Up for debate: is ulytau's thread just an implement of white-male hegemony?

zultar, we're very inclusive. All you have to do to join is go post something flagrantly ungrammatical or poorly spelled in ulytau's thread.

Example: "If I wasn't so excited about joining semck83's thread, I might actually play this game. Oh well, I am."

Should the quotation mark be inside the period/ full stop?

No.

(Closing periods always go inside closing quotation marks. Closing exclamation points and question marks go inside or outside, depending whether they are part of the quotation).

Woot! Cool thread! And for the record, I am a white-male and part of the ruling elite inner circle. Obama does my bidding (but he sure can screw it up) so clearly the other thread is anti-establishment and *not* part of the white-male hegemony.

Good. I always get confused about that.

This is concerning, Draug. Do you mean they're seditious Communist schemers? Do they need to be oppressed?

No one need oppress them. they will eventually collapse under their own weight due to all the rules they have to implement to keep them in elitist power whilst not *looking* like they are elitist.

Zultar has claimed, in the other thread, to have named my thread. The opposite is clearly true: he merely formed the possessive form of a prepositional phrase that _I_ had already employed in the title.

I'm beginning to think the sedition theory is correct.

Sue me, bitch.
I'm getting that 20% royalties no matter what.
The "losers" wasn't cool until I said "losers unite." Therefore, I get the royalties.
Damn it, semck83, you are suck a dick.

It's a conspiracy I tell you - a consipracy of the highest order! The elitist group refuses to call each other out and ignore the posts by those who have already been eliminated pointing out their errors. :-)

No, you are suck a dick.

WHO'S AN ELITIST? IS HE NEW?

Forget it, zultar, you'll never get a penny. A case like that will drag on for years. And you know what? You know what, zultar? The losers' thread was cool the second "semck83" showed up as the initial poster. Yeah, take that!

You are both suck ducking ship heads.

How am I going to support my Friday night google+ life with pretentious wine if I can't get no royalties?

Dude, you should have thought of that and created your own rocking thread. You can't just leech off the hard work of others.

Parenthetically, I think cooler rules for the grammar thread would have been that if you get caught, you lose a point (negative is fine) and the person catching you gains one. As it is, we're almost through all the people who care.

I think ulytau's right about Therefore.

That's why you're the cool guy who deserves his royalties.

Bad grammar is only a problem when the meaning of the phrase can't be conveyed. Study of grammar should only be descriptive, not prescriptive. Claims that developments in grammar are wrong are just conservative subjective statements of preference.

Discuss.

Lol no. Let's all rejoice in grammatic smugness for those lowly bastards deserve it.

You raise some good points.

Good topic, Vaft.

I disagree. Certainly grammar and language should be allowed to develop (and they will develop, whether they're allowed to or not). But only developments that preserve or promote clarity and precision in communication should be encouraged as correct. Not all grammar is equal, and some developments in language make it harder, rather than easier, to clearly and precisely communicate ideas.

A simple example is two words evolving to mean the same thing, when they did not before. I think this should be discouraged, by and large. (What I mean precisely is that, if the new usage of one is considered "incorrect," then that should continue). Why? Because once the evolution is complete, and there are two words that mean the same thing, the language will now be less well adapted for communicating the two distinct ideas, and thus less well adapted to easy and clear communication, at all. A classic example, I would say, is "comprise" and "constitute." Comprise is a very useful word that doesn't have any very useful synonyms, but its meaning has been evolving toward "constitute." This should be resisted, because we need a word like comprise.

I meant grammar in a linguistic sense here, that is, the structure of language, including morphology and syntax, but not semantics. That's a different topic. But in semantics, I'd say that your example falls under "when the meaning of the phrase can't be conveyed" that I mentioned earlier for grammar.

My real problem is people saying "You can't start a sentence with a conjunction... Because!" I want to headbutt them. And then write like this. Fuckers. <3 fragments.

And I'm talking from a general linguistic point of view, not specific to one language. English is not my first language, and I'm sure I make mistakes constantly. But even in Swedish, where I know all the grammatical rules well, I break them on purpose when it looks prettier or sounds better. Fuck rules.

"(Closing periods always go inside closing quotation marks. Closing exclamation points and question marks go inside or outside, depending whether they are part of the quotation)."

This is for Americans only, I think. British people put punctuation outside the quotes much more often. So be aware of that.

Breaking the rules deliberately to convey a different feel is something different than just being lazy in your communication. That's true for every human endeavour, by the way.