The reason I love grammar

wahrheit said:
Thanks for the explanation. I'm having some excellent Andalusian olives right now, do you think Nick would like one of those?
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I seriously doubt it. She's eyeing the carrots I gave her with extreme suspicion, so I think olives would be really suspect. She does, however, love millet. Seriously. It's her favorite thing in the whole world. If she had to choose between millet and me (not millet and I), millet would win.
 
flimflam_machine said:
I've recently become convinced that the whole comma-where-you-would-breathe approach is pretty useless, although it often happens that commas end up in those gaps.

I've found this exceptionally useful, especially the comma section.

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node00.html


Also I thought that the issue of punctuation in or out of quotation marks depended on whether the punctuation was appropriate to the quote. I had no idea that it was a UK vs. US thing.
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Ooooo, I like it.
 
Would it be pedantic of me to point out that punctuation is not a part of grammar?
 
GeeMack said:
I hate sentences without nouns or verbs. Really. And that rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition is something I've carried on about before.
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[mode=pedant]

Anyway, in this usage, "before" is being used as an adverb. [/mode]
 
flimflam_machine said:
<snip>
Also I thought that the issue of punctuation in or out of quotation marks depended on whether the punctuation was appropriate to the quote. I had no idea that it was a UK vs. US thing.
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I learned at my mother's knee -- in America -- that the punctuation went with the context of the quote, but since phrases (or partial sentences) rarely require a comma at the end (unless you're quoting text from a written source), there would be very little use for it in a quote context.

Therefore, by my mother's logic, most commas would belong to the larger sentence, and would be outside the quotes.

Americans, by and large, however, don't want to have to overthink things, so the rule became "everything inside the quote marks, unless it would be really silly to put it there." (Actually, the way the rule was taught to me at a proofreading class was "Little dogs [i.e., commas and periods] stay inside; big dogs [i.e., question marks and exclamation points] stay outside." Yeah, I think it's pretty stupid too.)

When I went to work as a proofreader and later as an editor, I had to relearn the rules of punctuation, as taught to me by my mother. But now that I work for a person who learned grammar outside the U.S., I am able to use the "British" punctuation guidelines, which make perfect sense to me: in general, the commas and periods belong to the sentence and are placed appropriately.

Gosh, sometimes I even have to think!
 
HawaiiBigSis said:
I learned at my mother's knee -- in America -- that the punctuation went with the context of the quote...
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I'm not sure where I learned it -- I doubt it was at HawaiiBigSis' mother's knee (unless she was briefly exiled to Nova Scotia in the seventies) -- but that's the 'rule' I've always gone with, more or less.
E.g.:

Did Caesar say, "I came, I saw, I conquered." ('Period' phrasing aside, here the period belongs to the statement, conveying the calm matter-of-factness with which Caesar said it);

vs.

Did Caesar say, "I came, I saw, I conquered"?! (Here a question is being asked, apparently by someone who can't quite believe Julius would ever say such a thing: Pompey, maybe; Crassus, you bet; but Caesar!? So the incredulity belongs to the questioner, not Caesar, and the punctuation expressing it goes outside the quotes. Or as another JC famously opined, "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's...", etc.)

Okay, better shut up now. When one's posts are typically a jim-jamboree of impromptu punctuation and fringe grammar, shutting up ain't never a bad idea (second only to not posting). :flamed:
 
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Why end a sentence with only one preposition when you can do so much more?

The little girl wanted a bedtime story, and asked her mother to bring one upstairs. Mom arrives with the wrong book, and the girl says, "What did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of up for?"
 
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NobbyNobbs said:
The little girl wanted a bedtime story, and asked her mother to bring one upstairs. Mom arrives with the wrong book, and the girl says, "What did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of up for?"
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"For what did you bring up that book out of which to me I don't want to be read?"

Bad grammar girl sounds like she needs a lollipop.

Good grammar girl sounds like she needs an exorcist.
 
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Did Caesar say, "I came, I saw, I conquered."

vs.

Did Caesar say, "I came, I saw, I conquered"?!
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Spot on I reckon, except [pedant] that the comma before the quotes is needless, and the exclamation mark following the question mark is superfluous and ugly. [/pedant]

Originally Posted by NobbyNobbs
The little girl wanted a bedtime story, and asked her mother to bring one upstairs. Mom arrives with the wrong book, and the girl says, "What did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of up for?"
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If it's a book about Australia then it would become "What did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?"
 
blobru;3154159Bad grammar girl sounds like she needs a lollipop. Good grammar girl sounds like she needs an exorcist.[/quote said:
Tagline!

"Bad grammar makes you sound like you need a lollipop, while good grammar makes you sound like you need an exorcist."

Should I replace the comma with a semicolon?
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NobbyNobbs said:
Why end a sentence with only one preposition when you can do so much more?

The little girl wanted a bedtime story, and asked her mother to bring one upstairs. Mom arrives with the wrong book, and the girl says, "What did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of up for?"
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This ending a sentence with a preposition thing is way beyond about over with.
 
Reminds of the puzzle my father used to throw at us on car journeys.

Can you create a sentence that contains legitimately, the word 'and' five times in succession?
 
This sounds like a job for INTERROBANG!
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Awesome! Thnk you for introducing me to something genuinely new and interesting.


Can you create a sentence that contains legitimately, the word 'and' five times in succession?
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This is the one about the pub-signwriter not leaving a spaces between "Coach" and "and" and "and" and "Horses".

So yes, but you can also have seven "ands" in succession if you construct a similar story about the band in the Commitments called "And and and".

Then if you were to report that you had legitimately constructed a sentence with seven successive "ands", but had written it down without the relevant spaces you could have a sentence with 13 successive "ands" i.e., "I accidentally left out the spaces between 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and'"

Then you could report that you had written that sentence incorrectly and so on ad infinitum.

It's similar to the fact that you can always make a longer sentence just by making it part of reported speech. So if anyone ever says to you "The longest sentence is 'X'" you can reply "No, a longer sentence is 'Who cares that you think that the longest sentence is 'X''"
 
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I alwayslike this one with the word had used 11 times in a row and is still gramatically correct.

Smith, where Jones had had "had," had had "had had." "Had had" had had the most votes.​
 
flimflam_machine said:
Awesome! Thnk you for introducing me to something genuinely new and interesting.


This is the one about the pub-signwriter not leaving a spaces between "Coach" and "and" and "and" and "Horses".

So yes, but you can also have seven "ands" in succession if you construct a similar story about the band in the Commitments called "And and and".

Then if you were to report that you had legitimately constructed a sentence with seven successive "ands", but had written it down without the relevant spaces you could have a sentence with 13 successive "ands" i.e., "I accidentally left out the spaces between 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and' and 'and'"

Then you could report that you had written that sentence incorrectly and so on ad infinitum.

It's similar to the fact that you can always make a longer sentence just by making it part of reported speech. So if anyone ever says to you "The longest sentence is 'X'" you can reply "No, a longer sentence is 'Who cares that you think that the longest sentence is 'X''"
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Blinding! Thank you.
 
LibraryLady said:
The British also spell color wrong. :)
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No, we don't. We spell it like that because we took it from Anglo-Norman,
not directly from Classical Latin. In fact up until the 17th century you'd
find -or and -our endings used interchangeably in Britain. Thereafter the
-our ending became standard (in Dr Johnson's dictionary of 1755, for
example, only the -our ending appears). The Americans just adopted a
different standard, mostly on account of the efforts of spelling reformists
like Noah Webster.
 
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