"Like" to continue the War on Grammar and Punctuation: Popular FaceBook GIFs don't need no stinkin'

[KurtNYC]

Strunk and White...



I count at least 4 crimes in that one. As a recovering grammar nazi I have trouble with many of the GIFs on FaceBook. Simple statements like that one above could be poetic but instead they seem to betray a lack of thought or care.

Can you beat 4 errors in 16 words?

[ret5hd]

1. Woodworking is a nice hobby.

Just sayin'.

[Scuba]

2. Alright, help me out here ....

I'd go "competing WITH the flower next to it" instead of "to" but I'm not sure that's a grammatical error.

What are the four errors?

[KurtNYC]

3. 1. Superfluous quote marks since there is no citation of a speaker.

2. "to" for "with"

3. 2nd sentence is a fragment so the period should be a comma

4. Plants DO compete with each other. That's why hoes and landscaping fabric exist. Michael Pollan and others document learning and thinking by plants.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-intelligence-may-forever-change-how-you-think-about-plants

[Scuba]

6. 1. Yep, agreed.

2. Noted above.

3. I would think either way would be correct, but agree a comma would be preferred. I'll have to research fragments.

4. Not a grammatical error, but an error of fact.



In any case, my grandmothers were both schoolteachers, so use of proper grammar has been drilled into me to the point that poor grammar is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Thanks for the post.

[A Simple Game]

22. 4. Not an error of fact,

an error in reading comprehension. Unless you are saying flowers think?

[Arugula Latte]

9. Actually, the 2nd sentence is a complete (if short) sentence.

Subject: It. Verb: blooms. Take out the "just" and "It blooms." is still a complete sentence.

[Lionel Mandrake]

12. You beat me to it.

In fact, a comma would be a mistake.

[femmocrat]

15. I agree. nt

[frogmarch]

23. You are right.

You beat me to it.

[In_The_Wind]

4. No, I cannot.

I've added a few reminders.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

16. "Your" and "you're" are NOT two different words ...

... they're (their/there) actually (or literally) THREE words!

Good morning!

[In_The_Wind]

17. Indeed

[img][/img][img][/img]

[GusBob]

5. On facebook there is a page you should check out

"Lady Grey's Compleat Annotated Memes" She corrects these things if you send them her way. I think she is a good liberal, there is another page "Lady Grey" most def. a liberal slant

[KurtNYC]

7. Maybe what she wanted to say was: No more self doubt: just bloom.

A beautiful thought, beautifully expressed by Kelsey (?):

http://www.operationbeautiful.com/no-more-self-doubt-just-bloom/

[Tom_Foolery]

8. Here's how I would write it...

A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it: it just blooms.

Or

A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it; it just blooms.


Because the sentences contain related ideas, the use of the colon or semicolon brings them closer together in a way that a period does not.

[KurtNYC]

10. Nice. I really think whoever created the image was influenced by the article I cite in #7

The original had a poetic efficiency of words: No more self-doubts; just bloom.

[Tom_Foolery]

14. I believe you are correct. n/t

[trof]

11. And then there's 'decimate'.

Many times I see it (incorrectly) used in place of 'annihilate'.

"Usage note:
The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).”

The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle. "
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate

[KurtNYC]

19. If we would finally join the modern world and go on the metric system

we might finally liberate "decimate" from misuse.

[Lionel Mandrake]

13. Most of the first sentence is superfluous,

since flowers don't think at all.

The second sentence is factually wrong. Only a plant can bloom. A flower doesn't bloom. A flower IS the bloom.

By the way, IMO it would be better to call yourself a recovering grammarian. Strunk and White, whom you mentioned, were men who cared about grammar. I see no reason to compare such men to Nazis.

[KurtNYC]

20. grammarian -- point taken. thanks

[NJCher]

18. I'm doing comma review

in a second-semester college English course. How little my students knew about commas shocked me. I asked, "Didn't your high school teachers cover this?" The answers:

--my teacher was having an affair with another student, so she kinda' wasn't "there."

--my teacher taught us literature from other cultures. Didn't cover commas.

Another student said he went to a parochial school that was known for its poor quality. He said that most classroom time wasn't spent engaged in a lesson. I'm not sure what the message was--maybe that classroom control was so demanding the teacher couldn't get around to teaching.



I took my copy of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves to the class, thinking it would amuse them as much as it did me. Instead, the comments were:

"Why is there a Santa Claus on top of the ladder?"

"Why does the panda have a gun?"

"Who did the panda shoot?"






Cher

[KurtNYC]

21. Now that you mention it, are there commas in texting?

I love "who did the panda shoot?"

[Lionel Mandrake]

24. Most colleges have tests

to separate students who are ready for a college-level English class from those who need a remedial class to learn what they should have learned in high school. (The same goes for math, but that's another topic altogether.)

The tests are imperfect. Perhaps this explains your predicament.

[NJCher]

25. this college

Is known for its remedial courses. The department is headed by a very competent person.

I find it hard to believe that a test could fail that many students!

Something else is at work, and I don't know what it is.


Cher

[Lionel Mandrake]

26. When I was a college freshman,

there were three levels of English classes. Those who failed the exam took what we called bonehead English. Those who passed took the regular class. And those in the honors program took the honors class.

The weird thing was that some students ended up taking the bonehead class AND the honors class.