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7 Responses to “You will read this. And you should.”

1. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 1st, 2009 at 18h57

   Dialectal Hiberno-English would be a great band name!

   OK maybe not

2. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 1st, 2009 at 19h21

   “Basque has three levels of formality: hi, zu and berori. … The most neutral is zu, that is considered the formal one.  The informal one is hi and its use is limited to some specific situations: among friends, parents to address their children … and to pets. … [B]erori … is a very strongly formal pronoun … used to address priests, judges and nobility.  It uses the 3rd form verbs. … In contrast to many European languages, the T-V distinction in Mandarin is predicated much more on the chronological age of the speakers than on their social positions. … In the 13^th century, the term “ye” [in English] was used as a formal version of “thou” (to superiors or non-intimates) — however, this use was often contextually-dependent (i.e., changing dynamically according to shifting nuances in the relationship between two people), rather than static.”

   “The following pair of examples illustrate the interpretative difference [between epistemic and deontic modal verbs]:

   (1)  John didn’t show up for work.  He must be sick.
   (2)  John didn’t show up for work.  He must be fired.

   … Is evidentiality a kind of epistemic modality, or are evidentiality and epistemic modality distinct[?]”

   “Here are some open WikiProject Theoretical Linguistics tasks[:]

   Broad/general: Syntax, Semantics, Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Generative linguistics, Spoken language”

   “To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar ‘assigns a structural description’ to the sentence.”

   “The synthetic comparative suffix -er generally occurs with monosyllabic adjectives and a small class of disyllabic adjectives with the primary (and only) stress on the first syllable.”

   “The study of language loss at the individual level focuses on what is lost – a first language (L1) or a second language (L2) – and where it is lost – in an L1 or L2 environment.”

   And what language book gets into the bestseller lists, pray?  Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which is basically a masturbatory diatribe about how much smarter people are who think that “Two Weeks Notice” should have an apostrophe at the end of the second word.  This is not unlike the most successful advanced French cookbook being a volume called Is McDonald’s Yummy?

3. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 1st, 2009 at 19h27

   Also an open question: why did “Vons Grocery Store”, started by Mr. Von somethingorother, lose its possessive apostrophe, while “McDonald’s”, started by the brothers McDonald, retain its apostrophe, and will the latter eventually lose its?

   Also: why the hell would most blog authors write “loose it’s possessive apostrophe”?  Seriously, WTF?  See, there I go getting prescriptive again.  Old habits die hard.

4. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 1st, 2009 at 19h54

   I wanted this aside, but, like the extended Esmeralda Cab Scene, there was no way to make it flow:

   “To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar ‘assigns a structural description’ to the sentence.”

   This, by the way, is very obvious to computer scientists, in the same way that the following are obvious:

   • Putting punctuation inside a quotation mark when it didn’t have one originally, e.g., using
     

     The Gettysburg Address begins “fourscore and seven years ago.”

     as opposed to
     

     The Gettysburg Address begins “fourscore and seven years ago”.

     is rude to a perfectly innocent string literal that never hurt anyone in its life.

   • Not including relevant punctuation prior to an ellipsis destroys information, e.g., that
     

     We are met on a great battle-field of that war … The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

     leaves ambiguous whether the original began
     

     We are met on a great battle-field of that war where lots of people died

     which is something that would not be ambiguous if the middle read
     

     great battle-field of war. … The world

   • Bracketed replacements in quotation that simply modify case are horrible, because it is completely unclear whether case problems in the source are being corrected or information is being removed and, if the latter is true, for what nefarious Ann Coulter reasons might it have been removed?  (e.g., does
     

     We have come to dedicate a portion of that field [b]ut in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate

     leave anything else out with that [b]?  Answer: yes, a lot.)

   But while these are all equally obvious to people familiar with formal grammars, none of the bulleted examples, as far as I know, strike style guides as occasions for desirable formalization, or indeed as problems to begin with.  Basically, software compilers would hack you to tiny pieces for this imprecision, but style guide compilers either don’t care or don’t notice.

   You would not believe how long I played with the formatting of this comment to make it easy to follow, and I am still not guaranteed it will look right on your browser, because the w3c never really bothered to formalize how BLOCKQUOTE is supposed to work while nested, deciding instead to simply “deprecate” this usage.  And, by the way, “to deprecate” does not mean “to deplore” or “to belittle”, as the dictionaries will tell you, but rather “to alert that a usage has been superseded and to note that future support for the usage is not guaranteed”, although it kinda still does if you tilt your head the right way.  Aarghfuckinghell grammar.

5. Karina Says:
   September 2nd, 2009 at 15h59

   This is giving me a headache… :p

   I don’t dare mess with Eddie’s lyrics, but I must admit, sometimes listening to songs with questionable verb conjugation makes me cringe, a little, but that’s about it. I’m kind of drawing a blank right now…the only song that comes to mind is from Fiona Apple’s last album. I know there are more though..

   “Get Him Back”
   One man, he disappoint me
   He give me the gouge and he take my glee
   Now every other man I see
   Remind me of the one man who disappointed me

6. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 2nd, 2009 at 18h55

   Thanks for commenting.  I’m not sure I expected you to, even though I commanded you to do so. 

   This is giving me a headache… :p

   And you only had to read it.  I had to write it. 

   “One man, he disappoint me
   He give me the gouge and he take my glee”

   I don’t have anything save Tidal, but I remember when that came out and everyone was bewildered that that voice came out of as skinny white teenager.  But it got played on rock radio, which it probably would not have had it been soul music performed by a heavy-set black woman.

   In the first (and, it is to be hoped, last) time quoting Eminem on this site:

   I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley,
   To do black music so selfishly
   And use it to get myself wealthy!

   So, yeah, Marshall, maybe not the worst thing.

   I actually really like Tidal.  Shhh.

7. Joshua (Site Owner) Says:
   September 2nd, 2009 at 18h59

   would not have had it been

   I have no clue what tense “to be” is in that quote, and I don’t want to fucking learn tonight.  Aaargh.

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