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[adventious]

The Language Rules We Know--But Don't Know We Know
BBC Culture
--Mark Forsyth

Mark Forsyth tasted internet fame this week when a passage from a book he wrote went viral.
He explains more language secrets that native speakers know without knowing.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns.
That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns.
There are things we don't know we don't know.
--Donald Rumsfeld

[fluffyhamster]

There was another book published in 2013 that also took a "you know but don't know you know" line, Harry Ritchie's English for the Natives (see my quasi half review of it on a thread a while ago), but as grammar is its constant focus, it's overall a fair bit drier than Forsyth's stuff. Anyway, thanks for the heads up, as it's got me dusting off the Ritchie at least.

And what's this, my eyes have alighted upon a good (well, strange and apparently solitary) example of a native speaker getting a particular rule wrong (possibly through overthinking or hypercorrecting things): 'I do not remember to have read a funnier first novel since Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall...' (from the first line of Betjeman's review of K Amis's Lucky Jim). As Ritchie remarks, it has to be 'having read' or 'reading' surely? Not sure though that 'forget' follows quite the same patterns though when it comes to -ings LOL.

[bograt]

What are you tossing on about?

[fluffyhamster]

Me? Recently I've been "tossing on about" a lack of content (or rather, the lack of comment from those posting links), and was trying to do my bit here to add a personal tidbit or two in relation to a book I bought. Your towering contribution has however stunned me into reverent silence, Pottymouse. Thank you for showing posters what they could be doing, it's truly humbling, and very inspiring. You are an example to us all.

[adventious]

That's a burn. T O T E S burrrrn.

I really really really enjoyed this article...really.

Reduplication in linguistics is when you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant (lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong. If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O. Mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong.

Some rules we really should know. It’s surprising and dispiriting how many English people don’t know the rules of stress, because that’s how all our poetry works. It’s quite easy really, and we can hear it in other languages.
[elision]
That has no rhymes, but it still works as a limerick because rhymes aren’t nearly as important as rhythm.

If you know Rachel's English (YouTube channel that's been developed into a book), her serious study of prosody is flawlessly presented in deceptively simple and short lessons structured by the concerns of rhythm and stress.

English is an immensely complicated language to get right, and native speakers often have no idea of its strangeness. We understand the sentence “I can’t put up with the guy I’m putting up at my house, his put-downs really put me out and I’m feeling put-upon”. Or “I’m doing up my house and it’s doing me in.” Literally, that should mean “I’m performing my house skywards and it’s performing me towards the interior”. These are called phrasal verbs and they are the nightmare of every would-be English speaker. Somebody once said of Ian Fleming that he got off with women because he couldn’t get on with them. To us that’s a simple joke, to a learner who also has to get through, get by, get down, get with it, get up… it does their head in.