This. Every time I read someone having a grammar melt down over BBS postings, I thank God that I don’t suffer the same affliction. I struggle with grammar in my professional writing. I can’t begin to imagine the pain my casual BBS posts have inflicted on the hyper-grammar-sensitive over the years. I can only hope that we don’t share a room in the after-life.
Yeah, you should report that :rolleyes:
“It has”?
The OP’s comma-ing was pretty much correct if a tad dickensian.
I just wanted to add that I’ve known the correct usage for quite some time, yet still find myself making this common error. So for me at least (and I suspect many others) it’s not a matter of ignorance as several folks above implied, it’s just a simple typo. Just the other day I noticed it in a small article I wrote twelve years ago. I don’t know how I missed it then as I typically spend a good amount of time proofreading.
I’m not (or at least wasn’t) a complete illiterate – I won school spelling bees 50-odd years ago. But lately I seem to suffer some brain damage and occasionally write “there” when I intend “their” or “they’re.”
Proof that that is caused by misfiring neurons rather than ordinary ignorance is that sometimes I substitute a homophone that makes no sense. One example I recall is “value” instead of “vowel” but there are many others.
I almost always click Preview these days; otherwise I’m afraid most my posts would be unintelligible.
Similar thing I was pondering recently: are ‘‘it isn’t’’ and ‘‘it’s not’’ grammatically similar, and if not, what differents contexts are they used in?
There too different weighs of righting and saying “It is not”.
:smack: And only now, in the light of morning, do I see what you did there.
I love the way grammar talk stirs people’s passions. Is it because we were first exposed to grammar when our adolescent hormones were raging?
“Grammatically” they’re the same, but discursively they’re used differently.
Don’t be a grammar tease, guizot. Or at least do me the favor of pointing me towards something on the discursive use of contractions.
It’s not something which has been studied a lot—because not many corpuses of spoken language have been set up to look at what might lead to a preference one way or the other, but from what I’ve seen, it’s influenced by whether someone is making an explicit denial of a proposition, an implicit denial of a proposition, or whether someone is making a generally corrective statement.
Negative contraction (it isn’t) happens more with explicit denials than with implicit denials and correctives, which are about equal. Operator contraction (it’s not) is more favored for correctives, then implicit denials, and then explicit denials.
Also, as I recall one study found that the relative difference seems to be changing (in British speech, at least), though I don’t remember how or in what direction. This is from a conference in London about four years ago, which I couldn’t attend myself, and I don’t have the article handy, but you probably can track it down on-line.
Yes. It has no comma splice. And Dickensian commas are hardly a “fuck up.” A lot of comma usage comes down to a question of style.