My general impression has been that my listeners overwhelmingly don’t care (about the touted “hung”/“hanged” distinction). As for my mother tongue, the reason it’s my mother tongue is because I learnt to speak it without requiring explicit instruction from school; I picked it up from my peers through osmosis, and there is very little conscious reflection involved in my doing so.
Teachers in school told me a lot of things: some of those things were false. Could you back up your position with anything other than such say-so? Could you explain the ultimate grounds from which this alleged fact arises?
This is pretty much what bothers me. Inasmuchas people who insist on always saying “x and I” (as opposed to “x and me” when it is correct, and believe it or not, there are times when it is, in fact, correct)even when it is totally incorrect, simply because they’re too lazy, stupid or well, whatever to be bothered by learning the very simple rule that governs that particular phrase.
And what the fuck, people? Can’t I just rant about a a pet peeve without all you turds tossing in your own pet peeves? Fuck, if you disagree with me back the fuck up out of my pit thread?
Please, please, please, please – one of you people who is so up in arms about hanged/hung – please present some evidence to support your claim that, when speaking or writinng of execution, ‘hanged’ is RIGHT and ‘hung’ is WRONG. Litoris, you may have thought you were providing that, but your cite does not say what you thought it said. And given that, as I pointed out earlier, ‘hung’ has been used in the execution context by writers including Pepys, Austen, Shelley, and Faulkner, I have a hard time accepting your unsupported assertion that only fucking morons use it that way.
Have a pet peeve by all means, but when you share it here, be ready to have its basis in actual fact investigated by actually intellectually curious individuals.
Once when editing a book, I had to edit a sentence that ended in a quotation, and was phrased as a question. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something like this:
Have you ever heard the expression “a penny saved is a penny earned”?
The text I was given had the question mark on the inside of the quote mark. I moved it out, and the author told me that punctuation goes inside the quotes. I said that periods do, but question marks and exclamations should only be inside the quote if they are inside the quote–the logic being that otherwise it introduces confusion. I backed it up with my style guide. She said, “I still disagree, but go ahead.”
And I still wonder, twelve years later, what it meant to “disagree” with the style guide.
Yet you used “arsed” for bothered as if it were an American construction. That’s more wrong than the offenses you cited. But I guess I can’t complain about that in “your” pit thread either? You don’t own them sweet cheeks, you only start them. They go where they will.
So I get the distinction between hanged and hung, but is it not true that to be hanged is simply one way of being hung? As in: to be hung, rather violently, from one’s neck, is to be hanged?
I was taught by one or two teachers putting any punctuations outside the quotation marks is a purely British convention, other teachers didn’t care. I proceeded to follow that instruction by switching wholly to the British style for those couple classes (they told me I could only use British conventions if I did the ENTIRE paper that way). Now I write in a disturbing splice of American and British conventions, and sometimes spellings, that irks people to no end (because I know I’m not supposed to do that – at all).
Anyway, there are two words/terms that annoy me to no end:
Pet Peeve - stop using it please, it is a completely arbitrary dislike, but I don’t care.
Deceptively - Look, if you write “the pool is deceptively shallow” some people will think “it’s shallower than it appears,” some will think “it’s deeper than it appears,” and some people will throw up their hands yelling “more information before I jump into the pool please!” It’s okay when you have a bit of information immediately preceding or following it, but overall the usage is just muddy.
That can be said of anybody. The issue then becomes one of allowing yourself choices. You can continue to limit yourself to one choice – the language patterns of the people you learned your mother tongue from or you may learn other patterns so that you have the option of using language in a way that is more eloquent or more professional or more appropriate for business or more persuasive. It’s not that your original dialect is inferior; it’s just that it’s limiting.
Most of the writers on your longer list were fiction writers. They often wrote in dialect. It is certainly understandable if the characters in their stories used the “wrong” word. That does not imply that the writers themselves didn’t know better or approved or would have made this choice for themselves. That still leaves a couple of them unexplained. Or perhaps “hung” was considered appropriate for the past tense in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century educated classes. Where is SamClem?
I understand your frustration. I got an aneurysm trying to convince the kiddies that periods and commas always go inside the quotation marks and that it changes for question marks and exclamation points. I finally got it across, I think…Then I found out that that is true only in the States. The Brits are different.
That can be said of anybody. The issue then becomes one of allowing yourself choices. You can continue to limit yourself to one choice – the language patterns of the people you learned your mother tongue from or you may learn other patterns so that you have the option of using language in a way that is more eloquent or more professional or more appropriate for business or more persuasive. It’s not that your original dialect is inferior; it’s just that it’s limiting.
Most of the writers on your longer list were fiction writers. They often wrote in dialect. It is certainly understandable if the characters in their stories used the “wrong” word. That does not imply that the writers themselves didn’t know better or approved or would have made this choice for themselves. That still leaves a couple of them unexplained. Or perhaps “hung” was considered appropriate for the past tense in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century educated classes. Where is SamClem?
I understand your frustration. I got an aneurysm trying to convince the kiddies that periods and commas always go inside the quotation marks and that it changes for question marks and exclamation points. I finally got it across, I think…Then I found out that that is true only in the States. The Brits are different.
Given the choice, I’d much rather read a clearly expressed sentiment riddled with grammatical/spelling errors than a convoluted message with impeccable grammar.
Or, if you say “well” when “good” was the appropriate word, you can be rest assured that I fully understand your meaning. I’m clever that way.
