<p>^^Only if it is your plane and you only have one.</p>
<p>I would probably say “in The summer…” :)</p>
<p>9-11 terrorists bug me less than people who say “Who are you taking to prom?”</p>
<p>People who read a lot and who receive a first-rate education (from K-12 as well as college) will write better and speak better than most others. That’s one of the many reasons why we pay high tuition costs. And why teaching has become even harder. </p>
<p>I am a high school history teacher who teaches mostly top students who go off to the Ivies and similar colleges. Even some of these kids were not given much of an education by undermotivated teachers who did not care nearly as much about how they wrote as about how they “felt” about whatever the topic was. I don’t care nearly as much about how you “feel” as I do about how good you are at something. </p>
<p>Admittedly, some people just have a mental block about spelling (some lobe of the brain not wired ideally, I suppose), but generally speaking, just about anyone can learn the difference between the “s” for plurals and the apostrophe “s” so often misused. Why don’t they? Because they don’t care. And they don’t care for the same reason, I imagine, that they don’t care about a lot of other things like how well they do their job. </p>
<p>Not to over-generalize or anything, but the world can be divided into two types of people – those who can punctuate and spell correctly and write clearly nearly all the time and the other 98% who don’t care. </p>
<p>For my doctor, lawyer, or airline pilot I want one of the 2%, someone who cares about getting it right. How’s that for a rant? I feel a lot better now. I really do.</p>
<p>I care, but I’m also careless all too often. So I’m often bugged by my own mistakes. I also grew up with both British and US schooling so I’m frequently confused by usage having been taught both at one time or another.</p>
<p>I fell into the grammar bog yesterday. I said to my son, “You did good.” This one is common in my neck of the woods. I corrected myself by restating, “You did well. You handled that situation well.” I could also have corrected myself by saying, “You did a good job.” Right? However, I am tired of the useage, “good job.” </p>
<p>I used, “You did good,” so often with the kids that they were astonished when we finally had the conversation that this was incorrect useage. They laughed derisively. I was mortified. I correct my (adult) children fairly regularly on this one now. Ouch.</p>
<p>Also, DMD77 post (I think) 142, wouldn’t the sentence, “Joan’s brother John drove us to the airport.” need commas? I thought it would correctly be written, “Joan’s brother, John, drove us to the airport.” </p>
<p>No? Also, should I have changed the period to a comma after the first airport to make that flow correctly? These are things I think about on a Saturday morning to avoid calling my cranky Uncle. Oy.</p>
<p>The commas setting apart “John” in the sentence above are no longer considered necessary. If you were to write, “John, Joan’s brother, drove us to the airport,” you would need those commas.</p>
<p>
Actually you don’t need either a period or a comma there, nor do you need the comma preceding the quotation. It would be best as:</p>
<p>Wouldn’t the sentence “Joan’s brother John drove us to the airport” need commas?</p>
<p>…and as mafool points out, the answer is no. The commas framing “John” are not incorrect, but they’re not necessary. Note also that they subtly change the meaning: the comma-induced pauses after “brother” and “John” make John’s identity seem more important, where without the commas the emphasis is more on the fact that he gave us the ride we needed.</p>
<p>Another goofy rule on the whole brother construction is whether the information is essential to the meaning of the sentence. So, if Joan only has one brother, using his name is not necessary, so commas would be used. It’s just additional information. If Joan has more than one brother, no commas are used because you need the name to know which of her brothers drove her.</p>
<p>
I think this is another case where usage trumps the rules. Would anybody here really say “Whom are you taking to the prom?” Sure it’s correct, but would you really say it? I live and work among reasonably literate people, and I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use “whom” in that kind of construction in conversation in at least 30 years.</p>
<p>EDIT: Or is it leaving out the “the” in “to the prom” that bothers you?</p>
<p>Speaking of things one rarely hears, when was the last time anyone heard an American use the word “shall,” rather than “will”? And how many Americans know the difference? I think the word has vanished from everyday use in this country, as opposed to the UK. Its use seems to be as much a marker of being British as “whilst.”</p>
<p>What drives me nuts is people (or sign makers) who put random quotation marks around phrases. Quotation marks are not meant to draw attention to a phrase - they’re meant to show that the phrase is a quotation! “Thank you” does NOT need quotation marks!</p>
<p>Regarding the earlier postings on house signs: When our neighbors moved into their house, someone gave them a carved, painted wooden sign that read: The Lastname’s. They hung the sign over their garage door for a few years, but when they had the house repainted the sign mysteriously disappeared. I suspect the wife cringed every time she saw it. Their son has grown up to be a stickler for grammar, I’m sure that came from one of his parents. As for a family whose last name ends in s, I think the house sign should read: The Jones Family. 
</p>
<p>I tend to over-use commas (sorry!) My mom was from South Carolina, she took a writing class when she lived in NJ and the professor told her that Southerners tend to overuse commas. It comes from the different pace of speaking - Southern speech is slower, so Southerners tend to be accustomed to more pauses in sentences. I’ve learned to write using as many commas as I want, then go back and remove as many as I can without losing the meaning.</p>
<p>
I quite like using shall.</p>
<p>Also, for those who go on grammar rants… <a href=“http://www.xkcd.com/326/[/url]”>http://www.xkcd.com/326/</a></p>
<p>Bill Bryson’s book “The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way,” has a whole section on grammar. Basically he says that grammar, as part of our constantly evolving language, is constantly evolving. He complains about grammar rules based on Latin, because English is not a Romance language. He says having rules for English based on Latin rules is like trying to play baseball using the rules of football. It just makes no sense.</p>
<p>Now I like a well-written sentence or paragraph as much as anyone, and I cringe at blatantly bad grammar, but I’m a lot more tolerant of people (including myself) breaking obscure rules. I have no idea if I’ve split an infinitive because I don’t know what an infinitive is. But I do know when people mix up their/they’re/there or misuse apostrophes and quotation marks. I clearly remember learning the rules of apostrophes in FOURTH grade, for crying out loud!</p>
<p>As it was mentioned earlier, some of the things that scorned as being poor grammar are actually colloquialisms. For example, my husband says “I left the dog out.” What? Why did you leave him out? How long has he been out? Get that dog and bring him in NOW. What I would say, which maybe is also a colloquialism, is “I let the dog out.” He also says “I left go of the rope” "and “leave go of that.” But when I think about it, how much less sense does that make than “let go?” “Let go of me?” How do those words actually mean “release your hold on me?” English – what a curious language.</p>
<p>
A way to remember is a quote I saw the other day: “Superman does good. You did well.”</p>
<p>“Going to hospital” or “going to the hospital” is not the only situation in which this arises. Do you go to doctor or go to THE doctor when you’re ill? After all, there’s more than one. I suppose it means that, while there are multiple ones to which you could go, you actually only go to one of them. (If you go to more than one, you drop the the and use a plural.)</p>
<p>Splitting an infinitive: An infinitive is the “to” form of a verb: to drive, to fly, to talk. Splitting it is separating the “to” from the verb: “to loudly talk” rather than “to talk loudly.” The most famous split infinitive is probably, “To boldly go where no one has gone before.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wow. I’ve never heard “left” used like that, ever. Where is he from?</p>
<p>^^ He is from central PA (Reading); Pennsylvania Dutch, Amish area. I had never heard that either, although I had heard “leave go of that!”</p>
<p>Chedva,</p>
<p>Thinking about the useage “Superman does good” made me realize why I’ve used did good with the kids. You did good carries (perhaps) both the meanings with a little slang/love thrown in. You did a good job, you did good work, you did good (good for the world) when you did that good work. I’m going to stop correcting…or maybe not, lol.</p>
<p>So useage of commas has def. changed since I was in school. Has this one changed: the rule that you must put a comma before the word “too” as in, “The boy used ketchup on his hotdog and then decided to add mustard, too.”</p>
<p>We were taught to always (holy split infinitive, Batman) use the comma before the too. Still the thing or not?</p>
<p>Glossy cosmetic ad in this morning’s paper;</p>
<p>“None of us are flawless.”</p>
<p>:eek:</p>