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A Point About Grammar
app103:
On SBS World News here, we sometimes get stories with subtitles for interviews with people in Africa - who are speaking understandable English. They might then have a news story from somewhere in the UK where, because it's Scotland, Yorkshire, etc, you have to wonder wtf they saying even though it's meant to be English ;D
-4wd (February 10, 2014, 06:44 PM)
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I have relatives that make Facebook posts that seem like that, loaded with misspellings and bad grammar, completely void of any punctuation and capitalization. I often wish that the "Translate this post" option would show up underneath. :o
The other day, when someone mentioned it to one of my relatives, remarking that it was the longest "sentence" that he had ever seen, begging for some punctuation, the relative replied "Really [redacted] u run a train all night an ur telling me i have to put dot in there so u no when to take some air in come on ur smarter then that lol ok if i have to tell u take some air now read U just want me to say ur smart again stop take some more air lmao just joshing u"
I'd also like to point out that I am a high school dropout...and she is a college grad. :(
TaoPhoenix:
Am I the only one that's annoyed by the seemingly decreasing quality of language in "professional" news, articles and general writing?
I really don't care about people making mistakes in forums or informal writing. A lot of people don't speak English as their first language, and that's not a problem. What I find annoying is "professional" media that simply don't know how to use English properly.
e.g.
* Statistical "outlyers". It's "outliers". Sigh...
* "mass nouns" -- They're called "countable" and "uncountable", not "mass".
* Verb agreement
The list goes on and on.
It's just jarring to get "hit" by grammar, spelling, and word choice mistakes that there really is no excuse for.
It's one thing for it to be "the odd time", but it's not. It's all the time.
Am I just super-anal? Is poor grammar really acceptable in professional media?
-Renegade (March 01, 2011, 08:43 PM)
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-crabby3 (February 10, 2014, 08:26 AM)
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Naw, you're not going crazy Ren. "Professional" media took a hit with the rise of Bloggers and the Web mauling their cash cows of comics and classifieds and a few other things that *also* helped pay for a Few Good Men.
"Professional" blogs are really feeling the heat to "post or perish", and that's where for me the worst mistakes are seen to be made.
TaoPhoenix:
Gosh, then the language has become rather like a local dialect. Mind you, American-English is arguably a dialect of received English anyway.
-IainB (February 10, 2014, 05:26 PM)
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Actually to amuse you, I would like to suggest half seriously that "dialect" is a "space time" phenomenon! I am a partial "style empath" depending on what I am reading as a Project. (Not just a misc wiki entry, but when I really get into a Project of the Month.)
This Month the project is a writer called O. Henry. Y'all may have heard of him, but except for the five or so staple classics that always show up in English Class textbooks, I bet you haven't seen his real flair for a really "Heavy Narrator" and fondness for "Parallel Sentences" and such. He also so mastered his style that when he passed away, no one had the heart to try to best him at it for decades.
Nowadays the Heavy Narrator is frowned upon, though I've noticed Tom Clancy at it.
Let's try an example, modified (badly!) for the times:
Mouser was displeased. A man of less culture and poise but more wealth would have sworn out of arrogance. However, Mouser was more cultured, more poised, and less wealthy, and "Two out of Three Ain't Bad" is true, except the first two are MeatLoaf and meatloaf, making poor Mouser the third, and he was in a bad way.
His Thesis wasn't going well. All Genius is bestowed upon us by Karma Angels, but poor Mouser's Karma could not quite afford the highest grade Genius. He received just enough to become tantalized by the Higher Orders, but not yet to solve them. So while taking some time to ponder, an image of a little white bird crossed his luminescent mind.
So Mouser strapped some code to his hard drive, ordered a pizza, and set out to make his or somebody else's fortune with a software site designed upon begging with onion tears asking for donations. Thus TearyEyedProgrammer DonationCoder was born.
:D
IainB:
...They might then have a news story from somewhere in the UK where, because it's Scotland, Yorkshire, etc, you have to wonder wtf they saying even though it's meant to be English.
-4wd (February 10, 2014, 06:44 PM)
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Speaking as a Yorkshireman, I think you will find that Yorkshire-English is recognised as being an example of having a sort of English dialect, though I am unsure as to how many people actually use the dialect - e.g., "Put wood i'th 'ole." meaning "Put the wood in the hole" (i.e., "Close the door").
Most of the time, what you hear in the news is probably just English spoken with a strong Yorkshire (or, in the case of Scotland, Scottish) accent.
Another example of a dialect could be Cockney rhyming slang (from London).
There was a time when all radio and TV presenters and announcers on the BBC radio/TV were trained to speak a standardised and clear form of English based on "received English", and it gave rise to what became commonly known as "BBC Midlands English", but the new mantra has become "diversity", so now it seems that anything goes, no matter how incomprehensible, and the the thicker the better. I must admit I think some of the regional accents are very interesting and easy on the ear, but it doesn't surprise me if people sometimes say that they can't understand what is being said.
If you listen to BBC Cymru (Wales) you will hear spoken not English, but an entirely different language - Welsh - which is incomprehensible to those who have never learned to speak Welsh, though it has adopted many modern English words, but puts its own slant/emphasis on them.
tomos:
On SBS World News here, we sometimes get stories with subtitles for interviews with people in Africa - who are speaking understandable English. They might then have a news story from somewhere in the UK where, because it's Scotland, Yorkshire, etc, you have to wonder wtf they saying even though it's meant to be English ;D
-4wd (February 10, 2014, 06:44 PM)
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:D
Gosh, then the language has become rather like a local dialect. Mind you, American-English is arguably a dialect of received English anyway.
-IainB (February 10, 2014, 05:26 PM)
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-
which 'English' was, in turn, a dialect of English which got favoured for use as 'proper' English (London English, I think).
Ironically many of the quirks of American-English (for English speakers from East of the Atlantic) were words and pronunciations that stayed the same -- while English in England changed and evolved. Of course it happened the other way too. (This happens to a lesser extent with Irish-English - more with word pronunciations.)
In Maine the accent is reminiscent of a Yorkshire accent (I found). In Eastern Canada and Newfoundland you can hear accents distinctly derived from *local* Irish accents -- this from people who have lived there for generations.
Edit// Iain, I had missed your post above. Yeah, 'BBC English' was a part of that too.
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