What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Mame, it's "wrong" only because some people with way too much time on their hands say that it's wrong. If the sentence is clear, lucid and understandable, there's no reason on earth why it shouldn't begin with a preposition, conjunction or any other kind of word. (Okay, okay, I can see where a pedant might argue against the conjunction. A conjunction, by definition, joins things. At the begining of a sentence, there's nothing to join. My personal rule of thumb still stands: if it's undertsandable, it's okay.)

Note that "heights" has a letter 'e'.

I'll tell you what really ticks me off.

It's the current American habit of using "hero" for both genders,

Is there anything more annoying?

No, there isn't.

Brion--


Welcome to A2K.

You seem to have a healthy ego.

I agree. It's just hard for me to do away with all those rules. But really, I cannot stand sentences that start with conjunctions and relative pronouns. Would you write the following:

He put on his rubber boots because it was raining hard. Which really bothered him.

NO!!! Weird, to me

You would simply write it another way, JTT.

The only time you use "Which" to start a sentence is when it's a question. At least, that is what I was taught.

"Which way are you going?"

The sentence in my previous post is not a complete sentence, so it's doubly wrong.

I'm slanging on here, JTT - and in convos with friends, you do that... but were you to write... you have to add the punctuation, so obviously it's different, which is what I think you said on the other thread - written is very different from spoken.

I asked you a question or two on the other thread, when you have time to get to them......

This,

"Which way are you going?"

also isn't a complete sentence.

Sorry, I disagree. A sentence is supposed to be complete.

Which is nice.

is not.

a.

complete.

sentence.



We shall have to agree to disagree

Happy New Year, JTT>

LGSWE

Unembedded dependent clauses are connected with the evolving nature of conversation. Clauses of reason, which are particularly common, allow the speaker to add some words of explanation or justification without planning an argument in advance.

Which-clauses are typically sentence relatives which allow the speaker to express a comment on something that has just been said. These constructions commonly open with expressions such as:

Which means/explains ...

Which brings me to ...

The special advantage of the relative link is that it signals a close connection to the immediately preceding text.

{at page 223-224}

LGSWE

Sentences will not be separately described, as it is debatable whetehr this notion is applicable to speech. [at page 50]

Whereas the sentence has been treated, traditionally and in modern theory, as the fundamental structural unit of grammar, such a unit does not realistically exist in conversational language. [at page 1039]

JTT wrote:

This,

"Which way are you going?"

also isn't a complete sentence.

Is this the way to San Jose?

What are you, CRAZY?