As in, doesn’t matter at all to you.
Most of it, as long as it’s understandable I don’t care. Language is about making yourself understood.
using clauses instead of full sentences, with proper punctuation;
Using commas, wherever you want.
They should be logical thought breaks, not adhere to any rules of grammar.
I’ve always just used them where natural breaks would be if the sentence was spoken. I know how it’s supposed to be used and I’ll do it correctly when writing papers, but it hurts inside to see it that way. I don’t understand how it improves comprehension.
There’s places where a comma can cause psychic damage.
I can’t read things comfortably with too many commas. My internal monologue stops at each if them.
I mean commas can be used specifically for pauses in speech
This one I’m so guilty of, it just seems fine when used in moderation, even if I know it’s wrong.
I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.
Found Christopher Walkin.
In Dutch you’re supposed to write “Volgens mij” (“in my opinion”), but it’s pronounced more like it’s one word. So I feel “volgensmij” flows better
volgens mei niet!
Deliberately not capitalising proper nouns as a show of disrespect (countries, people, titles, etc). Not “grammatically correct” but I think it falls under freedom of expression.
informal contractions are simply informal just because. there’s no real reason to consider them informal or not standard other than arbitrary rules.
“You shouldn’t’ve done that.” “It couldn’t’ve been him!” “I might’ve done that if you asked.”
I think if I took it too far and said that all contractions are basically acceptable, y’all’d’n’t’ve agreed with me.
I’d’n’t’ve had a single issue with it. In fact, I quite enjoy multi-contractions
I use this one unironically lol
This looks aggressively welsh.
You all did not have
It would be “You all would not have” because “You all did not have agreed with me” doesn’t make sense.
And I understood it perfectly the first time, which makes it acceptable by my lights.
This is the one that still ends up in my technical writing.
Y’all’d’n’t’ve is one of my favorites
Isn’t formality itself a bunch of arbitrary rules? There’s rarely anything about any formality rule that makes the thing itself inherently more or less polite, the point is that choosing to follow those arbitrary rules communicates that you are (or aren’t) choosing to be formal about the thing. It’s like a giant tone marker for “respectfully”
I consider the arbitrary rules that we call formal English to just be the set of rules that lead to the most widely understood texts, so if you want to reach a broad audience, both across the world and across time, then keeping to those formal rules makes sense.
In German there’s the saying “macht Sinn”, which is wrong since it’s just a direct translation of “makes sense”. Correct would be “ergibt Sinn”, in English “results in sense”, but I don’t care, “macht Sinn” rolls off the tongue easier.
Macht sinn to me.
A calque.
Passive voice is completely fine to use.
Who says it’s not?
(/s)Not only is it fine, but it’s the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.
The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have “reagent A was mixed with reagent B”, not “I mixed reagent A and reagent B”.
An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., “Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask”.
I’m perfectly fine with pretty loosey-goosey interpretations of when to use semi-colons. I realize that there is a specific use-case, but in reality it’s just used for the most part as a sort of elongated comma; where the intention in the writing is to have a longer pause than a normal comma would.
And I’m absolutely fine with that. No one is really clear on the real semi-colon usage anyway. I’m relatively sure that the last sentance in the previous paragraph is the actual correct usage technically, but who knows? And more importantly, who cares?
That’s not how you use a semi-colon; you use it when you want to show a logical connection between what would otherwise be two separate sentences.
Exactly my point. In my brain, that’s exactly how I used it. The two statements were logically related, but were separate statements. The fact that the second statement didn’t have it’s own subject-object-verb is (in my mind) irrelevant.
“Y’all”
I will die on the hill that it’s more efficient and neutral than the alternatives.
English has to bend over backwards to make up for the fact that it doesn’t have a natural plural 2nd person form.
Ye Y’all Youse (Dublin)
I recently realized that w’all needs to be shakespeared too. Following the pattern of other languages, y’all and w’all are missing in English.
Also, I shakespeared the verb shakespeared, in reference to Shakespeare making up new words by following patterns among other words.
I won’t argue against w’all. I’m fine with it in principle. But it’s not something I think I’ve ever said, or ever heard anyone say.
“Y’all” and the plural “all y’all” are part of my daily vocabulary. And I’m in no way of southern origin.
First we’re all like “Thou is too casual, gotta use the plural second person instead.” Then oh no, turns out number in pronouns is actually useful sometimes, but thou sounds old fashioned now, so we just gotta re-pluralize the second person. And then you get y’all.
I like y’all, but I almost wish we could just bring thou back.
For years I have said that y’all is the best thing to come out of the south.
Yinz is at least as efficient
My pet peeve is people thinking they are being clever by complaining about the supposed incorrect usage of literally as figuratively.
People, including famous authors, have been literally (not hyperbole) using the word as an intensifier, and therefore, figuratively, since 1847, e.g. F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray.
Did we change the definition of ‘literally’? | Merriam-Webster - https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
This one is great.
aluminum
This is a correct spelling. Not the only correct spelling, but one of them
I will also die on the hill that its incorrect
‘irregardless’ and improper ‘begs the question’ are both fine.
Can you explain what improper “begs the question” looks like…?
I guess it would be when something doesn’t actually lead one logically to a question? Idk
“Begging the question” is a logical fallacy wherein “the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true.”. However, “begs the question” is used more as where something creates a question.
So by the original “because the earth is flat the planet is not rotating.” You assume the earth is flat to justify your point of no rotation. Whereas the common usage “the flat earth theory and other science conspiracies beg the question of why people don’t drop dead by forgetting to breathe.” Flat earth theory created questions about human intelligence.
Ah right. I wonder if that’s the result of linguistic convergent evolution or however you’d term it, or if the common usage of “begs the question” arose from a misuse of the logical fallacy. I’ve not heard of the logical fallacy myself and only know it from the common colloquial usage, but English isn’t my first language so not sure how common the knowledge of the logical fallacy is among native speakers.
It’s colloquial for a reason, convergence, misuse, or whatever I would say most English speakers would not know the logical fallacy. Maybe as something for people who do debate clubs/class but unlikely for others.
I hate these, but acknowledge that the battle is lost
My body will be on the hill of the latter.
Anyone prescriptivist about “begging the question” cannot be taken seriously about anything.
The canonical meaning is a sloppy mistranslation, and what everyone sensible intends and infers is a plain reading of those words in that order.
I hit up that Wikipedia article every few years and I still don’t quite understand it. I also put nearly no effort into trying to understand it because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything but the technically incorrect way.
“Why do all American teenagers get cars as gifts for their sixteenth birthday?” is an example: It asks why something is true even though that thing is not, in fact, true.
I’m not sure how to feel about understanding this now. Good, because I understand, or bad, because I’ll perpetually be annoyed from holding back the urge to correct.
Thanks, I guess?
There’s no need to correct people using the phrase to mean “prompting the question”, that’s practically definition two at this point.
If you see people commuting the rhetorical fallacy, however, go ahead and call them out.
I once separated my shoulder trying to explain ‘begs the question’.
… while hanging from a cliff?
Irregardless means what? It’s a double negative, so it’s “regardful”?
A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their ‘mistakes’ have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.
There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:
- “He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old” (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
- “How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s’appelle? I think German too)
- “I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
- “She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.
The use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ for various vehicles in English is one that I always find interesting. Like you’re on a motorbike, or a boat, or a bus, but you’re in a car. Aeroplanes I think are kind of interchangeable.
Also the order of descriptive words for things is one I really find odd. “I’m on a big red old-fashioned London bus” = coherent sentence. “I’m in a red London big old-fashioned bus” = nonsense.
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Also how something like the word ‘jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, a door that’s stuck, traffic that’s not moving, playing music or cramming something into a hole lol.
Not an expert by any means, but I’d guess that has to do with the distinction between being on top of something, and having boarded something. You are on top of a (small) boat or motorcycle, but within a car. These examples refer to position. You can be both in or on a bus, plane, or yacht, because you have boarded the bus, plane, or yacht, and thus are “on” it, but are located physically within the vehicle and so are also “in” it (in the case of a yacht, that may depend on whether you’re inside it or on top of it). These examples refer to both position and state of existence.
This is totally conjecture so I’d be very curious to hear from an actual expert.
In German that question is: Wie nennt man das?
Or literally: How does one call that?
Putting the punctuation outside the quotes (or parentheses) when the quote is only part of a sentence. I.e. He said “I need to go now”.
