A few handy hints for Mott and others

After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges...

LOL

That one made me laugh before I even saw the picture.
 
Derp Derp said:
Its been my experience that those who obsess over grammar usually don't have much of interest to write about. :p

My problem is I type to fast and I'm not usually thinking to much about grammer or spelling.
Click to expand...

Perhaps you should read some of the books written ABOUT grammar. Several different types of grammar, there is even spoken grammar. Read some of the stuff from that doyen of good sense Noam Chomsky. But (never start a sentence with a conjunction!) more importantly the rules of grammar are the bones upon which we hang the wonders of spoken and written communication. Within the words we use every day we can find our history and our culture. We can look at place names - I mean real place names, not American fast food names - and see from their formation, spelling and root who lived in a place, from whence they came and from there, how we came to be. Chester/caster/castre show Roman military bases and forts, -by is a settlement, - ley, -land and others show the influences of the ancient rulers of Britain, words with a silent 'k' show us french and latin derivations (morphed from a hard 'c'). In America borrowings from Native American and South American languages shape our view of ourselves. We can find references to foreign trade and influence and the evolution of all societies. Even conventional grammar marks the influence of ancient Rome and its realms throughout Europe and North Africa.
If you wish to ignore the rules of grammar - written and spoken - if you wish two tern yore bach on conventional spellin then you might as well ignore you customs and traditions, your racial mix, your culture and who you are.

Quick question (no googling): How many tenses are there in the English Language? First answer gets a prize of an imperative verb and a preposition.
No. its late. I will not go back and proof read that.
 
Lowaicue said:
Perhaps you should read some of the books written ABOUT grammar. Several different types of grammar, there is even spoken grammar. Read some of the stuff from that doyen of good sense Noam Chomsky. But (never start a sentence with a conjunction!) more importantly the rules of grammar are the bones upon which we hang the wonders of spoken and written communication. Within the words we use every day we can find our history and our culture. We can look at place names - I mean real place names, not American fast food names - and see from their formation, spelling and root who lived in a place, from whence they came and from there, how we came to be. Chester/caster/castre show Roman military bases and forts, -by is a settlement, - ley, -land and others show the influences of the ancient rulers of Britain, words with a silent 'k' show us french and latin derivations (morphed from a hard 'c'). In America borrowings from Native American and South American languages shape our view of ourselves. We can find references to foreign trade and influence and the evolution of all societies. Even conventional grammar marks the influence of ancient Rome and its realms throughout Europe and North Africa.
If you wish to ignore the rules of grammar - written and spoken - if you wish two tern yore bach on conventional spellin then you might as well ignore you customs and traditions, your racial mix, your culture and who you are.

Quick question (no googling): How many tenses are there in the English Language? First answer gets a prize of an imperative verb and a preposition.
No. its late. I will not go back and proof read that.
Click to expand...

Linguists would be the first people to scoff at this notion. Grammar nazism is anti-intellectual nonsense.
 
Almost all of the silent letters are letters that used to be pronounced in some way but have long fallen into disuse. I would go with spelling reform and just eliminate the lot of them.
 
A picture is worth a thousand words

066.gif
 
This one is a good rejoinder:

One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you:
the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm,
the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary.

You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth.”
― Scott Simon
 
Lowaicue said:
This one is a good rejoinder:

One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you:
the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm,
the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary.

You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth.”
― Scott Simon
Click to expand...

20090211_thousand_words-01-r7g0lr.jpg
 
I consider myself to be quite the grammar Nazi. It just happens that I consider the topic to be overdone on this site, and I consider it to be a lost cause in America.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top