Re: Jiu Jitsu Strategies: Sports vs Reality

On Feb 10, 10:56 am, "Wayne Dobson" <nos...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't know how accents came into this.


I'm trying to understand why you don't want to use proper english
grammar. You are using, as a defense, the fact that people understand
you and that you yourself do not feel it is "jarring". The fact that
you do not feel it is jarring leads me to believe you are familiar
with it's use due to who you have been in contact with. For example
when someone speaks with a "french" accent you can tell they have been
living with french people for a very long time; if someone is from the
southern united states, or even just idaho -g-, or something like that
- it's often easy to tell.

So, your use of an adjective when you *meant* an adverb must be some
kind of accent. Maybe no one in your family or community has ever been
to grammar school. Maybe you live in Pensylvania. I don't know.

Another example is "you's people" which is common enough
in some parts of the southern united states (or wherever the hell it
comes from) to be socially acceptable (the way a rare non-
transmittable tropical disease would be) but nonetheless is very
jarring to educated people.

[http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/LILT/forminf.htm]

"The ability to vary your language according to the situation is often
considered a mark of an educated person."

I'm not sure which formal fallacy you have committed here - off the
top of my head I will go with the four terms fallacy. Your quote above
does not mention that the discussion in question was regarding formal
and informal language. Allow me to explain:

1. People are allowed to vary their language. (implication: from
formal to informal)
2. The mark of an educated person is varying their language.
3. Conclusion: People should vary their language (implication: use
nonstandard grammar).

As I said, I am not sure which particular fallacy has been committed,
however the four term fallacy is a close shave. (See? Right there I
switched to an informal tone with "close shave" in order to provide
comic relief. And that, Wayne, is the mark of an educated person.)

It's your official line. The official textbooks disagree. I gave you
four references.

Your response ignored the explanation that it was correct in an informal
setting.

No, it was not correct in an informal setting. An informal setting may
allow lewd speech, predjudiced speech, so-called "sexist" speech,
because the speaker and listener are not bound by the /formal rules/.
It does not mean that you can change the grammar to mean anything you
want.

Furthermore, this isn't really an informal medium because anyone could
be reading this.

Finally, in this particular thread, we are being very formal -
informal speech, or arguing that it is acceptable because it is
informal, is this then the mark of an uneducated person? One who is
unable to vary his speech according to the situation? Well no, that
would also be a fallacy. But it is something you think about, given
your explanation and the fact that you didn't realize this particular
thread was quite formal.

Just about every dictionary and book on grammar makes a formal
distinction between formal and informal modes of speach, yet you still claim
that such distinctions aren't formally recognised. If those aren't official
textbooks, what are?

Dictionaries are not textbooks, and I have never seen a single example
of the kind of "adverbial function" you are ascribing to adjectives.
The simple fact is that the adjective form affects the noun, so it
creates an ambiguity. It is *not* an adverb, nor an adverbial clause,
nor an adverbial function, or anything like that, precisely *because*
it is an adjective.

You'd be hard pressed to come up with an example of what you are
implying as well - since I couldn't, and I have far more sources than
you do.

I'm not sure what you're referring to.

You haven't provided a single reference to back up what you are saying
(not that you couldn't, you just haven't) and you haven't provided a
single example to show that it is, in fact, a common usage. (Again,
haven't, not couldn't. I'd love an example. I'd use it in my
teaching.)

Stilted and unnatural?

Yes.

Hmm, maybe you are from a social circle which
habitual uses adjectives in place of adverbs.

(Hence my implication your error may be due to your accent.)

Yes, we use all manner of bastardised versions of English. That's how
people speak in real life.

It isn't supposed to be good to be a ***. It's certainly not
"acceptable" in certain "situations", such as ones which to vary one's
language in accordance to is considered to be the mark of an educated
person.

I would conclude that the very people who consider it the mark of an
educated person are the educated people themselves; by putting that
statement forth I assume you want to be seen as an educated person.
Surely then you can vary your language according to /this/ situation.

When you say "was it an inability" you seem to be asking if you
yourself have an inability, however it can also be taken to mean that
you are questioning me if I made a comment which you disagreed with
deliberately. Part of the confusion lies with your misuse of the
pronoun "it" to refer to a subject beyond the last one you raised,
part of the confusion is your changing the tense from is to was. It's
just confusing.

That wasn't a misuse. I expected the glaring mistake to jump out at you,
and that you'd regard the 'it' as being the mistake being referred to in the
following sentence. You meant to say, 'inability'.

I did say that - in fact I said it first. Then I said "part of the
confusion..." but you already knew that ;-)

I'm not going to ask you to clarify, and I'm not going to answer
because it's ambiguous. This is what I am (not was, am) talking about.
You are difficult to understand, and whether it is intentional or not,
you are still difficult to understand.

So, any difficulty you have in understanding me is a fault on my part and
not any on yours? From my perspective there is enough information there for
an unambiguous understanding of what was meant, to be arrived at.

The only information I need is that you haven't used unambiguous
language to retract or advance your position, therefore you must be
being intentionally unclear. You have already said it is the mark of
an educated person to vary his language according to the situation,
but in the second-above paragraph you come out and /say/ that it was a
glaring mistake which was made on purpose.

The "conclusion", Wayne, is that you are not an educated person,
however you may be widely read in the sense that you have heard
certain sayings before and have attempted to draw conclusions from
them. I'd only propose that "speed" of research does not imply
"depth", and without a "depth" of research any errors will be exposed
equally as fast as they were made. Many things seem logical at first,
Wayne, that later prove to be not so logical. In fact it's the way the
human brain processes information. The human brain must consider a
proposition true before it can discover that it is false. If you think
too fast you will make all sorts of ill-supported mistakes. When the
mistakes start piling up, the best thing to do is stop, go back to the
beginning, and think a little slower - as counter-intuitive as it may
seem.

-
.