IME, I hear the phrase springing almost entirely from sloppiness and not from sarcasm.
Bugs the dickens out of me!!! To me, it just adds to the “dumbing down” of society. The ones that bug me the most are the simple ones, the ones we all learned in freaking SECOND grade! (less vs. fewer etc). The laziness and sloppiness of those types of grammatical errors is just plain GRRRR…grrrr
The very best of all the Downfall videos. So wonderfully apt.
“Less” vs “fewer” isn’t an error:
Your second grade teacher wasn’t very good, I’m sorry to tell you. You probably ought not rely on her advice.
I lean prescriptivist for work (tech writing) because it helps me be consistent. I’m not hard-core about it – I focus on the best way to get the message across and not on rules. I enjoy a more descriptivist fascination for words and language in general.
I’m much more annoyed by overused business-speak and wordiness for the sake of sounding “professional.”
Yeah, I agree on that. But, darnit, I can also understand Elendil’s Heir’s belief that it springs from sloppiness.
It would be nice if there was some proof one way or the other. I like the expression and enjoy using it, still I’d prefer that it was derived from sarcasm than from carelessness.
Has the thread reached the point where posters can just start randomly talking about pet peeves? ( I’ve never cared for the phrase “pet peeve,” but it’s so handy that I use it anyway.) Did you know that the JAWHORSE --the new sawhorse/vise device being widely promoted in infomercials-- literally gives you a second set of hands?
Literally no longer literally means literally; I realized that, but I’m damn sad to see it go because it was truly useful. Is there an effective replacement word or phrase?
“Sparks literally shot from his head. They actually, no-shit did. Not a metaphor!”
Good rule of thumb. Very few elementary school (or even high school) teachers understand grammar.
(That may be harsh – the needs of the job requires that the simplify things, so they’ll go with a rule instead of understanding the meaning of the rule.)
I was never a strong prescriptivist, but once I heard about descriptivism, I realized that was the way to go. Language does what it wants to, and all the prescriptivist King Canutes in the world can’t change that.
There are usages I don’t care for, and I sometimes spot errors (Like MSNBC last night putting “Whom should Obama appoint to the Supreme Court?” on the crawl), but they amuse me more than they bother me.
As a descriptivist, this form is not marked. And no prescriptivist would object to it, since it the wh-fronted question of this sentence: “Obama should appoint _____ to the Supreme Court.” The blank takes a noun or pronoun in the objective case, such as “whom.”
However, “Who should Obama appoint to the Supreme Court?” is also unmarked, and is the form more frequently encountered in natural American English speech.
I received an e-mail today that made my head go foop and my brain melt:
Obviously this was a business related communication. The worst part is that it was from the person tasked with contacting new and potential customers for my employer. I am at a total loss, do I talk to my boss about it, or do I just hope that he does better when communicating with potential customers?
This is not a question of grammar, but rather a question of deixis. There is an affective component to deixis which the Wikipedia article doesn’t mention. (When we visit mother at the hospital, let’s bring her some flowers. Instead of take.)
Different than drives me batty. I just don’t understand how anybody can say it, it sounds so wrong. Higher than, wider than, deeper than* … these all demonstrate the structure. How does anybody jump from that to different than?
It’s different from, people!
*I have to stop here, or I’ll wind up getting a note from the mods for quoting too much of the song.
I just know Gaudere’s Law is going to bite my ass on this one.
Really? Says who?
Dirty prescriptivists.
“Different than” can have a meaning different from “different from.” I read an article on this point years ago, suggesting that “different than” was more often used in reference to implied clauses (“Today’s Paris is different than I remember it” implied “[the Paris that] I remember”), whereas “different from” refers to noun phrases.
See, that’s the kind of shit that delights descriptivists: discovering subtleties in language. Prescriptivists tend, IMO, to shoot down such subtleties even while claiming, falsely, that they’re preserving the nuance of language.
I tend to see prescriptivism as a form of thinking akin to the belief that there was a ‘good old days’ when everything was ‘normal’, kids were polite, there were no gangs, drugs, sex and rock music to lead us astray, etc.
As someone who spends a lot of her time teaching grammar (in Latin!), English grammar is not in any danger of dying. My students have difficulty understanding some Latin grammar which is not analogous to English, but when there are useful examples from English, they tend to do much better. Teaching Latin also gives me a good excuse to evangelise for the split infinitive in English!
‘Change’ is not ‘death’. I read a great article recently which showed how many current prescriptivists base a lot of their claims on ‘Strunk and White’ – which introduced a number of ‘prescriptions’ which were not standard at the time (and also didn’t follow their own advice very often).
English grammar is always evolving. I’m not sure why that should be threatening to people. That things written 200 years ago are different than things written now is really not surprising.
What do you mean you don’t like thee, thy, thou, thine, and ye? LAZY KIDS THESE DAYS!
Um, that explanation doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
I can remain calm when some ad claims a product uses “3 times less” than the other kind, but I don’t know what they meant to say. There are places where words and numbers don’t mean what they seem to mean.
If you understood, you’d be making a fortune in advertising 