I use so many non-English words in my writing that I have turned off the automatic spell-checker. When I am DONE writing, then I go through the whole document once, ignoring some non-mistakes, and adding others to the dictionary.
But that won’t help with the grammar-checker, where, to my knowledge, you can only tell if to stop checking a rule in its entirely, not specific instances of the rule, which is what you’d want here. That’s why I was very intrigued by the suggestion to edit MSGR3EN.LEX. I tried opening it in Notepad, but it doesn’t seem to be a plain text file. It seems to lots of odd code bytes in there. I’m using Word 2002. Any suggestions? Thanks!
When it comes to Word, I definitely second turning the grammar checker off entirely. It just isn’t smart enough to keep it active all the time.
Yes, but if you ever join a faculty, you’ll notice that your salary and status are tied directly to number of words, not the meaning they contain. The head of the department is invariably the person who can write a three-page memo that boils down to “Does anyone have ideas for a memo?”
It’s not a plain text file, but it does have plaintext words here and there (at least for Word 2007… I’m not sure about 2002). I’d suggest using a text editor like UltraEdit in hex editing mode if you want to tinker around in there, but please be sure to back up your file first. Also, you might want to replace the string with something of equal length so the filesize doesn’t change, just in case Word has some sort of file integrity checking (I don’t know if it does).
Aw, sorry. I don’t have a Mac handy right now, but I might later tonight. I’ll look into it then if I can.
While chiming in to agree that “faculty” is a singular collective noun in American English, I will point out that its use as a synonym for “professor” is a minor example of jargon – a non-standard usage that is standard within a group, especially a group defined by a common profession. Many fields are loaded with words that mean one thing to those in the field, and something completely different to everyone else. Most speakers of jargon switch freely between the two, depending on who they’re talking to and what they’re talking about, but some cling to their jargon even when talking to people who clearly have no idea what is being said.
I think that’s non-standard. “You’re a faculty, I’m a faculty” sounds like jargon, not english. So it’s not a British-vs-American thing, it’s a “faculty is now a noun meaning professor, and its plural form is the same as its singular.”
You needn’t worry, because what dracoi said is just another one of those stereotypes that is actually false far more often than it is true.
First, as Rhythmdvl’s Chicago Manual of Style quote demonstrates, even usage guides say that treating mass nouns as plural is perfectly acceptable in many instances. In his Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner says:
Also, moving beyond formal usage, as someone who hangs around academics a lot, and who is currently serving as an adjunct faculty member at a university, i can assure you that using the word faculty with a plural verb is extremely common among those who use it the most often.
Personally, the only use I’ve ever had for word processor grammar checks is as comic relief, at the end of a long, stressful writing assignment. I once managed to even get one into an infinite loop, where if you made the change it suggested, it promptly suggested that you change it back to what it was before.
With greatest respect, mhendo, I wouldn’t use the phrase “*many *instances”. It is okay in some particular instances. And from the examples Chicago gave, it seems to have something to do with an affect of the prepositional object. We all know that it should have no effect, but there ya go.
Yeah, granted. However, adademia at that level is such a minority of the population that I’m not sure it qualifies beyond mere anecdotalism.
A minority of the population as a whole, perhaps, but then, academia also refers to “faculty” much more often than the population as a whole. The proportion of times the word “faculty” is used by academia must surely be non-negligible.
While that may be true (depending on whether “academia” includes students), it is seldom that prescriptivism — e.g., I think someone cited Chicago — assigns some rule of grammar to people of a particular profession or circumstance while assigning a different rule to everybody else. Therefore, your point, even if well taken, may be moot.
