Confessions of a Former Grammar Tyrant

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I used to use "used to" because I was used to it but now I can see that there is no use to it. I ain't gonna use it no more--not no way, not no how.

[aliantha]

Hashi --

I read the article, too, Sheriff. And it did occur to me that the discussion had turned into the very thing the writer was complaining about.

The alleged rule about split infinitives is, in fact, one of the things I was referring to upthread when I mentioned I've been having to relearn some stuff. A lot of things that I thought were hard-and-fast rules are actually style choices that ossified somewhere along the way. Syl's right -- "don't split the infinitive" comes from Latin and doesn't apply in English, despite what you may have been taught in school.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I try to avoid splitting infinitives whenever possible, refrain from ending sentences with prepositions, and steadfastly use "only" properly (the phrase isn't "I only have two dollars" it is "I have only two dollars") but I don't correct other people's use of language other than our kids. It isn't my place to correct other adults. When you see someone posting something and a variety of grammar rules are being broken, don't forget that English might be their second, third, or fourth language.

[I'm Murrin]

Pretty sure none of those three things is an actual rule.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There are personal preferences, at best. Rules, as you well know, were made to be broken.

[TheFallen]

If I had said "respectfully like to," I would have then modified "like" instead of "ask." "I would like to ask respectfully TheFallen" is just awkward, as would be most reformations of the sentence into acceptable forms.

They really wouldn't.

"I would like to ask TheFallen respectfully..." would be the elegant way to do it.

No, this split infinitive stuff is exactly the kind of garbage up with which I will not put! I have read that the rule derives from Latin grammarians, but that is simply because you can't split infinitives in Latin.

I'm not buying that. Why would there be a rule deriving from the Latin, a language in which, as you rightly point out, it is literally impossible to split the infinitive?

Speaking of tyrants, although you're strictly correct that either an en dash or an em dash would have been preferable to a mere hyphen, given the lack of either's immediate accessibility via a standard keyboard, only the most despotic of punctuation pedants would object.

[Vraith]

No, this split infinitive stuff is exactly the kind of garbage up with which I will not put! I have read that the rule derives from Latin grammarians, but that is simply because you can't split infinitives in Latin.

I'm not buying that. Why would there be a rule deriving from the Latin, a language in which, as you rightly point out, it is literally impossible to split the infinitive?

Because people make up dumb rules cuz they like it, or cuz they can. [and sometimes just cuz "dudes, wouldn't it make things easier if we just all did it the same way?"...a matter of convenience, not correctness.]
But Syl is correct...the rule originated in precisely that way.

[wayfriend]

a history of the split infinitive is rather interesting. (Apparently it is not derived from Latin. Nor German. And, apparently, it was a rule proposed because splitting infinitives was not, at the time, commonly done - a basis which no longer pertains!) So continue to freely split your infinitives, I say.

I'm damn surprised that I could not find a website to interactively unsplit infinitives phrases for you. Or to fix sentences with prepositions ending in.

[Vraith]

(Apparently it is not derived from Latin.

I'll have to look and see if I still have it in my ancient storage of college texts...one of them had several pages of images of a really old grammar lesson book from an English church/school. And I'm pretty that rule was in there.
Definitely in there was a suggested method for conjugating English verbs that lacked certain tenses [and a proposal/suggestion to regularize some irregular English ones] following a Latin pattern. [wholly inappropriate and awkward].

[sgt.null]

I mourn the passing of the correct "champ at the bit." it grates me every time I hear it on the idiot box. "chomp at the bit" is lazy and offensive.

I also grew up understanding that horses stamp, not stomp their hooves.

am I alone in this?

[TheFallen]

I'm with you on that one, sarge. "Champ" is a perfectly good and indeed evocative word, directly describing the cropping action of a feeding horse and springing from the French word for field.

Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.

I find it nigh on painful when words or idioms disappear through mutation into something that merely sounds similar. A strong personal dislike of mine is the British expression "to do something off one's own bat" being transmogrified – as it sadly is all too often – into "off one's own back".

I've been thinking about Syl and Murrin's point that, provided the thing that was intended to be communicated is indeed successfully done, then the manner in which it is done is therefore not "incorrect". I'm sorry, but for the life of me, I cannot buy into that in every event.

Yes, some niceties such as split infinitives or using the subjunctive in English really don't matter at all these days. However, I do think that certain grammatical errors go beyond the pale. Here's my top five personal list of the most grating horrors:-

1. "I should of done it" in place of "I should have done it". AAAAAACK!

2. Basic elided homophone errors – your in place of you're or their/there in place of they're.

3. "It's" and "its" errors.

4. Confusion between "license" (verb) and "licence" (noun) and similar with "practise" and "practice". Look, there's a very easy aide-memoire here... just think of the words advise and advice. There's no confusion there between the verb and the noun, is there, because they sound different. So the rule is that the verb has an S whereas the noun has a C. (This is something with which you Americans can never get to grips).

5. "I didn't used to do that."

Oh and sarge? I agree that most normally horses do indeed stamp their hooves. A horse could be described as "stomping" its hooves, but stomping implies a deliberate and grumpy heavy-footedness. The two words are very definitely not seamlessly interchangeable in terms of nuanced meaning.

As to the natural linguistic evolution of irregular (aka strong) verb forms into a regular (aka weak) form, this just happens. On this subject, it's a matter of mild interest that you Americans do on occasion preserve a strong form of verb, whereas we Brits have moved on to a weak (or weaker) version. Two examples come to mind:-

"I dove into the river" (US) vs "I dived into the river" (UK).

"If I had gotten the money..." (US) vs "If I had got the money..." (UK).

That last one may be merely regional in the US, though?

[Vader]

From what I know and learned about Englisch - and I have studied both British and American English (also other varieties like Australian or Canadian) - I have to agree with the Fallen. In formal and correct English "did" is always followed by the infinitive form of the verb, never by a simple past form. In spoken language I wouldn't mind, but I would mark it as a grammar mistake of one of my students wrote it in a test.

They're you go. :p

[I'm Murrin]

Thing is, a good portion of the "correct" grammar that you see people hold up these days will have inevitably started out as "incorrect" usages of the same type these people protest against. Language emerges from its use; it is described, not proscribed.

[Vader]

I agree with you to some extent. Language is an evolving thing and sometimes it changes. However, there are certain rules valid at a given point in atime. Lingusitics are not only descriptive, there is a prescriptive (that's the term, not proscriptive) branch as well. At school, at university or in your job you cannot make your own rules or use the wrong register. If you say "I didn't used to" to a friend it might be acceptable. If I were your boss and saw you using this phrase in a report, you wouldn't be in for a promotion any time soon.

Formal languageis called called formal, because it follows a certain formula. The current formula might be different from that a hundred years ago, but therefore ignoring itis not a godd idea.

[sgt.null]

TheFallen - thank you. I try to tell people that words mean something, but it falls on deaf ears.

I also find that when I tell inmates to place something on either side, they indeed choose one side or the other, not both sides.

[Vraith]

TheFallen - thank you. I try to tell people that words mean something, but it falls on deaf ears.

Of course they mean something. But what they mean is created by us...they don't mean in isolation. They don't even exist without us making them.
The questions are: when do things matter, how much they matter, who they matter to, and why.
Is defective use of a defective verb reasonable evidence of a defective brain?
[[the answer to that would be no.]]

Tangent: it kinda cracks me up that whenever I see a list of "most common mistakes" in this sort of thing, I look at the list and notice that many...if not most...of the entries are things that almost no one ever uses at all. And those who DO use them don't ordinarily make the error cited. So they cannot possibly be the most common mistakes.
A few exceptions. There/their/they're almost always is on the list, and people do make that mistake. But not as often as the tyrants would like to think, and usually for reasons other than stupidity.

[Vader]

4. Confusion between "license" (verb) and "licence" (noun) and similar with "practise" and "practice". Look, there's a very easy aide-memoire here... just think of the words advise and advice. There's no confusion there between the verb and the noun, is there, because they sound different. So the rule is that the verb has an S whereas the noun has a C. (This is something with which you Americans can never get to grips).

I'd disagree here. In American English "license" is a noun, whereas "practice" is a verb in AE. Nothing to do with not getting a grip on something, just another case of two countries divided by the same language.

As to the natural linguistic evolution of irregular (aka strong) verb forms into a regular (aka weak) form, this just happens. On this subject, it's a matter of mild interest that you Americans do on occasion preserve a strong form of verb, whereas we Brits have moved on to a weak (or weaker) version. Two examples come to mind:-

"I dove into the river" (US) vs "I dived into the river" (UK).

"If I had gotten the money..." (US) vs "If I had got the money..." (UK).

That last one may be merely regional in the US, though?

So what about about BE
(to) learn, learnt, learnt
and AE
(to) learn, learned learned?

Same with dream. UK kept strong form, US developped weak form.

[[Syl]]

Or, if you want to take the deconstructionist approach, words don't mean anything except what they're not, acting more as a filter than a descriptor.

A central premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence,[12][13] where intrinsic meaning is accessible by virtue of pure presence.[14][15] Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or intrinsic and stable meaning — and thus a relinquishment of the notions of absolute truth, unmediated access to "reality" and consequently of conceptual hierarchy. "From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs."[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Language, considered as a system of signs, as Ferdinand de Saussure says,[24] is nothing but differences. Words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words. 'Red' means what it does only by contrast with 'blue', 'green', etc.

And as I once argued with Rus about, words mean what we need them to mean. Lose the need, lose the word. Change the need... If you've ever used the word "nice," you're already using it to mean something it was never intended to mean decades ago ('precise, fussy, etc.). We can't even agree what words describe a particular color over more than a couple centuries.

[MsMary]

Heh. Sorry, Lorin. What I was trying to say is that the discussion in this thread is running contrary to the points of the article. Not that certain aspects of the conversation aren't worthy or even germane, I was more just giving Murrin props for going back to the spirit of the subject.

Also, I would like to respectfully ask TheFallen to not display Nazi imagery, even if in jest. It's within your rights to do so, but I find it in poor taste, especially since I said in the OP that I no longer use the term "grammar Nazi" because it can offend some members, one of whom I greatly respect and has expressed her thanks in this thread. Not to mention, it's still Rosh ha'Shanah.

Thank you once again, Syl.

Just back on the forum after Rosh Hashanah, as it turns out.

[[Syl]]

Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice