For those of you who have not seen it :]

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xA8GHHkohQ

That's very funny...

If the internet were a real place, there would be far less mangling of the English language.

 

Grrr.

 

Signed,

 

The Style and Grammar Czar

 

P.S. The Style and Grammar Czar laughed his ass off.

Subjunctive mood and split infinitives - both grammatical rules are surrounded, outnumbered, and short on supplies...I doubt either will hold out another generation...

Lack of precision in language contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire :[

^True. Take, for example, Constantine's order to "putrify" the water supply.

Subjunctive mood and split infinitives - both grammatical rules are surrounded, outnumbered, and short on supplies...I doubt either will hold out another generation...

 

Should we mourn those rules?  The only reason we shouldn't split an infinitive in English is because it is impossible to do so in Latin.  Therefore some Renaissance grammarian decided that an infinitive should not be split in English either.  Never mind that they are different languages from different families.  Rules are necessary for mutual comprehension, but many are just arbitrary.  It is better to judiciously eliminate arbitrary rules than to blindly follow them.

^I'm with you...which is why I've given up on split infinitives...I'm more a descriptivist than a prescriptivist...

 

And even though I try to use subjunctive mood, if I be aware that it sounds very wrong (like it does in that construction), I skip it...

 

So yeah, while I mourn the death of quirks and oddities that make the language rich, these rules are just distracting...

 

I fear (and loathe) the notion of a dequirked and streamlined English language. The apparently arbitrary nature of the language contributes to its richness and inventiveness (such as tacit permission to invent a word the likes of "dequirked"). Only English would have a word such as "mine" which means 1) a declaration of possession, 2) a place where you pull precious things out of the ground and 3) a device that blows things up. Besides, I'll trade all those wierd little rules for gender any day, despite the objections of the blond fiance.

^Amen on the gender thing...that's a continual pain in the tuckas in Arabic.  And talk about arbitrary...maybe I'm just too new to it, but I can detect neither rhyme nor reason to it.

 

Yes, quirks are fantastic, and ambiguity is the soil of poetry, no doubt.  But some rules are simply distracting, and those are the ones I don't mind seeing pass on...

 

Besides which, a changing language is in itself a beautiful quirk - some of the charm of Shakespeare lies in learning the language, and picking up on the subtleties.  If the rules hadn't changed over time, that newness would be imperceptible...

 

And yet the language has some glaring problems that could be easily corrected, like a male versus female word for cousins, a defferent set of words for maternal and fraternal grandparents, and different words than uncle and aunt for people who marry your parents' siblings.  And I'm not sure if that apostrophe was right. 

In Eastern Kentucky they say Grandmama and Grandpapa for maternal grandparents.  Anyone else ever heard this?