Can we PLEASE use the english language correctly?

"Come on Chester, the grammarians are on the attack again."

"How come is that Mr. Dillion?"

"Chester, they don't like regional dialect in it's written form."

"Mr Dillion, I couldn't never get a'holt of how their thinking.
I know stuff, I know the way you talk and write tells folks
what region your from, whether or not your a no account or a regular fella."
"It also has something to do with style, but I never could
make that out. You know what they mean?"

"No, there's no arguing with these folks; the only thing we can do is slink into a cave tell there through."

"Mr. Dillion I don't like caves, there plumb scary."

" They ain't near as scary as trying to talk to one of them
grammarians."
 
jujube said:
I will admit that I get tired of grammar misuse but when I get upset, I just pat myself softly and say "there, they're, their" and I feel better instantly.
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Haha, that reminded me -- here is one that I stole from someone online:

grammar-Peanuts.jpg
 

The one that sends me right over the edge is the misuse of the apostrophe; I even see it misused on signs around here. One that used to cause smoke to come out of my ears was the sign at a local bar that advertised "Ladie's drinks half price." Ladie isn't a word. Lady is the singular and ladies is the plural. It you want to advertise half price drinks for women, it should be "Ladies' drinks." GRRR.

Also, if you are writing of a family with the surname of Carson, it is not the Carson's; it's the Carsons.
 
Post 29
Forgive me Butterfly, I'm having a redneck attack:

Them signs on giving females cheap liquor is a code sign for males.
Decoded it means, 'Come on in fella's, we done lured them
females in here; if you come in, spend money and such, you
might get lucky with one of them semi-drunk females.'

ADDENDUM
Post 30
This should get me in bit trouble. What would be correct when your talking about a 'hen party,' sat, sitting, set...?
 
gennie said:
I blame this on too few people actually reading books anymore. Reading your phone won't replace the subliminal education value of reading a book.
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I recently read a book full of grammatical errors. It always makes me cringe, as it shouldn't pass the proof-reading.
 
Old Dummy said:
I'm with you all the way Ronni. I've been complaining about this problem forever. One of the dumbest ones I've seen in recent years is using "then" and "than" interchangeably.

Americans are becoming increasingly illiterate in their native language. I suspect this is the same for most people here, but I could not graduate from high school (class of '68) without passing English -- which was a required course right through 12th grade. I have no idea what's going on today, but it sure isn't like when I was in school.

Some images I've made over the years that I used to post, but people got too upset with me so I don't do it anymore. It's a losing battle:

oUWwJXz.png


MvQLFhx.jpg


grammar-piece-of-mind.jpg


grammar-advice.jpg
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Why do we hyphenate they're when it's just as easy to type they are.
 
Butterfly said:
The one that sends me right over the edge is the misuse of the apostrophe; I even see it misused on signs around here. One that used to cause smoke to come out of my ears was the sign at a local bar that advertised "Ladie's drinks half price." Ladie isn't a word. Lady is the singular and ladies is the plural. It you want to advertise half price drinks for women, it should be "Ladies' drinks." GRRR.

Also, if you are writing of a family with the surname of Carson, it is not the Carson's; it's the Carsons.
Click to expand...
That doesn't bother me at all. I just say to myself no ladies around they just spelled laddie wrong when I order.
 
You forgot two of my favorites:
"There's two," instead of there are two.
"I'll come over your house." Flying?

And I get a laugh when someone is testifying in small-claims court & says, "I axed her" instead of "I asked her." (popular with black people). Really funny when the judge corrects her.

And "We conversated."
 
Camp: Post 35
Correct!
The way you talk, write (and mannerisms) is as good as fingerprints in telling others where your from, how (and what)
you think.
Your verbal and written behavior is your ethos.
(We have lost the complications within ethos, complex definition.)
 
I just ran into a call back on one I just posted in another thread.

I posted. I bought Basmati rice from India.

The reply came back. All the way from India?

Well I didn't catch on at first . But the word from is often used as origin and that's the way I speak..

When I ask "where are you from?"

But I love being corrected because I can change to the correct usage.

I was terrible with your and you're till it was pointed out to me.
 
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jerry old said:
Camp: Post 35
Correct!
The way you talk, write (and mannerisms) is as good as fingerprints in telling others where your from, how (and what)
you think.
Your verbal and written behavior is your ethos.
(We have lost the complications within ethos, complex definition.)
Click to expand...
Also cursive writing tells how old you are. I don't think it is even taught anymore.
Everyone prints now. And they are really fast.
 
Butterfly said:
The one that sends me right over the edge is the misuse of the apostrophe; I even see it misused on signs around here. One that used to cause smoke to come out of my ears was the sign at a local bar that advertised "Ladie's drinks half price." Ladie isn't a word. Lady is the singular and ladies is the plural. It you want to advertise half price drinks for women, it should be "Ladies' drinks." GRRR.

Also, if you are writing of a family with the surname of Carson, it is not the Carson's; it's the Carsons.
Click to expand...
Reminded me of a friend from school- for some reason, she thought even proper names that ended with "s" needed an apostrophe. One day she was filling out a form that asked for her father's first name, and instead of writing Charles she wrote Charle's. I said that wasn't accurate- unless she was talking about something that belonged to a person named Charle. She wasn't amused! :p
 
win231 said:
You forgot two of my favorites:
"There's two," instead of there are two.
"I'll come over your house." Flying?

And I get a laugh when someone is testifying in small-claims court & says, "I axed her" instead of "I asked her." (popular with black people). Really funny when the judge corrects her.

And "We conversated."
Click to expand...
Well no "There's 2 in that sign'. O.K. There are a 2 in the sign? :)
 
jerry old said:
Camp: Post 35
Correct!
The way you talk, write (and mannerisms) is as good as fingerprints in telling others where your from, how (and what)
you think.
Your verbal and written behavior is your ethos.
(We have lost the complications within ethos, complex definition.)
Click to expand...

Oh, absolutely!! Although I've been in this are a long time, nearly everything I say/do brands me as an outsider. As only one example, when I was a regular smoker, whenever I was at a bus stop or other location where others were not smoking I always asked if it'd bother them if I smoked. This occasionally brought the response "Well, I can certainly tell you're not from (this location)- you have manners!" and others simply looked stunned by my question.
 
Ronni said:
On a Zoom call, (for those of you who aren't familiar Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing service you can use to virtually meet with others) so lots of people on the screen. In the course of that half hour video call, I heard the following:

I heard: "I could care less" (I COULDN'T care less!) "But I digest." (but I DIGRESS!) "All the sudden" (All OF A sudden!) and "A blessing in the skies" (A blessing IN DISGUISE!) Dear God, people! <SNIP>
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I saw that when I read your post the first time, but forgot to comment on it. This is one I love to pick apart.

First of all, to write "But I digress" is nothing more than a literary fad. And I hate fads as a rule, plus I try to avoid junk words that add nothing of substance.

So somebody writes an article/column and goes off on a tangent somewhere in the middle. That's always follow by "But I digress." And it's always those three exact words, thus a fad. Then they continue on with the main theme.

So if they are done "digressing," then they should have said: "I digressed (past tense) and will now stop." If they use "But I digress," then the reader would assume they are not done digressing yet. :) But it never happens that way.

1) Why must they ALWAYS point out that they went off on a digressing tangent? -- we are aware that they did. They point it out so they can be considered "cool" and up-to-speed by then saying "But I digress."

2) When writing, tangent ideas should be put in a sidebar. Not in the body of the article, and then noted by the author with a word used in the wrong tense.

IMO, a lot of this happens because when writing online, there are few restrictions on article length (like I'm doing :(), unlike in newspapers or magazines. So lousy writers ramble on and, apparently, there are few or no editors to keep things as brief as possible and to keep a common theme from start to finish.

I've noticed this in homemade Youtube vids also, mostly technical ones. Like some guy removing a cover to something that has 12 screws in it, and we have to watch him take ALL of them out. Plus, a lot of vids waste time "digressing" also, heh.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it! Thank you Ronni for starting this thread. If it was somewhere other than a seniors' forum, I'm quite sure there would be a lot of vicious trolling of those of us who like to maintain standards. :D
 
Pinky said:
I recently read a book full of grammatical errors. It always makes me cringe, as it shouldn't pass the proof-reading.
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Agree totally. Same for articles. When someone writes so poorly that you have to re-read every sentence to grasp its meaning, then I don't waste any more time on it.

And a lot of posts and casual things written online are OBVIOUSLY not proof-read before posting. If people would only do that, it would be a big help.
 
Butterfly said:
The one that sends me right over the edge is the misuse of the apostrophe; I even see it misused on signs around here. One that used to cause smoke to come out of my ears was the sign at a local bar that advertised "Ladie's drinks half price." Ladie isn't a word. Lady is the singular and ladies is the plural. It you want to advertise half price drinks for women, it should be "Ladies' drinks." GRRR.

Also, if you are writing of a family with the surname of Carson, it is not the Carson's; it's the Carsons.
Click to expand...

Yes!

There is a large farm some miles from me, owned by the "Miller" family. Although they've taken it down, there used to be a professionally-made sign in the front yard that said:

MILLER FARM'S

Huh?
confused-2.gif
 
“Their helping every night prepared dinner." and "Now we all write our meals and sitting down together and everybody pitches in."
This is from one of today's local news stories about kids doing chores at home.
Some people really need to go back to school and take some English classes...
 
Old Dummy said:
Agree totally. Same for articles. When someone writes so poorly that you have to re-read every sentence to grasp its meaning, then I don't waste any more time on it.

And a lot of posts and casual things written online are OBVIOUSLY not proof-read before posting. If people would only do that, it would be a big help.
Click to expand...
I worked freelance as a proofreader in my younger years. I am sometimes still employed to edit, though that's only occasionally these days.

Proofreading is an exact skill. I was trained to read a text at bare minimum three times. The first time starting with the last word and working my way through the article or chapter to the first word. That would catch any errors in spelling. The second time through, read from first word to last, looking for the less obvious errors, in particular plurals and contractions like an 's where there should be no apostrophe, or vice versa, the ..n't words, words like their, there and they're etc. I would stop at every single instance of those kinds of words and read the sentence for context and then red-pen as necessary. And then the third time through, again from front to back, for flow, punctuation etc. And becuase I'm so anal, I usually read it again a 4th time, occasionally picking up something I missed earlier.

These days the word processing programs take care of a lot of that. But I think people rely too much on the on-board tools of word processing. The program can tell if "whether" was spelled correctly, but won't differentiate if it should have been "whether," "weather," or "wether." Unless it's specifically designed to edit documents, like Grammerly for example, it won't let you know that a semi-colon would have been better than a comma, or a comma should have been used where there was a period, or there are too many run on sentences.

Proofreading and editing often overlap. A good editor will also automatically proofread, and a good proofreader can't help but edit a bit.
 
I walked into a room once and said, "If I were doing this," and a lady looked at me and gasped! She said, "I was an English teacher! I haven't heard ANYONE say "were" instead of "was" for years! "I thought people stopped saying that!" That was cool! I clucked around a bit like a chicken!
 
Ronni said:
I worked freelance as a proofreader in my younger years. I am sometimes still employed to edit, though that's only occasionally these days.

Proofreading is an exact skill. I was trained to read a text at bare minimum three times. The first time starting with the last word and working my way through the article or chapter to the first word. That would catch any errors in spelling. The second time through, read from first word to last, looking for the less obvious errors, in particular plurals and contractions like an 's where there should be no apostrophe, or vice versa, the ..n't words, words like their, there and they're etc. I would stop at every single instance of those kinds of words and read the sentence for context and then red-pen as necessary. And then the third time through, again from front to back, for flow, punctuation etc. And becuase I'm so anal, I usually read it again a 4th time, occasionally picking up something I missed earlier.

These days the word processing programs take care of a lot of that. But I think people rely too much on the on-board tools of word processing. The program can tell if "whether" was spelled correctly, but won't differentiate if it should have been "whether," "weather," or "wether." Unless it's specifically designed to edit documents, like Grammerly for example, it won't let you know that a semi-colon would have been better than a comma, or a comma should have been used where there was a period, or there are too many run on sentences.

Proofreading and editing often overlap. A good editor will also automatically proofread, and a good proofreader can't help but edit a bit.
Click to expand...

Beyond 12th grade English, I'm self-taught. I wrote 1½ novels (unpublished) 25 or so years ago; wow, was that ever a chore. Seems to me that you must have a real fire in your belly to write a book -- which I did have back then. Otherwise you will never finish it.

One thing I learned was when composing something important, I massage it the best I can, several times, then put it away and look at it the next day. (I suppose professionals probably don't have that luxury).

After sleeping on it, I often find errors or other corrections that are needed. Aside from grammar, punctuation, etc. I also learned how important it is to assemble sentences so they are (hopefully) clear the first time someone reads them. Sleeping on it, and looking at it fresh the next day helps a lot with that.

The tweaking can be endless though, so you just have to let it go at some point, ha. :D
 

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