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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (1224)	5/5/1998 10:48:00 AM
From: Rick Slemmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4710

It's not just SI. Years ago, when I was in the small hamlet of Clovis, New Mexico on business, I passed a billboard from the Clovis Chamber of Commerce that read, in huge letters: We're glad your here. It's an uphill fight. RS

To: jbe who wrote (1224)	5/5/1998 1:22:00 PM
From: Wizzer	Respond to of 4710

I is having trouble with anglish since peepole stopd posting there ideas about anglish on dis tread. Here's hoping we get back to posting, as I miss it. This thread was a source of enjoyment for me and many others. JBE, hope the above sentence doesn't make your skin crawl.

To: jbe who wrote (1224)	5/5/1998 2:40:00 PM
From: Achilles	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4710

I have to admit that I'm frustrated, not merely with web-English (which used to be called pidgin-English, before the pigeons began to take offense), but the ungrammatical sh*t that businesses are willing to send me: flyers and questionnaires written by semi-literate marketing majors. I've decided that I'm not going to take it any more. Last week I corrected the grammar on a questionnaire sent to me by my brokerage and sent it back to them with a blistering letter: poor grammar is unprofessional and reflects badly on their institution. Yesterday I phoned the number on the bottom of a flyer and lectured them on punctuation. (I was appalled to learn that the offending flyer was produced by a Ph.D. and an M.A.: o tempora! o mores!) If businesses start getting much of this, they will begin to demand grammatical competence of business schools or at least hire a few English majors to proofread their produce. So, gentle-people, to arms! Let us encourage professional people to present themselves professionally, or at least be embarrassed when they don't.

To: jbe who wrote (1224)	5/5/1998 3:23:00 PM
From: Jack Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4710

Hi Jbe, It's" for "its," "their" for "they're," "your" for "you're, You're right. I do a lot of wincing both reading posts on SI and also in our print media, whose spokesmen continue to refer to their media in the singular. But I don't wince as much as I used to. I no longer bristle when I hear like used as a conjunction, or their used as a politically correct neuter single pronoun. Those of us who care about such things are in the minority and probably will be gone soon. The print medium is moribund in the sense that we knew it -- reading for entertainment instead of for naked facts or numerical data. (This data still kills me.) I thought of language as art this weekend. I read Conrad's Heart of Darkness on the way to visit my son, since I knew he was reading it for an English course. Beautifully written. Isn't it interesting that two of the best writers in our language (Nabokov and Conrad) were not native speakers of English? We must accept that computer communications will often be like TV, nasty, brutish, and short. We gained a lot with TV and the computer, and we lost a lot. Jack