Ok, some qestions for ya’ll who actually remember HS English or took more than the one obligatory college freshman course:
Is “shouldn’t’ve” and the like proper?
What’s a gerand? Example.
What’s a split infinative and why is it so bad?
Is there a socialization dynamic that allows people to invent words like “dialog (v.)” and “incent (v.)”?
What’s up with everyone “axing” questions?
What’s up with this open sore that won’t go away?
Thanks.
Shouldn’t’ve is a correct, if clumsy, contraction.
A gerund is a verb expressing an incomplete action, for example, “running”.
An infinitive is the base form of the verb, before inflection, “to go”. A split infin. is “to boldly go”, where you’ve put a modifier in the middle. In linguistic grammar it’s not considered so bad, because it’s a common form. I have no idea why it’s bad in formal grammar, because I don’t care what they think. They don’t study language as it is.
Yes. It’s called growth. Much as I may dislike the process, it has to happen for a language to keep up with society.
North American lazy tongue.
You keep picking at it.
Languages and grammars exist prior to their documentation in primers and dictionaries. The books document the use of the living language, they do not serve to dictate what the language or grammar is or isn’t.
IOW, if “ain’t” ain’t in the dictionary, then the dictionary needs to be updated.
I thought a gerund was a verb used as a noun, as in “His singing could be heard throughout the house”. Used as a verb, with the -ing ending, it would be a participle (I think).
Re #2: TomH is much closer to the truth than is Suo Na. In fact, verbs being used as nouns (properly called verbals) can come in two flavors, much to the dismay of many non-native speakers. The one already cited is the gerund (“Running is good exercise”), the other is the infinitive (“To fart in church is rude”). Many languages do not have different forms for this function (and, in fact, in most cases in English, they are interchangeable), and so many non-native speakers guess wrong and produce odd-sounding phrases (i.e., where idiomatic English would produce a gerund, the non-native speaker produces an infinitive). Consider the construction “To run is good exercise,” which to most native speakers of English sounds strange if not ungrammatical.
Re #5: Suo Na’s humor is appreciated, but not fair. We should all remember that “bird” was a corruption of the earlier form “brid,” which underwent a pronunciation change to accomodate East Saxon lazy tongues. Also, the word “uncle” did not used to exist but came about because the construction “a nuncle” came to be understood as “an uncle” and the thing stuck.
My $0.02
I’m sure someone somewhere else has covered this much more eloquently, but I have something to add about split infinitives. Split infinitives can lead to hard-to-read sentences, though usually this is not a problem. The phrase “to boldly go” is not difficult to understand, but the in the sentence “Remember to throughout the day take notes.” the infinitive splits up the verb form to a point where it would be considerably better to say “Remember to take notes throughout the day.” Again, though, it’s usually not a big deal.
Also, as an interesting aside, there are a few instances in Latin wherein the infinitive form is in fact made from two words. (Future and Present and Perfect Periphrastic, I believe.) Latin word order being unimportant as it is, it’s grammatically okay to stick a modifier in there, and so split infintives are, in fact, allowed in Latin.
“Shouldn’t’ve” is not so bad. I would not present it in a college essay but when you are writing dialogue between characters, you want to write it the way they speak.
As long as you realize it is "shouldn’t’ve and not “Shouldn’t of”. Man I hate that. Like when people write “I should of known better.” instead of “I should’ve known better”.
Freaks!
You are only half right. There are two types of dictionaries and grammars, prescriptive and descriptive. You are referring to descriptive.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote an interesting essay on the subject of dictionaries, its in the compilation “Welcome to the Monkey House.” He suggested looking up the word “ain’t” to tell which type it is. If the dictionary says ain’t is ungrammatical, it is prescriptive, it prescribes proper usage. If it describes it as slang, it is descriptive.
From what I’ve seen, the split of dictionary types is about 50/50.
Whatever they presume to be, dictionaries are by their nature descriptive and not prescriptive. A dictionary does not dictate how to speak correctly any more than an encyclopedia is an infallible repository of human knowledge and history. Language predates dictionaries, and dictionaries serve the purpose of describing the manner in which native speakers of said language speak. (or, more accurately, how they write, since spoken language is generally a far cry from “proper” written language) If a dictionary says “ain’t” is ungrammatical, it is describing the prevailing opinion of the native speakers at the time.
Actually, I think they’re mostly a little bit of both. Unless you’ve got the totally non-prescriptive definitions of Reaganomics, Thatcherism, communist and reggae. in which case I’d like to hear them.
“descriptive” as in “reflects the actual usage”
vs.
“prescriptive” as in “dictates what the usage should be”
Since “Reaganomics” et al existed before they were put into a dictionary, the function of the dictionary is to record the existing usage of the words.
Although a dictionary may not capture the exact meaning of a word, it fails to do so not because it’s trying to advertise its own ideas about the word, but because A) meanings can be slippery and B) meanings evolve faster than dictionaries can be updated.
You could of course publish a dictionary that defined “Reaganomics” as “a shade of black” but that would be a pretty useless dictionary, now, wouldn’t it?
Here’s my general rule: don’t write as you speak. Very few people have perfect grammar, inasmuch as the perfectness of grammar is very much debatable (but not here, as this is GQ, not GD). And when in doubt, ask.
Now, your Qs, JamesCarroll:
Technically, debatable. Why not just stick with Shouldn’t have? FWIW, I had a teacher a short time ago who corrected contractions in papers.
A gerund is basically a verb with “ing” on the end, unless it’s sing, bring, fling, etc. The function has been explained, I think.
Split infinitives are annoyances of this language. “To quickly decide” and “to boldly go” are two examples. Basically, few verbs carry with them adverbs by definition. Avoiding a split infinitive is usually a pretty painless thing.
People are going to verbize and nounize words (or make them up as they go along, in some cases;)) . . . if you don’t understand, ask. However, in general when you’re writing a paper don’t make up a word.
“5. What’s up with everyone “axing” questions?”
Cut them down and they won’t axe so much. I think, as others have said, it’s a problem of people not pronouncing words properly (that enough Ps for you, people? Sorry, I’ll put an - er, stop it now).
Notice in the above sentence I avoided a split infinitive by saving “properly” for later.
“6. What’s up with this open sore that won’t go away?”
Maybe it has something to do with the people axing things . . .