Any Grammar Nazis here?

Edrof said:
My Oxford Manual of Style would strongly disagree. All one thousand pages of it.
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Lol, it might disagree but it would be wrong the origins of loads of our so called grammar rules can indeed be traced back to those sources. It is also undeniable that English is a living breathing evolving language so what was a 'rule' last week won't necessarily be one tomorrow!
 
Rroff said:
My comment was nothing to do with grammar specifically - talking about bosses finding any reason to put someone down. Besides constantly correcting people over incorrect use of the English language is just being a **** - if someone is making the same mistake frequently there is probably a deeper reason than they just need it pointing out which is generally pretty unhelpful and unconstructive as just pointing it out if they didn't notice the why for themselves isn't particularly instructive.

Do I need to add a TLDR?
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A link to a remedial English class at a local college would be helpful in most cases, but probably wouldn't go down well.

I am serious. Almost all of the times I've seen anyone mention incorrect use of English by a native speaker it's been for very simple things that a native speaker should be getting right long before they reach adulthood. The use of apostrophes is the most obvious example - a reasonably bright 5 year old could probably understand the extremely simple rules governing the use of apostrophes in English in almost all cases. Letter(s) deliberately left out (e.g. do not --> don't). Association or possession (e.g. Angilion's keyboard). That's it for the use of apostrophes. It's not rocket science.

Hardly anyone calls for consistent use of formally correct English outside of a few very formal contexts. People who adopt the very moderate position of minimal adherence to a vaguely organised language are called Nazis...by blithering idiots.
 
Angilion said:
A link to a remedial English class at a local college would be helpful in most cases, but probably wouldn't go down well.

I am serious. Almost all of the times I've seen anyone mention incorrect use of English by a native speaker it's been for very simple things that a native speaker should be getting right long before they reach adulthood. The use of apostrophes is the most obvious example - a reasonably bright 5 year old could probably understand the extremely simple rules governing the use of apostrophes in English in almost all cases. Letter(s) deliberately left out (e.g. do not --> don't). Association or possession (e.g. Angilion's keyboard). That's it for the use of apostrophes. It's not rocket science.

Hardly anyone calls for consistent use of formally correct English outside of a few very formal contexts. People who adopt the very moderate position of minimal adherence to a vaguely organised language are called Nazis...by blithering idiots.
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People learn in different ways - some are cognisant of the structure and rules of language for every word when constructing a sentence others only learn by seeing practical examples and might not understand the why just putting words together based on how they've seen them used - a basic English class alone might not be particularly helpful.

Personally I left school having a big chunk of my English eduction missing - literally at 16 I had never been taught about verbs, etc. - and that is actually quite hard to catch up on later, especially without a pressing need to do so (and there are some other factors involved). I still managed C grades in English lit and language without actually knowing what I was doing.
 
manic111 said:
Both are rubbish. Why not just say "we can't do it today as we're already busy"?

This unnecessary complication of work emails really bugs me.
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^^This. It's very hard to avoid being dragged into "business speak" in a corporate environment. It's not you, it's business culture, all professions feel the need to have their own lingo, especially in management. We don't have training anymore, it's called "enablement"..... sigh...

Just keep communication straight forward, simple and specific (especially important when working with people who are not native english speakers). So when you say "our hands are tied today in terms of available resource", you're hands are not literally tied and by "resource" you simply mean...... people. So just say, "I don't have anyone available to take on this task at the moment". I suppose as an alternative (esp. if you work in IT), you might find yourself tempted to say "my team does not have sufficient bandwidth at the moment". I know. I live it every day. But ask yourself, is this the sort of phrase that you would use outside of the office (going forward)??
 
Angilion said:
The use of apostrophes is the most obvious example - a reasonably bright 5 year old could probably understand the extremely simple rules governing the use of apostrophes in English in almost all cases. Letter(s) deliberately left out . Association or possession. That's it for the use of apostrophes. It's not rocket science.
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It's a bit more complicated than that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#General_principles_for_the_possessive_apostrophe
However, since even large businesses and official organisations make varied and inconsistent* use of correct/incorrect grammar (especially apostrophes), is it any wonder many others do?

The obvious one with apostrophes is former family businesses versus those that aren't. Sainsbury's, for example, has correct usage while the likes of Harrods and Barclays have dropped theirs, and people habitually append one to the likes of Tesco's, Asda's and Lidl's...
I used to work for Halcrow. Clients always called it Halcrows, or Halcrow's and even started talking about Halcrows's services!

Top that off with supposedly learned folk like George Bernard Shaw intentionally omitting apostrophes, in protest of and in the personal belief that they were redundant... as if there's no difference between cant and can't... or Lewis Carroll's overuse of them - These are people we consider exemplary in English Literature classes??!!



*Sometimes bordering on ghastly, and that even before we get to their marketing slogans!!
 
People feel like they need to make business communication formal and intelligent-sounding. They don't. What they say should be intelligent and formal, but that does not equate to using unnecessarily complex language where simple language works equally well.

My biggest bugbear is, for example, "please do ask us if you have any questions". Why is the "do" there? Infuriating.
 
manic111 said:
My biggest bugbear is, for example, "please do ask us if you have any questions". Why is the "do" there? Infuriating.
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Its to underscore the implied "don't be shy" but usually meaningless as usually these people still act like you are bothering them if you do have a question LOL.
 
ttaskmaster said:
It's a bit more complicated than that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#General_principles_for_the_possessive_apostrophe
[..]
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True, which is why I wrote "almost all cases" and referred to "minimal adherence to a vaguely organised language" as a reasonable standard. The two simple things I mentioned cover almost all cases and will do for more than minimal adherence to a vaguely organised language. I'm not after perfectly correct formal usage in all contexts. An attempt to be close enough most of the time is fine by me.
 
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