I have a rule, and it has yet to steer me wrong: if it’s not grammatically correct, it’s not worth reading. People who put little-to-no effort into the presentation of their ideas usually put little-to-no effort into the ideas themselves.
You want bad posting? Go to a forum for video gaming and/or computer modding. Yeesh! I mostly lurk at one of the medium-sized modding forums, and from other forums I have seen on the same topic, it’s one of the better ones as far as grammar go, and it still grates on my nerves most of the time.
Of ocurse, being a modding board, it allows pictures (to show off your sweety mods, of course,) but lordy oh lordy how that feature can get abused. If they just barred pictures from the ‘general discussion’ forums, it wouldn’t be bad, sicne then all the pictures would just be of people’s cases, or new hardware, and what have you.
I know this is a joke, but it touches on two of the stupidest nonsense rules ever perpetrated on those who learn the English language:
[ul]
[li]Splitting infinitives is perfectly correct. Everyone does it. Why? Because that’s how English works. The prohibition is a rule from Latin, a language where splitting infinitives is impossible, applied to English, where it is obligatory, by people who wouldn’t be competent to teach a chimp how to pick termites off his own ass.[/li][li]‘Whom’ is a perfectly useless word. It has no reason whatsoever for being, and nobody even comes close to using it consistently anyway. Even if there were people who use it according to the imaginary rules invented by ignorant schoolmarms, who cares? It adds no information to the sentence we don’t already have.[/li][/ul]Bah! Geek mad! GEEK SMASH STUPID RULES!
Great Language Log post on the death of ‘whom’.
This is even more fundamental.
Don’t get me started about the morons who decry double negatives. Shakespeare used double negatives, and he wasn’t no dummy!
Now, I don’t know if you are joking or not. Double negatives are stupid, they can introduce ambiguity to the language.
“There isn’t nobody home”
If I say that, it means that it isn’t the case that noone is home. But if a double negativer says it, it means that there is nobody home.
Cite?
[QUOTE=Derleth]
[li]‘Whom’ is a perfectly useless word. It has no reason whatsoever for being, and nobody even comes close to using it consistently anyway. Even if there were people who use it according to the imaginary rules invented by ignorant schoolmarms, who cares? It adds no information to the sentence we don’t already have.[/li][/QUOTE]
Sez whom?
No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Whom’s on first.
Yeah, I said this on another board I belong to…
Si
I don’t not know.
NADS is generally pretty good as well, but then that original started as an offshoot of this place anyway.
To be honest i think its generally closely tied to subject matter.
Just checking.
You are requesting a cite for a message board, other than this one, which is not populated by idiots.
Folks, simmer down. “Whom” is no more useless than “him” or “me” instead of “he” or “I” – which, not coincidentally, is how you remember when to say “whom” (whenever you would say “him.” See, you can tell because they both end with m!)
On my metro forum (French language), yes, yes they do. I tell you, when a kid is using no caps and no punctuation and typing the phonetic equivalent of thick joual, it can become damn near impossible to understand.
Ow. Almost as bad is random capitalization of Nouns, usually those the writer wishes given emphasis or respect, such as Football, the Saxophone, or one’s Supervisor at Work.
Darn, another one I am guilty of. I am working on this one currently. I picked up the habit in my supporting tech writing. This is extremely common for Cobol & RPG programmers to capitalize words in the middle of a sentence.
Jim
Yes. When you say “No, this is not the only one” and provide no further details it’s kind of annoying and pointless.
Add to this rogues’ gallery of shitty syntax the use of quotation marks for no apparent reason. You know, when you’re “surfing the” internet and there are message boards with “lots” of things in quotes? :mad:
You know, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing my master’s degree thesis on that topic: what effect e-mail, text messages, and instant messages have had on the quality of business/professional writing. Hmm.
What are you “trying” to say? :dubious:
(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
I think it’s because the market is absolutely saturated for that kind of board, and there’s fewer prospective quality members to go around. It’s hard to establish a new forum now, but there are still come categories where the phrase “build it and they will come” applies: video gaming, computer modding, car modding and tuning, MMORPGs, and anime. It seems like there can never be enough anime or car tuning boards.
Fair enough.
I can’t say for certain which message board, if any, Una Persson had in mind but my choice, among others, would be the aptly named Unaboard.
Then tell us all what extra information it provides to the sentence. Keep in mind that it is slowly dying out in normal conversational and written English, even in sentences produced by intelligent and educated speakers, and is not even useful as a class marker anymore.