I went to Spedricks web site, the one given in his member profile and got this message:
THE MEMBER PAGE
YOU REQUESTED
COULD NOT BE
FOUND!
Thus, we won’t ever be able to find the stuff where the word BUT was used in order to determine if it was used properly. Kinda moot.
Not being a native English speaker, I want to add my 0.02 worth.
In most Germanic languages, with added Latin overtones, starting a sentence with a conjunction is considered bad grammar.
But, remember that English is the language spoken by most people around the world. Not as a first language, but as a second. Nestlé, a Swiss company, has a board of directors from all over the world. The working language at their board meetings is … English.
And one thing that has made English great, especially American E. is its ability to steal, borrow and adjust from other languages as well as to transform.
Look at the French. They’re very protective of their language, and it’s losing out every year. Fewer and fewr people care about learning it as a second language.
If the purists get to decide, the same will happen to English. Let it evolve. Things are considered OK now, which weren’t a 100 years ago.
ct
Ah, the future is McEnglish you say ? Why not allow a “proper” English, retaining its identity (along with admittedly difficult rules) to coexist with the informal lingua franca of Afghan taxi drivers and Korean greengrocers ?
Guessing you’re at least familiar with Pacific-area languages, you no doubt recognize that there are formal and informal languages in everything from Japanese to Tagalog to Samoan. Spanish too, come to think of it, separates informal and spoken from the written. I have trouble speaking with Dominicans, and they got trouble in Spain (see another thread on foreign languages) but we can both read Garcia Marquez. And Spanish wasn’t vanishing last I looked.
Evolution doesn’t require reduction to the lowest common denominator.
>>Ah, the future is McEnglish you say ? Why not allow a “proper” English, retaining its identity (along with admittedly difficult rules) to coexist with the informal lingua franca of Afghan taxi drivers and Korean greengrocers ?
Guessing you’re at least familiar with Pacific-area languages, you no doubt recognize that there are formal and informal languages in everything from Japanese to Tagalog to Samoan. Spanish too, come to think of it, separates informal and spoken from the written. I have trouble speaking with Dominicans, and they got trouble in Spain (see another thread on foreign languages) but we can both read Garcia Marquez. And Spanish wasn’t vanishing last I looked.
Evolution doesn’t require reduction to the lowest common denominator.<< --Jorge
Umm, English is the “lingua Franca”? LOL
Rivkah,
Sorry you misunderstood me. Your experience with Japanese students’ scores was my point exactly. They weren’t studying Brooklynese, or Watts slang, but “standard dissertation English” (nor were they studying the pidgin so common on T-shirts in Tokyo). Good ! Those students rose to the occasion, as opposed to demanding simplified rules. My fault if I didn’t include NY pizza sellers or Seattle record store workers along as examples with the Afghan cabbies. (Lingua franca was a weak pun; but as an international business language, English surely qualifies.)
Ah, if only “American” English users learned “proper” English, and how & when to separate it from the informal…
There is a big difference between idiomatic and grammatically incorrect. Idiomatic refers to groups of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words, for example, over the moon. The use of “but” and “and” to start sentences is not idiomatic, it is at best colloquial, and at worst just wrong.
I am curious as to how you manage to edit scientific journals effectively without paying much attention to grammar rules. I am a technical writer, and in the scope of my profession I also do a fair amount of editing of others’ work. I have also worked at a newspaper (as an editor and writer) and supported myself in university editing term papers, resumés and cover letters. I would not have the professional reputation I do today were it not for my attention to detail in writing, particularly when it comes to grammar and word usage.
Certainly for some types of writing - first-person narrative fiction, for instance - using “and” or “but” to start sentences is acceptable. For most other uses, including journalistic writing, into which movie reviews would ordinarily fall, this usage is not acceptable.
I would also like to direct you towards my profile, which clearly indicates that I am not an American and therefore have no reason to subscribe to American grammar “rules” and conventions. By assuming that I am required to do so, you display the arrogance and egocentric attitude that so often causes strife between our two countries. The next time you see fit to give someone a lecture on “getting a grip” you should first make certain that your own is firm.
This question’s not worthy of its own thread so let me ask it here: With regard to the preposition at the end of a sentence rule, how else yould I ask Where are you from? without sounding like a total dork- i.e. From what country do you come?. Sheesh.
Use, ‘Where are you from?’ Opus. I see no reason not to. True, we are taught not to use a preposition there when we were kids, but it’s actually quite alright sometimes 
Ending an English sentence with a preposition is perfectly valid as long as it makes sense. The rule against ending sentences with a preposition was (unsuccessfully) imposed on the language in the eighteenth century when various scholars of the Enlightenment attempted to “bring English up to the standards of Latin.” In Latin you may not end a sentence with a preposition for reasons that are inherent in the structural syntax of Latin. English does not use the same syntax; sentences ending in prepositions were acceptable prior to the Enlightenment; no serious scholar of English accepted the pedantic insertion of the eighteenth century, anyway.
After all, if language is not to communicate, what is it for?
Tom~
Here’s an example. Gregg Easterbrook, in his article “Load and Lock” in the May 31 New Republic, uses the word “but” to begin sentences several times. True, Easterbrook writes in an informal style…but in a respected magazine directed at educated people. Let me point out one thing. He likes incomplete sentences. Without either a subject or verb. His style works. His articles make sense. Read a few of them if you don’t believe me.
Conclusion: If you’re a rookie, follow the rules. If you know what you’re doing, break them as long as you’re sure you’re going to communicate what you mean. And if breaking rules makes your writing more effective, go for it.
I appreciated Eris’s posts.
Oh, yeah. Wanna see incomplete sentences? Check out James Ellroy. Like him, don’t like him, the guy gets his point across. Hard. Tough. Too Hemingway-influenced? Maybe. Too much stuff about his mother? Sure. Over-macho? Perhaps.
>>To me, there are only two hard-and-fast rules of English: be clear, and don’t let it be clunky.<< --uncredited quote
Absolutely. See below.
All other quotes from Eris:
>>There is a big difference between idiomatic and grammatically incorrect. Idiomatic refers to groups of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words, for example, over the moon. The use of “but” and “and” to start sentences is not idiomatic, it is at best colloquial, and at worst just wrong.<<
No. Wrong. “Idiomatic” is anything that is accepted usage, but does not conform to stated rules. Specific kinds of idiomatic expressions, such as “catching up on homework,” “making up a story,” or “the clock is running,” are idioms. Using “but” and “and” to begin sentences in certain styles of writing is in fact idiomatic to that style.
Colloquial language is language specific to a geographic region, eg, the “ink pen” of the mid-West US. Since “colloquial” describes spoken language, it tends to be used to describe informal language. My mother spent four years trudging around Bohemian hills to tape record the natives for her award-winning study on the differences between literary and colloquial Czech, sub-titled “A Study in Code-Switching.” I’ve never been able to stay awake long enough to read it…
What? Oh ::cough::
>>I am curious as to how you manage to edit scientific journals effectively without paying much attention to grammar rules. I am a technical writer…<<
Please. The worst stuff I ever have to read these days is social-work speak. There’s never anything grammatically wrong with it, but it’s full of gems such as “Gary is 100% independent in the area of laundry,” or “Steve is not yet at the point where he can meet the change counting goal with more than two prompts successfully.” No, the second does NOT contain a misplaced modifier.
>>Certainly for some types of writing - first-person narrative fiction, for instance - using “and” or “but” to start sentences is acceptable. For most other uses, including journalistic writing, into which movie reviews would ordinarily fall, this usage is not acceptable.<<
Umm, no, reviews are not necessarily journalism-- or rather, there are many kinds of journalism. The guy covering the Mid-East peace talks for the NYT is not going to write the same way as the guy reviewing The Mummy for Rolling Stone.
If you do not believe me, read Dorothy Parker’s Constant Reader book reviews from the New Yorker. (Available from the MOdern Library) Some of the tautest, sharpest, sassiest, most lucid writing ever, and absolutely enthralling. And informal as hell.
–Rowan
If my mother had been in charge of the War on Drugs,
it would be "Just say 'No thank you.'"I know this has already been addressed, but I’d like to offer a specific cite: in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, page 36, it says: “Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there.”
As the ancient Chinese saying goes, “The Law may upset reason; reason must never upset the Law.”
Also, you used i.e. in an instance when you should have used e.g. – a particular peeve of mine.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
DAVEW0071 says:
Phantomwise
…never seen by waking eyes…
DAVEW0071 says:
quote:
>>You’re also not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. However, I have heard of an instance where someone ended a sentence with five prepositions.
Seems a little kid was waiting for his mother to bring up a bedtime book and tuck him in for the night. She brought up a book he didn’t like and he asked her, “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”<<
The way I heard it, the book was about Australia: “What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of about “Down Under” up for?”
–Rowan
If my mother had been in charge of the War on Drugs,
it would be "Just say 'No thank you.'"DAVEW0071 says:
quote:
>>You’re also not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. However, I have heard of an instance where someone ended a sentence with five prepositions.
Seems a little kid was waiting for his mother to bring up a bedtime book and tuck him in for the night. She brought up a book he didn’t like and he asked her, “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”<<
–Rowan
If my mother had been in charge of the War on Drugs,
it would be "Just say 'No thank you.'"PapaBear: You must not teach grammer? (Grammar).
We don’t want to teach Thor bad English.
PapaBear: You must not teach grammer? (Grammar).
We don’t want to teach Thor bad English.
No, no, PapaBear, “bad Grammer” is when Frasier star Kelsey Grammer is having a bad acting day.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
If you guys are just now discovering that I carry a bad-spelling gene, you’re not very observant.
BTW - I teach History, or as I prefer to call it “selective human memory”.