Bill East wrote:
>Can it be that Crockers is even more pedantic than me?
Easily.
Or, since there seems to be some confusion amongst the colloquials (apparently
some species of controling authority amongst the linguistic relativists of the
Momma Country) about when a verb is a adverb: "Easy."
(Note colloquially acceptable spurning of the pedantic-striking "an" and of
the peskie, knit-piquing matter of what parts of speech might be which.)
As in: "Crockers could *Easy* be more pedantic than the Ole Oriens."
Poor, long-suffering Crockers recently spent part of his
unwinding-from-reading-the-danged-pedantic-religion-list evening watching a
segment on his nation's much-touted, increasingly-blow-dried Public Tee-Vee
News Hour wherein several *senior* educators (superintendents and principals,
i.e., for the foreigners listening: head-masters/mistresses) in the secondary
public (i.e., for dittos: tax-supported) schools of several major cities speak
extemporaneously about *the* most pressing problem facing the public schools
in Crocker's country, viz., "discipline."
During which discourse each and every one of these Learnéd Morons made,
by actual count, an average of one significant gramatical mistake (even
by Fowler's relativistic pussy-footing) in every three sentances uttered.
Pedantic, schmedantic.
It's a simple question of one of those, waddayacallit, eclipses.
Something's left out, as Crockers tried to indicate.
Ifen the Ole Oriens is going to have a prayer of keeping his laurels as Head
Pedant of this Learnéd List (HPLL), he needs to diagram this
sentence for Crockers such that "than them" comes out a prepositional clause:
"We are like dwarves on giants' shoulders,
so that we can see more and further than them."
>[Fowler} "But the prepositional use of 'than' is now so common colloquially
(He is older than me; they travelled much faster than us) that the bare
subjective pronoun in such a position strikes the reader as pedantic..."
Bull feathers.
It doant strike *this* reader as pedantic in the least.
O Contraire, ma frere, it strikes this reader as a sentence which makes
perfect gramatical--and, therefore, rational--sense.
"He is older than me is."
"They traveled much faster than us did."
Mmmm...
I'll just *bet* they did.
No *WONDER* the Empire has sunk beneath the waves with hardly a echo
(note consistancy in the colloquially acceptable spurning of the pedantic
"an").
Down *that* road lies ruin and desolation, O.O., and there be dragons as
well.
Crockers will stand on this line till Purgatory freezes over, if necessary.
The *last* thing that we need is for "colloquials" to go round setting
the standards for what passes as the rules of language (which is to say:
of thought).
Crockers in Bloomington, and proud of it.
</rant>
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