Pedants' safe-house

[oldbutgold]

In view of the strong feeling expressed towards inveterate error-spotters (aka passive-aggressive bullies/pedants/twats etc) what about a thread for all the spelling errors/grammatical mistakes seen stricly outside MN in RL?
Like journalist Keith Waterhouse who was president of the AAA - campaigned throughout his career for the Abolition of the Abhorrent Apostrophe.
Spotted by self recently:

Ladie's hairdressers (in town)
Childrens' Society (on BBC)
10 items or less (everywhere)

Sorry, but what is wrong with If I were a carpenter? Perfectly good use of the subjunctive, grammatically accurate etc? Have I missed the point?

Yes, but my point nickelbabe is that words in the English language should be able to develop their plurals organically (I know I referred to 'rules' before, but I agree that that doesn't really work). Hence I have no problem with words that have, for whatever reason, retained their original singular/plural forms (e.g. medium/media, criterion/criteria); what I'm saying is that I don't see why people should insist on an adopted English word retaining its language-of-origin plural just because it still happens to have the same form as it did in the original Greek/Latin/whatever. I refer you again to 'pizza' - identical in form to the original Italian word, but quite properly (in my view) given the plural 'pizzas', because that is the plural form that English happens to have developed for it. My point is that to insist on using 'pizze' (or 'stadia' or 'referenda' or whatever) is often just an attempt to look clever - and quite often (e.g. in the case of people who use abominations such as 'octopi') turns out to be actually incorrect.

(NB WRT graffiti, the OED says: 'In Italian the word graffiti is a plural noun and its singular form is graffito. In modern English, graffiti is used as a plural in some specialist fields such as archaeology but in normal general use it is treated as if it were a mass noun (with a singular verb), similar to a word like 'writing'. This use is now widely accepted as standard.' Take that, S Fry.)

morning!
(i had to go home, so sorry for not responding sooner)

I'm not saying that language shouldn't change, but I don't believe that language should change just because some people won't learn the rules.

English is a complicated language, and it has rules, and yes, it has exceptions, too: but htat doesn't mean that we should abandon the rules just because we won't can't learn the exceptions.

We'll end up like the French who have banned any english words, or like the Germans who had to have a massive spelling reform a few years ago, basically rendering useless most of my German text books and lexicons.

talking of German - we've got a lot of German root words, too, especially most of our irregular verbs. Should we change those too because they break all the conventional rules?

get, getting, got
but
forget, forgetting, forgotten...
do, does, do, do, do
am, are, is, were, was,

Am committing the cardinal sin of not reading the entire thread - only pages 1, 2 and 14.

BIWI - in your post on the 1st page - you say
"I'm sure there's (there is!) more, but hope this helps!!! "

I believe (and am willing to be corrected) that in this example, it should be I'm sure there ARE more [examples], no?

Also - re. dodgy plurals on here and elsewhere (am probably repeating now) - WHY do people type DCs? Wouldn't DCn be more appropriate?
Although I suppose, if PIL, DC, GCSE etc. are acronyms then making them plurals would involve just tacking an 's' onto the end.

Grammar, especially punctuation, is so important in understanding the sense of what is being said; it drives me bats that people don't learn it properly.

Quattro - 'if I were a carpenter' is perfectly correct and about the only use left of the subjunctive in the English language.

Elusive- but you've actually just proved my point with that - the rules are there, but people don't learn them - that's a failure with the schools, as well as with the common media, who insist on allowing the corruption of the language when addressing their audience.
The whole thing about octupi surely follows the other thread on trying to be posher than you are - words like that out someone as trying to sounds better than they are (like those who say has instead of as because they think that aspiration creates aspiration (ooh, i love plays on words!))
when, in actual fact, if they'd just speak how they know, and learn the rules of grammar along the way, then they would sound so much higher class/station than they believe themselves to be.

andthat's a socialist issue, too - class shouldn't matter in this day and age, but people from the lower classes who try to sound like they're from a higher class contradict the efforts made to make every man equal.

don't worry tw, we've been going round in circles for ages!

good points raised, btw.

Didn't know that about changes to German, nickel - very interesting (French was always my language; never got to grips with German).

thumbwitch, I always get confused by the subjunctive in English (much happier with it in Latin ). I'm ok with uses such as 'put the bird in a cage lest it fly' or 'god save the queen', but not sure about 'if I were a carpenter'. Why is that not a remote conditional? (Or is that the same thing in English ?)

shame you didn't do German, then, because that's how i learnt all about the subjunctive clause! suddenly the english laguage made so much more sense!

i've no idea how it works in French because i only went to GCSE and subjunctive was learned at a-level.

("if i were...." is the same as saying "had i been...". i don't know what a remote conditional is, though so can't answer that one - leave it to tw!)

my favourite phrase is "would that it were"
basically meaning "if only", but so much more poetical!

nope, I don't know what a 'remote conditional' is either, despite having done German, French AND Latin to 'O' level. But as you can see, I did it all a looong time ago, and although much of it is heavily ingrained, the fine detail of definitions has been lost consigned to the mental archives, I think.

subjunctive mood, nickel! I'm not advocating active change - fwiw, Academie Francaise attempts to get rid of English fail pretty dismally - but just not fighting linguistic evolution when there is not reason to other than "I liked it better the old way".

We'd still be speaking Old English if that were the case. Or possibly French.

The "rules" of English assume an -s suffix for the plural - what you're advocating re stadia is that people learn the rules of Latin.

Re: classes - one of the favourite things I used to teach students was how the Black Death in C14th contributed to the resurgence of English in England - labour shortages meant that the French speaking landowners had to bargain and negotiate with the peasants - that had to be done in English.

don't even know why i called it a clause! that doesn't make sense at all...
i normally just put subjunctive without any clarifier on it! clause? what's wrong with me?

i used to be so good with words.
i think my brain has disappeared....

no, it's not - the rules come from latin, but they're english rules, because they've been absorbed into the english language and adopted by us.

if we're going to get rid of all latin influence, because, let's face it, the romans invaded us and we hated them, then we might as well erase most of the words that have appeared on this thread.(some of my examples might possibly be greek or germanic, because i don't know the difference)

in fact, we wouldn't even have a forum because that's a latin word.
influence
invade
hate
erase
view
deperate
separate
school
subjunctive
mood
plural
advocating
rule s
resurgence
labour
bargain
negotiate
etc

blimey, we'd lose an enormous percentage of our language if we got rid of all the Latinate parts! (Including the word language, which derives from the Latin word 'lingua', meaning tongue)

exactly!

and percentage
enormous (greek, i think)
derive

etc

i think lose is a germanic word (like the german verlosen) - i don't know whether they orginate from saxon.
not very good at this etymology bit: i remember what a learn, but don't really come across many examples.

used to absorb dictionary definitions.

latinate would be perdition...

thumbwitch - I said 'there's more' because I meant 'there is more information' or 'there is more help'

Ah well there you go then! See I extrapolated it to mean there are more examples, which is why I queried it.

oh good, i'm glad you've come back to explain it!
i wanted to say that to tw, too, i was worried that she might be right

Are there any other PG Tips' drinkers who have noticed that, on the side of their boxes, it states that if you enter the competition they will '...pop your name into a big drawer.' Now, perhaps they really do have a big drawer into which they will place all the entries, but I can't help thinking it's an error! (Quick mental check on appropriate usage of apostrophe required).

i think they do mean a big drawer.

they try to be funny, don't they!

i assume that's what's intended, a pun, if you will.

I hope.

nickelbabe "no, it's not - the rules come from latin, but they're english rules, because they've been absorbed into the english language and adopted by us."

I'm a bit confused by this. Are you saying that the rules of English grammar "came from Latin"? Surely not. Our basic grammar comes from Old English, although a few pedants over the years tried to introduce some grammatical rules based on Latin (like the avoidance of the split infinitive, purely because it cannot be split in Latin).

The influx of latin-based vocabulary is surely a red herring in your argument.

oh, sorry, no, i meant that the rules of the pluralization of latin words came from the latin.

so the plural of stadium is stadia in english because we've adopted that rule from the latin.

i didn't mean all english grammar rules came from latin.

maybe the "if I was" people have amnesia covering a large part of their lives. Maybe they actually might have been whatever it was, and not know it.