Grammar cop is Me

[Ms. B. Havin]

Ok, I stopped myself from responding with this in the politics thread in response to Bernard's posting of Sonya Chandler's Facebook entry, but here it is in the General section. Warning -- grammar rant (yes, I'm one of those...). This time I'm out to exterminate the incorrect use of the first-person subject pronoun ("I"):

Great to see people using socnets to get their word out, but I wish the hyper-correct could stop using the first person subject pronoun ("I") when they really should be using the object pronoun ("me").

It's one of those things that drives me up a wall.

It's "between you and me," not "between you and I," for example, and by the same token it's "with Philippe and me," not "with Philippe and I."

Why? Because "between" and "with" and "at" and "to" and all those other silly little words are prepositions, and they take the object pronoun, not the subject.

"getting both Philippe and I elected" is also wrong. Philippe and Sonya are objects in the quest to "get elected."

I would guess there's confusion over this in English because "you" functions as both the subject and the object pronoun.

I'm sorry to be such a nag about this, but hyper-correct use of "I" drives me crazy. So your mom or 1st grade teacher told you it was incorrect to say, "Me and Joe," and pounded the "I" into you instead -- some teachers still insist on using "I" when they should be saying "me." Ugh. They're wrong, wrong, wrong.

Seeing incorrect and hyper-correct use like this on a political announcement (vs some casual bit of drivel on a forum or something) crosses the line for me.

Yes, for me, not for I.

[VicHockeyFan]

Bah, that doesn't bug me. But we're and were, and your and you're, and their and there some could at least get right.

[Caramia]

It was forum nazis who taught me to spell. Seriously. Two university degrees didn't do it. Being publicly humiliated over and over was the key. I had one forum admin who programmed the forum to take common misspellings, cross them out and add the phrase "I don't know how to how to spell _____ (correct spelling). The entire thing was also in red so you couldn't miss it.

[VicHockeyFan]

I use Firefox, and it spell-checks as I go, but alas, it does not check grammar.

[victorian fan]

My grandmother was a Scottish Governess for the Dewar's Whiskey family . She lived with us for a time and corrected every mistake I would make when speaking. Heaven help me if I used the word "eh".

[julienne]

I support you in your grammar cop-ness. I personally can't stand typos on menus. I may have to start correcting them when the waiter isn't looking.

[Caramia]

Today's Wondermark...

[Ms. B. Havin]

Well, I think that cartoon is just about worthy of a solid ROFLMAO!

What a find -- thanks for posting that, Caramia! (It made me think about all the mistakes, too: "different" instead of "another," "between" instead of "of," etc.)

Um, wasn't it NParker who has questioned the "could care less"/ "couldn't care less" expression? This should give him more ammunition...

I can relate to Gus's observation that "the correction is often more annoying than the transgression," which is why I feel like a ****e for bringing up Sonya Chandler's deficiencies in using the English language.

However, ... It's just that unlike homonyms, like "your" and "you're" or "their" and "there," which, when used incorrectly are annoying but can at least be ignored because they sound correct, using "I" when you should be saying/using "me" exposes the speaker/ writer as a cretin who knows nothing about the underlying structure of grammar.

And if you don't understand the underlying structure of the language you use, how can I trust you to teach my children (if you're a teacher) or lead my city (if you're a councillor) or build my cities (if you're an architect or urban planner)? I mean, if you don't get basic subject-object relations and distinctions, how can you be entrusted with anything?

Subjects and objects... How hard can it be???

:-)

[Zimquats]

Originally Posted by Ms. B. Havin

...
Why? Because "between" and "with" and "at" and "to" and all those other silly little words are prepositions, and they take the object pronoun, not the subject.
...

My pet peeve are poeple that are using way two much 'ands' insted of comas and poeple who are'nt gud spellers and poeple thsat are actually knowing what the heck a preposition are and poeple like either me or I (not sure who is who anymore) who drink and make posts and....

[Ms. B. Havin]

Oh, drink posting -- that's fine. It's a forum. You're not making an official announcement to run for office!

And yes, the compound sentence.

Perhaps it's a form of passive-aggressive behaviour on my part.

[Zimquats]

Oh ya..and the " thing like someone is actually saying it instead of the ' thing like it's something to emphasize.

/hugs Ms. B, (don't hate the player)

[Nparker]

Originally Posted by Ms. B. Havin

Um, wasn't it NParker who has questioned the "could care less"/ "couldn't care less" expression? This should give him more ammunition...

That certainly sounds like the sort of nit-picky thing upon which I would expound. I found the cartoon hilarious.

[Ms. B. Havin]

^ Indeed. Although... I don't understand what's wrong with "ginormous"...?? Why is that verboten?

PS @ Zimquats: at least you don't have to see me doing the scare-quotes thing with my fingers, eh?

(OMG, victorian fan's grandmother is going to bust my ass for using "eh"... :-) )

[Zimquats]

Honestly, I'd be willing to bet actual money (not like the five bucks that turned into three cents that Kubla Khan owes me on the breastfeeding thing) that I have the worst spelling and grammer of anyone here who speaks english as a first language.

[Caramia]

The comic was pure serendipity. I check it daily. Today it just happened to fit the topic too well.

[Ms. B. Havin]

@ zimquats: Oh, I don't know -- you just posted a masterful, multi-clause sentence there. (Not to be confused with Santi Clause, of sanity clause. No sanity clauses here...)

@ Caramia: me loves serendipity! <3

[Phil McAvity]

I'm glad to be in the company of grammar and spelling fascists because mistakes are so ubiquitious on the internet that I tend to overlook most of them. It's cool that some people still care about this stuff. I tend to pick and choose who I pillory when it comes to linguistic trangressions though because at a site like IMDB.com it's rare to read two short posts without an error so I overlook most of them, whereas at some forums where I feel like I kind of know the poster and they seem intelligent, sometimes I will needle them for the slightest little mistake.

I too enjoyed the "Wondermark" cartoon as it is reminiscent of those old Charles Atlas cartoons.

Here's something I found at another forum that kind of surprised me because the person calling for these irrational, unworkable changes is a Brit. I would expect a Brit to be the last person to call for such fuzzy-headed changes as it is their language they would be mangling and Brits are often the biggest proponents of linguistic conservatism. The fact that he is a criminology lecturer is fitting though because what he proposes should be criminal.


Push to ignor speling in univercity is ridickulis

Rachel Sa, Toronto Sun, Sun, August 17, 2008


Whew! Now thet speling dosint mater anymor, riting this collum will be alot qwiker No, not really.

But, according to a U.K. university professor, proper spelling is just so passe.

Missed an e? Scribbled one too many l's? Don't worry, overstressed university students. No longer will the red pen of death bleed corrections all over your atrocious spelling. You're free to be mediocre! Doesn't it feel fab?

Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University is calling for university profs to "simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."

Uh ... okay. So, if someone makes a mistake often enough we should just start letting them get away with it? Oh yeah, like that's not going to lead to any problems down the road. Little Jimmy keeps playing in traffic? Ah well, let's let him do it. After all, correcting the problem would require some measure of effort.

But I digress into analogy land ... Smith even has a list of commonly corrected words that he believes should be accepted into a new lexicon. They include: "ignor, occured, thier, truely, speach, and twelth."

And, to illustrate how ridiculous this proposal is, I just had to spend five minutes purposely spelling those words wrong. Why? The computer wouldn't let me do it! My word processing program, sensing my errors, was quick to instantly insert missing vowels and rearrange misplaced consonants. Even our computers are trying to save us from our own ignorance. So, really, what is our excuse?

I admit I'm a bit of a word-nerd, as t'were. Bad grammar gives me hives. Misspelled words and pointless punctuation drive me nuts. God help you if you say, "I seen it," within my hearing. I might crack up.

And yet, I'm not so rigid that I don't understand the place -- even the benefit -- of innovations in language. Language and communication are about making meaning. And, as a wise Canadian once said, the medium is the message. Misspelled lingo beamed over the Internet serves a purpose and teaches us about the time and place in which it was written. Ditto for street slang and various dialects.

As a creative writer, how boring would it be if all of my characters spoke perfect English? Think of the tone and the texture that we lose by stripping our language of all variation and colour.

Heck, even Shakespeare, now revered as the father of hoighty-toighty, difficult-to-read verse, was lambasted in his day for his low language, including his tendency to spell words in a variety of ways. Changes to the way we speak, the way we spell, can be innovative and lead to the creation of whole new languages and dialects.

But, I'm sorry, university students who don't know how to spell "their" do not fill me with pride. They are not the forefathers of a new, exciting way of communicating.

Ironically, the Internet and technology are once again being blamed for the decline in our ability to communicate. Experts say that the swell of text messaging has left a generation illiterate, more likely to TTYL than to talk to you later.

That, too, is a copout. I can LOL with the best of them, but I didn't exchange one language for another.

There is a time and place for everything -- including the language we use. Do people need to be composing sonnets in text messages? Probably not (although it would be nice). But I don't think handing a report littered with spelling mistakes and bad grammar to a client will instill much faith in the writer.

Yes, when it comes to language and grammar, rules were made to be broken. But, you first have to know the rules before you can successfully break and transcend them. There is no innovation in ignorance.

[victorian fan]

(Hamlet, Act Three, Scene One)

"2 b, r nt 2 b dat iz d Q wthr ts noblr n d mnd 2 sufr d slngs & arowz of outrAjs fortn r 2 tAk armz agnst a C f trblz, & by oposn nd em?"

[Caramia]

(Hamlet, Act Three, Scene One)

"2 b, r nt 2 b dat iz d Q wthr ts noblr n d mnd 2 sufr d slngs & arowz of outrAjs fortn r 2 tAk armz agnst a C f trblz, & by oposn nd em?"

ROFLMAO!!!!!!

[VicHockeyFan]

I got a letter in my mailbox last week talking about the smoke testing of sewers. They used a lot of "&" in the middle of sentences. That seemed strange, and wrong.

[Baro]

& ur . is ?

[LJ]

Originally Posted by Ms. B. Havin

Yes, for me, not for I.

I was taught that in order to use I/ME correctly you just had to take the other person out of the statement.

i.e. The goal is to get Bob and I elected.

If you take Bob out of the statement you get;

The object is to get I elected.

or

The object is to get me elected.

Most people realize that the first example is incorrect.

FWIW

[Ms. B. Havin]

^ Yep, that's right -- it's a good check.

It'll fail only in those instances where "me" has become so ingrained through colloquial use that "I" sounds wrong, even though it's right.

"It was I" sounds bizarre because we're used to saying "It was me," even though in this case, "It was I" (and therefore "It was Bill and I") is correct. But no one says that anymore unless you're a prat.

Oh, PS, speaking of prats and England: re that story about the UK university prof wanting to accept unconventional spelling... What really cracks me up here is that he proposes that the professors should learn a list of "acceptable" deviations -- this was the point brought out in a BBC article I read some days ago, anyway. For example, as a student I couldn't write "akfdlkf" when I meant to write "aubergine" -- there'd be a limit as to how wrong or off-base I could be.

The reason this bugs me is that it puts the onus for learning more on the professors (as a prof., you have to learn the new list of accepted deviations!). As a student, you can stay stupid, but it's up to the prof to know what level of stupid is ok, and what isn't.

So the student gets to stay stuck with his/her misconceptions, while the profs learn new vocabulary lists and procedures and standards. What's wrong with this picture?

Aside from disagreeing with attempts to dumb down standards, I found the idea annoying from this perspective, too.

[Rob Randall]

Originally Posted by Ms. B. Havin

The reason this bugs me is that it puts the onus for learning more on the professors (as a prof., you have to learn the new list of accepted deviations!). As a student, you can stay stupid, but it's up to the prof to know what level of stupid is ok, and what isn't.

That's a very good point. It reminds me of the short-lived Ebonics fad of a few years ago.

1) Some sample sentences in AAVE/Ebonics, with discussion of the ways in which they show the systematicity of AAVE:

1. AAVE: "She BIN had dat han'-made dress" (SE: She's had that hand-made dress for a long time, and still does.)
2. AAVE: "Befo' you know it, he be done aced de tesses." (SE Before you know it, he will have already aced the tests.)
3. AAVE: "Ah 'on know what homey be doin." (SE: I don't know what my friend is usually doing.)
4. AAVE: "Can't nobody tink de way he do." (SE: Nobody can think the way he does.)
5. AAVE: "I ast Ruf could she bring it ovah to Tom crib." (SE: I asked Ruth if/whether she could bring it over to Tom's place.)

Although AAVE does have some distinctive lexical items (e.g. homey and crib in the above examples), much of what people know from rap and hip hop and other popular Black culture is slang, young people's vocabulary--which is almost by definition subject to rapid change, and which in many cases crosses over or diffuses to other ethnic groups, becoming almost an icon of youth culture itself.

[martini]

Originally Posted by VicHockeyFan

I use Firefox, and it spell-checks as I go, but alas, it does not check grammar.

Same here.
Bad spelling makes me wince. I know I can be a little flaky in the grammar dept. though.

Funny about the I vs. me.
I was taught from an early age it was I not me.
I'm going to keep an eye on my I.

One of my pet peeves is:
I took the fairy to the island.
Steeling is against the law.
I ate the hole thing.
I cannot count how many times I've seen that kind of error. (From adults)