Grammar Nazi Goes Off

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Yeh, it's fun. So, streaming the consciousness, from top to bottom of the ranting screed, writing as I read:

That "...doesn't fucking mean 'look out, here come's an S'" may be deliberate -- but probably shouldn't have been. There is the proper usage in "doesn't" to consider.

"Your/you're" section does need copyediting to clean sentences up and restore them to grammatical virtue. Taking him at face value, Our Ranter Here does at least know the difference, and all the time. How many examples of stumbling on just this point can we point to in these fora? How echoing is the lack of excuse for it? O.R.H. seems to think staying awake in elementary-school English class to be a good thing. I find it hard to disagree. Clear Writing = Clear Thought.

"It's/Its" -- right if rude. I'd critique this section as being insufficiently developed, contenting itself with only a relevant example, and not putting forth the rule on possessive forms, let alone determinative pronouns as well: that possessive nouns take the apostrophe, while possessive pronouns, to avoid confusion with their soundalike contractions, do not.

The comma spacing problem I have never seen. Fat-finger on little tiny Blackberry keys? In elder days there was a convention (in typesetting anyway) of spacing before a semicolon as well as afterwards. So sayeth Eats, Shoots, And Leaves. Sounds like it used extra paper. I still double-space between sentences, but upon posting that extra byte is the one edited out... onward, ho-ooo.

"There/Their/They're" -- gotta sympathize; it torques me. Somehow it seems posters in their mid-teens err there the most. And then they're determined to stay as ignorant about it as when they arrived. It's a lousy day when you don't learn something new. It's a suck day when you refuse to.

Nothing to say about "Then/Than" except maybe "nice fonts." The words don't sound that much alike. Half-rhyme, at most. Couldn't substitute the one for the other at the ends of lines in a sestina. (A somewhat mechanically difficult verse form in English, having been devised in Romance-language country for those languages.)

He could have gone on, but O.R.H. seems to have spent forty-five minutes to an hour relieving the pressure of his spleen with the composition, and it may have seemed enough. Imagine the fun he could have had appending a section on what we could start calling the Diners' Au Jus and its poor handling in menu copy... Yes, redundant prepositions abound. There's such a thing as being too innocent of French.