You! Off My Language!
Jun. 22nd, 2005 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalian"Possessive apostrophes aren't necessary", states Kate Burridge in her new book.
What the unholy fuck is this woman talking about?
Take the sentence, "I am going to my boyfriend's house this evening", just as a for-instance. This woman is suggesting that it should (or at least could) be written as "I am going to my boyfriends house this evening". Yes, eventually you would work out that the person writing is going to the residence of her (or his) boyfriend this evening, but there's an awful lot of room for ambiguity. Perhaps s/he has several boyfriends and is going to a shared house where a number of them are currently living. Fine, not a likely situation, but not impossible. See, with the apostrophe, you know exactly what it means -- if this person is going to a house peopled with his or her boyfriends, the apostrophe placement tells you that too: "I am going to my boyfriends' house this evening".
Plus, it just looks tacky. It looks like your apostrophe key is stuck. It looks like you wouldn't know grammar if you fell over it. It looks appalling. This woman is a writer and she thinks it's okay to just randomly ignore rules of punctuation that you don't like, no matter how bad it looks or how much ambiguity it adds to a sentence. A writer doesn't care about verbal ambiguity. That's just inconceivable. If you're published, you're usually published because you can write well, and it does not count as 'writing well if you do not use the goddamn language properly.
I believe that languages can and should change. I do not believe that change equals bastardisation and dumbing down. I hate the Franglish that seems to be springing up in places ('le weekend', for example, grosses me out completely -- that should be 'la fin de semain', lazy motherfuckers), and the way that English is creeping into other languages. I'll make a vague exception for Japanese loanwords, because there's no way of producing a word or phrase that means "CD player" in Japanese without them. But 'l'ordinateur' works perfectly well without having someone throw 'le computer' at you.
And I do not believe that you can just randomly ignore rules of punctuation without looking like a fucking idiot. Language evolution is one thing. Language devolution is something else again. It makes me not want to read things. I have a hard enough time reading some of my friends' journals (see? There's that possessive apostrophe again) because of bad spelling, odd sentence structure, misused punctuation and crappy grammar. It's not all of them, we all have our bad days and I'm not pointing fingers anyway. But it's there, and I don't want to have to give up reading for pleasure altogether because the rest of the world wants to hit their apostrophe key a little less often.
Argh. Nothing is sacred. As a wise man once said, "The English language may be your mistress, but that does not give you the right to tie her up, sodomise her and then beat her with a rubber boot".
What the unholy fuck is this woman talking about?
Take the sentence, "I am going to my boyfriend's house this evening", just as a for-instance. This woman is suggesting that it should (or at least could) be written as "I am going to my boyfriends house this evening". Yes, eventually you would work out that the person writing is going to the residence of her (or his) boyfriend this evening, but there's an awful lot of room for ambiguity. Perhaps s/he has several boyfriends and is going to a shared house where a number of them are currently living. Fine, not a likely situation, but not impossible. See, with the apostrophe, you know exactly what it means -- if this person is going to a house peopled with his or her boyfriends, the apostrophe placement tells you that too: "I am going to my boyfriends' house this evening".
Plus, it just looks tacky. It looks like your apostrophe key is stuck. It looks like you wouldn't know grammar if you fell over it. It looks appalling. This woman is a writer and she thinks it's okay to just randomly ignore rules of punctuation that you don't like, no matter how bad it looks or how much ambiguity it adds to a sentence. A writer doesn't care about verbal ambiguity. That's just inconceivable. If you're published, you're usually published because you can write well, and it does not count as 'writing well if you do not use the goddamn language properly.
I believe that languages can and should change. I do not believe that change equals bastardisation and dumbing down. I hate the Franglish that seems to be springing up in places ('le weekend', for example, grosses me out completely -- that should be 'la fin de semain', lazy motherfuckers), and the way that English is creeping into other languages. I'll make a vague exception for Japanese loanwords, because there's no way of producing a word or phrase that means "CD player" in Japanese without them. But 'l'ordinateur' works perfectly well without having someone throw 'le computer' at you.
And I do not believe that you can just randomly ignore rules of punctuation without looking like a fucking idiot. Language evolution is one thing. Language devolution is something else again. It makes me not want to read things. I have a hard enough time reading some of my friends' journals (see? There's that possessive apostrophe again) because of bad spelling, odd sentence structure, misused punctuation and crappy grammar. It's not all of them, we all have our bad days and I'm not pointing fingers anyway. But it's there, and I don't want to have to give up reading for pleasure altogether because the rest of the world wants to hit their apostrophe key a little less often.
Argh. Nothing is sacred. As a wise man once said, "The English language may be your mistress, but that does not give you the right to tie her up, sodomise her and then beat her with a rubber boot".
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 01:44 pm (UTC)(Having said that, I don't mind loan words at all, especially given the mongrel language that is English. If loan words were banned, we wouldn't HAVE an English language.)