Excellent point! Please do me the honor of wearing this genius cap.
(Note that as a bearer of the Living Language, I have decided that “genius” should now be spelled “DUNCE,” replacing the antiquated form found in dusty dictionaries.)
The only thing worse than being pedantic is being pedantic and wrong, or possibly being pedantic and fat.
I think I might enjoy that (possibly a little too much), because if they’re mistakenly correcting me, then it is ON! Time to have a discussion about how if you remove John from the sentence, you wouldn’t say, “You can give that to I.”
I heartily endorse this Pitting - it’s one of my current peeves, too, the ridiculous over-use of “myself.”
Just what is wrong with using the standard possessive form on an indefinite object? People keep saying it’s’s wrong…
I always forget to do it when we have these threads, so I’m going to read this one AFTER I point out that there is never an excuse to say “comfterble.”
Nails on slate…
What, like… its?
That’s the result of native speakers not learning the rules of the language from dusty old books, but through living examples and everyday use. The grammarians struggle to impose order on language, but the native speakers resist it because the language works fine for them. English has tons of technical intricacies, but we don’t learn the names for them or the full rules because we don’t learn the language through a book.
If you ask a native English speaker to write a sentence demonstrating the Present Perfect Continuous verb tense, you’ll get blank stares most of the time. They then say things like “What have you been up to?” without knowing it’s an example of Present Perfect Continuous.
Ultimately the grammarians will lose this fight, but it’s kind of fun to watch them shovel sand against the tide. I just wish it wasn’t so hard on people learning English as a second language. They may look to native speakers as a source of information on the language and the reality is most don’t know the rules explicitly, just implicitly. So they can’t give guidance in the way the learner needs it.
Enjoy,
Steven
I ain’t got nobody that I can depend on, just me, myself and I. <–Grammarian nightmare?
“Oh, I forgot, John’s on vacaton this month. Just give it to I.”
Now you’re just being difficult…
Next, could you go after people who prounounce the name of the second month as “Feb-yoo-ary”?
That should be, “To what have you been up?”
Nowadays, often condensed to “what up, homie?”
Luckily, people that are both fat and pedantic are invariably correct.
Me Am, Myself Said.
I guess you could, but you’d be wrong. That is the more popular, and thus correct, pronunciation, at least in American English.
Okay, how about “realator,” then? I watch a lot of real estate porn, and this is my nails-on-chalkboard mis-pronunciation.
Oh, yes, I work with a couple of those.
SmartAss: “John or I … .”
And I reply: “Oh, really? Are you seriously telling me you want to use the Subjective Case when dealing with a Direct Object?”
SmartAss: “Uhhh…?”
And I quickly walk away, before they can see me gloating.
Val Kilmer demonstrates the proper way to respond to an incorrect grammar correction in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (warning: language).
That’s pretty darn close to most pronunciations (/ˈkʌm.ftɚ.bəl/). Do you hypercorrect and pronounce it how it’s spelled or something?