Not Entirely OT: Grammar

jt august wrote:
I also have a problem with threads taking an irrelevant right or left
turn without signaling. The OP was asking about New MacBook models, not
English grammar.

I have undoubtedly been guilty of changing the focus of a thread in
this manner. The problem is that for those who know how to read and
write, and I make no apology for being one of them, bad writing is very
relevant. Bad writing jars the senses and nobbles comprehension. This
is not because we are priggish pedants. It is because of the way the
human brain functions; it bogs down when faced with things that aren't
the way a lifetime of experience tells us they should be.

I don't expect people who would write "I had a problem that made my HD
loose it's data, and I was going to restore it off of a backup but
their was more on the backup then the drive could hold. I tried to call
the company but there line was busy. There suppose to have enough lines
to help everyone. Just a warning. This could happen to you're HD..." to
get this, but I'll try to draw an analogy.

Take the ramp onto the Interstate. This is a stretch of Interstate
highway that you rarely drive; the Interstates that you frequently
drive are pretty well ordered, with only the occasional mistake. On
this particular stretch, however, traffic is moving in both directions
in both the northbound and the southbound lanes; some people are
driving backward. You're in the proper lane and trying to move in the
proper direction, but threading your way through this chaotic mess is
going to slow you down. It's not because you're a snob, but because the
information that your brain is receiving conflicts strongly with a
lifetime of knowing the way traffic is supposed to move on the
Interstate, and that befuddles your brain.

(I, on the other hand, lived and drove in Bangkok for nine years, so I
might fail to notice that anything was wrong if I were confronted with
the traffic mess described above.)

My brain, with a lifetime of training in the difference between
its/it's, loose/lose, off of/from, suppose/supposed, that/which,
then/than, there/their, your/you're, hey/hay, the _absolute_
requirement that compound adjectives be hyphenated, and the _absolute_
requirement that there be a comma before the last item in a series*,
will labor when presented with poorly written English; my reading will
be slowed. Like your Interstate experience, my brain is confronted with
conflicting information; the vast majority of the writing that I
encounter has been written by literate people, and it's mostly pretty
well written. When I'm confronted by bad writing my brain is taken
aback. If the piece I'm reading is sufficiently important I will
struggle through it, though research shows that my normal high level of
comprehension will be reduced as my brain keeps tripping over the bad
writing when it would be absorbing information in a properly written
text. If the text is not very important to me--the average USENET post,
e.g.--I probably won't continue reading after I have seen that it is
poorly written. If I do read it I'll try not to comment on the bad
writing, but I'm human, and I sometimes do things I shouldn't do. It is
also natural for me to wonder if the writer is ignorant in general.

I want to emphasize that this is the way the brain works. It has
nothing to do with elitism (an "elitist" being the guy who graduated at
#893 of 899 in McCain's USNA class).

In an era in which the President of the Unites States is functionally
illiterate, in which he campaigned on the premise that he is a just a
poor dumb good ol' boy from a lowly ranch in Texas (as opposed to, say,
a rich dumb crackhead from an elite New England family, which is what
he is); on the premise that education and educated people are bad for
America because educated people don't understand anything(!!); and an
era in which his Administration wages a relentless battle against
education and his party has teams of people (the neocon lie machine)
whose sole job is to smear educated people with lies, it isn't
surprising that low literacy levels pervade our society and the dumbing
of America is proceeding apace. The possibility that #894, who may be
even dumber than the incumbent, could be the next President is
chilling. His campaign, too, is attacking education and educated people
as elitist/traitors/friends of Bin Laden (insert your favorite neocon
lie here). Regardless of who wins, compare the results among school
dropouts with the results among high school and college graduates. If
we could eliminate education entirely #894 and his ilk would always
win. Taking this political? You may call it that, but I call it telling
it like it is. People who graduated somewhere above the .99 percentile
will get that. As for the others, it's still true: if you don't get it,
you don't get it.

Here's a bit of good news for those who don't get it. Those of us who
get it when it comes to speaking, reading, and writing are an aging and
shrinking segment of the population. Your degradation of the language
has a good chance of succeeding. You will be degrading your society at
the same time, but you won't notice it because not noticing such things
is part and parcel of not getting it. There will always be _some_
annoyingly educated people around who think that's a real shame, but
you can always make fun of the way they talk and dismiss them as
New-England elitists. Smirk when you say that.

As for "MacBook Pro's," it has become very common, almost "standard,"
to omit the apostrophe in a plural abbreviation. I can't dumb down my
writing for those who don't get it; I prefer to use the apostrophe so
that expert readers like myself won't be tripped up over whether it is
"prose," which is how the plural of the abbreviation "Pro" is
pronounced, or "prosse," which is meaningless. "Pros" even looks like a
misspelling of the non-word "prosse."

Davoud

....who makes the occasional error in grammar, in speech and in writing,
but who moves on and tries to do better the next time.

*It used to be the case that the New York Times was a bastion of good
writing. You can't run a newspaper with a geriatric staff, however, and
the dumbing-of-America generation has a firm foothold at the NYT. The
dropping of the _mandatory_ comma before the last item in a series and
the frequent omission of the _indispensable_ hyphen in a compound
adjective are evidence of that. See the first paragraph at
<http://www.davidillig.com/aboutpage.shtml> for information on the
importance of the hyphenated compound adjective to Western
Civilization.

--
Don't re-elect the past. Vote for the future: Obama in 2008!

usenet *at* davidillig dawt com
.

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