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Sat 21 Jun, 2003 03:48 pm
What's your number one grammar pet peeve?
You know the one. . . . When you hear it you cringe and your ears ache as if you just heard fingernails on a blackboard. You'd never hire the person who uttered those words, and you wouldn't even want to stand next to him or her at a free-food buffet.
Ain't.
My children never uttered this ignomious contraction, until we moved further South three years ago. I told my daughter is she did it again, I'd put Tabasco on her tongue.
HaHaHa!
My mother cringed when we said that, too. Her mother was an English teacher but, unfortunately, as children, we spent more time around our housekeeper than our grandmother.
Personally, I can't stand a faulty pronoun reference.
My very observant sweetheart is always attending meetings and loves to brag about who he saw saying what to whom and what she did when she saw him react to who said what to whom about him and her.
???????????????
But, it would NEVER keep me from a free-food buffet.
"grammer"
Especially when used like this:
"I'm good at grammer"
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition.
There are very few style guides or grammar books that cling to that obsolete rule.
This bothers me, too. I end in prepositions, and it sticks out like a sore thumb to me when I do--but when I correct, it sounds ridiculous. Unnatural.
Do you know of what I speak?
Sofia- Yup. Every time that I change a sentence it sounds so.....stilted!
I prefer to end all my sentences with propositions.
Sigh, I swear by my righjt teste that it is not wrong!
Anywho:
A Southerner stopped a stranger on the Harvard campus and asked, "Could you please tell me where the library is at?" The stranger responded, "Educated people never end their sentences with a preposition." The overly polite Southerner then apologetically repeated himself: "Could you please tell me where the library is at, you jerk?"
Did that rule ever even apply to questions?
My sweetheart hates, "Are you done, yet?" He thinks there's a problem in that sentence. I actually looked up all the definitions for "done" and, well, "done" is used correctly in that sentence.
I think he has probably been asked that one too many times in his life, and it's more a reflection on his propensity to procrastinate than anything else.
Of course, I have never asked him that . . . yet.
That rule only applied to Latin, prescriptivists tried to "port" it to English.
There are cases where avoiding a sentence ending in a preposition is favorable and the converse also exists.
"From where are you?"
I hate an ambivalent statement, especially when someone is giving instructions.
"Feed the cat on the porch."
Um . . . Should I feed a cat which is on the porch? Or do the feeding on the porch?
It's particularly frustrating when issued by a control freak who knows what he or she meant by what he or she said, but who failed to communicated it effectively!
Craven, you make an excellent point. I just learned a tiny bit about prescriptivists recently. Really, um, English isn't Latin. By golly, it's English. It IS a different language, after all.
irregardless of the location of the cat or the porch, something should be fed.
) is because I do it myself a lot. I realized it when I started writing on A2K, and found myself often correcting MY sentences which ended in prepositions!
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