grammar

I find grammar very interesting as a subject. That is, I find rules about language and the reasons of their existence very interesting (if there is a discoverable reason). In late high school, I taught myself a lot about grammar. i.e. on the ACT the English section was my second highest score (second of course to math). Then in college I took several semesters of Greek which surprisingly made me understand grammatical concepts a LOT better. Since then I think I've forgotten a lot of things about grammar, but I still feel inclined to write an entry about my feelings on grammar.

I should start by saying that I really don't consider myself in any way to be a grammar nazi. My grammar is categorized into two basic groups. The first is "correct" speech. Of course this is what is prescriptively considered correct. The second is understood speech. This is what people actually understand without giving you strange looks while their language engine parses your sentence. So I guess it's fair to say that I view grammar as an interesting theoretical subject (or at least very loosely applied). With this in mind, I'm going to share some grammatical rules that I completely ignore, some where I'm wishy-washy, and some that I try to stick to religiously. I have various reasons for ignoring rules. Foremost, I want people to understand me. If speaking grammatically means that people don't understand my words then grammar has completely failed in its purpose. Also, I don't want to sound like I think I'm better or smarter or something like that. Apparently, knowledge intimidates, and I have no desire to intimidate. So I keep a very close watch over what I do and don't say and which rules I do and don't keep. But there's also a part of me that really wants to speak correctly, so almost any rule that I can keep while almost no one notices I would happily keep. So without further ado...

Stuff I ignore
1. Like the majority of the English speaking population, I whole-heartedly ignore the rule that one must never end a sentence with a preposition. I even have a strong distaste for the way the rule is usually stated. The idea is not really that there should never be a preposition at the end of the sentence. The idea is really that every preposition should have an object (preferably immediately following the preposition). For example, I wouldn't be surprised if most people who know the rule as stated wouldn't realize that, "Who'd you give that to, yesterday?" still breaks the rule? In any case, this rule when applied to real life can really be a detriment to spoken language. When I started actually understanding this rule well, I remember I spent a few months trying to always use prepositions properly. I had a lot of experiences like the following:

Me: "To whom did you give the book about which you were speaking?"
Them: "Wha?",
Me: "Who'd you give that book you were talking about to?",
Them: "ohh, I gave it to Joe."

So, needless to say, I gave that up. Since then I've come across the concept of "phrasal verbs". In this regard, these have been my grammatical salvation. A really basic way to explain these is that many prepositions used together with many verbs act very similar to adverbs and completely change the meaning of the verb. In this case, I just consider the preposition to be an adverb instead and my grammar parser is happy again.

2. A rule that I completely ignore is not splitting the infinitive. Basically when you have an infinitive: to go, to eat, to walk, etc (verbs with the word to), you are not supposed to put the word "not" in between the words. So the sentence,

"I should tell him to not go to the park."

is incorrect while the sentence,

"I should tell him not to go to the park."

is the correct form. Now usually there isn't really a difference, and there are times with it actually sounds better to not split the infinity. But other times it sounds SO much better to split the infinitive, and other other times it even feels that they have slightly different meanings.

3. This last two may be be somewhat hard to explain. First, when you are writing about a general person, you are supposed to use the word "one" as a pronoun. Like in the following sentence:

"When one is writing about a general person, one is supposed to use the word 'one' as a pronoun."

As you may have gathered, I straight up ignore that one. It sounds so odd and antiquated when one repeatedly uses the pronoun "one". Interestingly enough the French have an official personal pronoun "on" which acts similarly, but the French often use it instead of "nous" (we). It's kind of the opposite of what English speakers do. I guess language speakers just don't like to keep rules.

On a similar note, we have the pronoun "they". In colloquial speech we have this AMAZING ability to use it when we don't want to specify the sex of an unknown person. For example we can say sentences like,

"I saw someone at the store and they were buying apples."

This makes the blood of grammar nazis boil, but I find it fabulous!

4. One more very specific thing that I ignore is the word "swum". I still remember in 5th grade or so when I learned that the past participle of swim is swum. (I have swum.) Back then I thought it sounded ridiculous and today I still feel the same way. So I refuse to use the word swum. Although, I guess technically I usually don't actually break the rule. I just find some way to bend the sentence in such a way that I wouldn't use the past participle. For example, instead of saying, "I have swum with manatees," I'd say something like, "I remember swimming with manatees" or "When I was in Florida last I swam with manatees." On the other hand, maybe that's why I'm just generally not a big fan of swimming; deep down inside I know that if I swim too much I'll have to use the past participle of swim.

Somewhere in between

1. Imagine you're name is "Joe". You get a phone call and the caller says, "Is Joe there?" Of course, everyone knows you are supposed to say, "This is he." But very few people do. I'm usually one of those people who doesn't. The reason I disregard this rule is because I think it's silly. Now I understand that English has a Latin based grammar and so it's wrong because we are using a verb of being and you're supposed to use a nominative (He rather than me or him), but I have beef with the basic concept that English should have a Latin based grammar or even that that should imply that one is supposed to say "This is he." For example, let's look again at French. As opposed to English, French actually is a romance language (evolved from Latin). So it would actually make sense for French to have a Latin-based grammar, but even in French it is proper to say, "c'est moi" (It's/That's me) when someone asks for John. Now if French, with l'Academie Francaise as the super prescriptivist group can say, "That's me" then in English, where we have very little real etymological reason to be Latin based, it should be ok to say, "That's me." That being said, I still occasionally say, "This is he," simply because I know it's right and at times my grammar engine wins the few millisecond mental battle.

2. Next on the docket we have special plurals. That is, plurals from other languages that somehow kept their native plural. A lot of math words keep their original form (at least among mathematicians) like: maxima, extrema, matrices, bases (plural of basis), indices, etc. With all these math words, I use the "proper" plural forms. This is basically because everyone around me does too and so it's acceptable and even expectable. On the other hand there are plenty of loan words where I don't use the "proper" plural. Like stadium. I think I've said "stadia" maybe once or twice in my life. I think I dislike this one because it is so inconsistent.

3. Finally, to the anguish of my brother I'm sure, when someone asks me, "How are you?", I rarely ever say, "I am well." Honestly, I rarely ever say, "I'm good," but I don't care in any way when people say, "I am good." I think typically use some other word like "fine" or something, which may be equally as bad. It's just that this way I don't sound like I'm better and I don't want to cringe inside while saying, "I'm good."

Stuff I don't ignore
1. Finally there are a few rules that I try to follow religiously. These are rules that a lot of people don't follow, but even if I do they will both understand me and not even notice that I spoke differently. First is adverb/adjective agreement. I realize that there are plenty of words that can be used as both adverbs and adjectives, I just don't know which so I pick words that are easily distinguishable. For example, is it ok to say:

"He runs fast."?

I can never remember if words like fast can be used as adverbs. And if it can be, is that only because people have abused adjective/adverb agreement for so long? In any case, I would stick to either, "He runs quickly", or "He's fast". The beauty of this is that if someone were to say, "He talks weird", I doubt they'd notice if I said, "He talks strangely" instead. On a similar note, I can't stand Apple's old slogan, "Think different", even though they claim they are using it as a fanciful category. (I doubt many people see "Think different" and think to themselves, "ohh they are using 'different' as a category, like 'think yellow' or 'think change'...hogwash, they see it and think, "I'm supposed to think in a different way." i.e. "Think differently.")

2. I also try to always use the subjunctive correctly. Sentences like:

"I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener."

The only problem here is that I get confused as to how I'm supposed to write mathematics. There is a common mathematical tool called, "proof by contradiction". Basically you want to prove that x is an integer, or something like that, so you assume that it is not an integer and then arrive at an impossibility (a contradiciton). When I'm proving something by contradiction, should I use the subjunctive? Since I know that x is not real, should I say, "Assume x were real."? I've not come to a formal stance on this and I think it's probably very dependent on the structure, but it still bothers me when I'm writing proofs.

3. Finally, there's not much to say about it, but I try to always use fewer and less correctly. This is also something that most people wouldn't notice.

Another Set of Dreams

Seems that all I do interesting lately is have weird dreams. So I figured I'd share the dreams of my last two nights, well at least the parts that I can remember.

I really remember very little about this first dream cuz it was two days ago. So the first one I was at a swimm'n hole with my sister. When we got out of the water she screamed and said, "There's a humongous frog!!". And sure enough next to the swimm'n hole there was a mud hole and there was a humongous frog playing in the mud. The frog, when sitting, was about 2 ft tall and he had a really long neck. Anyway, when he saw me he came straight for me. He chased me a few times around the mud hole and finally he took a big jump at me and it startled me awake. Yes I did shake awake.

On to last night. My dad had started a new business. I think it was a car repair business. In any case he'd figured out a new ingenious way to life cars for repair. He showed me on his new business vehicle (which was a ghostbusters station wagon!!). First you would take several rolls of paper towels and attach them to the frame of the car. Then you'd put the rolls on a metal bar (that is the bar goes through the tubes for the rolls.) Then you'd roll up the paper towel rolls and the car would of course lift. His secret: the paper towels were extra-ply. So he took up shop in a large several story house boat. I also remember that children would come to his business for school field trips and he specifically showed me a bowl that he had in the bathroom in case the toilet stopped working...I'm not sure exactly how it was used, but ohh well. So then a friend and I went on the upper floors of his boat house to find his weed cellar (yes marijuana). The weed cellar had gotten into disrepair, but we could see the weed inside through the windows. So we decided to break the door open. When we did lots of rats started coming out. We had to smash the rats as the exited. But some of the rats had been mutated by the weed and they were growing weed on their backs, so we kept those rats after smashing them. But then one particular rat that I tried to smash had somehow been bitten by a radio active spider so when I lifted my foot back up he'd managed to attach his webbing to the bottom of my boot. He started climbing up his web toward my foot. Again I started awake shaking my foot in bed trying to get the rat off, until I realized that it was all a dream.

Does it mean something that I keep getting startled out of my sleep when being attacked by freak of nature animals? I don't know, but I do know that I seem to have weird dreams. Actually I remember another dream I had that I was surrounded by foot long ants. They didn't attack me or anything, but I remember the whole time wondering how much weight they could carry.