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On December 30 2010 11:04 Severedevil wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2010 09:00 uberMatt wrote:is there a legitimate argument for anal retentiveness about the finer points of english grammar? it just seems like intellectual wank to me, who the fuck cares  If the sentence is ambiguous, or needlessly difficult to parse, then the sentence is poorly constructed.
I agree, on my last final exams I had a question that was: Did Neitzsche look more favourably on the teachings of jesus than those of the Catholic church?
Spent the whole time arguing that Catholics would almost self-evidently look more favourably on the teachings of Jesus, as his teachings and inherent goodness are intrinsically bound up in the Catholic faith.
In the same exam had an arguably worse one, although semantically not grammatically, that went: Was Hegel really an atheist? Think I just wrote is this REALLY an answer? and then wrote really a few more times getting gradually larger.
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How the hell did you misunderstand that? That's just you not studying Neitzsche and thinking on the exam 'oh shit!' then trying to find a loop hole that isn't there. If it were meant to be answered the way you wanted to answer it, it would have been phrased 'Did Neitzsche or the Catholic Church look more..." The way it's phrased is really obviously a comparison of the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Catholic Church. There is nothing ambiguous about it. Yeah, technically you could interpret 'those' in two different ways, but one is awkward and contrived as hell, and the other makes sense in the context of your exam. If you were really unsure you would have raised your hand instead of trying to get away with it.
The second is fine too. Your prof probably talked about it in class as a controversial question, therefore 'really' is meant to jog your memory about it and show that it is a debatable point. IE you're supposed to counter the argument to the opposite side you take, rather than just list a couple reasons that support one side.
ENGLISH.
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lol it's always the people that don't know what they're talking about that are the smartasses.
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Didnt misunderstand either of them, i just knew nothing about either so thought id get out of the first one due to the idiocy of the way it was phrased, and your wrong there is ambiguity as it can be interpreted in both ways, and the latter due to the idiocy of "really"
The whole concept of really is troublesome even if applied to our own existence let alone when the question is the authenticity of a philosophers belief. the question of Did X "really" anything is just dumb.
I was feeling pretty depressed at the time as well which might have leaned me towards being a dick in the way i answered them.
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The only thing I notice is when people say if I was or if it was. I notice this because I was corrected on it by my friend, and realized, OH CRAP, IT'S REALLY IF I WERE!
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Your writing is laden with errors both grammatical and punctuational.
Luckily, the people who hire you don't know the difference. Your use of the run-on sentence, in particular, is outstanding.
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A run-on sentence is not ungrammatical. Neither is an Oxford comma.
I feel like self-righteous Internet denizens who thump their chests over grammar and then complain about "they're"/"their"/"there" are like self-avowed science fans who can recite 20+ decimals in Pi but have only a foggy conception of Planck's constant.
On December 30 2010 12:16 XeliN wrote:
Didnt misunderstand either of them, i just knew nothing about either so thought id get out of the first one due to the idiocy of the way it was phrased, and your wrong there is ambiguity as it can be interpreted in both ways, and the latter due to the idiocy of "really"
The whole concept of really is troublesome even if applied to our own existence let alone when the question is the authenticity of a philosophers belief. the question of Did X "really" anything is just dumb.
I was feeling pretty depressed at the time as well which might have leaned me towards being a dick in the way i answered them.
I sincerely hope you failed.
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I share in your appreciation for writing! I hate to say it, but eloquent prose is close to the classics for me and if I desire a good bit of pretension I visit the Harvard Review or scan through some text by Shakespeare, which for me is a choice that consists of the unbastardized versions that are not as "colored" by modern English spelling of course; in fact, almost any classically powerful poet will have me in true textual captivation—Milton, Jonson or Keats.
I was just thinking the other day about how short of an attention span that our society has. When I worked for a classless Web firm the head writer was so infected by the "standard" version of readers. The statistics that I found supported his claim. They proved that the "normal" Web goers and traditional readers don't care to scan even a page of text anymore (Web or traditional media like newspapers)—we're talking a capacity of only 50-100 words maximum. It's sad to think of the total weight of our ability to be ignorant of our capacity to read and write. There's all kinds of justification for this so I don't blame the large incentive (in our society) to disregard information.
EDIT: To Jon: But there is a reason for individuals to know Pi for twenty decimals (just knowing that is beneficial to knowing a bit more about something), which is completely aside from "chest pumping". I'm sure there are many other reasons for us net "denizens" to pump our chests, but we are also passionate creatures. And for this poster (in his own blog post even) and others to be disillusioned about things is certainly justifiable. And while it's certainly correct to satiate oneself to any style they well please, there are of course different spheres of writing. The run on, fragment or comma splice are certainly accepted on an Internet forum and popular writing (Twilight).
Oh and my opinion on the Nietzsche question: A fundamentally flawed question, because he never "looked favorably" on life, heh.
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On December 30 2010 13:18 jon arbuckle wrote:
I sincerely hope you failed.
You cast your sincerity in vain, passed it  , although fully expected to fail utterly.
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On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
EDIT: To Jon: But there is a reason for individuals to know Pi for twenty decimals (just knowing that is beneficial to knowing a bit more about something), which is completely aside from "chest pumping".
Confirming that it's trivial knowledge doesn't necessarily work as a counterpoint.
On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
I'm sure there are many other reasons for us net "denizens" to pump our chests,
Here is as good a place as any to drop the civility: I am firmly convinced you do not know anything about technical grammar. A good example follows:
On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
The run on, fragment or comma splice are certainly accepted on an Internet forum and popular writing (Twilight).
Of grammar, a serial or Oxford comma is not a comma splice.
Otherwise, yes, you're entirely right: run-on sentences and sentence fragments are a function of literary ignorance and stupidity, the end-point of a century's worth of verbal erosion, grammatical ignorance, and dialect miscegenation. Literature and popular discourse these days is chock full of pen-armed retards putting together ghastly works of pragmatically ignorant and popularity-courting piffle. Besides Twilight, there's William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Zizek, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and the entire corpus of pre-20th century literature you evangelize - all of whom write in English and occasionally write sentences large in length or lacking in SVO construction. Man, that's just off the top of my head too. And don't even get me started on writers in translation!
I will hazard a risk that the hopelessly confined nature of "popular writing," confined to skimming a few hundred pages, negates the possibility of run-on sentences. I will guess this on the basis of experience with print media and taking for granted your hopelessly pretentious characterizations of the modern attention span in conjunction with popular print media. In some cases, at the most watered down level, newspapers and broad-reaching pop magazines have editors who vet their copy for complex-compound sentences and definitely extend the same courtesy towards the run-on sentence. I have not read Twilight - + Show Spoiler [pseudo-parenthetical tangent] +which doesn't seem to inspire the same admiration for useless knowledge you express for Pi's unending decimal numbers, but for someone interested in how Victorian-era gothic tropes and archetypes persist and/or are transformed in their genre- or literary-oriented reiterations, or for someone wishing to use Twilight's popular appeal from the perspective of wish fulfillment as a launching pad into a study of gender roles in popular fiction, cf. Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, Twilight would be a fascinating study indeed
And even if Twilight is addled with mixed metaphors Dan-Brown-style, this is still not a grammatical issue. Neither is your elitism, which does not effectively distance you from popular lit itself: Stephanie Meyer is supposedly a huge Victorian lit wienie that reads rabidly Austen and the Bronte sisters.
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Besides Twilight, there's William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Zizek, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas,
I cried when you mentioned Twilight and the greatest names modernism has to offer in the same sentence. You are a mean, mean man. That is vulgar, hateful, and offensive and I wish you to stop at once, sir.
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RiB: Poor example as well :D ... How much people exercise doesn't affect you in as direct a fashion as language use does, so obviously it's less natural to "hate on". That said, all this hating on things seems kind of petty, but I'm sure that more often than not, people just use it communicatively and not expressively. I don't believe that people have such strong feelings of dislike, but it's just easier to express as something you "hate", so the becomes a bit inflated.
Your example of how my example is a bad example is a bad example.
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On December 30 2010 15:31 jon arbuckle wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
EDIT: To Jon: But there is a reason for individuals to know Pi for twenty decimals (just knowing that is beneficial to knowing a bit more about something), which is completely aside from "chest pumping". Confirming that it's trivial knowledge doesn't necessarily work as a counterpoint. Show nested quote +On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
I'm sure there are many other reasons for us net "denizens" to pump our chests, Here is as good a place as any to drop the civility: I am firmly convinced you do not know anything about technical grammar. A good example follows: Show nested quote +On December 30 2010 13:57 ffdestiny wrote:
The run on, fragment or comma splice are certainly accepted on an Internet forum and popular writing (Twilight). Of grammar, a serial or Oxford comma is not a comma splice. Otherwise, yes, you're entirely right: run-on sentences and sentence fragments are a function of literary ignorance and stupidity, the end-point of a century's worth of verbal erosion, grammatical ignorance, and dialect miscegenation. Literature and popular discourse these days is chock full of pen-armed retards putting together ghastly works of pragmatically ignorant and popularity-courting piffle. Besides Twilight, there's William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Zizek, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and the entire corpus of pre-20th century literature you evangelize - all of whom write in English and occasionally write sentences large in length or lacking in SVO construction. Man, that's just off the top of my head too. And don't even get me started on writers in translation! I will hazard a risk that the hopelessly confined nature of "popular writing," confined to skimming a few hundred pages, negates the possibility of run-on sentences. I will guess this on the basis of experience with print media and taking for granted your hopelessly pretentious characterizations of the modern attention span in conjunction with popular print media. In some cases, at the most watered down level, newspapers and broad-reaching pop magazines have editors who vet their copy for complex-compound sentences and definitely extend the same courtesy towards the run-on sentence. I have not read Twilight - + Show Spoiler [pseudo-parenthetical tangent] +which doesn't seem to inspire the same admiration for useless knowledge you express for Pi's unending decimal numbers, but for someone interested in how Victorian-era gothic tropes and archetypes persist and/or are transformed in their genre- or literary-oriented reiterations, or for someone wishing to use Twilight's popular appeal from the perspective of wish fulfillment as a launching pad into a study of gender roles in popular fiction, cf. Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, Twilight would be a fascinating study indeed - but I will assume that Stephanie Meyer is neither writing many complex-compound sentences nor is her book being distributed chock full of grammatical errors. She has an editor and an audience that the editor understands, and even then complex-compound sentences are matters of style, not length, where a poor stylist's sentences (like maybe those of Stephanie Meyer) will read stilted, awkward, and tedious, while a powerful prose stylist can craft an incredibly long sentence reading urgent, complex, and beautiful. And even if Twilight is addled with mixed metaphors Dan-Brown-style, this is still not a grammatical issue. Neither is your elitism, which does not effectively distance you from popular lit itself: Stephanie Meyer is supposedly a huge Victorian lit wienie that reads rabidly Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Aside from the acridity of the analysis that you offer at the start of your reply, and apart from your incessant drivel about dialect miscegenation, grammar, "piffle" and "SVO construction", you directly lack in separating what is classified as part of classic literature or as you generically put it, "pre-20th century literature." In fact, due to your mislabeling of this literature as part of your broadened "repertoire", one idea is still true to the fact—literature, regardless of what you pretentiously classify as "pen-armed retards putting together ghastly works" is popular because of its modern appeal.
In fact, the apace speed at which you throw in such different writers, poets and minds into the supposed "drivel" of the pre-20th century literature makes me question your awareness of these works; perhaps you've read too much of what you aimlessly called the "mixed metaphors" of the Dan-Brown-style (that's a lot of hyphens).
And for you to make a weak assumption based on the above is not a strong argument for your case of Stephanie Meyer. Since as you stated that you have never read the work Twilight, you instead breach into an argument based on your sentimental knowledge of "poor stylist's sentences" in whatever "popular" books that you laud or disapprove of, which is of course as you put it either Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson.
Even with your weak assumption of her work, you reach a rather obtuse insight on the subject by constructing the final part of your reply based on the rather flaccid grounds of Meyer's ability to have editors and the power of Victorian-era writers at her support. In fact, to assume the knowledge of her appeal to readers is filled entirely with (and as you put it) "hopeless" elitism.
You callously boast of the "powerful prose stylist can craft an incredibly long sentence reading urgent, complex, and beautiful" but then rest on the rather baseless claim that there is a reading that you call "powerful" and those that are not obviously; a bit short-sighted. If anything in prose, the style of constructing a sentence is equally as complex as poetry, and this claim strengthens your trifling remark. The fact that no matter the sentence length or as you abruptly say "urgency" in the style itself, it matters not to the taste of said reader. Maybe you were amusing yourself or not, but a "power" of a text only has ephemeral value to the "beholder" or as you clumsily say "Neither is your elitism, which does not effectively distance you from popular lit itself".
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On December 30 2010 16:28 Chef wrote:Show nested quote +Besides Twilight, there's William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Zizek, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, I cried when you mentioned Twilight and the greatest names modernism has to offer in the same sentence. You are a mean, mean man. That is vulgar, hateful, and offensive and I wish you to stop at once, sir.
Prose is a prose is a prose is a prose.
At least I hope you got the point because evidently ffdestiny didn't.
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On December 30 2010 02:52 Seltsam wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2010 02:52 krndandaman wrote:
i also believe in grammar to an extent. i don't see why i can't use "snuck" when everyone understands the meaning. Why not use "sneaked" when everyone also understands that, and it also conforms to the laws of the English language?
First of all I want to say that I wholeheartedly agree with the views describe in your post. As I am not a native English speaker, I tend to make more mistakes than I would like (I guess I'm guilty for overusing commas. Especially while writing in English) but I try to do my best at all times.
There is one thing I do want to add though regarding the quote above. In your original post you mentioned language to play an important role in the evolution of man, which I agree with. However it's important not to forget that language has its own evolution which you will, like it or not, have to accept. If the word "snuck" is something that is used increasingly often, the chance is that it will be accepted and maybe even a replacement of the "old" term.
The Swedish language have had examples similar to this. One that comes to mind is the Swedish words for "them". Depending on the gender (someone correct me if I'm way off here) it's either "de" or "dem". What happened was that people would increasingly use the word "dom" as a mixture of them both. I have always hated that word and to this day I cringe everytime I see it being used. Regardless of that its use increased (with the explosion that was the Internet) and as far as I know, it's now an officialy accepted term. It's still frowned upon in academic writing but not considered wrong in more casual situations.
This seems to be similar to what is happening with the word "snuck" and I fear you might have to live with that.
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EPT
