Well, the examples in Bosstone’s post are all the same. The preposition ‘to’ is deleted and me is moved from the end of the sentence to immediately after the verb. The verb+me construction is also followed simply by a noun.
Give a beer to me.
Bring a book to me.
Recommend a restaurant to me.
In your examples, the longform would be:
Suggest a new car to me.
Demonstrate how to juggle to me.
Entertain me with a story.*
*Perhaps you had a different sentence in mind but if I simply inverted the process that I laid out up above, I would have gotten:
*Entertain a story to me.
Which is quite clearly wrong on multiple levels. At any rate, the only sentence I see as being possibly grammatical is the first one. I am not exactly sure what the phrase how+infinitive is classified as. Maybe it’s the equivalent of a noun but I really don’t know and I couldn’t find anything online that really talked about this construction so I’m really WAGing here.
There are 2 types of posts that rankle and haven’t been mentioned yet:
The person who appears to be a delusional paranoid, and feels if he/she gives out too much information then unnamed stalkers will finally know exactly who they are and hunt them down in real life.
So they write deliberately obscure posts to hide their “true identity.” Unless you’re Justin Beiber or Barrack Obama, you can give out your frickin address and bank account numbers and nobody is going to do anything. So saying that you work “at a major research university” or live “in a costal state” is just being coy for no reason.
Don’t even get me started on the rhymes with shit. As in, I purchased a camera at a large box store that rhymes with “Mest Guy”
The second thing is one of those flogged to death “jokes.” Any time someone posts about a topic that is at all titillating, there are always 20 posts saying that they must see pictures to judge/assess correctly. If someone asks, “Do my large bouncing breasts look sexy when I jump rope?” it’s understandable. When someone asks for pictures in a “How do I keep my bra straps from falling down?” thread it’s just creepy.
That example is not like the others, though, as it carries that “with”; “with a story” is not the direct object but a modal complement (or whatever its actual correct name is in English). To mean the same and be like the others, you’d have to use
Tell a story to me. Tell me a story.
Where the “me” is the indirect object and the “story” is the direct object, and both options are perfectly correct.
I’ve never been especially worried about keeping my identity secret. If you were willing to trawl through my thousands of posts, you could probably find out pretty easily who i am.
That said, it’s not just about stalking or identity theft; it can simply be about convenience and avoiding unnecessary complications. For example, if you do work at a “major research university,” you might not want your students to accidentally stumble across your SDMB persona and find out that their math professor was once arrested for using weed, or is gay, or likes to watch Oprah. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, but there are some professions where you don’t really want to give people more information than they need about you.
I admit I have done that corny shit where I called my kid Lil Zing. But please! Let me explain.
The thread was long, the post was long, she wouldn’t want me using her name, and it was the kind of long ass post that you have to keep saying, “so my daughter said and then my daughter did…” and it was a headache, so I saw the silly shortcut and I took it.
Whew. And I agree with the poster who said, goddammit, it’s a landmine on this board! I’m scared to type one paragraph now, for fear of annoying someone!
Don’t fret about it, embrace it! Fuck everybody else! Let them deal with the stick up their ass. It’s not your problem. Flaunt your ideosyncratic posting style! Conformity is for sheep, members of organized sports and Republicans. Raise your freak flag high and march to the sound of your own kazoo.
Wait…there hasn’t been a complaint about know-it-all assholes spouting off with stupid opinions on things they have no knowledge about, just to (metaphorically) hear the sound of their insignificant voice howling in the wilderness?
Not a posting “style” just a “doper thing” I absolutely despise. The slang “fap”. That is THE most sordid, tacky, take-something-fun-and-make-it-sound-creepy-and-pervy, yet somehow cutesy in ALL the wrong ways, aesthetically displeasing word on the board.
Oh come now, you can’t possibly mean that you go through life worrying about annoying someone, can you? It’s been my observation that this is impossible to acheive, so any attempts at it are guaranteed to fail. Even the sweetest, most fair-minded, mellow, and even-tempered people get on some people’s nerves with their mellow sweetitude.
Stay consistent with your own standards and principles and you will endear yourself to those who share your standards and principles, which is all that matters anyway.
