[kenberg]

Actually I was being idiotic, not ironic. But it perhaps makes my point, although not in the way I would most like.

I was thinking of the Black Sea, not the Baltic Sea, that part was just mis-speaking. But looking on a map I see that it is not on that coast either. Nor on the Adriatic. Landlocked, I see. Well, live and learn.

As mentioned, I am vague about how the first world war got going. But if the diplomats at the time were as clueless about geography as I am, that may have played a role.

I am finding Follett's book interesting, and perhaps i will learn something if I pay attention. He has heroes and villains and not much subtlety, but it's a fun read.

[kenberg]

 blackshoe, on 2012-October-08, 07:12, said:

What two Viet Nams?

Yes, there is now only one. This one I know.

[gwnn]

'(...)and that's why nobody's more interested in finding out what happened than I did' - Barack Obama.

[kenberg]

 gwnn, on 2012-October-17, 17:07, said:

'(...)and that's why nobody's more interested in finding out what happened than I did' - Barack Obama.

I missed that! But I put it in the category of there but for the grace of God go I. It's ok.

Sometime I should probably try for consistency in my criticisms, but not today.

[barmar]

 gwnn, on 2012-October-17, 17:07, said:

'(...)and that's why nobody's more interested in finding out what happened than I did' - Barack Obama.

Was that from a written speech or extemporaneous (was it from the debate)? When speaking off the cuff, and under a lot of pressure, glitches like that are common and, I think, excusable. It's not the same as people who habitually misuse pronouns, or can't pronounce "nuclear".

[kenberg]

Csaba may be sleeping, so I'll answer. I am pretty sure this comes from the debate. O was speaking of being at the funeral for the Ambassador and said something along these lines. I didm't pick up on the mangled structure.

I agree that as we speak, or at least as I speak, it often needs a little rearranging.

[barmar]

That mistake almost certainly came from having two thoughts in his mind. He was thinking about how he reacted (calling for an investigation -- what he "did") and in how to express his concern over the situation ("no one is more interested"). When this happens, you sometimes start the sentence from one of these thoughts, and then inadvertently switch to the other in mid-sentence. It has nothing to do with knowledge of grammar or proper style, it's just a brain fart.

[gwnn]

And which one would you rather have: a president who over-corrects or a president who has brain farts?

disclaimer: I am not paid by GOP or the DP, not a US citizen, not well informed, not well meaning, just a troll from across the pond.

[kenberg]

 gwnn, on 2012-October-18, 02:07, said:

And which one would you rather have: a president who over-corrects or a president who has brain farts?

Yes, finally we get to the choice we must make this November! Right now I am leaning toward the brain fart guy.

[luke warm]

 kenberg, on 2012-October-18, 05:12, said:

Yes, finally we get to the choice we must make this November! Right now I am leaning toward the brain fart guy.

well at least the brain fart guy seems to be getting a few thousand fewer assassination threats (of which the secret service is "aware")

[barmar]

Obama got it right last night on The Daily Show. He said "As I said, ...", and then restated it, but got the final verb right. I wonder if someone will call him a liar, since it's not strictly true that this was "as he said".

Also in the "trivial" category, what do you think of "nobody's more interested" versus "no one's more interested"? The latter sounds better to my ears,

[kenberg]

"No one" sounds more natural to me. If there is a difference in meaning between "no one" and "nobody", I can't tell you what it is. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow" would sound odd if "nobody" were replaced by "no one", but that's simply from familiarity. I have no idea what the difference might be, I just prefer "no one".

On your other point, I was brought up to be a little careful about calling someone a liar.

[Zelandakh]

No one sounds better because we know the given context is formal. "Nobody is more interested" is grammatically absolutely fine.

[y66]

Stumbled on this 2001 essay by David Foster Wallace today. What a hoot. It even has this line: "My wife and myself wish to express our gratitude and thanks to you for being here to support us at this difficult time in our life."

Quote

Excerpt:

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption" and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special "Distinguished Usage Panel ... of outstanding professional speakers and writers" is an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism? Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press's semi-recent release of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. The fact of the matter is that Garner's dictionary is extremely good, certainly the most comprehensive usage guide since E. W. Gilman's Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, now a decade out of date.[1] Its format, like that of Gilman and the handful of other great American usage guides of the last century, includes entries on individual words and phrases and expostulative small-cap MINI-ESSAYS. on any issue broad enough to warrant more general discussion. But the really distinctive and ingenious features of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage involve issues of rhetoric and ideology and style, and it is impossible to describe why these issues are important and why Garner's management of them borders on genius without talking about the historical contexts [2] in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics to public education to political ideology, and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner's usage guide so eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar can even be established; and in fact there's no way even to begin the whole harrowing polymeric discussion without taking a moment to establish and define the highly colloquial term SNOOT.

From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least going to need it, i.e., that offering counsel on the finer points of U.S. English is Preaching to the Choir. The relevant Choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched Story of English on PBS (twice) and read W. Safire's column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this — Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Language Police. The term I was raised with is SNOOT.[3] The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it.

I submit that we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd. There are, granted, plenty of nerd-species in today's America, and some of these are elitist within their own nerdy purview (e.g., the skinny, carbuncular, semi-autistic Computer Nerd moves instantly up on the totem pole of status when your screen freezes and now you need his help, and the bland condescension with which he performs the two occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid). But the SNOOT's purview is interhuman social life itself. You don't, after all (despite withering cultural pressure), have to use a computer, but you can't escape language: Language is everything and everywhere; it's what lets us have anything to do with one another; it's what separates us from the animals; Genesis 11:7-10 and so on. And we SNOOTS know when and how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and to keep participles from dangling, and we know that we know, and we know how very few other Americans know this stuff or even care, and we judge them accordingly.

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture:[4] We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails. We[5] are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else.

[Vampyr]

 y66, on 2012-October-26, 15:44, said:

It even has this line: "My wife and myself wish to express our gratitude and thanks to you for being here to support us at this difficult time in our life."

Well, you sound much more educated if you use "myself" instead of "I", just like you sound more educated if you use "I" instead of "me". LOL

Came across "it's" instead of "its" today on these very forums. This has a very high annoyance factor for me because it is one you see frequently.

[Vampyr]

From a BBO thread:

Quote

My head has literally just exploded.

I hate this.

[BunnyGo]

 Vampyr, on 2012-November-04, 05:51, said:

From a BBO thread:



I hate this.

Maybe it did...maybe it was the flu.

[Vampyr]

 BunnyGo, on 2012-November-04, 07:31, said:

Maybe it did...maybe it was the flu.

True, I hadn't thought of that kind of explosion.

[kenberg]

As a child, I thought that "literally" meant "figuratively" or at least something other than "literally". I don't believe either of my parents ever used the word, and whenever I saw it in print it was usually impossible that what was described as being literally true could in fact be literally true. So I figured it meant "in a manner of speaking" or some such. I was a rather literal minded child, even if I did not know what that meant.

[PassedOut]

 kenberg, on 2012-November-04, 08:31, said:

As a child, I thought that "literally" meant "figuratively" or at least something other than "literally". I don't believe either of my parents ever used the word, and whenever I saw it in print it was usually impossible that what was described as being literally true could in fact be literally true. So I figured it meant "in a manner of speaking" or some such. I was a rather literal minded child, even if I did not know what that meant.

I remember as a boy when I realized that I had had the meanings of "permanent" and "temporary" exactly reversed, but I never did figure out how that had happened. It was so embarrassing to me that I kept that mistake to myself for many years...