Cato's Grammar Grumble

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Oh my!   A few minutes to recall so many terrible things seen and heard in the past months!  😇

One of my favorites was at one of America's surviving department stores in North Carolina, in which store a door had the following sign:

Keep this Area Clare! 

Dang!  Looks like I won't be able to shop there--since I'm not Clare. 

PD

[Cato]

Dang!  Looks like I won't be able to shop there--since I'm not Clare. 

PD

To be Clare, or not to be Clare!  How would we clarify this problem?   

[Pohjolas Daughter]

To be Clare, or not to be Clare!  How would we clarify this problem?   

Oh, boo! 

PD

p.s. ...Use clarified butter in the recipe's solution?

[Cato]

Oh, boo! 

PD

p.s. ...Use clarified butter in the recipe's solution?

  Dude!    You are in the club! 

From a Mahler website  today: translation courtesy of some robot, as you will see!

" An immense Abbado conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker in a magnificent performance of the Symphony no. 1 at Mahler (1991)."


The recommendation offers a picture of Claudio, who shows no sign of an "immense" weight gain! 

And I do not think there can be a performance "at" a person, so... 


Probably the translation should be "The great Abbado...of Mahler."

"Artificial Intelligence" in this case needs to go back to school! 

[Florestan]

Keep this Area Clare!

They probably meant "Keep this Area, Clare!" --- ie, an injunction to Clare, whoever that babe might be, to not leave that area...

It's amazing what a huge difference a comma can make; refer to the famous oracle "you will go you will come back no death in war" offered to an ancient Greek general going to war. What do you think, did he die in the war or not?

[Karl Henning]

At last! More fun in Lent!

Download a free and fun Lenten devotional for families!

[Karl Henning]

Not a serious Grumble. None of us catches all the typos all the time. And this looks  like an "auto-correct" artifact which didn't get caught (and again, no grave fault) ... the title of the second of these episodes is, of course, The Universe of Battle.

[Karl Henning]

You're welcome.

[steve ridgway]

You're welcome.

The apparent misspelling can be deliberate in this sort of experimental music, it shows a rejection of bourgeois convention. I like the way the CD sleeve shows the graphic score indicating the ways in which the kettle should be moved with respect to the microphones so as to change the balance of the connected ring modulators, filters etc. This is not music to be whislted in the street.

[Karl Henning]

The apparent misspelling can be deliberate in this sort of experimental music, it shows a rejection of bourgeois convention. I like the way the CD sleeve shows the graphic score indicating the ways in which the kettle should be moved with respect to the microphones so as to change the balance of the connected ring modulators, filters etc. This is not music to be whislted in the street.

(* chortsle *)

[LKB]

Life has prevented me from placing even some of the Grammar Gremlins from the past months.


Here is an interesting one from a frozen-yogurt emporium's bulletin board: a poster from a local university.


"REGISTER FOR THIS SUMMER'S

WOMEN'S SOCCER ID CAMP"     

AND PREPARE TO COMPETE ON THE COLLEGE LEVEL!"

So, I am sure you are wondering what a "women's soccer id* camp" could be!

My first guess: a camp where you need to find your inner soccer-monster to become a winner. 

Mrs. Cato thought the "ID" was perhaps for "identify," which still is something of a stretch.  The camp, she thought, would "identify" you as a future college soccer player...or not!

I liked my explanation better! 


*
It is perhaps not well known that Sigmund Freud never used the Latin words id, ego, and superego in his theory of the mind, but used German, i.e Das Es, Das Ich, and Das Ueber-Ich.

His English translator decided to use Latin for the concepts, which meant losing something rather subtle.

In German, "the child" is das Kind, and therefore the gender, because the word for "the" is "das," is neither male nor female, but neuter.  Since the gender of the word is neuter, the child's pronoun is "Es."

In German, this links the concept of the child's inchoate personality directly to Freud's idea of Das Es, since all Germans as children were referred to as "Es."  z.B. "Das Kind ist so lieb.  Es ist auch niedlich!"  (The child is so dear.  It is also cute!")

(I have read debates where Germans question whether to use natural gender, when referring to the child, i.e. if the child is a boy, you would have "Das Kind...Er..."  (He) or "Das Kind...Sie..." (She).)

Purists wanted Das Kind - Es.

My Id would be happy to camp. A very small tent and a little wine would suffice...

[Karl Henning]

Disclaimer on a YouTube vid:

Important note: This video features 20th century music that might be unplesant to some, and lead to dangerous, toxic arguments. Proceed with caution

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Disclaimer on a YouTube vid:

Important note: This video features 20th century music that might be unplesant to some, and lead to dangerous, toxic arguments. Proceed with caution

PD

[DavidW]

[Karl Henning]

Seen on Threads:

"Update your lesson plans, we have a new perfect example for Oxford commas.

The highlights of his waning administration include encounters with Rudy Giuliani, a health-care disaster and a dildo collector."

[SimonNZ]

Seen elsewhere:

Grammar walks into a bar...
- The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
- A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
- A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
- A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
- An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
- Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
- A question mark walks into a bar?
- A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
- A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
- Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
- A synonym strolls into a tavern.
- At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
- A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
- An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
- The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
- A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
- A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
- A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

[Karl Henning]

This came from an experienced and lucid legal commentator, so I happily cut him some slack, but my left eyebrow about reached the ceiling as I heard many people, including I

Tangentially, speaking of cutting, one idly wonders how farts came to be cut. A quick search found the hypothesis that it draws from couper le fromage.

[Florestan]

This came from an experienced and lucid legal commentator, so I happily cut him some slack, but my left eyebrow about reached the ceiling as I heard many people, including I

He might have meant Many people, I included. 

[Cato]

Rural Northwestern Ohio has various accents and pronuciations outside of the standard (once called by linguists many decades ago as "unaccented" English) usually heard in the state's large cities.

A curiosity, which I have occasionally heard here, again hit my ears today: a local school official was being interviewed about field trips.

"Our students will tore the art museum in Toledo, and then tore the Wright Brothers sites in Dayton in May."   


"Tore" = "Tour" in the above! 

"Tour" usually has a glide: "Too-ur", or can rhyme with "poor."

This, of course, leads to other curiosities: "pour," according to some dictionaries, is identical to "poor," but I have heard people make it rhyme with "pore" and with the above glide pronunciation of "tour."  😇

In fact, I recall the glide for "pour" being taught as a way to avoid a homonym with "pore" and with "poor."

I am sure our European English speakers have heard other variations! 

[Mandryka]

A couple of things in The Wings of The Dove which struck me as somehow inappropriate from the point of view of register -- this is probably a difference between British and American English.

First supercivilised. Using super as an intensifier prefix seems to me popular and modern

She listened so well that she was really listening after he had ceased to speak. He had kept his grasp of her, drawing her close, and though they had again, for the time, stopped walking, his talk—for others at a distance—might have been, in the matchless place, that of any impressed tourist to any slightly more detached companion. On possessing himself of her arm he had made her turn, so that they faced afresh to Saint Mark's, over the great presence of which his eyes moved while she twiddled her parasol. She now, however, made a motion that confronted them finally with the opposite end. Then only she spoke—"Please take your hand out of my arm." He understood at once: she had made out in the shade of the gallery the issue of the others from their place of purchase. So they went to them side by side, and it was all right. The others had seen them as well and waited for them, complacent enough, under one of the arches. They themselves too—he argued that Kate would argue—looked perfectly ready, decently patient, properly accommodating. They themselves suggested nothing worse—always by Kate's system—than a pair of the children of a supercivilized age making the best of an awkwardness. Volume 2 Bk 8 Chapter 2


And secondly well aloof -- kids in school might say that their teacher is well boring, but using well as intensifier isn't the sort of thing I'd have expected to find in Henry James.

It would be accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof. These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a qualification. Volume 2 Book 9 Chapter 2