Those who can are condemned by one who can’t, or chooses not to, as pedants.
Moderator: please close this thread as a gang of internet kiddies have turned what was something kind of fun into an insult-spewing, name-calling flame war. I am ashamed to admit, I even caught the disease myself. There hasn’t been any worthwhile discussion here for thirty or so posts. Let’s kill it now.
Right. If you’re ignorant, the two most popular defenses are to mock those who are not, or to profess that that which you are ignorant of is unimportant anyway.
Surprisingly, we’re seeing a lot of that in this thread. I thought that most people here were edumacated.
I’m sure that’s why most of these threads get started, your typical high school English teacher being the most common agent of transmission. That’s because teaching writing–truly teaching it–is extremely difficult, and many English teachers fall back on petty fixations with minor things like apostrophes, etc., in order to avoid doing the real work.
You’ve had multiple people who actually understand linguistics explain how moronic some of your positions are and your response is to insult and argue with them. Go home and clutch your Strunk and White to your chest, since it’s apparently the only thing you’ll listen to.
And if you don’t want to be continually mocked and derided for spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, then don’t set yourself up as someone who knows their way around a relative clause.
Amen. The thread title itself is almost painful to read. The its/it’s error is a slight misdemenor in comparison.
Nope.
I was spacing myself for the long haul.
Goodness. If you’re not a troll then you’re the whiniest little bitch on this board.
This is kind of adorable. It’s like your circuits get fried if there’s an error. Now I’m picturing a very angry rudimentary computer with an emotion chip.
I’m imagining a cross between Judge Judy and the HAL 9000.
I think we need to throw in this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrJnzBFzEEY (Sesame Street piano guy) for the DRAMA!
There’s a small market nearby with a sign in the window that is hand-lettered and says: Closed for remodelating. Open until further notice.
Um…where shall I begin?
This store is a few minutes from my house. Every time I pass it, I have to look . . . like at a bad accident.
Then pertains to time or order.
Than is used in comparisons.
They are not interchangable.
It actually made me feel really optimistic to observe that. Usually, I go into these threads thinking “Well, everyone’s so set in their opinions, they’ll never budge. This is all rather hopeless. Why am I wasting my time?”. You know intellectually that people do evolve their opinions sometimes, but it’s nice to be able to actually see the change.
(Of course, I was a foolish prescriptivist once too. Though not in any particularly active way, just in the sense of never having really given the grammar gotcha games I was accustomed to hearing about any second thought. Still, I was guilty of letting the various shibboleths I happened to have heard of occasionally serve as internal badges of honor separating oh-so-smart me from the masses.
This thread’s premise is that unyielding respect for prescriptivist edicts is the way to uphold respect for intelligence, and that failing to give them that respect is a sign of the decay of intellectual culture. It strikes me as in contrast to my personal experience, in which my prescriptivist feelings were strongest when I was just blindly accepting what I’d heard without ever really thinking about it, and then weakened and disappeared after starting to study linguistics in college.)
(Some might say I’m now just blindly accepting some other thing other people say, and that my new way of being oh-so-smart is by clinging to this new position [“I heard it in college, you guys!”]. It feels to me like a position I’ve reached by and defend because of reasoning and thought, even if others helped inspire some of that thought, but, of course, everyone feels that way about all the things they’re blindly accepting too. So the parenthetical remarks in my last post don’t mean much (they certainly aren’t meant as a persuasive argument for anything). They’re just a personal anecdote which gives me some internal amusement.)
Me, too. I used to be quite the little rule-follower, tsking hither and yon while rolling my eyes at the ignorant.
Okay, I still roll my eyes. But now I roll them COUNTERCLOCKWISE.
Maybe the owner’s first name is Two.
Those who can are condemned by one who chooses not to as pedants?
Close on the cousins thing- it should be* two cousins’*, right? There are two of them, and the shop is theirs.