MC Grammar has learnt that Cleo Magazine in Australia has been giving some funky props to this blog on Twitter, helping MC Grammar bring grammar into the lives of even more brothers and sisters. Check it.
http://twitter.com/cleomag/status/1800188993
What can I say but ‘thanks!’ to Cleo for reading, and for spreading the word. Below are some of the many ways I would say thanks to Cleo if I only could say it in person
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
U Can’t Split This: the old-school rule of not splitting your infinitives.
MC Grammar is from the school of thought that the purpose of grammar and punctuation is to communicate better with each other. It should make it easier to communicate with more people – not less. So when something can be understood without being technically grammatically correct, then I think it should become acceptable.
A good example of this is ‘Split Infinitives.’
An infinitive is the ‘stem’ of a verb. In other words, it is the universal form of the verb, when it hasn’t been changed. For example, ‘To have’, ‘to change’ ‘to eat’, etc. Verbs stop being infinitive when they are changed to fit with different tenses or to agree with plurals, for example, if 'to have' is the infinitive,‘We have lunch with Sam’ could become ‘We had lunch with Sam’ or ‘She has lunch with Sam.’ and so on.
About thirty years ago, school kids were being taught that an infinitive form of a verb could not be separated from its little ‘to’ companion. For example, saying ‘I need to quickly speak with you’ was regarded as bad grammar. The reason? In Latin, as in some other Latin-based languages today, an infinitive could never be split, not least because the ‘to’ part was built into it, in the same way as the French infinitive for ‘to speak’ is ‘Parler’, hence it couldn’t be split, obviously, unless you were some crazy person who thought it was cool to wedge a whole extra word into the centre of another.
So the key reason that you weren’t meant to split an infinitive was because some other language, one that people tended to look up to as being more distinguished, couldn’t split its own infinitives. This is why people in old novels tend to say things like ‘I need quickly to speak with you.’ Or ‘Finally I go to attend to mama today.’
Sticking to the rule of infinitives is all very well if you happen to go back in time, find yourself in Ancient Rome, can’t speak of word of Latin but feel reassured that whatever they’re saying, they’re not splitting their infinitives, but what relevance does it have for speakers of modern English? A sentence continues to make sense even where an infinitive has been split, and so as far as MC Grammar is concerned, pack this rule away next to your mini-disc player and your floppy discs.
A good example of this is ‘Split Infinitives.’
An infinitive is the ‘stem’ of a verb. In other words, it is the universal form of the verb, when it hasn’t been changed. For example, ‘To have’, ‘to change’ ‘to eat’, etc. Verbs stop being infinitive when they are changed to fit with different tenses or to agree with plurals, for example, if 'to have' is the infinitive,‘We have lunch with Sam’ could become ‘We had lunch with Sam’ or ‘She has lunch with Sam.’ and so on.
About thirty years ago, school kids were being taught that an infinitive form of a verb could not be separated from its little ‘to’ companion. For example, saying ‘I need to quickly speak with you’ was regarded as bad grammar. The reason? In Latin, as in some other Latin-based languages today, an infinitive could never be split, not least because the ‘to’ part was built into it, in the same way as the French infinitive for ‘to speak’ is ‘Parler’, hence it couldn’t be split, obviously, unless you were some crazy person who thought it was cool to wedge a whole extra word into the centre of another.
So the key reason that you weren’t meant to split an infinitive was because some other language, one that people tended to look up to as being more distinguished, couldn’t split its own infinitives. This is why people in old novels tend to say things like ‘I need quickly to speak with you.’ Or ‘Finally I go to attend to mama today.’
Sticking to the rule of infinitives is all very well if you happen to go back in time, find yourself in Ancient Rome, can’t speak of word of Latin but feel reassured that whatever they’re saying, they’re not splitting their infinitives, but what relevance does it have for speakers of modern English? A sentence continues to make sense even where an infinitive has been split, and so as far as MC Grammar is concerned, pack this rule away next to your mini-disc player and your floppy discs.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
More correct than you: How hypercorrections impress no-one.
I once heard a great quote that went ‘a high brow is just someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence.’ There’s a lot of truth in there. The great institution of grammar tends to be a haven for people who know a lot about language, but not much about anything else, such as not being jerks.
This is where the scourge of ‘hypercorrections’ hits us. A hypercorrection is where a non-standard grammatical rule is applied in the belief that it is correct, even though a more familiar, standard rule would work just fine. Put simply, it’s masturbation with words.
One of the most common hypercorrections is the Me and I rule. Most people are taught at school that you don’t say ‘Me and you should eat our lunches now’, you say, you and I should eat our lunches now. That’s fine, but I don’t know about you, but as a kid at school, MC Grammar had it drummed into his head that using the word me was as bad as stripping naked and doing a poo on the Queen of Sweden, due to the idea that it could be uncouthly misused where the more refined I should have been.
As a result, a lot of people tend to think that using I is more proper than using me. This is where you get sentences like 'He gave it to you and I'. This is incorrect. The rule is that the pronoun (You, we, she, he, them) that would stand in isolation is the one that you should use. For example, you would say I went to the movies, therefore you would say You and I went to the movies. However, you would say he gave it to me, not he gave it to I, therefore you would say he gave it to you and me, not he gave it to you and I.
The best way to remember this rule is to simply remind yourself that the pronoun that would stand in isolation is the one to use. For example, when you hear someone say The letter was for you and I, you know that they should have said The letter was for you and me, because you can't say The letter was for I (Unless you are a seventeenth-century fictional pirate, obviously)
This cool video which talks about the correct pronounciation of often, might be just what you need to help you along as you let your thoughts about hypercorrection sink in. Enjoy!
This is where the scourge of ‘hypercorrections’ hits us. A hypercorrection is where a non-standard grammatical rule is applied in the belief that it is correct, even though a more familiar, standard rule would work just fine. Put simply, it’s masturbation with words.
One of the most common hypercorrections is the Me and I rule. Most people are taught at school that you don’t say ‘Me and you should eat our lunches now’, you say, you and I should eat our lunches now. That’s fine, but I don’t know about you, but as a kid at school, MC Grammar had it drummed into his head that using the word me was as bad as stripping naked and doing a poo on the Queen of Sweden, due to the idea that it could be uncouthly misused where the more refined I should have been.
As a result, a lot of people tend to think that using I is more proper than using me. This is where you get sentences like 'He gave it to you and I'. This is incorrect. The rule is that the pronoun (You, we, she, he, them) that would stand in isolation is the one that you should use. For example, you would say I went to the movies, therefore you would say You and I went to the movies. However, you would say he gave it to me, not he gave it to I, therefore you would say he gave it to you and me, not he gave it to you and I.
The best way to remember this rule is to simply remind yourself that the pronoun that would stand in isolation is the one to use. For example, when you hear someone say The letter was for you and I, you know that they should have said The letter was for you and me, because you can't say The letter was for I (Unless you are a seventeenth-century fictional pirate, obviously)
This cool video which talks about the correct pronounciation of often, might be just what you need to help you along as you let your thoughts about hypercorrection sink in. Enjoy!
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