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To: GraceZ who wrote (13281)	8/26/2003 11:49:02 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 306849

Bush attended Exeter and Yale, I can assure you he knows proper grammar even if he ditches it in favor of trying to sound like 'jus' folks'. Well you certainly live in your own little alternate reality. If you've ever heard interviews of any of his teachers at either school, those who actually recall him, they make it quite clear that his hillbilly grammar and difficulty in recalling facts frequently came close to flunking him out of school. No one in his immediate family expected much accomplishment from him - they've said as much publicly. America has a genuine doofus as a President - and an alchoholic to boot! It's not a clever acting job just to make him seem folksy. His ignorance just seemed to resonate with the American public. I think that says more about the general public than it does about Bush. Now Lincoln - there's a President who clearly played the part of a rough, plain country boy, though he was not by the time he was in politics - if he had ever been. His Gettysburg Address is poetry. Perhaps you were thinking of Lincoln. Bush is the genuine article.

To: GraceZ who wrote (13281)	8/27/2003 12:06:07 AM
From: marcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Grace, in this public forum you write, "...There was used as an adverb..." All this concern about proper and formal manner smacks of elitism--ways to discriminate between them and us. I am afraid that this kind of distinction leads one to kick others while they're down. This is not an association that I enjoy. I can only guess that you are a right-wing fiscal conservative, trying to convince others not to pay (any) taxes for the education of the untouchables. No matter how effective public education is, there will always be something to complain about. I support your right to voice your concern, though I deeply disagree with tactics that harm those with the least in order to save bucks for for those with the most. I suspect that this is the deeper agenda--cut funding for public education so taxes go down. As I've said before, I've studied the research objectively and am certain that educational practice in the public classrooms of California is much better now than ever. Is it good enough? Maybe not, but it's improving. I am sorry that I don't have the time or energy to respond in full to points you have made. And yes, I realize that as J. Derrida said, "It is the ear of the other that signs." Best wishes --Marc

To: GraceZ who wrote (13281)	8/27/2003 4:57:46 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

, 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.