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Quote:
I'm not much interested in grammar gotchas. *yawn*
Yet you can use and probably even construct a sentence like I ran into an old friend in the mall yesterday. You also know that
I ran into an old friend in the mall yesterday.
is correct but
*I ran an old friend into in the mall yesterday.
isn't.
You also know that
I ran up a big bill in the mall yesterday.
and
I ran a big bill up in the mall yesterday.
are both correct and even if you had learned grammar in school you wouldn't have learned why or even that those particular forms existed.
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Yes, it's a pity they don't really teach grammar in grammar school. Never have. They teach some usage rules that usually contradict the grammar one learned, unconsciously, while growing up speaking the language.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I think I was taught a little grammar in grammar school, but that my mind was not prepared for it. I never acquired an understanding or appreciation for English grammar until I took Latin.
The problem with the grammar we learn unconsciously is that some of it is good usage, but not all of it is. Goodness is partly a matter of convention, but it's also a matter of utility.
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I've long felt that the whole preposition-at-the-end-of-a-sentence thing was caused by the long time ignoring of the phrasal verb. The particle of a phrasal verb looks like a preposition and can come at the end of a sentence quite nicely. Then, when kids that had learned the phrasal verb naturally in the first few years of their lives were told by grammarians that prepositions should not end sentences and that the particles were really prepositions, rather than coming up with things like "up with which I shall not put," started putting real prepositions at the ends of sentences.
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Hey, big guy, what say we get together when you get out of jail. Oh. Never mind. That's a prOposition at the end of a sentence.
TEd
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the grammar one learned, unconsciously, while growing up speaking the language. There's a Funniest Home Videos clip where Mom is behind the camera, filming her chocolate-smeared toddler, and she says things like, "You didn't eat no candy, did you?", and "Are you sure you didn't eat no candy?" (To every question, of course, the kid says no.) And I think, "Lady, aren't you embarrassed to be heard on national television talking like that?" This is a pretty old clip; the kid's probably in grammar school right now, talking the same way as his mom.
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"You didn't eat no candy, did you?"
Well, she's probably not embarassed by the way she speaks, because that's the way she speaks.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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> Mom is behind the camera, filming her chocolate-smeared toddler ...thus proving herself a true American Mom by referring to chocolate as candy without being embarassed ('cause that's the way she speaks)  1. Crystallized sugar, made by repeated boiling and slow evaporation, more fully called sugar candy; also any confection made of, or incrusted with this. (In U.S. used more widely than in Great Britain, including toffee, and the like.)OED2
Last edited by maverick; 01/27/06 01:43 PM.
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After I took my first few semesters of German, I came to assume that prepositions at the end of sentences was something borrowed from that root. But that isn't the kind of thing I'm talking about. I think Jackie's closer to what I was talking about. There are people in my family who talk just like that woman - and it's fine when you're talking to your own family or other people who understand you.
The problem is that language like this is often either imprecise or incorrect. It's fine for some uses and utterly inadequate for others. Imprecision may not matter in every case. But precision needs to be sufficient for the circumstance.
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Crystallized sugarCOED: 1 N. Amer. sweets. 2 chiefly Brit. sugar crystallized by repeated boiling and slow evaporation.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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