I’m not really mad, just irritated. I don’t think you realize what you are implying. You keep saying that you’re not implying that, but then you keep posting things that very much imply that.
Whether you were thinking of me or not, you are painting with a very broad brush. Truth is, a lot of people with an excellent grasp of the written language play around with language a lot. You know, Shakespeare did a lot of that too. And a lot of his completely invented words became standard English. The willingness to experiment with language is a sign of creativity and intelligence, not degeneracy.
To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition) task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children’s messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children’s grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task.
It’s almost as if, in order to use slang and textese, you have to understand the English language!
Definitely. But doing it successfully – meaning using neologisms that are strongly expressive and perhaps funny, or using words in unusual ways – requires a foundation of good writing skills and confidence in them. There is nothing in common between creative writing and bad writing. That, in fact, is the whole basis of the humour in the Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest! The premise is a fictionalized version of what happens when terrible writers try their hand at creative writing. I was going to say an “exaggerated” version, but I’ve seen some examples of actual manuscript submissions, and some are just as bad and just as unintentionally funny as the jokes.
I barely have any clue how to use those. There are some blind spots I have because I learned most of my English from reading and don’t recall much formal English instruction. I know “to whom” and “from whom” but that’s about it.
Stick with those and don’t worry about it otherwise and you’ll be fine. Personally I find incorrect usage of “who” to be far less grating than misuse of “whom”.
I don’t mean to join the pile-on here, but this snip is a very clean and concise explanation of a circumstance that I think needs more yakyak …
What follows is NOT a lecture aimed at @wolfpup. It’s a rumination for us all, certainly including me, to think about.
I will suggest that at one time 10 or 15 years ago, when the Dope was a much snarkier and more ribald place, that sort of sniping was indeed considered part and parcel of the game we all happily played.
I will also suggest that, along with many in-phrases that are now past passé, past cliché, and into actively grating, that particular play has ceased to be part of current board culture. We all remember it, but maybe we all don’t welcome it now as we once did.
Someone continuing to prattle on regularly about 20 minutes or death rays or Opal’s fondness for threes isn’t even quaint; it’s stupid bordering on senile. It’s most assuredly tone-deaf versus the current culture here.
I too enjoy reading a good goof and sometimes relish providing a corrective. But I feel the need to make a witty joke or a larger comment out of it. Not just “you did wrong”. And especially not “you did wrong, asshole”.
As we all get older and crotchetier and new blood seems in thin supply, the place will get more formal, less flexible, and less tolerant.
Maybe the community tolerance for drive-by pedantry has waned to the point it’s moved over the line from fun to microaggression / microtrollery.
I’m not certain that’s true. But I’m also not certain it’s not.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “intuitive,” but it’s definitely true that “descriptivism” is just a less precise term for “science of linguistics.” The more that prescriptivists act like descriptivists are white-knighting language, the more they make it clear that they don’t even understand the argument.
And for the love of God I teach children to write. It’s what they pay me for. I’ve spent nearly twenty years trying to persuade our district to teach more grammar, and to spend more time focusing on the mechanics of writing. None of that is what I object to.
I’m a copyeditor, and the explanation I’ll usually give, when one is needed, is to look for a verb you can pair with the “who/whom.” If you can find one, use “who.” If you can’t, use “whom.”
For “I will give the prize to who(m)ever crosses the finish line first,” you can readily see that “crosses” is the verb you’re looking for. Or, you know, at least I hope it’s readily apparent.
Of course, that doesn’t account for contexts where a correct “whom” is simply going to have a stuffy, overly formal feel. Or sometimes it just sounds wrong anyway. Seriously, would we have wanted to hear Bo Diddley sing “Whom do you love?” I think not. It’s okay to break the rules; just know why you’re doing it.
But Ernest Hemingway was good with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
ETA: That advice is not 100 percent foolproof. The answer may not always be apparent because sometimes prepositional phrases can throw you off. But I’m comfortable with saying it’s fine if you add “most of the time, you’ll get it right this way.”
On the matter of “who” vs “whom”, several posters provided useful tips, especially @dirtball. As a broad generalization, I think one should follow the rules for using the correct case, but as already noted, there are exceptions if it sounds overly stuffy or pompous. My general rule of thumb is to use “who” as the default unless the objective case is clearly called for. The use of “whom” has in fact been declining for many years, though its frequency seems to have flattened around 1980.
I was just thinking of an example where it’s best to abandon pedantry and just go with what sounds best. Consider this sentence:
With whom are you going to the dance?
“Whom” is correct here. If one transforms the interrogative into a declarative (“I am going with her”) one can see that the prepositional phrase demands the objective case.
But consider the exact same sentence with just one word migrated to the end:
Who are you going to the dance with?
It has the same meaning, the same words, yet almost no one would say “Whom are you going to the dance with?” even though this should technically be the correct choice. Why?
My speculation is that it may be in part because putting the preposition at the end breaks up the prepositional phrase, but I think there’s a more important reason. I think it’s mainly because flipping the preposition to the end changes the tone, or register, of the question to a less formal one. In the less formal register, “whom” sounds incongruous and pretentious.
I thought it was interesting. I welcome corrections if I’ve got this wrong.
According to my limited knowledge descriptivism is a less precise term for the modern science of linguistics. I understand that English prescriptivist linguists once existed (they wrote grammar manuals) but that research program crashed and burned once they tried to operationalize their approach. (French and Spanish don’t have this problem: proper grammar is defined as what the Academy says it is. Easy peasy.) Cite: My memory, probably mangled, of past Pit threads. Because that’s where the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate typically goes.
I’m a prescriptive-adjacent armchair grammarian (who struggles with spelling, punctuation, and grammar). Not as adjacent as wolfpup, but still. The study and presentation of English grammar that ignores a sense of propriety constitutes an imperfect description of the English language. Those at the highly informed far end of the linguistic pedantry chart get it wrong. Because the world is not made up of compassionate and emotionally integrated eggheads: the world is made up of mid-wits. So those with subterranean levels of pedantry need to up their game and lay down the law a little. Because that’s what the mid-witted market demands.
I’m a native English speaker who uses “should of” and “should have” interchangeably and goddamn it I appreciate the correction. I have never been exactly deaf, but my hearing has always been iffy so I’m not surprised that I misheard this and internalized it over the years.
“Should have” is just better communication and I hope to use it moving forwards. Furthermore, now that it’s been pointed out I have a preference for should have. “Should of” is somehow irritating: as a native English speaker it offends my sense of propriety. It sounds wrong and is bad grammar to my ears, despite the fact that I used it routinely prior to a couple of days ago.
That’s an example of the sort of prescriptivism that dedicated descriptivists need to take into account.
I frankly consider thoughtful elementary school English teachers to be experts on the prescriptivist/descriptivist controversy: they are on the front lines after all. LHoD’s posts on this subject are consistently high quality. For example I have to agree that using grammar as a gatekeeping device is offense if sadly common.
Apparently my use of the term “morons” has gone way beyond its intended bounds. I consider you to be one of our more thoughtful and erudite posters, and I owe you an apology if I inadvertently included you in the group I was denigrating. Obviously the linkage between what one hears and what one writes is more reflexive than I thought.
Thank you for that concession, which really encapsulates my point.
I admire you for what you do, undoubtedly against repressive administrations in your political climate. At the risk of evoking more ire, however, let me once again try to lay out my position as clearly as I can.
What you seem to object to, judging from your numerous posts on the subject, appears to be any criticism of people who don’t write the way that you teach your students to write. This argument isn’t about someone like me “not understanding language”. It’s about the inherent contradiction. Yes, I understand the concept of different audiences, different registers, and so on, but here’s the essence of my argument.
These discussions often devolve into claims that people have a natural sense of grammar, that one might say “I ate the last remaining sandwich” but no one would say “Sandwich ate remaining last the I”. Arguments just like this have literally been made right here on this board (though not by you, AFAIK, but by other self-styled descriptivists). And it’s abject nonsense. The fact that we have a rudimentary sense of how to order subject, verb, and object doesn’t mean that everything everybody says is grammatical or even necessarily comprehensible.
This is precisely why English teachers like you are paid to teach these skills. And based on your demonstrated sense of language I’m sure you do it very well. I sincerely mean that. But then you declare it to be unnecessary as long as you can decode whatever gibberish someone has pecked out on a keyboard.
The real argument here, as illustrated very well by your quoted example of the poor old lady who just wanted to talk about gardening on a discussion forum and got slammed by rude idiots for her bad grammar, is to cool it with this sort of obnoxious bullshit. I’m fully on board with that. But being impatient in the general case with atrociously bad writing and what its prevalence says about how little value our society places on language skills is an entirely different matter and an entirely different discussion.
Isn’t “should of” just “should’ve”? They sound exactly the same to my ear.
I wouldn’t know, I usually say “shoulda.”
At least when I’m being informal.
That’s the point I’m trying to get across here - you can’t tell when you hear someone use this construction whether they are a drooling moron or an erudite word aficionado. You just don’t know.
When I hear people trash this kind of language it just reminds me of the first time I landed at an elite university how people tried to correct my casual speech, which is basically their way of telling me that poor, rural students need not apply. And I was thinking “Fuck all y’all, I can write circles around you motherfuckers.”
(I didn’t actually think that, I was a nice girl. But that’s how I feel looking back on it now.)
Reminds me of a joke that everyone here has probably heard. A guy from Alabama is admitted to Harvard. His first day there, he stops another student and asks, with an obvious Southern accent, “Where’s the library at?”
The other student draws himself up in an indignant stance, looks down his nose at the Alabama guy, and says, in a world-class condescending tone, “This is Harvard. We do not end sentences with prepositions here.”
The Alabama guy says, “All right, then. Where’s the library at, asshole?”
(Side note: it’s all right to end a sentence with a preposition.)
