As in, doesn’t matter at all to you.
I’m of the opinion that so long as it is understandable it does not matter. English was once written as it sounded and there was no spelling consistancy. Those who were literate had little issue with it.
Some related reading: https://ctcamp.franklinresearch.uga.edu/resources/reading-middle-english https://cb45.hsites.harvard.edu/middle-english-basic-pronunciation-and-grammar
Edit: Okay my rant is more related to spelling than grammar but still interesting.
Period AFTER the end of a quote.
My buddy Joe told me “I will live and die on this hill”.
Absolutely. Anyone who has done any programming should recognize that changing what’s in the quote is corrupting the data.
If I’m quoting a question though, then it makes sense to include the question mark in the quote.
I laughed when Joe asked "That's the hill you chose?".If the murky depths of my memories of school is correct, the location of the period is dictated by whether or not it is part of the quote. So, if the quote should have a period at the end, it goes inside the quotation marks. If the quote does not include the period (e.g. you are quoting part of a sentence), but you are at the end of a sentence in your own prose, you put the period on the outside of the quotation marks.
Ugh, there should be one before AND after!
So is this correct?
My buddy Joe told me. “I will live and die on this hill”.
My buddy Joe told me: “I will live and die on this hill.”.
imo.
Using commas, wherever you want.
They should be logical thought breaks, not adhere to any rules of grammar.
I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.
It’s not a grammar mistake per se, but I feel like sharing it and it is close enough so here we go.
As a non-native English speaker: How can you have mob and vacuum the floor but not broom the room?! I know it doesn’t exist, but I don’t care. If we have to phrase it as a grammar mistake: I use verbalisations where they are uncommon.
Deliberately not capitalising proper nouns as a show of disrespect (countries, people, titles, etc). Not “grammatically correct” but I think it falls under freedom of expression.
I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don’t think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, “he’s coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning,” as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, “he’s coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning.”
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it’s a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
Ending a sentence with a proposition is just fine. Picky people whom I’ve only seen parodies of on the Internet go “oh you ended your sentence with a preposition I have no idea what you mean by ‘He went in’ maybe you could explain what he went into? A jello mold? A ditch? What did go into?”
You asked if he went into the store and I said he went in, you know what I meant because of CONTEXT CLUES.
I’ve never met anyone who’s ever been this picky but I’m ready to bite them if I ever find one.
Did you mean to say, preposition instead of proposition?
I think that since you’re aware of typos and context clues you knew that was the case.
Anything that is used colloquially but technically isn’t correct because some loser didn’t like it 200 years ago. To boldly keep on splitting infinitives is a rejection of language prescriptivism!
I’m really sick of people treating AAVE and other dialects like grammar mistakes, is what. Grammar Nazis indeed, protecting the purity of the English language.
I dont care about capitalizations, apostrophes, or if you shorthand words like tho as long as i can understand what youre saying from the context
“Y’all”
I will die on the hill that it’s more efficient and neutral than the alternatives.
I recently realized that w’all needs to be shakespeared too. Following the pattern of other languages, y’all and w’all are missing in English.
Also, I shakespeared the verb shakespeared, in reference to Shakespeare making up new words by following patterns among other words.
A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their ‘mistakes’ have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.
There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:
- “He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old” (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
- “How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s’appelle? I think German too)
- “I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
- “She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.
informal contractions are simply informal just because. there’s no real reason to consider them informal or not standard other than arbitrary rules.
“You shouldn’t’ve done that.” “It couldn’t’ve been him!” “I might’ve done that if you asked.”
This is the one that still ends up in my technical writing.
I think if I took it too far and said that all contractions are basically acceptable, y’all’d’n’t’ve agreed with me.
This looks aggressively welsh.
You all did not have
In German there’s the saying “macht Sinn”, which is wrong since it’s just a direct translation of “makes sense”. Correct would be “ergibt Sinn”, in English “results in sense”, but I don’t care, “macht Sinn” rolls off the tongue easier.
A calque.
‘irregardless’ and improper ‘begs the question’ are both fine.
I hate these, but acknowledge that the battle is lost
My body will be on the hill of the latter.
