Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jajdude]

Language has been shot in the ass.

We have more people who are more educated than ever, more people who can read and write, yet we seem to love dumbing things down. I don't get it, really, yet go back to smalltown US/Canada/wherever and say "shall" or "perhaps" and many people will at least think you're being pretentious if some jerk doesn't punch you in the head for
speaking like a person who has read a few books.

It's just another conceit, this garbage language we're using these days.

[little mixed girl]

ever since people have published grammar books, they have been crying about the decline of the language.

[jajdude]

You may be right. Perhaps it is the same as always.

Tell me this, though: why are so many people misusing apostrophes these days? I doubt it was a common thing a decade ago. It sure has caught on.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

My favourite (Canadian university English) sentence was one student who wrote 'Hitler thought that the Jews were an invaluable race'.

[ardis]

I went to a pretty good university in America and was really surprised at the types of mistakes made by my classmates. I edited papers for a lot of my friends and returned them with red slashes and comments all over place.

"This is not a complete sentence."
"This has nothing to do with your thesis AT ALL."
"You started the last five sentences with "I"."
"You have absolutely no citations to back up any of your information."

When it came to spelling...it was even worse. I hadn't realized how many people were misusing "their", "there", and "they're." Even on this board, I see it constantly. Isn't that something they teach you at quite a young age?

I've seen the way my younger cousin writes to her friends and it's pretty gross. "Lyk i wusnt doin nothin n he wuz lyk shut up!!!!111111 wtf lolololololol lmao btw gtfo!!!!"

[Koveras]

[kotakji]

Here you guys might appreciate this:


A HISTORY OF THE WORLD
By Richard Lederer
Copyright 1987 by Verbatim, The Language Quarterly

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or history teacher is
receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted
together the following "history" of the world from certifiably genuine student
bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade
through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.
The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the
Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that
the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are
cultivated by irrigation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a
huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and
Spain.
The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the
Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their
children, Cain, once asked, "Am I my brother's son?". God asked Abraham to
sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother's
birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be
patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave
refuse to the Israelites.
Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led
them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made
without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the
ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He
fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who had lived in Biblical
times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.
Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three
kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth
is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the
river Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appers in "The Iliad", by
Homer. Homer also wrote "The Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship
that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer
but by another man of that name.
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who sent around giving people advice.
They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and
threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of
Athens was democratic because the people took the law into their hands. There
were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb
over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought with the
Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.
Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans
because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the
guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the
battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he
was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor
subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur
lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold mustarded his troops before the
Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was connonized by Bernard Shaw, and victims of
the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that
no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.
In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer
of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote
literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an
apple while standing on his son's head.
The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of
their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg
for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated
by a bull. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that
made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and
discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical
figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the
circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot
clipper.
The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking
difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the
"Virgin Queen". As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself
before her troops, they all shouted, "hurrah". Then her navy went out and
defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear
never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived at
Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies, and errors. In one
of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving
himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince
Macbeth to kill the king by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an
example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel
Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton.
Milton wrote "Paradise Lost". Then his wife died and he wrote "Paradise
Regained".
During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great
navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships
were the Nina, the Pinta, and the Sante Fe. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the
ocean, and this was known as Pilgrims Progress. When they landed at Plymouth
Rock, they were greeted by the Indians, who came down the hill rolling their
war hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back. Many
Indian heros were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal
to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died
and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in
their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post
without stamps. During the War, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing
balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing.
Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay taxis.
Delagates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented
Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin, were two singers
of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all
his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented
electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against
itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother
died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own
hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, "In
onion there is strength." Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while
traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also
freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth
Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would
torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. It claimed it
represented law and odor. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the
theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture
show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane
actor. This ruined Booth's career.
Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare
invented electricity and also wrote a book calle "Candy". Gravity was invented
by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are
falling off the trees.
Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel
was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large. Bach died
from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He
was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took walks in the forest even when
everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for
this.
France was in a serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished
before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French
Revolution, and it catapulted into Napolean. During the Napoleonic Wars, the
crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish
gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at Napolean's flanks. Napolean
became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He
wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she
couldn't bear children.
The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in
the East and sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She
sat on a thorn for sixty-three years. Her reclining years and finally the end
of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final
event which ended her reign.
The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts.
The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus
McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.
Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for
rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the "Organ of the Species".
Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.
The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a
surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.
[My copy of this story ends here, I don't know what happened to the rest of
time]

[Koveras]