My 9yo son has homework to find six "adverbial phrases" (I had to look this up) in one of his books. I had to look through three novels to find even one example, and in the end I made four of the six up.
You may say I shouldn't be doing my son's homework for him, and you'd be right. But if you're going to say that, please also explain to me how there is any expectation that any of these primary-age children are going to do this themselves, and what the benefit of doing so is, and what the benefit of knowing what an "adverbial phrase" is? Because the whole thing seems to me like a waste of time designed to teach children that they can't be expected to do their own homework.
Hey @grammargirl, I have a question that I’m hoping you can help answer. I learned at one point that the correct usage of the words comply and conform are that you comply with laws, but that products or designs conform to standards. The dictionary is not quite so definitive. What are your thoughts on this? #grammar#usage
While I'm a stickler about the proper use of Daying Saving (no 's'), I have to hand it to Savant that this GE Sync promo is pretty clever. Even if it does feel about a week too late. #smarthome#grammar#daylightsaving
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
I almost always prefer the European standard of a spaced en dash ( – ) to the US’s unspaced em dash (—). It’s less distracting and feels more semantically accurate as a separator of clauses. (Keeping in mind that every font has different dash proportions.)
Here’s a rare case in which an em would reduce confusion. For a quick moment, I mistook that en for a minus.
What kills me about learning #Latin is you’re effectively learning two languages at once. You’re learning the actual vocab, conjugations, declensions etc – and you’re also learning the language of #grammar itself: what the grammatical rules and parts are called and how they map to particular functions of language
Latin is the kind of language that, in the past, used to be drilled by asking discipuli things like “what is the passive second person plural subjunctive” or whatever the fuck
This means that a lot of the language learning tools I’ve encountered are based on the assumption that you already know this ‘second language’ of grammar, so eg the vocab flashcard lists I have found have got verbs in four different forms, and I’m like “what the fuck do those mean? Which is which and how do I know which one is called for in which situation?”
Like, I can tell that one of them is the infinitive and one of them looks like the first person present indicative – and by the way, these are terms that I only know because I’ve had to teach myself grammar in order to edit other people‘s work – what the fuck are the other two??? I’m just looking at them going, “well, you know, it’d be nice to know that”
If you are a native English speaker aged under 50, you probably didn’t learn grammar at school in your first language, and you probably don’t even know how to apply these words to your native language!
As a copyeditor in my own first language, English, I have had to teach myself the language of grammar in order to explain why certain choices I intuitively know are right or wrong. I am an EXCELLENT editor and yet I still have to look up English.stackexchange to find out what the word is for the function of language I am trying to explain
I’m honestly not sure if the traditional rote learning method or the intuitive ‘immersion’ method of language learning Duolingo uses is better for Latin
because Duolingo’s weakness is that it is based on guessing: you never learn the rules and so you don’t know why something is correct or not correct, which can help you analyse what a certain sentence demands
Basically Duolingo wants to make everyone into the same kind of speaker that I am in English
Surely there’s a happy medium
(Unfortunately I suspect it is ‘formal language classes such as one takes in school’)
There should be an IDE for writers (novelists, journalists, bloggers, etc). I’m imagining something that feels like PhpStorm, but would check grammar and readability, cross reference with specific data sources, and other Writer-y type tasks.
I never really saw the point in correcting someone's grammar, but if I can get called a fly sodomizing little dot shitting comma fucker then I'm going to start 😂
Re an earlier toot, #English needs a set of verbs like #French#tutoyer. Verbing words like “it” (as someone did in a reply - “to it someone”) or “thou” (as is sometimes done when discussing #Quaker speech) doesn’t feel right. Also, is there a #German equivalent of tutoyer? #grammar#translation