Do you agree...

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 3:55 pm

...with the answers to this quiz?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7049323/

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 5:29 pm

No I don't. It;s the Mr Spock school of grammar rather than the real world.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 6:39 pm

The SATs don't identify mistakes in English grammar; they ask you to identify the delusions the examiners have about what is correct English grammar.

And of course they throw in "none of the above" to penalize those who are not deluded. As many have pointed out, if they missed that out examinees would not have to worry that some of the examiners might actually know English grammar.

The committee example is particularly nefarious since, although it more commonly takes a singlular verb in American than in British English, both the American Heritage book of English usage and the Colombia book of style accept the plural usage.

The first example is a little harder; the sentence is stylistically clumsy and changing 'and' to 'when' would be a definite improvement. Even so I would prefix the sentence with a ? and not a *

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 6:47 pm

So why does all the mavenry and stickleriness seem to come from one side of the Atlantic? There doesn't seem to be so much fuss in other English speaking countries.

Is "good English" to these people some kind of WASP drawbridge that verges on racism? Or is it some kind of healthy aspirational thing, part of membership of the great society, that anybody can join? Even if made unnecessarily difficult by so much prissiness.

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:57 pm

Juan wrote:

Is "good English" to these people some kind of WASP drawbridge that verges on racism? Or is it some kind of healthy aspirational thing, part of membership of the great society, that anybody can join? Even if made unnecessarily difficult by so much prissiness.

Being more pedantic than deluded, it can't be a WASP drawbridge as that acronym stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The "committee" example would therefore rule out Anglo-Saxons, not to mention the Welsh and Scotish. In otherwords, it it is even more restrictive than you suggested, verging on racism, quite possibly, or possibly even being intentionally so.

East of the pond, we often get the impression of a certain how shall I put this "take" on education in certain parts of the USA. Am I right in thinking that it is illegal to teach evolution without reference to the Bible and explicitly stating that it (evolution not the Bible) may be wrong in certain parts of the USA?

I may have gone too far in linking such people with the grammatical delusions of SATS. American posters can advise me here if this is a fallacy ad hominem.

In the UK, most exam boards mark most Americanisms correct. The one exception is expressions such as, "Did you see it already?" Here we would mandate the perfect tense. The idea here is genuinely retrospective and I wouldn't argue that it is "standard" unless its currency becomes overwhelming. Knowing what I do about SATS, I expect that they would proscribe it too.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:58 pm

WASP was obviously not strictly the term I was looking for to describe this type of snobbery.

I picture these sad high school journalism teachers and dinosaurian provincial newspaper "style" columnists as seeing themselves as defenders of something, and it's a worrying something. As I say, do they welcome into the fold anybody who can get to grips with their absurd shibboleths or is it one of many ways of denying membership of this something to the, to them, wrong kind of people?

The UK is not immune to such silliness but perhaps we do it with names of meals, or if your granny is your nana. We certainly seem to be officially more relaxed about these weird grammar points.