Grammar Gripes and Other Psycholinguistic Squawkings

I think you need to do something to signify that "Adam Bede" is a title, either italics, full quotes or underline. It's been 35 years since I did any serious editing, though.

 

^^^^^
Thank you all for the help.

I was floundering even more than I thought: your explaining the implications of my comma between 'novel' and 'Adam' was an eye opener.

 

Stolen from George Takei's facebook wall:

 

Something my woman does as required by the APA-styling guidelines adhered to by her Master's degree program: insert two spaces between sentences.

Something she does on her own: leave out the space needed between an open parentheses and its preceding word.

Maybe they cancel each other out?

 

Those ems and ens add up!

 

Will the real Slim Shady please add up

 

Missing... (cough, cough)... comma... (cough, cough)...

 

Now editing with an Epi pen?

 

This is just dialectal variation rather than a grammar problem. That usage of foot you mention is acquired with its own set of rules, as bizarre as that no doubt seems to people whose foot vs feet opposition is (presumably?) purely a singular vs plural thing.

In my dialect it goes like this:

"The wall is twenty foot tall." - ok
"The wall is twenty foot high." - ok
"The helicopter is twenty foot tall." - ok
"The helicopter is twenty foot high." - unacceptable

"The boat is 40 foot long" - ok
"The boat is 40 foot from the dock" - unacceptable

"The man is six foot tall." - ok
"The man is six feet tall." - unacceptable

You can probably spot the rule.

One of my pet peeves regarding grammar is when people complain about errors that aren't necessarily actually errors.

Jokes aside, I think most of my gripes were already raised. It does bother me when people use e.g. where they mean i.e. and vice versa but you can see what they mean in any case.

 

I did mention that I was talking specifically about my own dialect. Truth be told, I don't know that it's truly unacceptable since I've never heard anybody actually say it (except speakers of other dialects of course). So I can only assume. Certainly it sounds off to my ears, although it doesn't bother me that other people use "feet" in that position.

As I say, I think it's a dialect thing and if Lindy's post is anything to go by it sounds like the rules you pick up differ depending on where you are, given that she has a foot/feet opposition that doesn't base itself wholly on plurality too but also doesn't seem to follow the same pattern as mine.

Also, "if I was an inch shorter" would be pretty normal in my dialect but we have all manner of strange grammar. I try to avoid writing it but there's no way I could make myself say "were" in that case. The thing is, if I hear speakers of other dialects saying that, I think they sound a bit dense, probably because it's not standard in those dialects.

 

I was responding to the “psycholinguistic squawkings” portion of this thread.

So this, however far- fetched, has caused me to question the suitability of colloquialisms in general. The word “nigger” is used as a term of endearment, in some circles. I feel it is still symbolically steeped in degradation and therefore makes it unacceptable (to me) no matter how mainstream it becomes.

I suppose this is a radical example, but the recreation of the meaning of “nigger” was a calculated response to an outrageous disregard. Using the word “Foot” instead of “Feet” when you are referring to more than one foot is simply a case of linguistic laziness.

Bugs the piss outta me.

 

I would just call it regional variation, personally. I think sometimes people rush to take a right vs wrong view on language matters in cases like those, but if most/all of a dialect group does something a particularly way that's different from other dialect groups, it seems a bit shaky to call it wrong (or "laziness" as you put it). Better to just observe that it's different, imo.

That's not to say that it somehow shouldn't grate on you. If it grates, it grates. And also, presumably within your dialect it is actually unequivocally wrong to use "foot" that way so it's not that you're even wrong.

At least this board is pretty civilised. I've come across amazing discussions on the internet on this kind of topic with some seriously judgemental (or is that judgmental?) posts about language/spelling errors that aren't really errors, just examples of variation.

My jaw is still hanging open at a post I read somewhere about how people who pronounce the letter H as "haitch" should be shot. But, gosh, would you look at that, the people who do that around here are usually Catholic. Good warm fuzzy sectarian feeling.

I'm not saying this has been the case here, in fact I don't think I've noticed it at all in this thread, but one thing I've noticed in the UK particularly is that in the absence nowadays of any politically correct ability to judge/criticise people based on their social class, people tend to look for other ways to do it and language seems to be the main thing that people pick on. And it goes in both directions, with people sneering at those who might say "nuffink" instead of "nothing", and people automatically labelling speakers of RP as pompous stiffs.

Why can't we all just get along?! Ha.

So anyway, hopefully that goes some way to explaining why it's touchy for me. Not that you seemed to be at all judgemental, but others who might write the same sort of thing definitely have been, in my experience.

Anyway, moving the heck on, one thing that has tickled me probably stemmed from people using "should of" instead of "should've" and being corrected on it. Presumably whoever did the correcting didn't explain why it needed correcting, so the person ends up overapplying 'the rule' and you end up with "kind've" and "sort've" instead of "kind of" and "sort of". I haven't seen it a lot but it's out there.