I have been losing my grammar grouch badge. Frankly, I never really embraced the title. As early as 1972, when the first issue of Ms. magazine came out- I purchased it right away – I realized the efficacy of using the word Ms. as opposed to Miss or Mrs., in comparison with the term Mr.
I’ve embraced variations on you. Newish takes on they/them make a lot of sense to me.
Part of my learning on the topic comes from being around my wife, who taught English as a New Language, formerly known as English as a Second Language. Among other things, I realized that English is difficult and irrational; often, it doesn’t make much sense.
Actually, I knew that well before that, certainly by the time I first saw Dr. Seuss’s book The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.
I have been listening to a lot of YouTube videos by RobWords. He takes on some of the weird variations in the language, looking at the historical as well as the current usage. He explains, for instance, in The Great Vowel Shift, why certain words that look like they should rhyme do not. (When I was doing Wordle recently and was trying to find words ending in ROWN, I immediately picked up brown, crown, drown, and frown but missed grown because it doesn’t rhyme.) Certainly, somebody who isn’t a native speaker would have real difficulty with that.
Punctuation
Still, I remember back in 2005 when a bunch of bloggers were new to me. One of them, a very smart guy, had a terrible time comparing the word its and the word it’s. Without him asking, I made it my mission to gently, firmly, and repetitively explain the difference. BTW, it did not work. I now look back at that with a certain degree of, “Boy, was I arrogant,” along with “Why are you bothering to do this?”
More recently, some folks online were lamenting that young people don’t end their sentences with a period/full stop. It wasn’t this 2021 article, but the sentiment was the same. The subtitle: To younger people, putting a period at the end of a casually written thought could mean that you’re raring for a fight.
“To younger generations, using proper punctuation in a casual context like texting can give an impression of formality that borders on rudeness, as if the texter is not comfortable enough with the texting partner to relax. The message-ending period establishes a certain distance… Simply put, the inclusion of a formality in casual communication is unnerving.
“Think of a mother using her son’s full name when issuing a stern ultimatum.”
I didn’t say this, but I should have included that in this space of acronyms (LMAO, TY): We older folks are non-native speakers. We should at least try to speak their language, as I practiced my rudimentary French in 2023 when I was in western France.
“Every generation tends to loathe to some extent the way the generation after them speaks.”
Oh, John Green muses over Which is Correct? — or – ? And why not?
Whereforartthou
RobWords asked, Where did punctuation come from?
He makes a very good case that spaces between words are punctuation marks. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who had to read breakeless texts mumbling aloud like a modern six-year-old, spaces and other punctuation made texts more comprehensible. We can thank, in part, the proselytizing by early Christians.
I’m pretty lax about apostrophes. Some believe the apostrophe used to show possession is a shortening of John his horse to John’s horse. This is probably not true.
“In Old English, you just stuck an S on the end of a noun to reference it as belonging to someone with no apostrophe needed.”
If you want to use a word to show the possession of the house owned by the Joneses, I don’t care if they use JONES or JONESES, with or without the apostrophe, But the one thing that does make me crazy is when they use JONE’S; you never break into the word.
Acorns, er, eggcorns
certain that you’ve used at least one.
“Say you’ve heard someone voicing disapproval about another person’s clothing – or more precisely, lack of it. If you’ve never come across the phrase “scantily clad” before – or the word scantily at all – it’s perfectly logical to then interpret that as “scandally clad”. It’s kind of clever. You’ve even had to invent a word.”
Eggcorns, mondegreens, and even malaprops don’t bother me as they used to.
A line must be drawn.
But their #1, and mine as well, is literally. Over a decade ago, I purged it from my vocabulary. As I wrote: “While using literally to mean figuratively may be OK (for some), what do I use when I REALLY, REALLY mean literally? How can I make this clear to the reader/listener? Therefore, I must sadly conclude that the word ‘literally’ has been rendered useless to me. If it doesn’t mean one thing, but rather the thing OR its opposite, then it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
