As in, doesn’t matter at all to you.
“Y’all”
I will die on the hill that it’s more efficient and neutral than the alternatives.
First we’re all like “Thou is too casual, gotta use the plural second person instead.” Then oh no, turns out number in pronouns is actually useful sometimes, but thou sounds old fashioned now, so we just gotta re-pluralize the second person. And then you get y’all.
I like y’all, but I almost wish we could just bring thou back.
For years I have said that y’all is the best thing to come out of the south.
Yinz is at least as efficient
English has to bend over backwards to make up for the fact that it doesn’t have a natural plural 2nd person form.
Ye Y’all Youse (Dublin)
“Y’all” and the plural “all y’all” are part of my daily vocabulary. And I’m in no way of southern origin.
I recently realized that w’all needs to be shakespeared too. Following the pattern of other languages, y’all and w’all are missing in English.
Also, I shakespeared the verb shakespeared, in reference to Shakespeare making up new words by following patterns among other words.
Period AFTER the end of a quote.
My buddy Joe told me “I will live and die on this hill”.
If the murky depths of my memories of school is correct, the location of the period is dictated by whether or not it is part of the quote. So, if the quote should have a period at the end, it goes inside the quotation marks. If the quote does not include the period (e.g. you are quoting part of a sentence), but you are at the end of a sentence in your own prose, you put the period on the outside of the quotation marks.
Absolutely. Anyone who has done any programming should recognize that changing what’s in the quote is corrupting the data.
If I’m quoting a question though, then it makes sense to include the question mark in the quote.
I laughed when Joe asked "That's the hill you chose?".For me in American English it’s also the commas that go inside the closing quotation marks, even when they’re not part the original quote. I die a little every time I see this, so illogical.
If it’s not part of the quote, just leave it outside.
Using commas, wherever you want.
They should be logical thought breaks, not adhere to any rules of grammar.
I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.
Found Christopher Walkin.
I’ve always just used them where natural breaks would be if the sentence was spoken. I know how it’s supposed to be used and I’ll do it correctly when writing papers, but it hurts inside to see it that way. I don’t understand how it improves comprehension.
This one I’m so guilty of, it just seems fine when used in moderation, even if I know it’s wrong.
A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their ‘mistakes’ have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.
There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:
- “He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old” (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
- “How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s’appelle? I think German too)
- “I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
- “She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.
The use of ‘in’ and ‘on’ for various vehicles in English is one that I always find interesting. Like you’re on a motorbike, or a boat, or a bus, but you’re in a car. Aeroplanes I think are kind of interchangeable.
Also the order of descriptive words for things is one I really find odd. “I’m on a big red old-fashioned London bus” = coherent sentence. “I’m in a red London big old-fashioned bus” = nonsense.
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Also how something like the word ‘jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, a door that’s stuck, traffic that’s not moving, playing music or cramming something into a hole lol.
Singular they. I’ve had this opinion since long before I even knew about non-binary people. Using “he or she” to refer to a person without specifying gender is clunky as hell.
but singular they isn’t incorrect in the least. anyone claiming otherwise has some agenda to push in spite of the facts of it’s use for a good long while
It’s not, but with… Political views as they are, it’s gotten a lot of pushback. People don’t even realize they use it regularly.
“Someone called for you”
“What did they want?”
Bam. Easy. I was stoked when magic the gathering changed card wording from “he or she” to “they” because it cleans up the wording so much.
Political views as they are, it’s gotten a lot of pushback
Yeah, the comment above mixed up grammar nazis with actual nazis I guess.
A good point I heard though is that singular “they” is used when you don’t know the person’s identity. To the extent that it could be multiple people involved, hence the use. Obviously, it’s at slight odds with “someone” in this example, but still.
Fun fact though, we do actually use “they” in that way in Polish, in old-fashioned military slang, like “Where’s private Kowalski? They were supposed to be here”. (Edit: I think that might be used when addressing them directly, so this might be a bad example, but then there is no version in English since “you” covers all genders and numbers) I don’t know if non-binary people here actually use it.
It’s not a grammar mistake per se, but I feel like sharing it and it is close enough so here we go.
As a non-native English speaker: How can you have mop
band vacuum the floor but not broom the room?! I know it doesn’t exist, but I don’t care. If we have to phrase it as a grammar mistake: I use verbalisations where they are uncommon.It’s “mop”
Not if you bring your thugs
Fair
I agree. I’m going to start brooming the room. Thank you for this insight.
While “broom the floor” isn’t common, “sweep the floor” is. Of course, why we use the tool name as a verb in the case of “mop” or “vacuum”, but not in the case of “broom”, is another case of English being English. But, you shouldn’t expect consistency out of English. It’s not really a language, it’s several languages dressed up in a trench-coat pretending to be one.
abbreviations. it doesn’t save any meaningful time. it only prompts questions for clarification because people don’t define the abbreviation prior to using it throughout their post. plus since everything is being abbreviated out of laziness, the same abbreviations get used for multiple things which just adds additional confusions.
Hahaha yep. Now Death Stranding 2 is out, Dark Souls 2 discussion has become difficult, joining DS1.
I’ve always followed a rule of which was popular first claims it. TF2 is Team Fortress 2, not Titanfall 2, DS2 is Dark Souls 2 not Death Stranding 2 etc etc.
If you gonna abbreviate, say its name in full first in the context, otherwise I’ll assume another!
say its name in full first in the context
that’s the only rule that should be followed with abbreviations
Yeah, that’s the best way, but with no context provided, I’ll fall back to the aforementioned.
In Dutch you’re supposed to write “Volgens mij” (“in my opinion”), but it’s pronounced more like it’s one word. So I feel “volgensmij” flows better
volgens mei niet!
I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don’t manually add spaces, but most don’t do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.
Dashes, of all kinds need to fucking die, die, die.
While not completely fair, my burning hatred of dashes comes for word processing applications automatically replacing hyphens and especially double hyphens in code with dashes. And this never gets caught until said code needs to be copy-pasted back into a functional application, and it fails. Sometimes in weird and horrible ways. So, while it’s the auto-replace which causes the problem, the existence of dashes is proximate enough that they all need to be burned out of existence for all time.You’ve given me a horrible flashback to the time I took two hours to figure out that some code wasn’t working because someone else’s copy/paste had, somehow, introduced a few zero-width spaces that I did not think to check for
But yes, I agree that using just one character for all three of those would be fine for general purposes and easier in specific fields. I think I’d prefer the en dash to be the default since it’s the middle ground size, but to be honest as long as we don’t need to start using em dashes as hyphens for very—wide—compounds I’d be happy
oh no
oh no I apparently feel very strongly that you’re wrong here
You’re right that m-dashes should be spaced, of course. But there’s a big difference between an m-dash and an n-dash, and you used the wrong one in your example. An m-dash, like a semi colon or colon, is for separating two related clauses — there’s never at time when you should use two in the same sentence. Whereas n-dashes are used for parantheticals –sub-clauses that can’t stand on their own– and should, like round brackets or quotation marks, have spaces on the outside but not the inside.
Putting the punctuation outside the quotes (or parentheses) when the quote is only part of a sentence. I.e. He said “I need to go now”.
Ending a sentence with a proposition is just fine. Picky people whom I’ve only seen parodies of on the Internet go “oh you ended your sentence with a preposition I have no idea what you mean by ‘He went in’ maybe you could explain what he went into? A jello mold? A ditch? What did go into?”
You asked if he went into the store and I said he went in, you know what I meant because of CONTEXT CLUES.
I’ve never met anyone who’s ever been this picky but I’m ready to bite them if I ever find one.
It’s not grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s a common misconception that it is a rule, basically because one guy argued in favor of it back in the 1600s and had some support for formal writing in the 1700s. But it’s never been a broad rule, and even in formal contexts it’s not a rule in any current, reputable style or usage guides (so far as I know, at least).
Some more info on the topic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/prepositions-ending-a-sentence-with
I only know of this “rule” because of a joke.
A new student is looking for the library and stops a passing professor to ask, “Excuse me sir, can you please tell me where the library is at?” To which the professor responds, “Here at Harvard, we don’t end our sentences with prepositions.”
The student without missing a beat says “I’m sorry, can you please tell me where the library is at, asshole?”
(Not sure if I remember exactly how it should be written it, apologies if I got it wrong)
I love to end my sentences with a proposition, you wanna fuck?
I’m of the opinion that so long as it is understandable it does not matter. English was once written as it sounded and there was no spelling consistancy. Those who were literate had little issue with it.
Some related reading: https://ctcamp.franklinresearch.uga.edu/resources/reading-middle-english https://cb45.hsites.harvard.edu/middle-english-basic-pronunciation-and-grammar
Edit: Okay my rant is more related to spelling than grammar but still interesting.
Passive voice is completely fine to use.
Not only is it fine, but it’s the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.
The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have “reagent A was mixed with reagent B”, not “I mixed reagent A and reagent B”.
An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., “Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask”.
Who says it’s not?
(/s)
Anything that is used colloquially but technically isn’t correct because some loser didn’t like it 200 years ago. To boldly keep on splitting infinitives is a rejection of language prescriptivism!
In German there’s the saying “macht Sinn”, which is wrong since it’s just a direct translation of “makes sense”. Correct would be “ergibt Sinn”, in English “results in sense”, but I don’t care, “macht Sinn” rolls off the tongue easier.
Macht sinn to me.
which is wrong
Which is also just prescriptive bullshit perpetuated by grammar nazis
https://www.sprachlog.de/2009/01/12/seit-wann-machen-wir-im-deutschen-sinn/
I think if something gets said a certain way for a period of over a hundred years, maybe it’s time to accept it as a normal way to say things
