I've seen those English dramas too, they're cruel

[venta]

I avoided all the BBC frothing about bad grammar the other day. Much as I like a well-placed apostrophe, the sort of people who say "I think you'll find you mean 'fewer'" are, largely, arses (up with whom one should not put).

However, a nice grammar quiz? oh yes, that sounds like fun. I can answer it and feel all smug. Except, of course, I disagreed with it.

Question 3: Read this sentence carefully. "I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary." Which of the following is correct?

1. Hilary is male
2. Hilary is female
3. It's impossible to know from the context

Now, the BBC's answer is that Hilary is male, because there isn't a comma after 'brother'. Benedict is described as "my brother who doesn't [live in Madrid]", so there must also be another brother, and thus that brother must be only-other-sibling Hilary.

I claim the answer is morally 3: it's impossible to tell. Because I, for one, got so lost among the commas of that god-awful sentence that I was frankly quite bewildered enough by the end without worrying about whether Hilary was a boy or a girl. Good grammar aids clarity, it doesn't reduce English to a puzzle of whether you knew the rules well enough to divine the writer's intent correctly. If your reader has to count commas to understand your statement, you've already got it monumentally wrong.

Bah.

Comments

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

Besides, Hilary could easily be transgender.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You mean grammatically speaking, or just that it should have been included as an option in the question?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I think most transgender women would not be pleased to be classified as "brother".

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I think you may mean intersex (explicitly some of each) or genderqueer (somebody who doesn't want to be sorted). Transender people are usually quite clear about whether they are a brother or a sister, it just doesn't match what they were born with.

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right. I meant intersex. In fact the structure of the sentence almost implies that the third sibling iOS of ambiguous gender.

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

... the third sibling iOS of ambiguous gender.

Can you tell I have an apple autocorrect feature?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If they're going to be all "let me infer the gender of a person who is standing right in front of me from grammatical pedantry instead of talking to them" then surely that comma is only important if Hilary is the brother who *does* live in Madrid? Otherwise Benedict being a brother who doesn't is entirely irrelevant.

Anyway if somebody's going to call their children Clara, Benedict and Hilary they are either a Tory minister or a character in a Victorian novel, in which case Hilary is probably male.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering about the motivations of the speaker, who seems determined not only to stretch their interlocutor's comma-counting skills to the full, but also to probably rather embarrass poor Hilary.

There must be a reason why they introduce them as sibling rather than as brother or sister. Maybe they aren't sure themselves.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is the sort of horribly contrived sentence which only exists to pop up in grammar questions. I feel sorry for Benedict, too, as it seems the most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't live in Madrid.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I assume we're looking at a transcript of logs from a house bugged by MI5 or somesuch, rather than being directly involved. The transcriber was meticulously accurate but has since been blown up by enemy agents, so we can't just ask her, and only this fragment of the transcript survives, so there's no context to tell us whether it's a male or female Hilary we're after.
Hilary is probably a big strapping beardy bloke whose gender nobody present would doubt, and the speaker wished to clarify that the family gathering was complete.

[chrisvenus]

This.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, you wouldn't be able to do the grammatical pedantry if you were actually being introduced, because you can't hear commas :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

... except in highly specialised circumstances (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA).

[lnr]

*applause*

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

(And the one about semi-colons is wrong too.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I took a dislike to the that/which question.

I've always thought saying "the car which ran me over" was fine. ("The car that ran me over" is also fine).

The obsession with "which" only being permissible after a comma is something I think of as a M$-ism.

This morning, Word took exception to the phrase "some of them chose their own names". Reflexive Pronoun Use, it said. Consider revising, it said. Sod off, I said.

I think I agreed with the answer to the semi-colon question, but didn't like their explanation.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, it is an MS-ism. To excuse them slightly, it's always been more of a thing in the US. But it's thanks to Word that it's become a thing over here too.

As usual, Language Log is informative and sensible!

[erming.livejournal.com]

I think from reading it that any sentence that long and convulated is clearly bad English as the sentence should be split into smaller sentences. Or at least that is what my HCI and technical authoring course said.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It's a terrible sentence, whatever the 'correct' interpretation. (And I agree, if you're introducing poor old Hilary as "my only other sibling", there's something unclarified about Hilary's status or you clearly hate him/her/zie.)

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.

[eniel]

*grins* Can't complete half of these questions, they're all based on British grammar, and American grammar seems to have evolved and deviated and ended up "same but different".
Also, if I had been misbehaving as a child, I might have used "I was sat in the chair" if my parents put me there :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Can you get away with "I was sat..." like that? You can certainly say "They sat me....", so I don't see why not :)

Obligatory XKCD reference (http://xkcd.com/326/).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting example of a verb in transition. "They sat me down" would have been considered incorrect until fairly recently (preferred: they seated me down, I was seated).

It's originally two separate verbs, 'to seat [someone]' (past tense 'seated') and 'to sit' (past tense 'sat'). But 'sit' has stealthily been taking over the work of 'seat'. I wonder if this is because the main use of 'seat' these days is reflexive, so eg. 'please seat yourself' meets 'please sit down' to become 'please sit yourself down'.

[eniel]

I'm not sure at all, and my dictionary (Websters, and I am wondering if this use might be an Americanism) is unable to help solve my dilemma, since it only gives "origin" dates for the verb itself, and does not distinguish between transitive and intransitive uses. That said, it does state that "to sit someone" is an acceptable use of the verb when meaning "to place on a seat" (in my example, I was), whereas "to seat" is "to cause to sit or assist in finding a seat".
Interesting way in which both verbs have been intertwining though :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Looking at usage of 'sit yourself' vs 'seat yourself', this is interesting:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sit+yourself%2Cseat+yourself&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=

The US pattern is similarish but sit has not yet overtaken: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sit+yourself%2Cseat+yourself&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=

Not a sophisticated enough query to prove anything much, but it might be indicative.

[eniel]

*nods* Yes, it does seem to infer that the differences between the verbs are being progressively erased. Thanks for the link!

[eniel]

Get away with? Probably, there's nothing preventing me from using it in a passive voice if all I'm going for is "grammatical correctness" (which seems to be the goal of this quiz). Would I use it in an everyday conversation? Unlikely, but then again, I would never have tried using that sibling sentence either ;)

My favorite so far is the "don't end a sentence with a preposition". Because obviously using Latin rules in a Germanic language is the height of logic...

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

the sort of people who say "I think you'll find you mean 'fewer'" are, largely, arses

Or primary school teachers.

When someone corrects my grammar, I feel revenge correction is appropriate. Otherwise, well, I prefer to a)have friends and b)not get my face pummelled. And usually c)not to be so rude, but that one depends on my mood ;-).

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think if it is actually your job to teach someone language (because you're a teacher, or you're in possession of a small child, or something) then correcting grammar is appropriate. Or if someone's asked you to (my boyfriend has a standing order from his French-speaking colleague to point out the colleague's English errors). Or if you genuinely need to clarify what someone said.

Other than that, I think it's best to shut up :) (Apart from, as you say, revenge corrections which are probably fair game.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

> then correcting grammar is appropriate
Sure, but only if they are actually right. And things like less/fewer or split infinitives aren't grammar, they are style.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It is still acceptable, in "possession of a small child" circumstances at the very least, to point out that a given construction is ugly/ambiguous/likely to provoke arguments and is thus best avoided. Style can still be steered towards the prevailing norm, and arguably should be in many cases.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It's been demonstrated pretty conclusively that children pick up orthodox grammar (and style, in this sense) much more efficiently from reading orthodoxly-written text than they do from being taught rules.

Repeated correction can do more harm than good imo. Exemplification is more likely to be effective.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Who said anything about teaching rules?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Who said anything about teaching rules?

Erm, that's what this comment thread's about, isn't it?

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

> then correcting grammar is appropriate
Sure, but only if they are actually right. And things like less/fewer or split infinitives aren't grammar, they are style
Followed by it is still acceptable ... to point out that a given construction ... is best avoided. There may be no "actually right" answer regarding less/fewer* but it doesn't mean you can't tell children that the issue provokes much discussion, and that there are style conventions. None of which has anything to do with reading vs rules as methods of learning.

If you wish to address "teaching rules", why not respond to someone who was discussing that?

* Worms, can, etc.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

If you wish to address "teaching rules", why not respond to someone who was discussing that?

Sorry, I hadn't realized the comment placement rules conventions were so strict. I had figured that as my comment was prompted by and added to your point about guidance being preferable to correction, placing after it would be appropriate. How wrong I seem to have been!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I am feeling tetchy this morning. Apologies.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I apologise too, I shouldn't have been sarcastic. Fridays eh!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's not what happens in real life though: people repeatedly say that such-and-such a usage is "wrong", or "don't you mean <some synonym>", and they do these even for perfectly idiomatic, comprehensible and nonambiguous usages. It's rude and ridiculous.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Oh, ok. My obviously fictional child and I will carry on as we are, rude and ridiculous real people can do what they please.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't intend to imply that anyone was fictional. My point is that there is a constant barrage of ill-informed pedantry, and it's really wearing.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

It's pretty wearing being on the parental end of discussions like "but why does English work like this, Mummy?" too, I admit. Working towards reasonably good/standard style and grammar is much harder work than one realises from a grown-up learned-it-already perspective.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think[*] that I have a reasonable grasp of grammar, but have no memory of really learning it. Which is a shame, because it might make it easier to teach (should I be in a position to do such a thing).

Doubtless the mother will be along in a minute to tell me that I, too, asked relentless questions about it. Possibly resulting in a series of occasions where "just because" actually is the correct answer.

(Actually, since you seem fairly grammatically informed, may I hear your opinion on the relative correctness/pleasantness/etc of the following two sentences:

1. In the evening, I headed out to the pub.
2. In the evening I headed out to the pub.

Other people who read this comment are also invited to have opinions too, of course.)

[*] Possibly wrongly.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Instinctively, I'd plump for 1 as a better reflection of how we'd say it (commas indicating breaths, etc). There's no real ambiguity or confusion introduced if you omit the comma, though, and it's a very short sentence so you can get away without it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Friends don't correct friends' grammar! -- ought to be a common precept, along with "friends don't pummel friends' faces".

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Its a quiz, you are meant to study the sentence. I thought the questions about the names of things were stupid. Who cares what is called a gerund, all that matters is that it is used right.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's not important what a gerund is called, particularly. I still think that - even in the context of a quiz - a sentence you have to study is a poor illustration of a grammatical precept.

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

yeah, that was the one that I got wrong, although I'd decided Hilary was female, for some reason, so I got it very wrong