Dammit. I thought he said "lots of." I need to read more carefully.
Edit: On second thought, maybe I was right, anyway. https://www.redlinels.com/is-a-lot-singular-or-plural/
You can't make this up...
- Thread starter cosmickid
- Start date
Edit: On second thought, maybe I was right, anyway. https://www.redlinels.com/is-a-lot-singular-or-plural/
This is the kind of OCD shit that makes me crazy with plural pronouns used instead of him/her. Mrs. Bridgewater (7th grade English) would be aghast.
Fox News is drawing rebuke after airing a graphic tracking stock market gains following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who savagely beat Rodney King, and the police killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd.
One of the graphics aired:
I’m glad I tuned in to Fox yesterday. It cleared up a lot of things. Now I know Mattis is just a disgruntled ex employee, Trump is showing excellent leadership, Joe Biden is doing everything he can to divide the country and black people are over-policed so we can better protect good black people from bad black people.
Collective nouns are grammatically interesting. In England, as I understand it, collective nouns are all plural, even if they don’t end with an s. I’m sort of a pedant, because both by profession and by personal interest I care about usage. But ultimately I’m with Stephen Fry.
She might if she just googled something and pasted it so as to convince people she was "smart".
The effortting that went into the listening was well worth the effort to listen.
So here’s me being a pedant when I say I wouldn’t have added the additional t to effortting. But what is the “right” answer? I doubt there is one, even if there is. Mostly I think the usage in that case has to do with telling the reader whether they’re “hearing” a short or a long vowel sound, and I don’t think “efforting” creates any confusion about how the o sounds, so I wouldn’t add a t. But this feels less like a rule than an aesthetic to me.
Here’s an odd example that illustrates my point. We change the spelling of “picnic” when we write “picnicking”. We add a k to picnic when we write picnicking because we don’t want the reader to “hear” a long i in picnicing.
Similarly, the usage of “a” or “an” doesn’t depend on whether the first letter of the next word is a vowel or a consonant. It depends on whether the first letter of the next word sounds like a vowel or a consonant. So we write “an NFL player” and not “a NFL player”.
Anyway, my point in this pedantic digression is that writing is best written when it sounds good to our ears, which may or may not be the same as whether it conforms to formal rules. In his rules for writing, Elmore Leonard said, “if it sounds like writing I re-write it.” But he had a great ear for writing.
I'm not a fan of Calvinball when it comes to grammar. I try to play by the rules, but when I'm unsure that is my tie breaker.
The rules should always be the default, but good writers know how and when to break the rules. Breaking grammatical rules can be like jazz. Or kneeling during the national anthem.
James was a master of dialogue, didn't sound like writing at all.
Anyway, I'll have you know I took some time and did consider my options before getting itt wrong, kinda.
Paste:
I or O can be long when they come before two consonants.
In the word stroll, as in The emu went for a stroll, the letter O comes before two consonants and says its long vowel sound. In these words, I or O are long before two consonants: kind, gold, child.
Unpaste
But then the word kiln comes to mind.
Please don’t think I was screwing with you. I get that you get it. I just find this all nerdly interesting. My bad if it seemed otherwise.
And then there's the use of adverbs as adjectives. <sigh>
video of Trumps arrival.
i think the shoulder piece was a present from Jr.
it's never really regal without the flower petals.
You're right. At this point people aren't really upset about it because they expect it. But it's still natural to want to vent and bash Trump. Judgement day is in early November.
Thank you for bringing back to life one of our many fun discussions on grammar.
A video of his supporters in case you missed it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-ca...r-golf-club-a-peaceful-protest-010531486.html
Last edited:
The sad thing for Trump is when he leaves, these same people will not give a flying feck about him other than the true cultists.
Similar threads
