Well this really is off topic!
Its also comparing the roundness of apples with the yellowness of
bananas. Yes, there are "rules" that were imposed on English by
misguided monks educated in Greek and Latin such as the split
infinitive and ending a sentence with a proposition (in the vernacular
they are called "pick-up lines), but confusing plurals and possessives
isn't in the same class.
Some things, like commas rather than semicolons in lists, or even commas
in parenthetical clauses, are a matter of style so long as the sentence
is not ambiguous for the lack of them. But failing to differentiate
between two words because they sound the same can lead to ambiguities.
And I'm not talking about "color" and "colour" or "two and "too".
If you think this doesn't matter, imagine the result of such ambiguity
in a contract. Not all contracts are written by lawyers. There are
many drawn up by "ordinary" people, wills being the most obvious. If
you think that wills are not worth arguing over, you haven't paid
attention to history.
Or imagine ambiguities in an operations manual or s service manual. A
service manual, perhaps, for some equipment on which lives depend.
Yes, language changes. The predominant trend in written English is to
shorter sentences. Reading the Great Works one can see that progressing
over the centuries. Much of Early Victorian (or earlier) writing would
be excellent candidates for the Bulwer-Lyton contest. Now, more than
one major sub-clause in a sentence makes it sound ponderous.
Sloppiness in communication is sloppiness. Outright errors are outright
errors. E-mail is somewhat of a rapid-fire media and some sloppiness is
excusable, along with typos and spelling errors. It tends to be
conversational, but don't let that make you think that "write as you
would speak" is coming to dominate. Speech is inherently
conversational, a dialogue where the span of any one side is fairly
short. Writing, be it E-mail, "letters to the editor", journalistic
(in both sense of the word) or as literature tends to be longer. It
also tends to be more structured and have an underlying, even if not
very obvious, formalism.
But by the measures of those old monks I have, even in this piece, which
is both formal and structured, broken a lot of those silly grammatical
rules. None of them would, however, incur the wrath of the Editor of
the London or the New York Times, or even my old English teacher of more
than 30 years ago. I've broken those rules quite deliberately to
illustrate my point. Such writing can be clear, vigorous and
unambiguous. (I take delight in finding ambiguities in published
pieces.)
Once I start confusing the possessions of my fiend Michael for the
multiple sound pickups in a recording studio, then I am communicating
badly. Such ambiguity will not be tolerated by my readers.
What is probably more relevant than Skunk & White, it Fowler's Modern
English Usage. It is both modern and revised. There, the references
point out that "various idiomatic constructs require considerable
knowledge, instinctive or acquired, of the ins and outs of syntax to
secure one against lapses". Prize among problems of the class we are
discussion - plurals and apostrophized esses, is that of "it's" and
"its". Since the use of "it" in place of other constructs appears in
the spoken vernacular we are back to my earlier point about writing as
one speaks.
However I should also quote Fowler on "possessive puzzles":
7. The non-possessive 's. The ordinary purpose of inserting
an apostrophe before a final s is to show that the s is
possessive, not plural; it originally indicated the omission
of the e from the possessive inflexion es. It may occasionally
be used before a plural s as a device for avoiding confusion,
but this should not be extended beyond what is necessary for
the purpose. ... To insert an apostrophe in the plural of an
ordinary noun is a fatuous vulgarism ...
Perhaps Scott is one of those who think linguistic reform is not so much
"write as you speak" as "write what it sounds like when you speak".
That has been debated on USENET since its inception an on other media
before. But USENET - or MSN or AOL - is hardly the whole world and I
still don't see us writing "ov" in place of "of" which is by far the
most common. That these discussion keep popping up is no indication of
their validity. As they say, we complain about the weather but no-one
does anything. Language is changing; it is clear that English is
changing into a "carrier" language and set of specialized sub-languages
that use the same words and grammar but with different meanings. One
only has to attend a conference in a specialization other than one's own
to see - or hear - this. The "in group vernacular" can hardly be called
a dialect!
Yes, language changes, but for it to change in such as way as to
increase its ambiguity is dysfunctional and such changes will rapidly
"evolve" out.
/anton
On Sat, 2003-01-11 at 16:22, Scott Rogers wrote:
>
> One thing to keep in mind about all of this is that Strunk is nearly
> 100 years old at this point (despite White's revision of him, he added
> remarkably little to the meat of the thing aside from the brilliant
> introductory essay on Strunk). English, like all languages, changes
> over time, and it appears that the possessive apostrophe rule is going
> to be the next big element of the language to change. The fact that
> this discussion keeps popping up from time to time EVERYWHERE is a
> pretty good indication that the rule is changing.
>
> The comma will be next. Split infinitives officially went a few years
> ago (an incredibly silly rule that as I understand exists only because
> it is impossible to split an infinitive in Latin). All this, and we
> only got the letter "K" sorted out a few hundred years ago!
>
> Cheers
> Scott
>
>
> >
> > In a previous message, Tom McDougal typed vigorously:
> >
> >> This came up in a recent discussion with friends. We disagreed about
> >> the rule so we went to two authorities: Elements of Style (Strunk &
> >> White) and A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Garner). The authorities
> >> agreed: Form the singular possessive by adding apostrophe-S no matter what
> >> the last character is.
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Jan 26 2003 - 04:02:58 EST