for being a tad annoyed at having my English corrected by my daughter's non-native English speaking boyfriend?

[Kladdkaka]

Cheeky bloomin sod. Even though he may in fact be correct.

I was faffing around passed him my daughter's school bag to take upstairs as he went. I said 'Take her the bag.' He laughed at me and asked what sort of rubbish English was that. Apparantly my sentence was grammatically incorrect. He says I should have said 'Take the bag to her'. I then handed him a book about Warwick Castle, asked him to pronounce it, laughed at him and told him to come back when he's spent longer than 2 weeks in the UK.:o

So, MN jury, do I tell him that you all agree with me that my sentence was perfectly acceptable? Or do I lie to him and tell him that you all agree with me that my sentence was perfectly acceptable? :o

He's correct, but rude!

He's right

but manners trump correct grammar so he was incredibly wrong too

Admit that you were wrong.

I think he's right grammatically but everyone knows what you mean. And it is a bit rude.

As him to pronounce belvoir.

I reckon if you had said "please" he wouldnt have made any comment

He will only speak gramatical English because that is what he has been taught if he has ESL.. It's will be a long time before he picks up the nuances of everyday speech.

He is right, but very cheeky. My dh is a non-native English speaker and his vocabulary and grammar are superior to mine (and I consider mine to be pretty damn good). It's very annoying.

I am not a native Enlgish speaker. I love having a good old rant at the radio/tv/newspapers/mumsnet/etc about incorrect grammar and/or spelling. I would never say anything to anybody though except to my children.

I do know how to pronounce Warwich and Belvoir.

Yes, very cheeky!

Tell him it's idiomatic speech and he needs to learn it!

How old is he, btw? It's more forgivable in an enthusiastic teenager than an adult IMO.

He was wrong: Take her the bag is as correct as Take the bag to her and probably better.

Ask him to pronounce

Indict
Phlegm
Featherstonehaugh

Maybe you should have said "Whatever - you knew what I meant, and by the way, be careful about putting my back up and correcting me over trivial things, as one day, I might be your mother in law"?

I don't know that it's necessarily rude... Maybe it was a ways of being friendly/ making a joke/ being more familiar around you??? He laughed - he didn't tell you off.

how rude.

Admit that I was wrong? Never! This is war.

I think I probably did have a 'please' or two in there somewhere, wot wiv beein proper English like. Just forgot it in my post.

He's always doing this. Next time I'm going to ask him if he knows what a knickerbockerglory is. [evil smilie]

I thought this was going to be about using data as a plural, apparently only non-native speakers can manage to get that one right consistently (dusts off soapbox).

I really wouldn't bother to care about it, OP. But I am a X-continental transplant and mischievously use grammar from my native culture with abandon, no matter how unBritish it may be.

I put some weird commas in that post didn't I? Sorry.

Take her the bag is grammatically fine. So he is incorrect, as well as annoying.

He's done this more than once?!

Kill him.

I reckon you can truly tell when someone is fluent, when they start distinguishing between accepted spoken forms and the accepted written forms they will have learned first.

Take her the bag

Put a momma in it and it means something quite different .....

take her, the bag!

Oh yah, put a momma in that bag!

I'm a native English speaker pretty much surrounded by non-native speakers. They correct me a lot as well, but more because they are confused about what is actually right, given that I don't talk how they have been taught. IYSWIM.

Sounds like he knew what he was doing though, if he was laughing. Pretty annoying!

comma

He was being cheeky, agree that this would somehow be more acceptable in an enthusiastic teenager than an adult somehow. I think both are fine. I also think it's important to realise that English is quite fluid and there are nuances in the way native speakers use it. Also agree that you could have said please and following on from that that manners trump grammar so he shouldn't have said anything!

The thing that did rather shock me however was "I told him to come back when he's been in the country more than 2 weeks" - whatever did you mean? Slightly confused by this statement.

You were actually right anyway, and AndrewFogg is right that you were both right.

As for your daughter's boyfriend's manners - my lips are pursed. Pursed.

I think his always correcting me stems from me constantly telling him that he sounds like Boris Johnson. Not only that, but I've trained every British person I know to say the same when they first meet and speak with him. Not that I'm evil or anything ...