Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Grammar Nazi Stuff
I heard something interesting the other day.
The whole "don't end a sentence with a preposition" thing was created by a dude who just wanted English, which was considered a sort of "low" language back in the day, to be more like Latin (and therefore mooch off of it's prestige).
Essentially, it isn't really a rule of the English language, just something sumdood added back in the day that doesn't really work for English that well, with the stated goal being entirely irrelevant in today's world.
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/11/grammar-myths-prepositions/
I say this not be a semantic busy-body, but because I honestly did not know that the rule about ending sentences with prepositions was a total myth that has perpetuated itself for some damn reason and will not go away.
Also, splitting infinitives is totally cool, too.
That, and starting sentences with "but" and "and" being verboten, which was another thing that was drummed into my brain in grammar school, is totally false
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It was a comparative anthropology class that gave me this nugget, "When dealing with a living language, the native speaker is always correct with regards to grammar."
ReplyDeleteThat led to a discussion about dialects...
Angus – I actually believe that to be very true. Point of fact – consider English during the time of Shakespeare. The language was so different then that modern English speakers often have a hard time understanding it. There are no more “forsooths!” and “thou arts!” and “ye alls!” in English anymore, because it is a living language which has changed with the times and the people in them.
DeleteI always laugh when I watch Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy,” because one of the things that they emphasize in the movie is that the man who traveled 500 years into the future is constantly made fun of because he “talks like a fag.” Consider a man from Shakespearean times in today’s world, and he would likewise be lampooned, because to our modern ear, the way people talked back then would sound really strange.