OT: a solution to the grammar wars.
For those who wince at the poor use of grammar, the Soceity for the Promotion of Good Grammar has a website for you. SPOGG accepts submissions of examples of poor grammar. The next time you read poorly written post here, simply copy it and sumbit it to SPOGG: http://spogg.org/. For those who are unsure about the rules of grammar and punctuation, visit SPOGG for some tips. This should reduce the snarkiness on this site.
i reed good
Shouldn't that be "The next time you read "a" poorly written post here"?
Normally I wouldn't care, but this is a post about grammar after all.
nailed. I left myself wide open. By the way, I am personally partial to "Our Endless Numbered Days."
I can see "post" being a plural noun, like a quantity of something. Like "poorly written text" for example. Well, ok. Maybe it's a stretch. LOL
wars are fun. The fear of topics getting derailed by grammar debates is what is going to keep this place from becoming YouTube Comments Redux.
I don't understand your reasoning. Are you saying that the fear of being "outed" on the SPOGG site will shame people here into correct usage? Personally, I think that taking someone's post and pasting it over there is considerably more disrespectful than just offering a comment here.
it has nothing to do with SPOGG. I am saying that the embarrassment of not knowing "their/there/they're" and having it derail your a thread is the type of thing that will make people proofread their comments here, ultimately improving the quality of MGoBoard.
deleted, sorry
I wish I would of known about that sooner.
So you could turn yourself in for writing "would of?"
Note: If your post is intentionally ironic I retract my lame witticism and extend my congratulations on a job well done.
Yeah, I'm glad you included your note. The "would of" "could of" is a McFarlin favorite. I'm sure your more smarter than that but should of known I was joking.
Slipping in other grammar mistakes with "should of" make my head asplode trying to determine if it was intentional.
I'm not on here enough to know which posters are not so swift and which are feigning it.
I know, no worries bro. I'm kind of a grammar nerd. Chances are, I'm faking it. Magnus on the other hand, he has a crazy retardation. Just tell him to chill out and all is well.
For example, "myriad" was once used primarily as an adjective, but is now used as either a noun or an adjective, as in "a myriad of reasons" or "myriad reasons." Also, the dangling preposition has apparently become an accepted element of journalism, as in "The Amazing Age We Live In, case file No. 473," in the "mgo.licio.us" box to the right of this post. At any rate, these have certainly become part of vernacular English.
At what point, though, do you pull the plug?
Should recreational posters who come here to discuss their favorite team be required to write as if their posts were going to be part of a term paper for an English Composition class? Should common or vernacular language be ridiculed for its very existence?
I try to be non-judgemental about grammar. Some posts are pleasing to the eye and some are almost impossible for me to read. If a post uses no punctuation or "white space," then I usually just skip it. Twenty sentences in one long paragraph are too tedious for me, and I skip them, too. Posts that look like text messages don't really have much allure for me, either.
But I don't begrudge anyone their style of posting. And I certainly don't think anyone is any better or worse than anyone else because they know or don't know how to write effectively.
This is supposed to be recreation here; it is not a final exam. People who can't write effectively will catch enough crap from people in other aspects of their lives; berating them for it here really accomplishes nothing.
If anyone is really concerned about another's grammar, maybe a gentle offlist reminder would be apporpriate.
But I don't think the militant grammarians on the site are saying anybody is better or worse because of grammar. The point is not to have perfect grammar, but just to write well enough that:
1. You communicate your thoughts relatively painlessly; and
2. Our (or "are" for those at whom this post is targeted) fanbase doesn't look completely illiterate.
In other words, split infinitives are acceptable, unhinged non-English is not.
Split infinitives actually are always grammatically acceptable in English. The "prohibition" against them was just an old fad started by Latinophiles who wanted to make English sound as much like that language as possible. (In Latin, you literally cannot split an infinitive, since it's one word). Star Trek's catchphrase ("To boldly go where no man has gone before...") is perfectly good grammar.
The only caveat with split infinitives is that if you insert too many words in between the "to" and the verb, you can potentially cause confusion.
I'm actually aware of that. My point was that posters shouldn't worry about observing supposedly strict rules but should try to communicate clearly. I suppose I wasn't clear about that and thus violated my own maxim.
Good catch anyway.
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