And I just learned what phobia I have. Now I’m afraid I won’t be able to remember it correctly.
ThelmaLou, if it helps, I finally learned it’s/its properly here on the Dope.
I learned that Nava is a kick-ass poster, who is smart, funny, and always fun to read. And she is a hell of a lot better at English than I am.
Blushes. Thanks, Waltzes with Cacti, but that’s exactly what I’ve learned at this board, to express myself fluidly and hold real conversations in English, and acquiring those many idioms in the first place you never learn in school. My experience with the English language before were 9 years of school, listening to many, many songs and reading books, but nothing beats practice. That goes hand in hand with my very extended grasp of American political and social issues. I was always interested in America and of course already had my notions through cultural osmosis (you cannot escape American culture in the Western world), but after 7 years on this board (and some years of lurking before), I’m much more informed about American sensitivities than I thought was possible without actually visiting the country.
It always amazes/humbles me how much more some international folks seem to know about my country than I do. I have an Irish friend who could blow me away on any U.S. history or civics test.
My contribution: I have learned that there are people out there willing to take a hard-lined stance on virtually anything.
Sometimes, the focus of the statement is what happened, not who did it. Focusing on who did it is injecting irrelevancies into the sentence and, therefore, should be avoided. Lab reports are very commonly written this way: The focus of the paper isn’t who did what, it’s on what was done and what happened as a result. Forcing the authors to assign “blame” would be grossly inappropriate, and allowing them to deemphasize that aspect means the meaningful portions shine through more clearly.
Thinking the passive voice is somehow sneaky or dishonest is precisely the kind of nonsense I’m talking about, as is taking that idiotic idea to be a grammatical rule.
Absolutely. I write papers for lab journals sometimes, and the passive voice is frequently used when describing the methods and results.
Okay, granted. The passive voice is appropriate in one percent of all written material, which is read by specialists (note the passive voice in my clause there). I’m talking about ordinary communication among regular people on topics of interest to the general public. IOW times when you want to communicate WHO did WHAT to WHOM.
“Forcing the authors to assign blame”??? Geez, Louise. What about “**allowing **the authors to take credit,” hmmm?
Grammar fight! Grammar fight!
I’ve learned that talking about grammar is a sure fire way to derail a thread.
My grammar said so!
I want to take issue with the whole tack you’re taking. Real linguists do something called corpus linguistics to figure out how language is used on a large scale, so they have evidence behind their claims about how most people talk most of the time. You’re trying to make those claims without any evidence at all, and, indeed, you seem unaware that evidence might help your case.
That’s what I really dislike about the “grammar” taught in primary and secondary schools. It’s a farrago of claims with no evidence behind them, made by people who are unfamiliar with the field and unaware that evidence is even relevant to the field. It’s bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense of the term: They don’t care about truth.
I was echoing the tone you took in the post I quoted, where you said that the passive voice allows people to evade responsibility.
So true.
ThelmaLou, it has been realized by me that the thread was started by you, of course; however, it is thought that the discussion being had by you and Derleth on grammar might be better spun off into its own thread.
Nah, I’m gonna drop it.
Ya gotta admit, the modding was delivered with style.
It certainly had Elements of Style.
That experiences I thought were universal really, really aren’t.
It isn’t easy to get Pitted.
I’ve learned that there is no joke so bad on this board that it can’t be one-upped (one-downed?) by another Doper.
I suspect it could be taken even further by one with sufficient intestinal fortitude.
But I could be wrong.
And experiences we thought were unique really, really aren’t.
You Murricans are not all rednecks. Or some similar Hollywood clichés.
No we really are all rednecks, especially the non-whites. They are the redneckiest of all rednecks.