which may explain your confusion re. ‘complex’.
do they have live political debates in Canada? English or French?
…there’s a killer Yorkie out for his blood. Mind your ankles, dude–that’s one mo-fo crazed lap dog.
I won’t say this is the lamest Pit rant I’ve ever heard–I’ve heard worse–but it’s certainly right up there in the Top 10. :rolleyes:
Eh, Geezer, BTW, it’s customary, when flaming someone for a specific post, to include a link to the thread in question, so’s the rest of us can see exactly why your rage burns with the fire of a thousand 2-pound canines with pink ribbons in their topknots. Normally, out of mere curiosity, and in a spirit of helpfulness and moving the discussion along, I’d look it up and post it for ya, but this time…eh, I think this time I’ll let you do the wrassling with the Search engine, as I have to go over to cnn.com and see if there’s an update on the iceberg lettuce crisis…
matt_mcl is being a smart-ass but is absolutely right.
matt_mcl is being a smart-ass but is absolutely right.
So why did you deign to post, being as this is such lame excercise?
Got the iceberg situation under control?
:eek:
Great Merciful Heavens! I’ve been pitted! Now I know how an olive feels!
And on my birthday, too! Have you no feelings, sirrah?
DesertGeezer, my usage of the slang phrasing (link here) in a sentence in which I was declaring myself to be old was meant to be, you know, like humorous and somewhat facetious and stuff. Apparently it didn’t come across that way! I offer my most humble and abject apologies.
Do I teach things like that in my classes? HELL yes! I teach English conversation, and understanding English conversations (especially for native Korean speakers) depends, to great degree, on some basic undertanding of the culture. That includes many things… and I try to at least touch upon all of them. I do not see myself as a grammarian, nor do I make any claims to be one (although I think my grammar and syntax are pretty good, on the whole)!
I teach slang, idiomatic expressions, body language, culture, and a whole slew of other things designed to aid my students in understanding spoken English. I do not teach grammar; most of my students already know the grammar fairly well. I want my students to feel free to come to me and ask questions like “What does it mean ‘skanky ho?’” Where else are they going to learn what was meant by that? Heck, I had a fairly long conversation with a class last week about giving people the finger (Koreans think it’s funny, and I don’t want them to get punched out if they ever travel to the west…)!
I’m rambling now… what was my point? I had one here somewhere…
Anyway, um… yeah! So there! Neener, neener, neener!
Oops! I did it again! (Now you got me quoting that Brittney Spears chick!)
Thank you!
For the record, I’d like to point out that this thread caused a rather uncomfortable incident this morning at work. The esteemed Mr.O walked up to me in the hall, sniffed me, and said, “Is that BBQ sauce?” Took me a second to figure out what the heck he was talking about (I had seen this thread by then, but hadn’t had a chance to reply yet…).
Proofreading VERY carefully before I hit the submit button!
Hey, HappyHeathen… how’s the view up on that horse?
No apology necessary, I misread you. And I’m sorry to have overreacted.
Better than most native speakers. (Yes, I realize that sentence fragment was ungrammatical.:D)
Punched out hell. In some areas they could get shot! Some of us are hotheads and some of the hotheads have guns (minor hijack intended to infuriate certain individuals from another thread…you know who you are.:p)
**
Hahahahaha!! Astroboy, you are one phat dude! Your reasons for “speaking kid” make sense in the contex of your classroom. Here, where English is generally not the second language (with some exceptions which are the subject of much debate in Southern California), I really think English teachers, and, for that matter, all teachers should be a little more pedantic and a little less “cool.” I know when I was in school (in the dark ages of the fifties and sixties) if a teacher had used current juvinile slang in the classroom I would have had no respect for him/her. I expected teachers to be the adults, and to behave that way.
Mr.O sounds like a pretty cool dude as well.
God bless you both, DesertGeezer and happyheathen.
It’s because of folks like you that people will pay me $40 an hour just to have a conversation with them. Japanese students spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours every day for 6 years studying English, yet I can reduce them to confused silence just by asking “What’s up?” Why? Because they spend that entire time studying nothing but grammar, grammar, grammar. I’ve met high school students who know enough minor grammar rules to creep out William Safire, yet are competely incapable of communicating an idea, let alone an emotion. The concept that the “correct” way to speak to your boss, the “correct” way to speak to a co-worker and the “correct” way to speak to your best friend are not the same is something they’ve never encountered before (despite distinct politeness levels being a conerstone of the Japanese language) because they’ve had it hammered into their heads by their teachers that there is one, and only one, correct way to speak the language, and idioms, colloqialisms and slang play absolutely no part in it. (run-on sentences are another issue)
So yes, when I have students who want to learn English for travel or socializing, I’m going to show them how the people they’ll encounter will speak. They respect me for it because I’m teaching them what they want to learn.
Hey! What kinda cheap shot is that? I’ve been dieting! Really!:mad:
Also, shouldn’t that be “d00d”?
Sublight, preach it brother! I can’t believe how much money people here will pay you just to chat with them! Unreal! I don’t do private lessons anymore… among the reasons I stopped is that I felt kind of guilty charging the going rate. In fact, I got a call earlier this afternoon from a nice lady who wanted me to do an hour seminar on Wednesday. I had to decline because Tommy Two-Ties and I have a meeting with our publisher that afternoon, but I think she said that it paid around $50.
No one has addressed Happy Heathen’s question:
Hmmm… I’ve been puzzling over this for a couple of hours now, slightly hindered by a birthday party buzz.
The best guess I can come up with right now is that it is an incorrect usage of the word “good.” Would “Winston tastes delicious, as a cigarette should.” be more satisfactory to '60’s English teachers? It doesn’t scan very well, though.
I’m not confused: all of my dictionaries agree. At any rate, I’ll check the phonetics text again, but I’m pretty sure that, as odd as it sounds, the voiced/voiceless distinction is not the same as the emphasis/no emphasis distinction.
Both. Funny you should mention - I have a friend who has taken perfectionnement- level French. He knows all the rules. The exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions (or exceptions[sup]5[/sup], you could call them). He writes beautiful French - much better than I can. But the poor dear has such trouble with his accent, colloquial word use, phrases, etc., that he has a great deal of difficulty making himself understood.
I’ve never studied a good deal of the grammar. I sometimes confuse masculine and feminine, and I would never release an important document in French without having someone proofread it. Essentially, I finished learning it by living with a francophone for six months and dealing constantly with speakers of colloquial Québécois French. And it’s a good thing, because now I speak it fluently, with a very good accent, and receive compliments about my spoken French all the time. I ran a campaign almost entirely in French two years ago, have had to speak it constantly while working at jobs and for my metro hobby, and (hell) in everyday life in this province.
I feel that this, like Sublight’s anecdote, can tell us about the relative worth of prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar in linguistic competence. Interesting, isn’t it?
So exactly how many d’s are in “middle”?
about the cigarette jingle, i’m thinking that it shouldn’t be
“like a cigarette should”
instead it should be
“as a cigarette should”
but i could be completely wrong.
Grammar geek checking in…
The problems with the Winston jingle are two-fold. A) as Matt pointed out, “tastes good” is incorrect because the adjective “good” is being wrongly used as an adverb to modify the verb “tastes.” B) In the phrase “like a cigarette should,” the preposition “like” is being used incorrectly. English grammar demands that the correlative conjunction “as” be used–“as a cigarette should.” On the other hand, the slogan works well as an example of the colloquial American dialect of English.
I do not wish to get into the descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar discussion. I will say that Sublight and Astroboy14 are absolutely correct on the futility of teaching grammar without context to non-native students. Koreans take English grammar classes from about the third year of elementary school through the last year of high school. A Korean student can conjugate an irregular verb perfectly, but he cannot understand a news report or a pop song. Teaching conversational English requires teaching students to understand slang and the language of the people, not just the dry and tired rules of a textbook. When I taught in Korea and Hong Kong, I used information gap activities, chain drills, and pattern drills disguised as games to get students to speak to each other. I also taught them the different levels of speech, so that they could use “Wassup?,” “How’s it going?,”“How are you?,” and “How do you do?” with equal facility.
One textbook series I used, Spectrum, combined grammar lessons with sentence pattern drills to teach conversational English. It taught students to understand different accents and dialects, and even included lessons on speech-fillers, such as “um,” “er,” and “uh.”
Re: Astroboy’s posting style
I believe that Dopers here generally acknowledge that I am an educated and literate poster, yet I, too, will use slang and colloquial speech in my posts, particularly if I’m being facetious or coy. “So, uh, you’re, hmm, kinda hot, d@@d,” would be an example. It’s called style; look into it.
Um, I didn’t say that; Astroboy did. What’s more, I wouldn’t have said it, because it’s wrong. According to my Little, Brown Essential Handbook for Writers:
“Taste” is a linking verb, and therefore, it is perfectly proper to follow it with the adjective “good.”
(What would the alternative be? Winston tastes well?)
Surely only a senseless knobbo with an arse tighter than the micropores in Goretex could deny the validity of conversational lects.
Major bigups to Astroboy,matt_mcl,SPOOFE and gobear. My constant respect to go with you like the gleaming light o’ knowledge, boys.
Um, I didn’t say that; Astroboy did. What’s more, I wouldn’t have said it, because it’s wrong.
According to my Little, Brown Essential Handbook for Writers:
“Taste” is a linking verb, and therefore, it is perfectly proper to follow it with the adjective “good.”
(What would the alternative be? Winston tastes well?)
I checked with Words Into Type and The Gregg Reference Manual and…
they agreed with Matt. [sub]Damn, damn, damn, damn…[/sub]
OK -
As many of you who are going to get the as/like ‘thing’ (or should that be ‘stuff’?) have already done so.
For extra credit:
Accept/Except
Excise (adj. vs. verb)
gender/sex
celibate/chaste
and for the post-grads:
which/that