, I can assure you he knows proper grammar even if he ditches it in favor of trying to sound like "jus' folks".
are you sure of this? are you relying on your own expertise or other sources? as you might recall, recently i explained to you how to differentiate between its and it's, and between then and than.
Message 19069746
to me, Bush sounds like an unexpurgated idiot no matter how you slice him.
As for MS Word, what can I say, whomever wrote the grammar checker went to lousy schools.
whomever in the above sentence is grammatically incorrect. whomever is the direct/indirect object case. whoever is the agent or subject case, which is what you should use in the above sentence.
There was used as an adverb in that sentence you wrote.
alas, this is incorrect. to refresh your memory, the phrase in question was there weren't much to learn. in this phrase, there is a dummy subject (or expletive, to be a bit more technical), not an adverb.
here is an example of there used as an expletive:
"there is a chance of rain"
and here is an example of there used as an adverb:
"it is raining over there"
thus your characterization of there as an adverb in fatty's phrase was incorrect.
however, fatty's phrase was indeed incorrect according to standard English. as you helpfully point out:
The number of the verb (to be) is taken from the subject, as usual. The subject is "much", which in such a sentence construction, is placed after the verb and is singular. It refers to a quantity (not quantities). You could have written, "There weren't many things (plural) to learn." There was grammar to learn.
actually, much isn't the subject; the expletive there is the dummy subject, although it must agree with much to be grammatically correct (on a deep structure level, in a generative grammar interpretation, one could call much the subject, but the appearance of the phrase at that level would not be recognized as English [e.g., "much be not", followed by a transformative rule which plugs on the expletive, rearranges the word order, yada yada] but i doubt that is what you meant).
but anywhoooo, if we assume fatty is a native speaker of English, then your correction is not called for, unless it is of the "technicality" variety (e.g., telling somebody they can't write because they wrote "teh" instead of "the").
why is this? because every native speaker of Standard English (a group which seems to include fatty), knows you're supposed to say "there wasn't much" instead of "there weren't much". if you've read any of fatty's posts, you know that he speaks a standard enough variety of English that he would know this (his posts aren't peppered with "ain't" and "i is").
thus fatty simply had a brain fart. like writing "teh" instead of "the". so BFD. congratulations, you found a brain fart in his post.
unfortunately, your instruction didn't really teach him anything he didn't already know. this is because he already knows the rule you tried to explain to him (ignoring for the time being the technical errors in your explanation).
way back in the 1950s, before he became America's most famous lefty intellectual, Noam Chomsky posited a distinction between competence and performance in native speakers. competence refers to all the rules you know about your language--an abstract model which Chomsky and countless others have tried to "discover" in linguistics departments around the world ever since. in contrast, performance is the stuff that actually comes out of one's mouth, brain farts and all. (the reason Chomsky started with this distinction was to explain how a child learns the "real rules" of a language, despite being exposed to various and sundry brain farts during the language acquisition process.)
thus you should just recognize that fatty's performance in that instance was off a bit and cut him some slack. it is unlikely that his competence does not include the rule about the singularity requirement for much when arranged with there as a dummy subject. |
