So, to you, someone who said “Myself and her is gonna bake Dad in the oven a cake with he and I” is speaking perfectly proper English? And you would truly not think “What a moron”?
Really?
First off, the word order is scrambled, and so we can’t tell what exactly is happening. There’s also a difference between locutions that are rarely used and those that are commonly heard. “Myself and her” is one of the former, so it does make the person sound uneducated. All I said, though, was that it was perfectly understandable. Your sentence is both odd and not understandable.
Try this one:
Myself and her think that candidate don’t know nothing about what the challenges is.
Is that acceptable grammar? The meaning is clear.
Just to be clear, I didn’t say that the first version was “acceptable”. I’m sure most people would think it wasn’t. If someone used that manner of speech when addressing the public, most people (including me) would figure that the person did not have much of an education, and probably not suitable for office.
Many people who grow up speaking a dialect, but who are well educated can “code switch”. We see this a lot with African-Americans. An African American pol might speak differently if he was talking to a group of his constituents who were all AA, too, but might speak differently if the group was a mix of different people. The key is to be able to communicate to the group you’re talking to.
Obama does this. He doesn’t have an all-out AAVE dialect handy, but he does speak differently when he’s addressing a Black audience in a church. He takes on some of the aspects of, for lack of a better term, “Black Preacher Dialect”. Hillary tried to do it, too, although it didn’t come off quite as authentic for some reason.
Can you clarify your position? You seem to be saying grammar cannot be “wrong” if the speaker conveys the intended message but also saying a sentence like that is not “acceptable.”
An irrefudiateable response if ever there was one.
It’s subjective. We don’t have a language board that decides what is right and what is wrong. We have various standards, but they don’t agree with each other on all aspects. And it depends on context. What is “acceptable” (note the quotes) when speaking extemporaneously might not be “acceptable” in print journalism. What is “unacceptable” for the NYT might be “acceptable” for Mother Jones. In fact, what is “acceptable” for the NYT editorial page might be different from what is “acceptable” in the Lifestyle section.
Stop preverting the language!
Of course the way they speak is “lazy” and the way you speak isn’t. Of course.
Wait, no, it’s not clear to me at all that it is. Can you explain why you think what they’re doing exhibits laziness?
I mean, I’d have thought it’s pretty lazy to refuse to pronounce that ‘t’ in ‘often’.
Why would I think this person is a “moron?”
Your sentence is perfectly understandable btw, and as far as I can tell, it’s grammatically unimpeachable. The only ambiguity I ran into was the one that made me wonder why they’re baking a person in an oven. But then “a cake” right afterwards resolved the ambiguity.
Stylistically, it’s bad. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually break any rules of grammar. I could even diagram the thing.
Here’s a perfectly parallel example which should seem unobjectionable:
You will give John, in all seriousness, this ‘award,’ with Elaine.
There’s nothing wrong grammatically with this, and in fact it’s perfectly imaginable that someone (with the appropriate accompanying gestures) could utter exactly this sentence. But grammatically it’s just like the one you created.
To get back to the OP, I’d be much more likely to think less of the politician in question if it came up in written material. It would tell me that his/her staff is incompetent or lazy, which would make me wonder about the competence of the pol, or at least the people (s)he trusts to get things done.
In the spoken word, it’s much less of a deal. It’s more informal, brain farts happen more easily, and it’s harder to check.
Just because she’s Queen, doesn’t mean she always speaks correctly. It just means no one corrects her.
Of course, it’s understandable. Frylock even said it’s completely understandable and therefore grammatically correct.
Stylistics aside, what would your (and others who say there are no standards) opinion be of the person who made such a statement?
No, not grammatical because understandable. I understand this sentence because it’s grammatical. It’s grammatical because there is no rule of grammar I know of that it breaks. Hence the grammatically parallel construction I gave you.
I’m not sure how to set aside stylistics when asked to assess the person making a statement, based just on that statement.
But honestly, if I heard someone rattle off that sentence without giving it a second thought, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, then I’d think I was encountering a very strange dialect of English I’d never heard of before.
By the way, no one’s saying your sentence is “perfectly proper English,” so let’s not have that misunderstanding. “Perfectly Propert English” generally denotes some fairly formal variant of Standard American or Standard British English. The sentence you gave is not an example of either.
But you, an anonymous poster on a message board, do? Then give is a cite that it’s incorrect to pronounce the "t’ in often.
I’m in total agreeance. You just can’t excape the fact the thread title is a bit disorientating.
Oh, all right, then. Can I just come along?
Don’t confuse prepositions with particles–natural components of phrasal verbs, which are often intransitive.
Although I now see that Mozart is banned, I think we can agree he’s not going to find anything like that.
Still, if it’s hyper-correction that bothers him (and I don’t think it is), then the Queen wouldn’t be a good counter-example. Isn’t she supposed to hyper-correct herself?
Would I vote for her? Supposably …
Just because you say it’s wrong doesn’t make it wrong.
I seriously doubt any series of English classes anywhere spends the entire 12 years teaching grammar, and focusing on obscure grammar trivia.
And there isn’t any “universal” set of standards for proper English given that:
-
Standards change not just over the long term but over the relative short term. Almost anyone here can name some “standard” that was drilled into them in school that is now considered “standardly” incorrect. Such as split infinitives and ending sentences with a preposition.
-
The grammar nazis with the hugest sticks up their asses can’t even agree among themselves on certain grammar issues.
-
Professional organizations have no universal set of standards to rely on, and therefore have to create personalized style manuals in order to maintain consistency.
:rolleyes:
I would vote for someone who said ‘irregardless’ long before I would vote for someone with that kind of attitude.
It’s sad when people trade one sort of ignorance for another.