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Kymro
Joined: 19 Oct 2003
Posts: 244
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 Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:12 pm Post subject: Re: Curious |
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| Big_Cannon wrote: |
As far as a "surge" (?) of overused words such "actually","always" and "of course", they are applied to virtually every teenaged way (?) of answering, making them sagged under (?) the weight of overuse; in the same vein we make gradable words that aren't, a linguistic indiscretion (?). Your students are just mimicking what they hear from us or the media.
It's a teenage thing for the most part. Expressions like:
"It was so..." or "It was like..." "You Know?"
We have been numbingly abused (?) by it. |
Do you, or any of your various sock puppets on this forum, ever intend to master comprehensible English, BC? |
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Big_Cannon
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
Posts: 47
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject: Re: Curious |
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| Kymro wrote: |
| Big_Cannon wrote: |
As far as a "surge" (?) of overused words such "actually","always" and "of course", they are applied to virtually every teenaged way (?) of answering, making them sagged under (?) the weight of overuse; in the same vein we make gradable words that aren't, a linguistic indiscretion (?). Your students are just mimicking what they hear from us or the media.
It's a teenage thing for the most part. Expressions like:
"It was so..." or "It was like..." "You Know?"
We have been numbingly abused (?) by it. |
Do you, or any of your various sock puppets on this forum, ever intend to master comprehensible English, BC? |
Are you sure you are an English teacher or you just like to gatecrash any ESL forum pretending to be one? Whatever you are or "wanna be" you have the obtuse tendency to housewifely underline the wrong words as if you were bastardizing collocations. Anyway, "sagged" and "under" don't go together, it is not a phrasal verb. "Teenaged" or "teenage" are both adjectives and go before a noun. To find the meaning of the other expressions, you ought to buy a good dictionary or read more, K-ho'. |
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Kymro
Joined: 19 Oct 2003
Posts: 244
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:38 pm Post subject: Re: Curious |
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| Big_Cannon wrote: |
Are you sure you are an English teacher or you just like to gatecrash any ESL forum pretending to be one? Whatever you are or "wanna be" you have the obtuse tendency to housewifely underline the wrong words as if you were bastardizing collocations. Anyway, "sagged" and "under" don't go together, it is not a phrasal verb. "Teenaged" or "teenage" are both adjectives and go before a noun. To find the meaning of the other expressions, you ought to buy a good dictionary or read more, K-ho'. |
You may well imagine you're terribly clever BC, yet much of what you write is plain wrong.
Your misuse of the English language is so glaringly obvious that no educated native speaker of English requires a dictionary to identify you as a phoney. |
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Big_Cannon
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
Posts: 47
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 7:16 am Post subject: Re: Curious |
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| Kymro wrote: |
Your misuse of the English language is so glaringly obvious that no educated native speaker of English requires a dictionary to identify you as a phoney. |
Textbook example of Babu English. Were you born in Kerala? And if so, were you transported to the UK to work instead of finishing school? |
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Kymro
Joined: 19 Oct 2003
Posts: 244
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:08 pm Post subject: Re: Curious |
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| Big_Cannon wrote: |
| Kymro wrote: |
Your misuse of the English language is so glaringly obvious that no educated native speaker of English requires a dictionary to identify you as a phoney. |
Textbook example of Babu English. |
Care to provide us with any examples, old boy?
| Quote: |
| Were you born in Kerala? And if so, were you transported to the UK to work instead of finishing school? |
A tad racist perhaps?
Which is a little rich coming from a poster who writes English in the style of a non-native. |
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dynow
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 1080
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 8:27 am Post subject: |
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I would have had to go
OR
I would have had to have gone
people think I'm crazy for saying the latter, but it's completely natural for me (I would've had to've gone......)
i find that conditionals/unreal cases are inconsistent, even lack a true rule.
so which is correct? |
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Big_Cannon
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
Posts: 47
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| Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 7:15 pm Post subject: |
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| dynow wrote: |
I would have had to go
OR
I would have had to have gone
people think I'm crazy for saying the latter, but it's completely natural for me (I would've had to've gone......)
i find that conditionals/unreal cases are inconsistent, even lack a true rule.
so which is correct? |
My linguistics professor taught us a way to teach conditional perfects and yet we all got caught with oversimplification. So nothing for your students should be quite that black and white.
One thing about conditionals you should clarify to your students is that the tense used to refer to non-fact is not related to real time or real past. Students often pay too much attention at the past tense that we use with the sole purpose of distancing the meaning from reality. That is the norm: unreality expressed by shifting the verb form "backwards", present to past.
Those examples are constructed grammatically in a correct way. With the expression "have to" there is an option of using a complex verb idiom and/or phrase with participle construction that some speakers might find questionable or even ungrammatical. If you happen to use the second to emphasize the perfect aspect you might find it semantically similar to the first, hence more obvious in a pluperfect tense. |
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biffinbridge
Joined: 05 May 2003
Posts: 701
Location: Frank's Wild Years
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 8:41 am Post subject: erm |
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1.) The teacher is in charge of his classroom. (He controls it and is responsible for it).
2.)He's in the charge of the courts. (The courts are responsible for him.)
3.) He's on a charge. (He's in trouble).
4.) He charged the enemy on his horse.
5.) He charged me $10 for that picture.
6.) He's charged up. (High on drugs). |
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Master Shake
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
Posts: 1202
Location: Colorado, USA
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 1:00 pm Post subject: |
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I think you can also use 'charge' as a noun to mean a young lad someone 'charged' with looking after. (i.e. The young charge had finished cleaning the muskets by the time we returned to camp.)
It's definitely archaic British English, but that's what I had to study in U. |
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dynow
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 1080
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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sometimes i just find myself in difficult situations with my advanced students when i need to clarify these tenses. being a native speaker, I just decide how to say it by feel. english has so many tenses to be super-specific as to when something happened, when something didn't happen, or when it could have happened, but didn't, etc., and i just do it by feel. a Polish student doesn't have that luxury and needs a little more thorough explination of why or why not something is being said.
funny thing is, when this question first came up, that week I came home and turned on CNN. they were giving a news report about I don't know what, and the woman said, "they would have had to have had....." and it is exactly how I would have said it myself. it sounds completely natural to me when I don't think about it, but when i analyze all those "have's", it looks crazy. i can't imagine how it must look to a Polish student.
and then I thought to myself how completely evil and seemingly useless at times Polish declensions are, and I lost all sympathy.  |
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Big_Cannon
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
Posts: 47
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| Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2008 11:34 am Post subject: |
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| dynow wrote: |
funny thing is, when this question first came up, that week I came home and turned on CNN. they were giving a news report about I don't know what, and the woman said, "they would have had to have had....." and it is exactly how I would have said it myself. it sounds completely natural to me when I don't think about it, but when i analyze all those "have's", it looks crazy. i can't imagine how it must look to a Polish student.
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What it seems obvious from that particular example is that some people while they are talking in full flow, for a brief moment, they get caught thinking as if they got distracted, looking for the right word/expression to use. Their speech suddenly eases off as if it were in slow motion, and as a result of them not paying much attention to what they're saying, they end up uttering things with little semantic elegance, even idiomatically accepted, nonetheless gramatically wrong. Our current President's favourite flaw  |
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dynow
Joined: 07 Nov 2006
Posts: 1080
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| Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2008 7:13 pm Post subject: |
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| are you saying "I would have had to have had" is grammatically wrong? |
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Big_Cannon
Joined: 31 Dec 2007
Posts: 47
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:15 am Post subject: |
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| Not this particular example. But often when newscasters interview experts in a topic subject (style or politics critics) these get caught in tongue twisters and cacophonous yuppy talk, hence the many occasions, including the one you gave, when they might sound ungrammatical but legit. |
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