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English in the Real World
- DieBruderBauer 3y agoYou can pull Strunk's from my cold, dead hands.
- emodendroket 3y agoPerhaps one of the biggest blights on English writing instruction that that book isn't just ignored. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf
- ghaff 3y agoI've read it before. It's a bit of a rant and is also probably a bit unfair--but I'm not sure it's wrong either.
- mold_aid 3y agoYeah I'm always shocked at how frequently it's used by my colleagues. I will say it is used in a lot of non-writing disciplines, but I remember my first English class putting that thing in my hands and ugh. It's part of a broader issue in writing instruction that mistakes etiquette for style.
- ranko 3y agoIronically, it was ignored by the authors in much of their writing, both in "Elements" and other works.
- emodendroket 3y agoYes, if they'd followed their own suggestions their writing would not be as well loved as it is.
- tuukkah 3y agoThe point is that around you and Strunk, the language keeps evolving.
- actionfromafar 3y agoIt’s not that good.
- jjgreen 3y agoAmusingly, the original PEP-8 had "When writing English, Strunk and White apply" rather than "applies" (so treating "Strunk & White" as a plural). That subsequently corrected to "When writing English, follow Strunk and White".
- troad 3y agoLinguists universally make fun of S&W. S&W is a series of misinformed and inconsistent stylistic preferences that mediocre English majors use to status signal to other mediocre English majors.
- Georgelemental 3y ago[flagged]
- emodendroket 3y agoClearly you're trying to insinuate something sinister but I don't know what it is.
- Georgelemental 3y agoThe third-person singular "they" used to refer to specific people—officially it is a standard that all sensible right-thinking people accept. In private, I hear people complain regularly, unprompted, that it makes things unreadable, and that it is ridiculous in general.
- msla 3y agoSingular they has been used for centuries. It isn't a top-down imposition, it's a natural development of English. It is, in fact, older than singular you. If anything, the pushback against singular they is the imposition by self-appointed language lords onto people they arbitrarily decided weren't speaking correctly https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
- mathieuh 3y agoYeah I file opposition to singular they in the same place as ending sentences with prepositions or splitting infinitives. Something for pedants to get worked up over without really understanding the issue.
- Georgelemental 3y agoThe issue is engenders confusion—"wait, how many people are we talking about, again?"
- 3y ago
- tkgally 3y agoDavid Foster Wallace wrote an essay on usage guides, including Garner’s, for Harper’s Magazine in 2001. It was titled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Still worth reading if you enjoy—or at least can tolerate—Wallace’s own writing style: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...
- tuukkah 3y agoTLDR their approach: > In Garner’s view, the best course is to “follow idiom and usage” but “otherwise apply logic.” Such advice circumvents the descriptivism-prescriptivism binary often invoked in discussions of grammar. Garner is saying, essentially, be descriptivist when you can and prescriptivist when you can’t.
- ubercore 3y agoI've noticed the "less" vs "fewer" issue a lot more in the last few years. I feel like we're losing that battle. I will continue to (kindly!) remind people of the difference, though. I can't help it.
- snazz01 3y agoIt'd be one less thing to worry about ;)
- linguistics__ 3y agoIt's almost like it's an unimportant distinction for normal speech and that the spoken language is moving on, as it inevitably does.
- ubercore 3y ago100% understand that. It's just something that's stuck with me for some reason.
- linguistics__ 3y agoFair enough:) It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse). And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often. Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)
- VoodooJuJu 3y agoNitpicking is unkind. Saying that you're kind about nitpicking doesn't make you kind. If you want to be kind, I recommend not nitpicking. Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> “hone in” for “home in.” That's for people that have never used a straight razor.
- doetoe 3y agoI'm not a native English speaker. I didn't get what is wrong with the sentence > “States were further required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than [who can be sure what this means?] the width of a human hair.” that is quoted in the text. Should they have said "soot particles"? Or is it something else? And why can't we be sure what "28 times smaller than" means?
- ranko 3y ago"28 times smaller than" (and the like) is one of my bugbears. I think it means "1/28th of the size", but then you get constructions like "three times smaller than" instead of the clearer and more obvious "one third the size of". Trying to think too hard about what it means to be "N times smaller than" becomes pretty confusing, I think. In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.
- NeoTar 3y agoSteve Mould, the YouTuber, has a fun takedown of the phrase "6 times colder than", and how in every reasonable interpretation it is completely meaningless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C91gKuxutTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C91gKuxutTU
- jccalhoun 3y agoI found the section in the book that explains it: >X Times less than. Brand Y may cost twice as much as Brand X, but that doesn’t mean Brand X is twice as cheap as Brand Y. Farburg may be two times as far away as Nearville, but that doesn’t mean Nearville is two times closer than Farburg. Big Dog may be twice the size of Little Dog, but that doesn’t mean Little Dog is two times smaller than Big Dog. >One time is 100% of the cost, distance, size, or any other measure. If you take away “one time” something, you’ve taken away all there is. If you walk toward me and cover all the distance, you can’t get any closer—you can’t be twice as close as you were before. If the price is discounted one time or 100%, the item is free. Two times cheaper, if it means anything, might imply that the store will pay you the full price of Brand Y if you will take Brand X home with you. That mangles the meaning of cost, and it surely isn’t what the writer means. Personally, I can see what the author is going for but I disagree that it implies the store will pay you.
- zanderz 3y agoPrescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!