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Looking through Geoffrey Nunberg's the way we talk now, I noticed the chapter titled Hell in a Handcar. He says, ...the signs seem unmistakable that the language is in a bad way. He isn't talking about things like the loss of correct usage of in behalf of vs. on behalf of. ...people seem to have lost their grip even on the simple things, like when to write its without an apostrophe. ...
And yet something has been changing over the years. It isn't that people are writing worse but that they're writing more, and spreading it about more widely. It's the effect that Jacques Barzun described fifty years ago as the endless multiplication of dufferism. On a per capita basis, we aren't producing many more novels or histories than we were in the eighteenth century. But there has been a huge growth in sectors like popular magazines, government pamphlets, press releases, and user manuals--most of them written by people who would not have been putting pen to paper in the age of Johnson.
And of course the internet has multiplied this a googol-load; I believe that the more we see poor writing the more likely we are to replicate it.
What do you all think?
I apologize for any mistakes in copying.
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Dang strait!! And Hell in a Handcar is a good example!!! Any idiot knows its Hell in a Handbasket!!!! And don't get me started about over use of exclamation points!!!!!
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I believe that the more we see poor writing the more likely we are to replicate it.
What do you all think?
I don't think so. If that were the case, all those peeving grammaticohooligans would be writing worse than the folks they complain of.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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I try my best to re-read everything just for the punctuation. Even when texting I feel compelled to place a full stop,question mark or comma where needed. When people LOL, most times they are not but it conveys emotion in a succinct way.
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Dang strait!! And Hell in a Handcar is a good example!!! Any idiot knows its Hell in a Handbasket!!!! And don't get me started about over use of exclamation points!!!!!  Who says Americans can't do irony sarcasm? Well--texting language has already affected the e-mails from some of my friends. And if I see a word misspelled often enough then I start having a hard time remembering the correct way. Wonder how many people, say under 35, can tell you the difference between affect and effect, for ex.? I see one in place of the other all the time in mainstream media. And mantel/mantle; and lots more.
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Next thing you know they'll be thinking cleofan and clifian are the some word.
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Next thing you know they'll be thinking cleofan and clifian are the some word.No danger there. The rule for peeves is that everything wrong with language is of a recent origin. At least some time after the primal event of the peever's being corrected by Miss Thistlebottom. It's a well known truism that the Romans invented txting ( link and link). Latin changed, but I don't know anybody who say that Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Romanian are "worse" than Latin. (OK, I do know people who say that Italian is just corrupt Latin, but they're talking about something else.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Miss Thistlebottom and Mister Misspellbottom were a pleasant, well-spoken couple. (grin) I just had a moment to think and I think, ( you asked us what we all think)... there's too many of us and too much of everything including too much of nothing for the larger part of us. And too many neweties that all need words. We just have to swim in this pool of rapidly changing words and expressions and keep afloat. 
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J'all see this in today's Word?
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. -George Polya, mathematician (1887-1985)
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member
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J'all see this in today's Word?
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. -George Polya, mathematician (1887-1985)
To me this looks like a restatement of the "good writers can break the rules" argument, which never made much sense to me. If only the masters can break the rules, where does that leave the rest of us? And since we all want to be good writers, and since good writers can break the rule, how useful is the rule anyway?
Last edited by goofy; 10/19/11 02:39 PM.
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