"good" and "food" should rhyme.

^ that one's from an old Gallagher routine.

We drive on a parkway, and park in a driveway.

Let us eat lettuce.

There is a big difference between:

Let's eat, grandpa.

and

Let's eat granpa.

punctuation is powerful a poster tells me:

A professor writes the following on the board telling his students to punctuate it correctly:

A woman without her man is nothing


THe guys write:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.


The women write

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

A grocery list:

Milk, eggs, bacon, coffee, cheese and ammunition

…… versus ……

Milk, eggs, bacon, coffee, cheese, and ammunition

…

I can't buy "cheese and ammunition" in a package, can I?

Knowing at good bit of Latin quickly taught me that English is about as dumb as dumb gets. Too complex to say the least.

English grammar is simple, espcially compared to Latin. No gender,cases almost nonexistant. Plurals are easy. Just tenses and moods.

Why do words need to have a gender? What makes a toaster feminine but a pencil masculine?

If English is your first language, yes, it's easy. If not, it's not.

As much as you need standardized spellings...

I will we could still make up our own or choose the one we wanted a la Chaucer, ie, decide between "show" or "shew" for the same word.

Just for fun.

:)

2WL - You really cant work out why a toaster is feminine and a pencil is masculine.... ?

@BrownPaperTiger, I wouldn't jump to hat conclusion. Latin (as an example because it was previously mentioned) has quite a few things, such as genitalia, backwards.

@CrazyAnglican, some of those aren't even specific to English, what's your point?

that conclusion*

@ghug - I'm being a smart-arse.
I speak a smattering of several languages that have the gender-noun thing going on, and I know it makes *NO* sense, generally!

Including some high-school German...which has some very strange "neuter" words, from memory

While we're being pedantic about grammar:

@Putin - it's compared WITH not compared TO (or at least it was very much so when I was at school!)
@BPT - it's CAN'T not CANT - totally different meanings!

Sorry couldn't resist - my (English) English teacher was very particular and now so am I. It's very sad how even the BBC newsreaders don't speak BBC English now!

@hammac: In the nicest possible way- piss off. Your sentences aren't anything about which to write home. :P

touché - lol

"While we're being pedantic about grammar:
@Putin - it's compared WITH not compared TO (or at least it was very much so when I was at school!)"

Some style manuals say that it is better to use "compared to" when stressing similarities and "compared with" when highlighting differences, but this is surely a matter of convention and not a rule. Thus in my humble opinion I don't think it is wrong.

According to Fowler's Guide to Modern English (Burchfield):

"When the sense is 'to mark or point out the similarities and differences of two or more things', compare may be construed either with with or with to."

Burchfield also says:

"When the meaning is to speak of or represent as similar, to liken', compare is normally construed with to"

Most of these "rules" come about because some style guru says so, but really its just that gurus personal preference. Some of these rules are nonsensical, like the rule alleged rule that you can't end a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive. Nonsense.

To boldly go, I just split tht infinitive! Those last two rules are carry overs from latin. People just want to make English more like Latin.

"They" should not be treated as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. "He" serves that purpose aptly. "They" introduces unnecessary ambiguity and leads to even more confusion than was already there surrounding words like "everyone", which are often mistaken as plural in part because they're frequently paired with the possessive "their."

My phrasing was a bit convoluted. To clarify: my quarrel is with the use of both "they" and "their" in the singular.

The number of different ways the letter combo 'ough' can be pronounced is marvellous
1. Though (tho)
2. Through (throo)
3. Cough (coff)
4. Rough (ruff)
5. Plough (plow)
6. Ought (awt)
7. Borough (burra)
8. Hiccough (hiccup)

@ Humble, your statement about "they" (and by extension them, their, theirs) being inappropriate for the third person singular is right on target. However, I do have a quibble with your statement that "'He' serves that purpose aptly." The problem is that even though traditional grammar rules permit it, the use of "he" (and him, his) gives the distinct impression that the person being referred to is male. One possible strategy for avoiding this language trap is to avoid these pronouns when they might be confusing, if possible; and another is to make everything plural. For example, instead of saying "Each student must bring his own pencils and paper," which implies male students, we could say "Students must bring their own pencils and paper," or "Each student must bring pencils and paper."

I don't actually think using "he" does/did give the impression of maleness when it is/was accepted by everybody as the appropriate generic neuter pronoun in English.

Only in today's 'politically correct' world does the pronoun he truly generate the idea of maleness as you've called it. Language has traditionally fell back to masculine when no determination could be made. This is just part of being a language derived, in part, by Latin. Take, for example, the plurals in Spanish. If it is purely a mixed group, the masculine plural pronoun is used. ONLY when it's a purely feminine group is then the feminine plural pronoun used. That same logic would apply here.

Just a small point from an English language teacher ... language changes and develops. It always has. King Canute tried to stop change. The French Academie does the same. It's unlikely to succeed.

Definitely, RSf.

Yet part of that process is (and has always been) those who prefer some old construction and continue using it and arguing for it. Language changes when they lose those arguments; but for example, _clearly_ the many English teachers in America who insisted on not using (for example) "ain't" greatly slowed or eliminated the process of that being accepted as standard usage. That, too, is part of the process. To try to oppose the concept of arguing for a particular extant construction because language changes is, in my opinion, somewhat fallacious as it attempts to elevate one aspect of that process above another.

That said, it is a completely valid point.

One other thing, in poor Canute's defense -- he was actually making a point about limited human power, not seriously trying to command the sea.