too or either

[Metamorfose]

As native speakers, what sounds more natural?

(1) they get nervous and can't act naturally too.
(2) they get nervous and can't act naturally either.

Something tells me (2) sounds nicer because the negative phrase is closer to the words too/either (modifiers?). What do you say?

Thanks


José

[fluffyhamster]

I'd prefer to avoid the question: They get nervous and can't (therefore) act naturally.

That is, adding 'too' or 'either' makes me start thinking of there possibly being another group of people involved (and I then think, why not use BOTH the words you're apparently fretting over, José): They too get nervous and can't (therefore) act naturally either.

But I suppose that if you put a gun to my head and asked me to give you my gut rather than (you give me) my brains, I too would choose your 2 rather than your 1.*

Or you could simply change the conjunction to 'but (also)' and add 'not only' before it: They not only get nervous but (also) can't act naturally... (in which case, 'either' certainly seems to again end the sentence better than 'too' would).

*I guess that whilst either word can generally appear in an end position, there is something about the relative mobility of 'too' compared to 'either' moving up but into e.g. an 'Either...or...' construction [in which the conjunction would have to change from 'and' to 'or'] that makes me feel that 'too' is somehow less clear/more meaningless, certainly in its end position here, than 'either' appears to be, if only because 'either' would appear (as just explained) to "have nowhere else to go".

[Macavity]

Either sounds better because of the negation.


I don't like grammar/ Me either!


I could be quite negative about grammar, though, without negation:


I hate grammar/ Me too!

[JuanTwoThree]

Almost all the time I rejoice in the diversity of English and champion usage over prescription. But there are limits ( such as "didn't used to") and I have to say that

"Me either"

is well up the list of things that I'm bound to accept on the grounds of usage but that at the same grate on some part of my inner ear; I don't mean anatomically but that place where you mentally taste (to mix metaphors!) a slice of language to decide if it works for you.

I trust it far more than I trust self-appointed arbiters of correctness and incorrectness.

"Me either" doesn't so much grate on me as mill me to a finely powdered Parmesan. If it means "Not me either" where the **** is the "not"?

[Macavity]

Maybe your inner ear would serve you better if you blew your nose from time to time

[JuanTwoThree]

Just back from a walk. It's -5ºC and snowing and I've blown my nose clear of any impediments to my judgement. But I just don't get it.

It's nothing personal, as I'm sure you understand, nor is it a dig at AmE in general. I suppose it is AmE:

http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/conversa ... age16.html

I can't offhand think of anything used by other NSes, AmE speakers or not, that rings as untrue as this does. "Did you eat already?" and so on barely raise an inner eyebrow in comparison.

Gosh, that's a third part of my head mentioned. It's hard to say where the NS instinct for this resides. In Fluffyhamster's gut apparently.

Is it only "Me either" or do people say "Us either", "John either" and so on? Could "Or me" be used in the same way?

[woodcutter]

Astonishingly, that bending before pure unexamined intuition currently often seems to be the "correct" academic attitude to take about wrongness.

For one thing though, US English often grates on British English ears, even when we are trying not to let it happen. They are big and brash and we are small and threatened. So this "wincing" or "inner eyebrow raising" etc is more likely to occur in a Brit when the offending items have a US feel, IMHO, even if we know we shouldn't be so insular.

[JuanTwoThree]

It's not about wrongness, as such. Saying that a widespread usage by other NSs sounds odd is not to say it's wrong. It's more like thinking that two colours clash horribly and finding it strange and interesting that anybody would think not.

Unless it's "should of". Which is plain wrong.

I don't think it's because we're small and threatened (are we?) or that particularly AmE gets up our noses for some other reason. It's only because AmE is the variant that we're most likely to encounter. There may well be Australian usages that sound iffy to New Zealanders and vice versa but I don't get to hear them so often, although I'm sure some BrE speakers do.

My South African colleague says "See you now" when he means "Back in a moment". I get the urge to duck under the table and say "Not any more". I dare say if most TV programmes and so on were "in" SA Eng there'd be many more expressions that sounded odd.

Besides, AmE shouldn't sound strange if we've been exposed to so much of it. There's some kind of contradiction there.

Anyway, what do you mean by "unexamined"? In one sense of the word, we've had essays corrected, our spoken English corrected, passed O levels, A levels, or the equivalent, and in some cases a raft more exams. Nobody has escaped prescription, whatever they think about it.

In another sense, mulling over an expression and finding it strange is a sophisticated process and anything but unexamined:

You wouldn't say that experienced mechanics are using intuition, at least not in a disparaging way, when they say that it "sounds like the trunions are worn". My intuition, and that of most people here, is the result of thousands of hours of erudite reading, listening, speaking (often in intelligent and culturally diverse company, which I think helps)and fairly careful writing, not to mention studying grammar explicitly: in my far from humble opinion it's a highly-tuned device after all this time ( I'm not a young man, you know).

But I do accept that other people have come to different conclusions after the same process. Though I'm surprised sometimes, I have to say. Similar inputs should produce similar results, even though each person is a product of a subtle blend of dialects, sociolects and idiolects, of course.

Surprised is not horrified though. Despite my pretended hypobolic reactions to "me either" it's quite dispassionate in fact: "I really don't care for that way of putting it. It grates. But other NSs use it. Hmmmm. How interesting."

[woodcutter]

I'm sure your ability to intuitively spot what is not the norm in standard British English is better than mine Juan. However I doubt you or anyone else have eyebrows inside, and unless the wincing that experts mention is meant to have the force of "wrong!!" then I don't know why they feel the need to mention it.

I think the problem is that we can't really get our heads around the allowances we should make, and when, for foreigness, or dialect, and you seem to agree. However I think the way out of these eternal cul-de-sacs is not to become semi-mystical about wincing (which Pinker does in his most recent popular work, for example) but to look harder into the way our intuition about non-standard usage must be modified when we are not dealing with people known to be using formal English from the self-same subset as ourselves - BBC English in our case (though the BBC is intent on killing that!). If they are the exact same group and aiming for formality then intuition will usually pretty much do all that corpus linguistics can.

The problem is that online we often don't know. And is there such a thing as general English?

(By the way, If anyone else here came from a region where using the local grammar implies (with hilarity) retardation and incest, even in that region, they would understand my general thoughts better, I think)

[fluffyhamster]

Foreignness is only really a genuine problem in the context of learning a foreign language (and then, a lot of learners should just be getting on with learning and communicating instead of pondering so many minor points that they begin to pester teachers...but a lot of us would probably be out of a job if it weren't for such students' curiosity). Certainly, I wouldn't be particularly bothered about teaching native speakers too much about their own language (exemplars can and do speak for themselves usually - all one has to do is draw attention to things in the right way), unless to correct some clearly erroneous approaches (e.g. that ETAQ rubbish). The fact is, the kids don't really care, and neither should we, probably, unless their shouting 'Ug ug, ug ugging ugger!' whilst burning down the classroom was somebody actually trying to warn that somebody else was going to burn down the classroom rather than them all simply telling us to get lost.

[JuanTwoThree]

Woody, I'd have thought that we both have the same highly developed gut feeling for standard BrE because we went through the same mills for the first twenty years of our lives and share a very similar culture. If anything, I'm probably losing mine by not living in the UK: my NES circle is about six people.

But I do think that perhaps a curious and retentive mind and being a bit older helps with exposure to a wider variety of Englishes: I've noticed something among some younger people or people who have led curtailed lives however long they've lived, as well as among people who read very little or have limited tastes in TV books, films and music. It's that they seem to understand and speak a very limited or adolescent form of it and are surprised by things that seem to me normal and familiar perhaps because I've been exposed to them over and over again, although they're not something that I would say myself. I don't mean that they use a dialect, dialects are as rich as standard English, but that they only deploy a fraction of what standard or any other English is capable of.

I have a young teacher who can't accept that "A house whose foundations are weak will fall down" might be correct. He says he's never heard "whose" used for inanimate objects. I say he needs to get out of the house more.

It's a difficult and delicate thing to comment on and I'll probably get into trouble but something similar is true of some native English speakers whose families haven't been English speakers for generations: it's as if English is their second language but they never learnt their first. It might be something to with having all four grandparents who weren't English speakers or growing up in communities where English wasn't exactly the only language.

So getting back to "me either". I've heard it a lot, for a long time. I'm well aware of its existence and widespread acceptance. I don't think it's "wrong" or "dialect" or "common" or "non-standard". I should have got used to it. I haven't.

[woodcutter]

Korea mixes you up more than Spain I think. I'll finally be leaving soon though. And region is important too. I have you down as Home Counties - I can't remember if you ever said.

I think that "wrong" is something you wouldn't use yourself in the same context and wasn't used simply because the user is of a different group, or because it was a smart usage you were ignorant of. Arbitrary rules may have a role to play in that. Therefore I would probably say "the house whose", and we have surely all heard such things a lot, but I would avoid writing it because of the rule, therefore it crosses the line for me in written English.

(Although I constantly make EVERY sort of daft mistake before editing, which is my downfall at places like language log where you can't edit after you send!)

[ronqgentry]

As a new poster from you can see where, I found this whole string fascinatin'. I suppose it's a wonder that we can understand each other as well as we can. Jose from Brazil got far more than he asked for in his original question. What I thought was different for me was your use of whilst and learnt. I immediately understood these even though I never hear them from North Americans or read them either, except perhaps in Edgar Allen Poe or older writers.

Another example of usage: People from other regions always make fun of Texans' use of ya'll and frequently mistakenly use it in the singular when making their fun. It's really just a contraction for you all and as real Texans know should only be used in the plural. Why say "all of you", which is much too long and what fool took the plural second person out of the language, anyway? Just ask any Spanish speaking person about this.

One question, for the benefit of maybe Jose and me: (Remember, as I always tell my students - there aren't any foolish questions.) What is NS? I think I got everything else.

[ronqgentry]

Oh! Native Speakers, right?

[JuanTwoThree]

You might be interested in this:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009

To nit-pick, we really dropped the 2nd person singular (thou, thee, thy, thine) and now only use the plural (you, you, your, yours). If that also interests you then you've come to the right place!