the incredible amount of rancor that seems to arise in so many threads.

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At this point (at least from my perspective) this has become less a discussion about grammar, proscriptionists, descriptionists and such...and more a discussion about how differences, even significant differences, can be discussed on the Internet without the incredible amount of rancor that seems to arise in so many threads.


You might have expected that Frank were you not so destitute of knowledge about human nature due to you thinking it such a fine thing so that you might very well conclude that you are a fine thing being an ordinary, average, common or garden example of the typical human being with a handicap in the high teens. And anything above twelve is the high teens.

Its about snobbery and its antonym anti-snobbery. Rancour is a given in discussions about status symbols and it easily segues into the incredible when the discussions are between those who gather in a large bulge, in a graphical illustration I mean, in that region of the the y-axis that makes it look like a perfectly symmetrical tit. Bees swarming on a branch illustrates the phenomena just as well in another parellel universe of the communication systems of nature.

Is it obsessive you might well ask. It is indeed.

There are axes to grind. And bees in bonnets. Idea fixees. Hard bitten neurotics. Up the Jones's garden gnomes. It's serious ****. It's like presenting driving 200 miles, getting on a boat and braving the swells and having to take a dump over the stern, to see some whales spout, as demonstrating a better class of person than one sprawled across the sofa watching the Tour de France whilst being served cups of tea and cakes from time to time with mods cons within easy reach. That gets more rancorous than this will.

(I ought to research whether the whales make their passage through the coastal waters off the north-eastern seaboard of the USA at the same time of year that the Tour de France takes place because otherwise I have a faulty metaphor. But I haven't time and I assume you dig my drift.)

The manner in which we use language is like dress. Or table manners. Others judge our personality from it. Our intelligence. Our social status. Our educational standards. Aptitudes for occupations. And many other aspects of our identities and social capacities.

People are easily hurt when such things are questioned.

The "rules" are authoritarian. That's like a red rag to a bull to many people. They are against that emotionally. The presciptivists think of the descriptivists as the sort of people who blow their nose with their fingers and talk when they are eating. It's elitist conservatism versus radical liberalism.

Your "let's all be friends and discuss this calmly" line is not only fatuous but shows that you are in a central position in the swarm around the average. But the sweet reason will take an early bath whenever your own status symbols are challenged. And that you can't go the distance with a JTT using that uni-sex writing style.

I bet Dave wouldn't use "U" for "you", or "b 4" for before, if he was writing a deposition.

And I bet JTT wouldn't present for a teaching post dressed as a clown. The prescriptivist rules for dress codes at interviews is well known.

Spendi, my cad, my lad, you're doing very well in this thread.

On Pinker, I'll have to read that. I skipped it since I remember him as a JTT god.

JTT's virtually exclusive reliance on Pinker

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JTT's virtually exclusive reliance on Pinker

To be fair, I've always gotten the impression that Pullum is JTT's primary authority, not Pinker, and Pullum is indeed a linguist.

if I recall correctly, he never actually says that there's anything wrong with prescrptive grammarians,

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html/

just that such prescription is unnecessary to effectuate comprehension.

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/