I was inspired by argument on grammar in this thread. It’s in the Pit, well, because many recent grammar threads have been in the Pit.
The sentence under debate reads, “I had a high school teacher that once…” Tarantula states that it should be rewritten to say, “I had a high school teacher who once…” as people take who and only things take that.
This is not true. Who refers to people, which refers to things, and that can refer to people or to things. Granted, that mostly refers to people in a general sense, as in “teachers that” rather than “a teacher that.” In addition, that is only used to refer to people informally. However, usage of that to refer to people should be acceptable on an informal method of communication such as posting on a message
In your rewrite, you used “who” in a method that would win the approval of any teacher of English. However, you used a superfluous comma after “whites.” Never insert a single comma between a subject and a predicate. Two commas may be used to bracket off a personal name, an aside or parenthetical expression, or a relative clause that is not essential to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. In fact, in an especially intricate sentence, there may several pairs of commas serving as brackets between the subject and predicate, but there is never a reason to put in only one.
The substance of your rewrite has been addressed in the original thread, but I will observe that your newly structured sentence is cumbersome and unwieldy.
Correcting punctuation and spelling in midst of a debate/discussion is indeed quite lame. It shows that you cannot properly debate the points presented in the discussion/debate, instead using your corrections of errors as some sort of debating method.
I find most posts by the Grammar Police to be unnecessary and annoying – and particularly so when, as in sugaree’s example, the Grammar Patrolman presumes to criticize a proper usage on the basis of an erroneous “rule.”
Having said that, I want to pick a nit in the OP. The no-comma-after-verb “rule” is also not a valid one, and Tarantula’s reconstruction is not in error in using it. At about the time of the Founding Fathers, it was a nearly invariant usage, following German usage, for formal English to place a comma following the verb where there was an extended subject and an extended predicate. Good usage here pays more attention to style than to supposed rules. Certainly “That is, incorrect” is itself incorrect, but in an extended construction, a comma setting off the verb (either preceding or following, as good taste may indicate) may very well be stylistically appropriate. In fact, I can compose a sentence that would require a comma to be even marginally readable: “The reason that the proper verb in that sentence is “is,” is that…”
If a person were to be typing like that, it’d be unlikely that they would be involved in any form of serious debate. Do you ever see people typing like that on the SDMB? Or more specifically the GD/Pit? It’s pretty damn rare to find people speaking completely in leetspeak or have their messages made completely indeciperable by their spelling/grammar.
No- You said that sugaree’s “lame ass IQ couldn’t pick up that I was correcting grammar, rather than punctuation”. Yet in the originial thread you stated that you were correcting punctuation. Don’t act like such a hostile jerk.
