Whats that your calling me? A grammer snob!
You know you've got yourself a reputation as a grammar snob when three people mail you this link in the same day, saying "I saw this and thought of you". Great! I never wanted it to be this way. I'm not really a snob about it and I'm definitely no expert. I just think it's important to try and get it right. Take this quiz and see how you fare. I got a measly 6. For which I blame my schooling. Unless I just wasn't listening when they explained the apostrophe to me.
Anyway, I mention it merely as a link to say thanks to Andre Morkel for my early Christmas present. Expect more blog entries like this.
On another matter altogether, it's been almost a month since I set about finding my new company a bank account. Can you believe I've still not got myself one?! That's what you get for choosing an "ethical" bank. The amount of proof of ID they want from me has driven me away and I've got a meeting with my "personal" bank today in an attempt to make it a little simpler.
Talking of the new company. I must, must, must finish off the website and start pimping myself more. I guess this is the trouble of working for yourself - it's easy to concentrate on the real work and forget all about the important stuff that doesn't pay.
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(title) GrammEr Snob?
Owe eye get tit now; Ironie
Dough!
Just to let you know I got 8 answers correct in the quiz and i'm from Belgium, natively speaking Flemish!
I must admit that the question about Shakespeare was a lucky guess, though :-)
James. Is that the only error you found in the title? :-)
Jean Marie. It seems that people who learn English as their second language do so a lot better than we do. Especially the Germans.
Although I am a German (no I do not eat people) and scored only 4 in the test I think your title should be:
What's that you're calling me? A "grammar snob"?
You are still lokking for a bank? How about the BCCI Bank?
Top marks to mt69clp.
BCCI? Never heard of 'em.
Whats that YOU'RE calling me
I got a measly six as well - this have never been in my english teaching! (unless I was asleep) - ive never seen a semi colon used in that manner:
"I have been a good boy all year; I want a digger and a Spider-Man costume from Santa."
Dont go Barclays - they too use offshore call centres - which I found out whilst shopping for a choice to switch from HSBC to.
Well considering I only left School 5-6 years ago my score was 5. I NEVER remember them teaching me anything to do with the apostrophe.
Infos about BCCI bank:
{Link}
7 right.
Have you read "The Well-Tempered Sentence"? It is a weird and wonderful book on punctuation. The subtitle is "A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed".
I got 7 right!
My pet snobism: use of the word to.
"I will go to the two cent show, too."
too = also
two = 2
to = a fairly useless word if you speak cave-man.
I see people use "to" when they mean "too", a lot. Not hard to remember, I shouldn't think.
Tom E. No, but I should. For example - should the second sentence of this paragraph have that comma? I don't know. It just looks right to me.
Jerry. That reminds me of a story. While I was a student I got my friends trying to concoct a sentence that hard the three variation following each other in a sentence. I won! The sentence was:
"What would you say to two too strong coffees?"
Beat that!
My team at work calls me a grammar freak. On the test, I got an 8 -- the results counted 7 correct but noted that in the US, I would have gotten one of the questions right. Since that's where I am, I gave myself the extra.
Here's a zinger.
Alice, while Jane had had "had", had had "had had". "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
I vaugly remembered this from grammar class, but had to search it out on the internet for the exact phrasing.
If the OED had recognozed that brackets, braces and parentheses are different things (and had included elipses, as I did), then I would have scored 10. Since the question did not ask how many punctuation marks there are, but how many the OED claims there are, then I will settle for my 9 and leave it at that. (By the way, this is a parenthetical -- not bracketaceous -- sentence, so the external delimiters are properly called parentheses.) Now, that's snobbish!
I agree with Steve, anyone that has an offshore callcentre is abusing you and their new employees. Avoid like plague. What? This site's about Domino Development? ohh..er... Notes 6.5, hurrah, it's fab, use it darling.. [will that do?]
I, too, got a six. However, it would have been a seven but for the difference in punctuation rules between British English and American (regarding the period inside quotation marks).
But I'm not bitter.
You may have recognosed that speelinghe is not my forté, though.
Well, I surprised myself with a 9, although I will admit that while I got the count of punctuation correct, I didn't end up with the same list as them. I included square brackets and single quotes, and forgot about the dash and didn't count Capitalised letters. Does that still count?
I have to admit that I am guilty of failing with many of these rules, particularly semi-colons in the middle of sentences, and punctuation inside quotes.
My pet snobism is also the "to, two, too" syndrome, to which I add "their, there, they're" and "your, you're"
It's people that spell "lose" as "loose" that bug me!
Dave you wouldn't believe how many people - especially in IT spell lose as loose - its weird!
In most cases the spelling "loose" might just be correct when they are talking about their general attitude and knowledge.
And by the way, Steve: It's "it's weired". :-)
I simply MUST add my tuppence to this thread -- grammar (or the lack of comprehension of it) by most technically-proficient people has been a constant source of alternating amusement and irritation to me.
Jennifer, the whole point of CORRECT grammar is to place the final punctuation mark inside the final inverted commas. American English uses "popular" as aposed to "strict" grammar.
The bit I don't understand is: how do practitioners of American English actually programme using strings It must just be too too confusing ...
I can remember almost every day of grade seven English we wrote out quotations of direct speech; woe betide anyone that put the last comma outside the last inverted comma. (Steve: two sentances joined together without a conjunction require a semi-colon.)
If you are really interested, THE DEFINITIVE PUNCTUATION REFERENCE has historically been Fowler. ({Link}
Jerry, that's a bottler! I recall this one:
When using the phrase "Father and son", it is not normal to pause between "Father" and "And", and "And" and "Son".
This was a topic recently on Radio 4's PM programme; unfortunately it is too late for my brain to function sufficiently well enough for me to remember the two very clever apostrophe examples that illustrate the point perfectly ... Oh well, I'll sleep onit and try to remember tomorrow.
Actually my pet hate -- especially at the moment -- is the incorrect use of the SSI abbreviation for bits instead of bytes. If I see one more reference to a 40Mb harddrive or 256Mb RAM I'm going to scream. It makes an eightfold difference to numerate people.
Patrick, you started picking on this, so I have to take unit geeking to the next level. While the storage capacity of harddrives is indeed given in MB, memory module sizes are in MiB. ;-)
If you got only a six on the grammer quiz mentioned above at {Link}
I congratulate you. I read the questions in disbelief. Winston Churchill would have wet himself laughing!
geeks!
Its all nonsense some of the silly rules which most of the english speaking populations can't remember.
I feel a little doubtfull of writing not sure if my english is typed well.
As long as one can get their message across it should be made fine.
I stink, I only got 5 right! I'm usually good at writing....