Inspired by Bob's suggestion of a dedicated thread following an entertaining discussion on the Loughborough M25 thread, I'm launching this. Feel free to chip in with contributions of your own, especially what gets your goat about other people's glaring grammatical errors when you see/hear them.
I'll kick off with a story of my own about the bane of CD's life, the auto-correct function on his smart 'phone. I happen not to possess such a device, just a bog-standard Nokia, which has only a fairly primitive predictive text function which is quickly overridden, so I don't have to contend with the curse. Many moons ago, however, I had a Panasonic pay-as-you-go 'phone which did correct perceived mistakes in text messages. I once sent a message to a friend which should have concluded with the statement "Life's a bitch". To my utter horror, I sent it without noticing that it had inexplicably changed "bitch" to "chubi"! She's never let me forget it!
Inspired by Bob's suggestion of a dedicated thread following an entertaining discussion on the Loughborough M25 thread, I'm launching this. Feel free to chip in with contributions of your own, especially what gets your goat about other people's glaring grammatical errors when you see/hear them.
I'll kick off with a story of my own about the bane of CD's life, the auto-correct function on his smart 'phone. I happen not to possess such a device, just a bog-standard Nokia, which has only a fairly primitive predictive text function which is quickly overridden, so I don't have to contend with the curse. Many moons ago, however, I had a Panasonic pay-as-you-go 'phone which did correct perceived mistakes in text messages. I once sent a message to a friend which should have concluded with the statement "Life's a bitch". To my utter horror, I sent it without noticing that it had inexplicably changed "bitch" to "chubi"! She's never let me forget it!
Googling suggests that 'chubi' is urban slang for 'bitch'..
I hardly dare message, lest my ignorance of English grammar becomes exposed to all
Auto correct has certainly given me a few laughs in the past. I was due to pick up a friend from the airport a few years back, but not Alicante (my closest) but Murcia. My friend message me to remind me but autocorrect didn't recognise Murcia. What I got was ...
I've just skimmed through the comments on the other thread. I'm really picky.
Missing/unnecessary apostrophes, wrong use of "myself", fewer/less, annex/annexe, I could go on!
I get unreasonably irritated by people that use the wrong near-homophone (either through ignorance or carelessness). An example being defuse/ diffuse. I suspect that it may be dictation software having similar shortfalls to the autocorrecting phones.
Another auto correct example - I can't remember if it was a phone or computer that once changed my friend Martina's name to Martian!
In the early days of Microsoft Word the Labour Party published a significant amount of their party documentation spelling their name as "Labor". Not a gripe - I found that one funny (although a damning indictment of those that absented to proofread their output). On a similar note I have a soft spot for a Canadian TV show called Murdoch Mysteries - in it a likeable constable called George Crabtree has just been promoted to Inspector, and they tried to put his name on his door:
However, on a grammatical point, help me out here.
further/farther
I am sure I use them interchangeably but I doubt they are.
Farther refers to distance - further means more.
Actually, they are interchangeable to some extent, more so in British than in American English, with the latter making a more clear-cut distinction between "farther" used in reference to distance. "Further", however, has additional connotations where "farther" just wouldn't work:
- "farther" can be used as both an adjective & an adverb & signifies "at a greater distance", be that literal or figurative, but you wouldn't, for example (or at least I hope you wouldn't!), say "the Prime Minister declined to answer farther questions" ;
- "further", on the other hand, while it may denote "at a greater distance", is also used as an adjective meaning "more" & as an adverb meaning "in addition"/"additionally" (a shorthand form of "furthermore", if you will) AND as a verb meaning "to advance" or "to promote".
I'd go so far as to say that the choice boils down to personal preference except in cases where there can be no question of distance ("the police need to carry out further enquiries to determine the cause of the accident"). That said, I personally would still favour it in statements such as "Penzance is further away from London than Bristol", whereas others would use "farther" in that instance...
Not sure whether that sheds any more light, but I had fun composing it.
Just by the by, and I wish the authorities would listen:
At our local state primary school, several decades back, we learnt spelling and times tables. And then, suddenly, in the last two years of juniors, all the teachers were very much in the 'express yourself, it doesn't matter how' vein. All nice and liberal. No grammar was taught. It was all about projects, and tasks, and writing for self-expression. Which was fine, and no problem. I read a lot. Could write fine. Was one of the more 'arty' kids. Enjoyed it.
And then suddenly our teacher was called up for jury duty. A long murder case. And we got an old retired replacement teacher (well, he seemed old to me, probably wasn't more than 60 or 65 :smile)
And he started off straight away on grammar
From pretty simple ('Whose v who's') to more complicated (single possessive apostrophes and plural possessive apostrophes) to the basics of parsing a sentence
And I loved it !!!! Various things I'd sort of figured out for myself were now crsytal clear. New things were interesting. It was my favourite lesson. AND he taught the specifci art of précis (or summaries or whatever you want to call them). We had to summarise texts into one line, three sentences, or one short para, or whatever. Great skill. (Some people might think I could do with a bit more practice ! )
But long story short, it does kids a disservice to think it's boring and restricting/restrictive (? )
-- Edited by Coup Droit on Wednesday 17th of January 2024 09:22:28 PM
Some clever mod should copy and paste all the posts from the Loughborough men's event over here So we can put all our gripes and moans together
It's not possible to move individual posts from one thread to another, only to merge threads or to move them from one forum to another. However, as I probably have more time on my hands than many on the board, given that it was my reference to the fact that "surgery" is an uncountable noun that kicked off the discussion, I'm happy to copy & paste all the relevant posts into a single one in here in the morning.