OT: - Grammar controversy | The Boneyard

OT: Grammar controversy

My favorite is the one where a comma saved a man's life. The story is that a man who was convicted of a capital crime appealed to the President for a pardon. The President send back his judgment as follows..."Pardon, impossible to be be sent to the gallows", instead of what he intended, "Pardon impossible, to be sent to the gallows."
The man was released.
 
Probably an apocryphal story, but supposedly Winston Churchill got a note back from an editor complaining about him ending a sentence with a preposition. He said, "This is a situation up with which I will not put."

Ending sentences with prepositions, no split infinitives, etc., may be good rules but they don't always make good writing. A firm grasp of the rules allows one to break them properly.
 
WiseWillie said:
Boy, the things bored b-ball affectionados do to entertain ourselves from the end of one season and the beginning of another. What next? Trivia contest? Puzzles? Mystery solving? Critical discussion by our fellow grammarians of the split infinitives rule?
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First summer on the Boneyard? We do all of those things on one board or another. The men’s board played Mafia all summer a couple years ago. A Boneyarders set up a weekly trivia game for years here. Why not?
 
I've been a professional writer in a number of very different fields for more than 50 years. They way I've dealt with this has been like this:
1. Follow the rule when you can, which turns out to be the vast majority of the time. This often helps the reader, because the "to" or "with" hanging off the ends of the sentence can be confusing when the rest of the words with which they go are back in the middle of the sentence.
2. Reread the sentence. If it seems like word soup to do it that way -- (the "with which" or "to which" just stands out like a sore thumb and distracts the reader or chops up the flow of the sentence) to hell with the rule. Give the reader a break and write a sentence that's smooth and easiest to understand.
 
Bigboote said:
Probably an apocryphal story, but supposedly Winston Churchill got a note back from an editor complaining about him ending a sentence with a preposition. He said, "This is a situation up with which I will not put."

Ending sentences with prepositions, no split infinitives, etc., may be good rules but they don't always make good writing. A firm grasp of the rules allows one to break them properly.
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Always the contrarian, I try to end all my sentences with a preposition. But, seriously, a beautiful sentence ending in a preposition can be turned into a stilted mess trying to adhere to the "rule".
 
Bigboote said:
Probably an apocryphal story, but supposedly Winston Churchill got a note back from an editor complaining about him ending a sentence with a preposition. He said, "This is a situation up with which I will not put."

Ending sentences with prepositions, no split infinitives, etc., may be good rules but they don't always make good writing. A firm grasp of the rules allows one to break them properly.
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+1
 
tomcat said:
I've been a professional writer in a number of very different fields for more than 50 years. They way I've dealt with this has been like this:
1. Follow the rule when you can, which turns out to be the vast majority of the time. This often helps the reader, because the "to" or "with" hanging off the ends of the sentence can be confusing when the rest of the words with which they go are back in the middle of the sentence.
2. Reread the sentence. If it seems like word soup to do it that way -- (the "with which" or "to which" just stands out like a sore thumb and distracts the reader or chops up the flow of the sentence) to hell with the rule. Give the reader a break and write a sentence that's smooth and easiest to understand.
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I went from an abysmal writer to a pretty good one based on two rules a creative writing teacher had when I was a junior in high school:

Use strong verbs.

Never use two words where one will suffice. (There were ALWAYS points off for adverbs, which violate both rules.)

At work, if there was a page limit on a paper our group was submitting, I always wrote the first draft.
 
HuskyNan said:
This isn’t what I learned in elementary school. This might be as controversial as the Oxford comma

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Your elementary school teacher, and mine, taught a bunch of codswallop. They were quick to declare stylistic preferences “rules”. Had they bothered to read Hemingway, or Sinclair Lewis, or a certain gent named Shakespeare, they would have been astounded that such literary luminaries had scant use for the 19th century latinate school of English grammar.

And we shall go where no man or woman has gone before*.

IMG_2886.gif



*This is probably adverbial, rather than a preposition, but tweaking faux grammarians is fun.
 
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Hoops66 said:
My favorite is the one where a comma saved a man's life. The story is that a man who was convicted of a capital crime appealed to the President for a pardon. The President send back his judgment as follows..."Pardon, impossible to be be sent to the gallows", instead of what he intended, "Pardon impossible, to be sent to the gallows."
The man was released.
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Which brings up the story of the young English teacher in San Francisco who had made it through the winter with the Donner party. Her lesson on commas was simple, "There's a big difference between 'Let's eat, Gramma vs. Let's eat Gramma.'"
 
Bigboote said:
Probably an apocryphal story, but supposedly Winston Churchill got a note back from an editor complaining about him ending a sentence with a preposition. He said, "This is a situation up with which I will not put."

Ending sentences with prepositions, no split infinitives, etc., may be good rules but they don't always make good writing. A firm grasp of the rules allows one to break them properly.
Expand ...
As a sometime fiction writer, I never use grammar check. But I have to say that “would’ve, could’ve and should’ve” are not contractions of “would of” could of or should of”. That I object to.
 
Bigboote said:
At work, if there was a page limit on a paper our group was submitting, I always wrote the first draft.
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As a quondam copy editor I was taught to ‘dele’, or excise every word that didn't add meaning. Terse text ensued.

Back on topic, Bama fan, who used to post here, referred me to Morris Bishop's witty verse about terminal prepositions.


“I lately lost a preposition:
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: “Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!”

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: “What should he come
Up from out of in under for?” “
 
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