102 new of 151 responses total.
re #48: when you're referring to yourself as the object of the sentence rather than the subject, "my wife and me" is correct, not "my wife and I." You can test this by applying the "remove the extra person rule" suggested above to see that "the only time I do that is when I'm talking about I" sounds wrong compared to "the only time I do that is when I'm talking about me.." (unless you be Rasta, mon..)
*fart*
i think anyone that doesn't encourage standard english grammar from their children are crippling them as far as having the tools to succeed in the real world as they grow older and face making a living in the real world. messing about on a bbs or using street slang with your posse on the playground are fine as long as the child is aware that such language is purely recreational. no matter how much knowledge they possess they may never get a chance to shine if everyone who listens to them speak perceives them to be a moron who can't speak their native language.
Before using terms like "wrong" wrt grammar, it is best to define the context. When writing for a business or otherwise professional audience, it is grossly inappropriate to write "Me and my wife were talking the other night." OTOH, it's fine to say that, and ok to write it in more informal contexts. Professional writing is a dialect of English. As such, it should be treated like one -- there are settings in which it is the most appropriate means of communication, and settings in which it sounds completely out of place. Perhaps the striking difference between professional writing and any other dialect is that there are few who speak it naturally; most have to learn it, although many learn it from exposure rather than explicit teaching. Language is extremely powerful, and how you speak, write, and even perceive language can be used as a tool or a weapon. We'd like to think that language doesn't matter that much, that it's fine to be casual, but using slang and sloppy language in a business setting is like wearing a t-shirt and jeans to a board meeting... you will be treated as the bumpkin you are, for not knowing the rules, just as you will be scoffed at for showing up at a goth bar in a three-ppiece (non-black) suit. In other words, what jerry said.
One thing: "although many learn it from exposure rather than explicit teaching." That's true of *all* language. Efforts to teach a second language that ignore this truth often fail.
True enough.
re resp:53 Haven't been to a Grex board meeting lately, have you? ;)
I try very hard to speak as I write since it's good practice and makes me sound more intelligent. ;-)
Does it work?
Me, I mostly agree with folks and stuff.
I agree with folks, but have difficulty really meeting minds with stuff. I need to work on my mediation some more.
Meditation might be more useful than mediation if that's your goal. Or was that just an example of disagreement with "stuff": in this case a disagreement between you and your keyboard? :-p
re all the comments objecting to what I said in #42: Kids do not learn grammar from being told "don't say 'Me and Joe', say 'Joe and I'." They learn grammar from the people around them, beginning with their families in the early stages of their lives, and continuing with their friends and classmates in their elementary school years. I expect they'll be perfectly comfortable with using formal speech in formal settings, but less 'correct' grammar in settings where other people use that kind of grammar. I once heard my older boy, then about 7, say something along these lines: "I think Christmas is fun, whups, I mean 'I'm *like* Christmas is fun". At home we would say "I think Christmas is fun." However, at school, all of his friends would say say "I'm like" instead of "I think". He "corrected" himself to sound like his friends. He was practicing fitting in, and not concerned with correct formal grammar. That's perfectly fine. Also, it is beyond my control. He *is* going to fit in with his friends. I can battle about it forever, if I want to be fighting with him that long, but that's all I'm going to accomplish. He'll know what's correct in formal settings, just like I do.
Yeah, but usually you say "I'm like" as a predecessor to something you said or thought *at the time*... It's more like saying "I said" or "I thought"...
If people jump off a bridge, it does NOT follow that YOU should jump off a
bridge.
Certain rules are EXPECTED; certain rules WORK - standalone or as
exceptions; and, the rest is horseshit. If you really feel you need to
generate a NEW RULE, then I am sure that yer peers ("yer") can manage
to keep you on ther "straight and narrow".
There are lots of "acceptable processes", but Eubonics and AOL-speak ain't
one of them.
Oh..
I sghould also point out that education no longer, (it snarled
with me years ago), teaches wtf the punctuation MEANS and is FOR.
And, if they ain't teachin' that it MEANT and IMPLIED pauses and
breaths: they is WRONG.
(Find an English Teacher that can manage Olde Englische)
(You know, I hate the whole "jump off a bridge" analogy.. of course I'm not going to jump off a bridge just because someone else did.. that's fucking dangerous!)
I don't have my English teaching certificate yet, but I can manage Olde English just fine. =)
Actually, if enough people jumped before you, it wouldn't be such a bad fall.
No one ever taught me punctuation or grammar. Nor did I consciously go out and learn it on my own. I have some sense of what nouns and verbs are, but not what "preposition" means. Apparently prepositions are "little words" of some kind. I don't really care.
<smirk>
Knowing how to use nouns, verbs, and prepositions is part of knowing a language, and there are indeed two ways to learn it: through immersion, and through a formal class. Generally immersion is best, but a formal class does have certain advantages. Proper punctuation is part of written literacy, and that is one of the things people generally do learn through a formal class. Immersion doesn't work nearly as well for this because one doesn't usually get the sort of immediate nit-picking feedback necessary for immersion learning. Knowing how to use prepositions is certainly something one can learn without ever having conscious knowledge of what they are, but being able to recognize a preposition may make it easier to do proper punctuation, or to learn a foreign language. For instance, without a knowledge of prepositions, the sentence "I give to the dog a biscuit" sounds like something a non-native speaker might say, that will sound wrong to most native speakers. Someone who has gone through a course of grammer will be able to say that sentence is a "<subject> <verb> <indirect object> <direct object>" and that either the <direct object> needs to come before any <indirect object>s, or in some cases, the preposition can be deleted if the right word order is used: "I give the dog a biscuit". As native speakers, most of us learned all this stuff well before we learned what year it was, even if we couldn't articulate what we knew. However, being able to apply proper punctuation to the sentence "I gave the dog a small dark biscuit before breakfast" isn't quite so obvious and being able to defend that decision really does require some knowledge of grammar. I hate to think what sort of schooling Larry got. I remember *years* worth of drill in prepositions, nouns, adverbs, Isadora Duncan, and all that. I can't say that it all stuck, and I still think there's got to be a better way to do it all, but what stuck does seem to have been useful. This is certainly one of the things that makes me really despair of there ever being any real hope for public education, however much I might like the idea in the abstract.
Larry, just don't forget that prepositions are little words that *always* go where the end of the sentence is at.
(I still think language immersion is a fad.)
Re 71. My eyes glaze over. Direct object? Indirect object? I don't have time for this stuff. More than that, I resist it. I don't want to know. There's no space in my head for it. I have written a tremendous quantity of prose in my time. Since I started BBSing in 1983, I have probably written at least a few lines just about every day. I write it, I change it, I read it again, I revise it, I keep working on it until it sounds good to me. Grammar is never the problem: I'm striving for the right meaning, the right cadence, the right tone. My first draft is often angry and rude, and I revise it into a semblance of calmness and civility. I'm not normally called on to "defend" my choice of word order or syntax. I suppose I would make a poor English teacher, because I would have trouble articulating why one sentence sounds good to me and another doesn't. I would also make a poor bricklayer, a poor surgeon, a poor television newscaster. Fortunately, I don't have to do any of those things. I have written for publication, and never once have I gotten into any discussion with editors about direct objects or prepositions. I think memorizing those rules and definitions may be helpful to some people. That's fine for them. It doesn't work for me.
*sigh*
Punctuation is based on the "rules" that a "town cryer" would have
to employ to "quote" the author of a document. The period, colon,
semi-colon, comma, hypen - all of this implies breath-control and
pause-length.
Spelling is something *I* do by spelling a word over & over..
Until it "looks right". The other rules? I've never seen anyone
get excited about most of them unless they were an English major.
Indeed, I can only remember the basics of noun, pronoun, verb..
object, subject.. Mostly because they relate to programming.
Shall we switch now to component/decompositional comments?
Yes...us English majors drool over things like "correctly modified nouns" and "using well and good correctly", but you guys drool over things like RAM and other stuff that makes my eyes glaze over. ;-) To each their own. I must state, however, that even though I don't know much about computers and really don't need to know specifics about many parts of the computer world, I still enjoy being told when I'm wrong and learning how to correct something so that I don't look like an idiot. It's part of a learning process. I don't go right out and tell people when they're a horrible speaker, and I'm not one of those people who interrupt conversations to correct someone, but I really really really REALLY detest things like, "Nobody cares if I talk like an idiot or can't spell a word." Why don't *you* care if you look bad? (This is a general "you" and not directed at any one individual online or in real life)
"To each their own." (sic) GAG ME!!!
What? It's a common expression. =)
Common yes. Correct, not by a long shot. "To each his own." or "to each her own." Glass houses and all that...
Actually, "language immersion" is how practically all of us learned English. This "formal school" idea is a fad of a mere few centuries in length; before that, most people spent more time thinking about shit than they did about their letters. Shit was, after all, an everyday product of farming and livestock, while letters were merely a curious affectation of the priesthood. Larry's response regarding grammar sounds a lot lot like how many engineers responded to the idea of science and mathematics in the 19th century. I confess, though, I wonder how he decides when to use a semicolon instead of a comma.
#79> check your style manuals. "Their" and "they" have been accepted as singular gender-neutral pronouns for a while now.
Re #74: Exactly. We had some of that formal stuff about the arcane names for the parts of sentances. We even had to diagram sentances for a while. I don't think I learned anything from it. I certainly couldn't diagram a sentance now. I get the impression that all the formal terms for different parts of speech are extremely useful if you're researching language, but not very useful if all you're doing is writing it.
..."us English majors"... ;-)
We English majors... and "their" was my gender-neutral version of that phrase. <birdy is speaking through heavy cold medication so Back Off> ;-) (Thanks, Katie).
Re 80. I use a semicolon where it is appropriate to do so. Have you ever seen me misuse a semicolon? I think the chess metaphor may be useful here. Beyond the rules of the game of chess itself, there are certain rules of play which, in general, you violate at your peril. I'm sure that someone has written up and codified all these rules. If you're a beginning player, you could learn from studying them. However, as an experienced player, if you stick to following all those rules, all the time, then you are playing terrible chess. I suppose you could take that a step further to describe the computers which will soon be defeating even the world's greatest human chess players. Presumably the software for computer chess is full of formulas and probabilities and thousands of complex rules of play. In the end, computing power wins out, sure, just as a computer can calculate the stresses in a bridge design better than a human can intuit them. In those kinds of endeavors, resistance to mathematics is silly, and the rules expand the possibilities for ever greater human accomplishments. By contrast, applying ever more complex rules to human writing and speech is a dead end, useful only in learning. Fluency in a langage, or at any task, consists in part of forgetting the rules; it becomes an automatic, left-brain activity requiring little conscious intervention. When you drive, you can shift gears, change lanes, adjust speed, etc., without even breaking your unrelated train of thought. When you read, you do not have to focus on each letter individually, or consciously notice punctuation marks. When you speak, you don't have to consider where to place your tongue to make the "T" sound. Similarly, when I write, I do not have to focus on rules to decide when a semicolon is correct. As I type, my finger taps that key, and the character ends up in the right place. When I started this response, I wanted to give an example of a sentence containing a semicolon, but couldn't think of one and gave up. Now I see that I used a semicolon in the previous paragraph. Obviously, it didn't take any conscious thought. I didn't even notice that I was doing it. I remember a discussion of Artificial Intelligence and houseflies some time back. A fly buzzes around the room, controlling its altitude, avoiding obstacles, seeking goals, etc., and it does all this with remarkably little hardware in real time. An AI fly would have to solve equations to calculate its position and velocity and appropriate wing flapping speed, etc.; the real fly does not seem to find this necessary.
It would probably be more correct to say the real fly *is* those calculations than to say it's making them. You are making a similar set of calculations when you reach out to pick up a glass of lemonade -- if you weren't, the lemonade wouldn't still be in the glass when it got to your mouth, if indeed you actually manage to pick up the glass at all, or succeed in not clubbing yourself with the glass. Very small kids can be seen learning this, and most mothers take steps (such as plastic cups, tarps, etc.) to limit the amount of blood lost and other secondary damage. Sometimes older people lose the ability to perform those calculations. What is interesting to watch is somebody who may be a perfectly competent driver, user of the english language, etc., but who doesn't really understand what he's actually doing, teach someone else how to drive a car, the use of proper punctuation, etc. Sometimes, the results can be quite comical, and sometimes quite sobering.
Re 86. No, that's not it. The fly makes its decisions about speed and direction and wing flap rate and so on without any outside intervention, and it doesn't have the hardware to solve any equations. Reaching for a glass of lemonade is the same thing. Nothing in my head is calculating the square root of the estimated distance, or doing any math at all.
It is obtaining the same result as solving the mathematics of the situation,
but doing so through feedback loops, comparison of sensory input with
previous algorithms ("skills", which are memories of previous attempts
processed to optimize consequences), and adjustments as the process occurs.
An automatic control system with learned "skills" is just a machine, but
there is a mathematical way to describe its behavior in totality. The
mathematics in any case is always just a model, not the real system.
Re 88. Ah! Well said. The mathematics is not the real system. The grammar rules are a description only, not the real communication.
Re: #81: I don't give a crap what some "style guide" says is acceptable. There is no third person sigular neuter pronoun beyond his (him). Their is not an option. That nasty little noun-verb-pronoun agreement biz. If you feel so put upon that "To each his own" somehow bothers your PC sensibilities, then knock yourself out and write "To each his/her own". But don't try to trot out "To each their own" as acceptable English grammar.
The rules of grammar serve as a framework for passing on the means of communication to the next generation. The goal is to preserve the ability to communicate between people with different experiences of socialization -- primarily due to inevitable changes in the ways of the world as generations go by. The rules have to adapt in order to maintain relevance to the experiences of each generation, but they are necessary to slow the rate of change in the language to that which allows three generations of people living simultaneously to communicate successfully at at least rudimentary levels. Under ordinary circumstances, the older generation(s) will protest the changes, while the younger generation(s) will proclaim the framework insufficiently flexible to maintain relevance.
That's a nice definition of "dumbing down".
That's a cynical interpretation. Dumbing down is only one way of looking at it, and I'm sure that most older generations would apply it to the process undertaken by subsequent generations to modify the grammatical structure of our language. That doesn't mean it is the exclusive interpretation.
#90> Sorry. Forgot you were the final source of information on this topic.
Re #90 - I'm hardly PC. It was a fucking typo.
Re #90: I have no problem with using "they" or "their" in both a singular and plural sense. No more than with using "you" in both a singular and plural sense. "To each their own" is fine.
actually, third person singular neuter is its, not his.
(anyone else remember the movement to make "ne" the gender neutral pronoun of choice?)
Yup. Icky.
ne,nis, or ne,ner?
Yeah, but for some reason people object to using the pronoun 'it' to refer to other people. ;>
Paol Anderson, in his novel _Starfarers_, coined pronouns _en_ (subject and object) and _ens_ (possessive) as third person non-gendered. BTW: Polygon: Where did you goto school?
Re 102. Kindergarten-2nd grade: Swift School, Chicago IL
3rd grade: Red Cedar School, East Lansing MI
4th-6th grade: Bailey School, East Lansing MI
7th-8th grades: McDonald Middle School, East Lansing MI
9th-12th grades: East Lansing High School, East Lansing MI
Undergrad: Michigan State University, East Lansing MI
Law school: Wayne State University, Detroit MI
Grad school: Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Teaching grammar was out of style at the time I was passing through the
grades in which it was traditionally taught. However, I also ignored a
lot of what they attempted to teach me. I do vaguely recall refusing to
get involved with diagramming sentences, around 6th grade.
Ah, proof that polygon and I are not the same person. I *loved* diagramming sentences. (I think it was taught to me in the 4th grade.)
I *hated* diagramming sentences. They had also changed "noun" and "verb" to "subject" and "predicate" at that point. Icky.
re: 105..
That may be why I have such problems with sentence components.
Diagramming should essentially be programming, and I see those as
FOUR elements, rather than TWO.. Shit.. No wonder I ignore that
noise.
I diagrammed sentences in elementary school, but I think that is too early for a good appreciation of what it really means. I didn't learn English grammar until I studied German grammar.
aren't lawyers among those that value sentence structure and word usage the highest? aren't forests full of trees sacrificed to the minutia of legalese?
Sorry, "subject" and "predicate" are parts of sentences. "nouns" and "verbs" are parts of speech. "subjects" can contain nouns, adjectives, prepositions, gerunds, and many other parts of speech. "predicates" can contain nouns, adjectives, prepositions, verbs, adverbs, and many other parts of speech.
Which is why introducing that into diagramming sentences was so hard on a fifth grader...
nyt (long)
Is a Word's Definition in the Mind of the User?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
n England in 1857, an ambitious proposal was made to create an encyclopedic
concordance of English words. Such a dictionary, it was argued, would be a
"historical monument"; it would represent "the history of a nation" recounted
from a distinctive "point of view." The result, completed 70 years later, was
the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. In that work's 441,825
words and 1,827,306 quotations, the grandeur of the English language was
displayed in all its expanse, every transformation chronicled by citations
from English poetry and prose.
Times have changed. In the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary,
the monument is dismantled, multiple points of view are proffered and the
authority of the past is rejected along with the privileged position of
written poetry and prose. This edition is the climax of several decades of
lexicographical evolution. Though many authorities are consulted for this
dictionary, the ultimate authority is the ordinary person's ordinary speech.
Nothing is absolutely correct; nothing is ever incorrect. It is just a matter
of who uses a word and why.
This dictionary aims to be endearingly up to date and informative; it often
is. It is handsome, colorful, plainly written if not elegant. This edition
includes 10,000 new entries like "shopaholic," "mommy track," "acid reflux"
and "control freak." Four thousand color illustrations and photos accompany
entries that range from the helpful ("ophthalmoscope") to the superfluous
("Oprah Winfrey"). Notes accompanying entries helpfully explain "flotsam"
while defining "jetsam," or show how "mosquito" and certain forms of weaponry
share etymological pasts.
The main ambition is to create something distinctively American: a democratic
dictionary that describes, not prescribes. Of course the debate over whether
dictionaries should be asserting that a word has relatively determined
meanings and a proper usage; or descriptive, asserting that a word has
shifting meanings determined by its popular has been raging for several
decades. The best dictionaries maintain a precarious balance.
The problem here is that too often the balance tips. The dictionary recalls
at times Humpty Dumpty's famous declaration to Alice in "Through the Looking
Glass": "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to neither more
nor less."
"The question is," Alice replies, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things."
"The question is," Humpty Dumpty says, "which is to be that's all."
In this dictionary the master is not the word but the user of the word.
Competing claims are never firmly settled; there are no rules. In the
dictionary's "usage notes," for example, traditional distinctions between
"who" and "whom" are noted, but it is also suggested that such distinctions
tend to become irrelevant in informal speech. "Incentivize," a variety of
boorish bureaucratic misspeak, has an entry simply because the word has come
into use (meaning "to motivate").
In an introductory essay, Geoffrey Nunberg, the chairman of the dictionary's
usage panel, implies that social issues so deeply affect notions of linguistic
propriety that any linguistic decision is an implicitly political one; it is
best, he suggests, simply to take note of differing preferences without
issuing a verdict. In controversial cases the usage panel was consulted,
consisting of two hundred writers and scholars "who have distinguished
themselves by their command of the English language." The panel, which
includes the novelists Oscar Hijuelos and Mona Simpson, the humorists Garrison
Keillor and Calvin Trillin, the poets Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove and such
scholars as the economist Robert J. Samuelson and the computer scientist
Douglas R. Hofstadter, was regularly polled about various words. Results
appear in the "usage notes" accompanying major entries.
Thus we learn that the panel was split 50-50 on how to pronounce "harass."
We find out that 61 percent thought "schism," should be pronounced "skism,"
31 percent voted for "sism" and 8 percent chose "shism," (the "traditional"
pronunciation, the dictionary points out, is "sism"). The word "man" was
accepted as meaning "human" in certain contexts ("modern man") by 81 percent
of the panel, but only 58 percent of the women on the panel thought that
meaning appropriate: to each his or her own.
Yet it is difficult to reconcile this demotic vision with the authoritative
role courted by this very dictionary. Mr. Nunberg affirms, for example, that
"the fundamental linguistic simplicity, clarity, are unassailable." He
argues that in "specialized" cases, there might even be definitions having
more authority: for example, that the word "ironic" requires special
consultation with literary specialists because "the meaning of ironic is not
at the disposition of the general public."
But doesn't that mean that some standards of accuracy exist? Shouldn't this
be the function of a dictionary in dealing with every word: to allow access
to subtle and accurate meanings that may not be at the disposition of the
general public? Why give "ironic" more attentiveness, for example, than
"disingenuous?" In the latter case, one "usage note" points out that "the
meaning of disingenuous has been shifting about lately, as if people are
unsure of its proper meaning." One "proper meaning" is offered: "not
straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating," a meaning that is
supported by 94 percent of the Usage Panel. But another meaning cited is
"unaware or uninformed, naove"; 75 percent of the panel rejected this use but
the dictionary cannot bring itself to call the other 25 percent incorrect.
I prefer Samuel Johnson's more pungent and accurate definitions of
disingenuous in his imposing 1755 dictionary, "meanly artful, viciously
subtle."
I don't think this dictionary is disingenuous in Dr. Johnson's sense; I think
it is disingenuous in the incorrect popular sense. With all its usefulness
and sophistication, it is naove. It cannot take responsibility for the words
it describes. Yes, all usages are of interest, and yes, language is mercurial,
and yes, a dictionary needs multiple perspectives. But this dictionary, like
many other contemporary counterparts, sits comfortably amid the swirl of
conflicting assertions, nodding this way and that, deferring to the mastery
of each and all, while urging the reader to hop up and join it on its
precarious Humpty Dumptyish perch.
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FOURTH EDITION
2,074 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $60; with CD-ROM, $74.95
"naove"?
Look it up.. :-p
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=naove No entry found for "naove" in the dictionary. Suggestions: nave naive Nave Naeve Naive nave naive naive naive NAOE nave I suggest that the 'o' is a computer misrepresentation of the i-umlaut likely included in the original text.
Re: #97: So sorry, you're wrong: Neither it nor its can ever be used to refer to a person. Try again.
I don't know. While 'his' is historically a neuter pronoun, I don't think you can make rules about language without considering the way people *perceive* words. A large number of people see the use of 'his' as sexist, and I think that's a fair reason for alternatives to come into use. Language is for communicating, so you can't seperate what people think of words from how they use them. After all, 'idiot' was once a medical term, but no doctor would use it to refer to someone now.
And a large number of people are PC brain damaged. Instead of trying to make a real difference, they try to meddle with language, which does nothing more than piss off people. Person hole cover, yeah, right.
To whom are you refering when you say it "pisses people off?"
Anyone who writes, speaks or otherwise inflicts the monstrosity "incentivize" upon any person, except as a bad example, should be subject to criminal and civil penalties. Ditto with most of the other "-izes", and "impact" used as a verb.
I'd criticize that sentiment. :) Language evolves, reactionary attitudes toward change notwithstanding. Granted, people make lousy proposals for new language at times, and an ugly word is an ugly word, e.g. Russ's "sensitivize" example, which I hadn't run across before. But change is inevitable, and much of it is good. It keeps the language from stagnating. As to "PC" issues, I'm sympathetic to attempts to find a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. Granted, there have been a lot of silly proposals, which stand no chance of widespread acceptance. "It" just doesn't seem right. I lean towards using "they", "them", and "their" in a singular sense. After all, we already do that with the second person, where "you are" can refer to one person or several. We even do it in a limited way with the first person - the "editorial we", the "royal we".
Today I noticed a sign on Southwest Airlines that advizicated that 'Federal law states persons under 15 years of age may not sit in rows containing an emergency exit.' I asked Mary Wilson (who is almost 7) if she wanted to sit in one and she opted not to as she wanted a window seat behind the wing.
I take it Mary Wilson is under the impression she's an "it" and not a "person"?
I recommend that Eric and Kevin spend some time listening to people talk. Themselves, even. I believe that they will rapidly discover that everyone, themselves included, uses the formerly plural third-person pronouns as singular third-person gender-unknown pronouns. (Note that I said "gender-unknown" not "gender-neutral"; there is a difference, and it's important here.) Languages do evolve, and this particular shift has been underway for at least a quarter-century. It's over, folks. Get over it.
re#122: No, she and I understand the difference between 'may' and 'shall'. Obviously the federal FAA regulation cited in the SWA notice referenced FAA language that actually used the word 'shall' instead of 'may' otherwise it would be meaningless. (At least that is what I told her and I hope it fact)
"May" asserts an option is available. "May not" asserts the option is not available - ie, there is no option to exercise. "Shall" asserts an affirmative lack of option. Hence, "shall" and "may" have very different meanings, but "may not" and "shall not" map to almost the same meaning. "May not" is the conventional, preferred and correct polite usage. "Shall not" implies a certain predictive connotation that would strike most american ears as a bit "rude", so is generally overly harsh and not the best choice in most general situations.
The only correct way to use they and their and them is to make the subject and sentence structure plural. If you feel you must eliminate the dreaded he and his and him, the make it plural, and you can be correct and PC at the same time.
my first reaction to "pc" was not 'politically correct' but 'personal computer' - made me chuckle.
So much to say. re resp:80 -- Yes, language immersion is the most common and (arguably) the most successful technique for teaching languages, in the sense that it is how we all (loosely) learned our first language(s). But people can and do learn languages non-immersively, by means of grammar, memorization of vocabulary, etc. Some people even do better that way. I'm one of them. However, it has become fashionable in language classes to teach purely immersively. I vividly recall sitting in Japanese class at UM one day, while the professor spent half an hour trying to get us to do some exercise. Unfortunately, she used Japanese, and used terms and constructions none of us were familiar with, so we had no idea what she wanted us to do. This in vivid contrast to the German class I had taken the previous semester, in which the professor was independent-minded enough to use English where appropriate to make the learning process more efficient. Ultimately, all learning is immersive, in the sense that understanding is deeper than rote memory, but completely immersive language teaching ignores the fact that there exist intermediate steps between complete incomprehension and total understanding, steps that can help make the process of learning a language more efficient. So, I think it's a fad. re strict vs. evolving grammar: I used to be a pretty strict grammarian. I still have a lot of admiration for writers who take the trouble to construct their sentences in such a way as to avoid split infinitives and dangling prepositions, though they grow rarer. Similarly, I admire writers who take the trouble to write with style in a context in which content is more important, such as computer reference books. It happens, probably not by chance, that writers who do so tend to have more reliable content; they make fewer mistakes. I've observed in myself a trend towards more permissiveness in grammar (mis)uses, so long as meaning (and, hopefully, some kind of grace and style) is preserved. Until recently, I felt vaguely guilty about this; my practice was straying from my theoretical ideal. My theoretical ideal has done a pretty violent 180, though, supported by a couple of things. First, I started reading a mailing list (World Wide Words) run by an etymologist, which started to give me some perspective on how word usage changes, how spellings and meanings evolve from god only knows where, and how "correctness" comes to be established. Second, for whatever reason, I've been reading an abnormally large number of English-language originals from before the "modern period" of grammar, which is really playing with my notions of correctness. How can you complain about Jane Austen's usage, or Chaucer's spelling? They're not wrong, just different. I think it's unbelievably cool to spell cooperation with an umlaut on the second 'o', but I'm sure not going to lower my opinion of modern authors who don't do so. Likewise for British vs. American spellings of words. As for 3rd person neuter pronouns... My inclination, again, is to go traditional and use "he", but the subject is touchy and complex. Unless I'm in a situation where it's possible to get into a long and detailed discussion of the various linguistic, logical, social and gender issues surrounding the problem, I use "they" in conversation, or go for a "he or she" kind of construction. Fact is, there are people (misguided as their priorities may be) who can be offended and hurt by the traditional usage, and I don't really want to be seen (even wrongly) as a boor. As for "may not" vs. "shall not"... Guess what: the English language, unless used with extreme care, is by nature ambiguous. Ambiguities in content tend to be resolved by usage and context. "A may not X," by usage, is understood to mean "negation of (A may X)", rather than "A may (negation of X)". When the latter is meant, a construction such as "A may choose not to X" is used.
Kevin, you are wrong. Gender agreement is more important than number agreement, in English. I think it always has been, but "he" didn't used to be marked for gender; now it is.
What is the plural form of 'each'? Re: shall vs. may. The content and apparent purpose of the sign provides sufficient context from which to ascertain the intent of the statement beyond question, but setting that aside, there is nothing inherent about the words 'may not' to suggestion the lack of option rather than the option of lacking. Marcus is ascribing a definitive meaning which those words usually convey only by the addition of inflection -- an aspect unavailable to the written form.
Why would the Feds make a rule like that in #121?
As I remember, the requirement is that the people near that exit be physically able to open it.
Re #130: Right. I frequently use "may not" in the sense of "might not" -- i.e. there's an option present.
re: 131 Two-fold, I'd suggest. One, as indicated in resp:132, and two, that people in proximity to the emergency exit be assumed to be sufficiently capable of understanding the consequences of their actions that they'd not toy with the emergency exit release handle.
Toying with the emergency release handle is unlikely to do any serious damage, though I wouldn't suggest it. Emergency exits are "plug doors" that open inward; when the airplane is in flight and pressurized, I doubt there's anyone alive that could yank one open, since they'd be working against about 8 psi. If the exit door is 2 ft. by 5 ft., that's almost six tons of force holding the door in place.
But isn't that what happened just a couple of weeks ago, where a plane had made an emergency landing, and an attendant opened the emergency exit before the plane had be depressurized? He or she was sucked out of the plane and died on the tarmac?
I was surprised by that as the pressurization of an airplane cabin is usually *less* than ground-level atmospheric pressure.
How about "To each one's own"? Awkward sounding, to be sure, but if one wants to express something without even a hint of gender, while still using proper, accepted grammar, one ought to word one's prose with one and one's.
each = one, so that would be, "To one one's own."
Yes, but "each one" is an accepted extension of "each." To each's own?
And I thought that the cabins of commercial jet passenger aircraft were always pressurized to 7,000 feet. But I don't know where I got that bit of info. We have a jet mechanic in the family and I'll ask him next time we talk.
There was discussion about this on one of the aviation newsgroups. The consensus was that planes are commonly pressurized to about 0.5 psi on the ground, just before takeoff, to minimize pressure changes that could be uncomfortable for the passengers. However, most people thought it was more likely that the attendant was thrown off balance by the door opening (the attendant-opened ones often have power assists) or by an over-eager passenger.
The reports I saw of that accident were short on detail, but I got the impression that the exit in question was one of the regular ones, not the over-wing emergency exits. As noted, those are assisted, but they also open differently.
You would notice a pressure change of 0.5 psi, and I've never felt one on the ground. However you feel the changes as the plane ascends or descends, which I've always thought was a somewhat lower pressure (like, 7000 feet) as one ascended, and the reverse when descending. (The low elevation pressure decrease with height is about 1 inch Hg per thousand feet. 7000 feet would mean ca. 7 in Hg, or about 3.4 psi.)
Re #143: Never trust the media to get anything right about an aviation accident.
Think about every airplane disaster flick you've ever seen, the cabin gets a hole in it and passengers are sucked out. The cabin is at higher pressure than the outside atmosphere. Now think about the news story referenced above. On the ground the flight attendant is sucked out because the air pressure on the ground is lower than that in the aircraft? And as pointed out, was lower enough to suck the attendant out, but the attendant was strong enough to open it against the pressure differential holding the door shut?
re #146 - I can think of one airplane disaster flick that doesn't have a hole in the cabin - Airplane! didn't have anyone getting sucked out of the plane. ;) (just a minor nit)
(That was a comedy/parody not a disaster flick.) (just a minor pick at a minor nit)
I spoke with my jet mechanic brother-in-law last evening and he explained it this way: Aircraft, once off the ground, are pressurized to a differential that changes depending on altitude. At 30,000 feet or above the cabin would be pressurized to between 7 and 8 psi. On the tarmac, in preparation for takeoff, the aircraft is at 1 to 2 psi. What he suspects happened in the incident being discussed is the "ground shift" didn't promptly occur. Ground shift is the term for the plane realizing it is on the ground and pressurization returning to 0 psi. All door have an emergency assist whereby a gas canister essentially blows the locking mechanism and the door open. At altitude even this assist wouldn't be enough to open a door. But he suspects this particular plane for some reason didn't complete the ground shift, was still at 1 - 2 psi, the attendant couldn't get the manual handle to open the door (it wouldn't at that pressure), so he or she activated the assist, which did work. He also suspects the attendant wouldn't have really been sucked from the plan as much as bumped out by the resulting air concussion, onto the tarmac, which is between a 10 and 25 foot drop depending on which door it was on what jet.
Cyberpunk .... No i must be lost ?
No cyberpunk covers broad issues of social change in cyberspace, not just h8cking for 3llet2 d00ds. :-)
You have several choices: