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A Point About Grammar
cranioscopical:
Oddly, that seems perfectly natural. The plural contraction doesn't. So sure, you can buy me a beer anytime~!
-Renegade (March 03, 2011, 06:53 AM)
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Another brewhaha come to a head.
mwb1100:
Can I just make a comment about the word "alot?"
It's not a word at all :o
-timns (March 02, 2011, 09:18 PM)
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Something changes language overtime. Sometime hence, "alot" shall be altogether alright if it's not already.
I'd allot around 4 score years.
timns:
Can I just make a comment about the word "alot?"
It's not a word at all :o
-timns (March 02, 2011, 09:18 PM)
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Something changes language overtime. Sometime hence, "alot" shall be altogether alright if it's not already.
-mwb1100 (March 03, 2011, 11:13 AM)
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I do hope you mean "all right" old bean ;)
CWuestefeld:
The more you learn about language and "correct" writing, the more you discover the amount of rules that aren't taught in school (or not my school, any way).
For example, I was never taught what a transitive verb is (see Wikipedia if you don't know). But I notice this occasionally with my wife. (She's an immigrant, and with English as her third language, she does remarkably well, so much so that in casual conversation you wouldn't know she's not native.) But every once in a while she comes out with a clunker, all the more surprising because you can forget she's not a native speaker. And this is one of the common problems.
Another thing that most natives just get right from having heard it so much, but isn't really taught explicitly, is when a determiner is necessary. One of the things my wife finds most difficult is deciding when a noun needs a "the" in front of it.
Finally, there's an error that I see committed almost universally, and demonstrating how much it's not taught, I don't even know what the correct terminology is. I think of it as parallelization of lists. When giving a list, the items in the list need to all be of the same part of speech and conjugation. For example: "My dog Buster likes to chase a ball and poops in the woods". This is incorrect. I need to either change "poops" to "to poop" so that the list of what Buster likes is all of the same type, or I need to change it to "... and he poops..." so that it's not a list of what he likes to do.
mwb1100:
I do hope you mean "all right" old bean ;)
-timns (March 03, 2011, 11:31 AM)
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Yeah, sorta. "alright" might not be all right, yet. But I think it's a lot further along being an accepted word than "alot" (see http://www.word-detective.com/back-q.html). And you can't seriously make me think that such stand-up Brits as "The Who" might not know how to spell (don't bother with the remake of that movie; it was no where - er, nowhere - near as good, even if they might have done better with the spelling).
My point is that sometimes word are combined (for various reasons) - it has happened for several words in that post, and will probably happen to some of the others.
Then again, words can fall out of favor or common use like "score" as meaning 20. And certayne wordes which might bring about yre and be considered garbidge today were once amonge truely correct spellings.
If I could trade 'word status', I'd gladly endure "alot" if I could get rid of "blog". I don't like that word for some reason, even though there clearly needs to be a word for those things. I just don't like "blog" - blecch.
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