Quincy wrote:I am not advocating perfect English- I too use bad English as you will no doubt be able to find for yourselves.
I doubt that you do use "bad" English, Quincy. You use the English of your dialect and that can hardly be bad.
But these types of errors are horrid, ugly, lead to confusion, and are easily avoided. It's not difficult to distinguish between adverbs and adjectives and when to use which. It is nowhere near as bad as some of the really arcane rules of grammar.
It is as arcane as any other prescription, Quincy. Speech is the driving force for language change.
[quote]LGSWE
... conversation is at the forefront of linguistic change and it is thus less likely to make use of features which were previously more frequent in the language.
[Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English]
The standard mantra, [sounds like a Reader's Digest type comment], is that these standards of speech lead to confusion. That is rarely, rarely the case. The great confusion that has come in language are the silly prescriptions that come from such sources as the Reader's Digest, the ones that drive most of the peeves of language. Hold these peeves up to scrutiny and most are flimsy as hell.[/color]
English is my mother tongue, and I was schooled in the standard English, or "the Queen's English", and saying: "I am seeing good", and using "good" as an adverb in that sentence is as bad as saying "that forrest is scarily", and almost as bad as "he are very tall"!
should be interpreted is if good is a noun, thus your meaning is not conveyed. If we allow this to happen, English deteriorates. We may as well grunt at each other. Eventually "good" will have no meaning at all.
Has this ever happened, Quincy? No. Language takes care of itself. It always has and it always will despite the prescriptivists. Their "rules" have always been laughable. It sounds as if you're givng us some more of Reader's Digest sage advice.
While I'm at it I may as well toss in another of my pet peeves: "all but" constructions in sentences. I know they are grammatically correct. What's wrong with "nearly"? "All but" to me is unnecessarily complicated and ugly.
And also, people often use it like "I all but cried" meaning "I cried", so it is often incorrectly used and superfluous.[/quote]
English is renowned for its rich store of synonyms. Everything that exists in language has a nuance. 'nearly' is one choice as is just about & almost and more or less & pretty much, not quite, nearing, approaching, close to, be on the verge of, be on the brink of, ...
Language is exceedingly complex. There is so much more to it than that expressed by a Reader's Digest point of view. Delve into a real study of language and you'll see that these concerns are mostly misplaced.
