Well, if they’re both acceptable, then they’re both acceptable - the use of both have and got sounds wrong to me, even if it’s not actually wrong.
Well, the fact that an acceptable idiom doesn’t sound quite right to some people doesn’t really qualify as a “gross abuse of the English language,” but I just want to thank everybody involved in that particular discussion for officially making this my most successful thread ever…
Barry
Official, eh? I’d like proof! A citation, or something . . .
Yep. With 162 (now 163) responses, this thread pulls well ahead of godzillatemple’s previous popularity record holder, “Strange but true names,” with 131 posts.
Oh, wait, you were being facetious…
Taking that a little further, I’ve heard some people say, “My…those prices are absorbant!”
sigh
A headline in today’s Boston Globe reads, “Consumers largely nonplussed about mad cow risk.” Do you think they meant that consumers were utterly bewildered about mad cow disease, to the point where they couldn’t possibly be more bewildered?
Yeah, in a pig’s ear.
To quote The Princess Bride, “That word you keep using – I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Barry
A friend who lives in Massachusetts says it must be illegal to use the word “gone” in North Carolina (where I live). Even our local newscasters say “the stormfront has went through our area.”
A few that make my skin crawl:
Complete lack of punctuation. Reading the average e-mail or message board post (outside SDMB, of course), I see a lot of paragraphs that could charitably be described as run-on sentences. It’s just a mess - no commas, no periods - and if this is the new average for communication, no wonder there are so many idiots out there.
Using nouns as adjectives. I’ve completed a project for a textbook company where we were required to use sentences like “Choose a fraction concept.” That’s almost as ugly a lingual sodomy as “by and large.”
Count nouns used as if they were mass nouns. “Have some more potato.” Come to think of it, the reverse bothers me too, even when it is technically(?) correct: “Our moneys are insufficient.”
Realtor - it’s not a REAL-uh-tor! Do you see any vowel between the l and the t?
And a couple that are correct or necessary, but still bug me:
power up/ power down. I understand that turning a computer on or off is only part of the process, and we do need something to denote the entire process. But why did it have to be so ugly, bending the meaning of the word power?
Asterisk. For years, I was sure that the correct spelling and pronunciation was asterik. The second s just sounds wrong, but it’s supposed to be there…
Am I the only person bothered by “most favorite” - as in “that’s my most favorite food!”? I thought “favorite” was an absolute, like “unique” (or perhaps a better example, like “best”).
Then of course the good old favorites “lie” and “lay,” and “different than” has me cringing so badly these days that I start cringing at “other than,” which, I would think, is just as grammatically incorrect but hallowed by long usage. And why have people started sticking in apostrophes almost at random, but especially in plurals? Hyper-correction?
Hey, my grammar is no worse then yours!
Using ‘then’ for ‘than’ is becoming so common that I’m afraid it’s going to be accepted as common usage. I try hard not to be anal about these things, but this one really drives me up the friggin’ wall!
How about the misuse of:
discreet / discrete (as in “Please be discrete while talking behind her back…”)
affect / effect (just remarked upon it in another thread)
spelling “hilarious” with a double L
spelling “occasionally” with a double S
That’s all I can think of right now… I’m sure I might be back with more later.
F_X
“Most unique” really gets my goat.
In a letter to my local paper today, a woman who describes herself as “an educator of 28 years classroom experience,” complains that she was “demortalized” by some put-downs of teachers in the letters section.
Speaking of “by and large”, I have actually seen someone axe it even further by writing it in an email as, “by enlarge.” It’s a good thing I wasn’t speaking with the person because I actually laughed out loud at the poor, mutilated metaphor.
Am I the only one who has noticed that words which were supposed to be unacceptable have slowly gained legitimacy? Words such as: “fishes”, “alright”, “irregardless” etc.
In fact, even the rules of grammar have been bent. We were taught that sentences shouldn’t begin with conjunctions or prepositions. We were told that a comma does not go after “and”. We were told to avoid writing in first person. We were told to follow the same tense, preferably the past, through out the document, so on and so forth.
And we were told that a period must always be within the quotation marks, not after them. To be honest, though, that is one particular rule with which I’ve never agreed.
Barry
litost - I thought “fishes” was always right. “Fish” is the collectivel, and “fishes” is the plural. Sort of like the distinction between “money” and “moneys.” I’ve searched, and I couldn’t find any usage manual or dictionary which claims “fishes” is incorrect. In fact, my Oxford American dictionary states to “use the plural form fishes especially when you mean two or more species or kinds.”
As for the first part of you response, well, this is how language evolves. Unless you’d prefer to be speaking Chaucerian Middle English, this is a natural process. There’s plenty of common words which have made the transition from “acceptable” to “unacceptable” in the eyes of grammarians. “Laughable” (coined by Shakespeare) was argued to be more properly rendered as “laugh-at-able.” According to Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue, "Dozens of seemingly unexceptionable words — lengthy, standpoint, international, colonial, brash — were attacked with venom because of some supposed etymological deficiency or other.
And many of the grammar “rules” we once were taught are more guidelines than rules. And some are plain wrong. What the heck is wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction or preposition? Maybe you meant ending a sentence with a preposition, b/c I’ve never heard a rule against heading a sentence with one. And that rule, too, is silly.
“Avoid writing in the first person.” This is pretty outmoded. For certain types of writing, authors do refer to themselves in the third person, as in “it is in this author’s opinion.” But in my opinion, this sounds old-fashioned and vaguely disconcerting in the way that boxers sound when they talk about themselves in the third person.
Following the same tense IS generally a good idea. But there will be times when you need to pull out the past perfect, the present or the future. If you’re writing about a book, referencing the story line in the past tense, and then want to compare it to a present real-world situation, you would use the present, of course.
However, I suspect this rule was handed down to you because your class hadn’t mastered proper tense usage, and it’s easier to keep this as a guideline. As a blanket rule, though, it’s completely wrong.
Commas generally don’t go after “and,” except in certain circumstances. How about this one: “Bob is a nice guy and, judging by the looks of things, exceptionally tidy.”
And don’t get even me arguing about how “different than” is perfectly fine.
Another alleged rule that’s outmoded - if it was ever moded - is the beginning of a sentence with a conjunction. You can do this, folks. Forget what your misinformed grammar school teacher told you.
Oh, and you don’t have to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. Doing so usually makes the sentence seem very awkward.
This is a British (or at least non-US) thing. British grammar states that the period and the comma go outside the quote marks; Americans put it in. So it’s a matter of style depending on the country, really.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by pulykamell *
**
And many of the grammar “rules” we once were taught are more guidelines than rules. And some are plain wrong. What the heck is wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction or preposition? Maybe you meant ending a sentence with a preposition, b/c I’ve never heard a rule against heading a sentence with one. And that rule, too, is silly. **
Whoops, pulykamell covered it already. Whoops.
Commas go after conjunctions if a new thought is being expressed. “John walked down the lane and through the woods.” (no comma) “John walked down the lane, but Mikey kicked his ass anyway.” (comma)
Sorry to keep picking on you, Dantheman, but I think you misread. The question isn’t whether “and” goes after a comma, but rather whether a comma goes after “and.”
In other words, you wouldn’t say, “I went to the movie and, Brian came with me.”
Commas don’t go after conjunctions in most circumstances. That is, there’s no rule that leads to a comma following a conjunction. Some other rule may necessitate the comma, however, as pulykamell described.
On the matter of whether punctuation appears inside or outside the quotation marks, I’m a grammar rebel. I firmly believe that it ought to go with whichever thought makes more sense.
In this sentence, including the quote “I hate uni”, the comma should go outside the quotation marks to indicate that it’s setting off a nonrestrictive phrase.
In this sentence, I want the period to be inside the quotation marks, since the sentence ends with a quoted sentence: “I really sincerely hate uni.”
In this sentence, since the quoted material isn’t a full sentence, I want the period to be on the outside: here, I’m just telling you that I despise a Japanese sea-urchin extract called “uni”.
Sadly, though, no grammar textbook sees the elegance of my solution.
Daniel