Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Does grammar matter?
The short answer is, no. Except in the SAT's. At least in the US, that is. My take is that kids deliberately forget their grammar once they enter college and join the work force with near complete disregard for it.
For the most part I don't pay attention to solecisms but a few still continue to irk me. First and foremost is the apostrophe in a plural world (the so called greengrocer's apostrophe). Of late, this apostrophe has crept in almost everywhere a word ends in an 's' leading to such constructions as
"This software let's us automate our tasks".
It is almost as if people have completely lost it when it comes to the usage of an apostrophe. And as for the possessive form of "it", it's rarely that I see it correctly used minus the apostrophe.
Next on the list is the rampant confusion between the possessive pronoun and the abbreviated form of the "is" verb.
So "You're welcome" becomes "Your welcome" and "They're doing it" is now "Their doing it". People seem to forget the distinction between "their" and "there" as well.
And lastly, for now anyway, "lie" and "lay". Granted this is difficult given that "lay" serves as the past tense of "lie" and as a transitive verb in its own right whose past tense is "laid".
So whenever I hear someone saying something like "I was laying in bed last night", I am tempted to ask "what or who". Surprisingly a rock song gets it right when Bon Jovi sings "I will lay you down in a bed of roses". Of course it would have been equally meaningful, perhaps more so from a rock 'n roll perspective, if the "down" had been left out!
For the most part I don't pay attention to solecisms but a few still continue to irk me. First and foremost is the apostrophe in a plural world (the so called greengrocer's apostrophe). Of late, this apostrophe has crept in almost everywhere a word ends in an 's' leading to such constructions as
"This software let's us automate our tasks".
It is almost as if people have completely lost it when it comes to the usage of an apostrophe. And as for the possessive form of "it", it's rarely that I see it correctly used minus the apostrophe.
Next on the list is the rampant confusion between the possessive pronoun and the abbreviated form of the "is" verb.
So "You're welcome" becomes "Your welcome" and "They're doing it" is now "Their doing it". People seem to forget the distinction between "their" and "there" as well.
And lastly, for now anyway, "lie" and "lay". Granted this is difficult given that "lay" serves as the past tense of "lie" and as a transitive verb in its own right whose past tense is "laid".
So whenever I hear someone saying something like "I was laying in bed last night", I am tempted to ask "what or who". Surprisingly a rock song gets it right when Bon Jovi sings "I will lay you down in a bed of roses". Of course it would have been equally meaningful, perhaps more so from a rock 'n roll perspective, if the "down" had been left out!
