Tuesday, July 29, 2008
English Abuse
I find it interesting that I spent so much time in school being taught the proper use of English with all of the nuances only to have to live with the way that it is used in real life. It is really amusing. The other day, I was on a ferry ride to Fort Sumter, SC. The ranger was giving the passengers the normal safety talk and commented: "We have life preservers on board for adults and children under 90 pounds.". This brought two curious thougts to my mind: (1) What will happen to adults and children over 90 pounds? or (2) A 90 pound life jacket just might defeat the purpose of wearing one.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
While the sentence may be grammatically ambiguous, I find it interesting that probably everyone listening to this man understood what he was saying perfectly.
I also find it interesting how English as a spoken language is growing so far apart from the written language. I suppose it can't be helped due to the stretching of the language in North America, Europe, South Asia and even Australia.
What's more, take a look some time at some English language texts from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. There was hardly uniformity back then. In fact, it was somewhat like the internet is today, where there are so many people printing and publishing on a small scale that uniformity is unimaginable, let alone enforced. Even matters such as spelling, which thanks to our spell-checkers will hardly ever misfire, were fairly u up in the air. From what I can see, it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when language was brought under the authority of a massive state apparatus, that proper instruction in grammar (language must conform to the rigor of logic) became a goal for schools. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Bryan suggests, have challenges ahead that perhaps no state can tackle; at least, none that have been formed yet...
Thankfully, they do not need to either.
I had not realized that the issue of that grammar had continued to perplex you. I very much enjoy the poorly structure and even more poorly uttered statements of people that don't observe proper grammar. This is one reason why I laugh at myself for being absolutely dreadful at spoken English.
I did not say anything about being perplexed ... I said amused. You can have a lot of fun when you take so much of what is uttered on a daily basis and analyze what it really says. This is especially true for the instructions you get on an airplane.
On the other hand, I find it more and more the case that for business writing, I have to be extremely specific and anticipate all of the strange ways something can be interpreted. It is just strange and funny.
So I have an English question for you. In your post, you wrote:
The ranger was giving the passengers the normal safety talk and commented: "We have life preservers on board for adults and children under 90 pounds.".
Quotes have always thrown me off because I have never really understood how to properly use punctation with them. I suppose I should probably pay more attention when I read, but then that might take all of the enjoyment away. So is it necessary to include both periods? If so, is that due to the colon?
I have also been confused about punctuation within quotes. I know I was taught it at some point (probably 11th grade honors English with Ms. Hattie Cooper - best English teacher I ever had). I guess I take a logical approach. I am writing a sentence of my own which requires its punctuation. Simple enough. The quote within my sentence is a quote of a full sentence (often quotes are of portions of statements so you see the ellipses - ... - within the quotes). Since it is a quote of a full sentence, it seems to me that it should have its own punctuation.
Well, I did some exploring and found out more about punctuation inside of quotations. I went to the following website (among many) to see what the rules are:
http://socrates.acadiau.ca/dagora/tutorial/qpunct.html
Based on this, I should remove the final period as the colon represents the end of my statement. If I had a question or exclamation on my sentence, then I would add that outside the quote.
I am not going to bother to update the blog, though.
Duh, I am with Tim... I speak and write like I teach the "cheren"! I had no help from my English teachers in high school and I keep a copy of Werner's English, Grammar, and Composition at my desk. This text is still used in the high school... go figure....
At least I doesn't spreak ebonics! BT
Well based on what i have learned through my studies of citation in composition and rhetoric this semester, i believe the proper quote would be something like this:
The ranger was giving the passengers the normal safety talk and commented, "We have life preservers on board for adults and children under 90 pounds."
The quote always begins with a coma, then a space, the the first quotation mark. After the quote is finished, if it is the end of the statement, then the final punctuation goes inside the closing quote. No punctuation is necessary outside the closed quote unless you are siting a source, in which case no citation goes inside the closing quote. It is a little confusing typed out which is why most grammar text books come complete with several examples. I hope this helped some.
Post a Comment