Neil_Oz

And nobody's mentioned "Bollocks"?

ucsun

quid...don't hear british people using the term pound a lot. i work with an aussie, south african, and brit...i'm use to calling the trash can the bin now. 'what' becomes 'wha' for some reason.

flanneruk

Ira:

Both hanl and I have explained about spurious rules. But to repeat:

English doesn't have rules. How can it? Rules need a rule-making authority, and one of the reasons English both dominates the world and has produced a wholly disproportionate amount of the world's great literature is that it doesn't have a rule-making authority.

But in the 18th and 19th centuries, a bunch of philological illiterates went round inventing rules (like "don't split infinitives&quot based on how they saw Latin working. Or sometimes less well known languages - which is why pedants like me insist that criteria, seraphim and pappadom are the only legitimate plurals of criterion, seraph and pappad. Those phoney rules (like Brother Francis Xavier's whalebone-supported insistence that "differ" can be followed only by "from&quot aren't rules, and have little logic to support them. But observing them can be a strong way of sending a signal that you're part in the club of people who know and follow them.

Now many people (and almost everyone in many other Romance or Germanic languages) feel happier saying "different to" or "different than". And in our deeply democratic language, that's entirely up to them. You're quite entitled to conclude they're sloppy or ill-educated - and indeed in many walks of life, it can be quite foolish to say "different to", since the person who concludes that's a sloppy expression may well conclude its speaker is a fool.

But that doesn't make the educated convention about "different from" a rule. Only autocratic, dying languages (like French) believe it's possible for someone to tell others how to speak. Compare Shakespeare's splendid ignorance of rules with the rule-bound turgidity of Corneille or Racine and you'll see why rule-making leads to seriously tedious literature.

harzer

"English doesn't have rules"

That's a pretty silly statement, Flanneruk.

When you make that statement you are following the rules of English:

1. You are putting the subject (English) before the verb (doesn't have) and the object (rules) after it.
2. You are putting the verb 'do' into the singular form 'does' to agree with the singular subject 'English'.
3. You are making the verb negative by putting a negative particle (not, n't)after it rather than before it.

If you didn't these things you would not be producing English at all:

Rules not do English have

Harzer

Neil_Oz

harzer, I took flanneruk to be saying that English may have generally-agreed conventions, or guidelines, but not binding edicts. You and he may be assigning different meanings to the word "rules". Fortunately, such confusion is entirely permissible in English.

PatrickLondon

Grammarians distinguish between 'rules' and 'regularities', especially in English, which has far more of the latter. They are conventions that make us comprehensible to each other, but they can and do change from time to time and place to place.

Ira's hens set on eggs. Fair enough, I've seen that spelling often. But for me, they sit on them. On the other hand, to me 'set' is a transitive verb and the idea of 'setting on' people to work is not at all odd (though a bit dated nowadays, perhaps). One's regular in one place, the other's regular in another. Neither is a rule.

tedgale

Hard to see that "setting on" eggs is any thing other than a rural illiteracy, based on mispronunciation: If you pronounce "sit" as "set" you might write it that way as well.

I notice many people on this board also write "bigger then" when they clearly mean "bigger than" -- same phenomenon

Set on staff seems a very risky expression -- so prone to misunderstanding as to be useless.

When I read set on, I think set upon, as in The Good Samaritan:

There was a traveler who was set upon by thieves...

If a colleague told me he had set on 2 employees, I would call the Human Rights Commission or the police.

ira

Hi flanner,

I accept that you are using hyperbole when you say, "English doesn't have rules".

It does have conventions, however, and these conventions are determined by the way a majority of educated persons use the language.

You may recall the nonsensical claim a few years back, when people in the US were touting Ebonics, that there is no Standard English.

You are also, I am sure, aware of the extremely tortured way in which editors of current dictionaries, in their desire not to be prescriptive, try to justify semiliterate uses of grammar and words.

As far as "different from" is concerned, I have explained why I think that it is the most logical expression.

Anyone may, should they wish to do so, ignore conventions - use further instead of farther, say presently instead of present, use impact as a verb, etc, but they do so at their own risk.

I don't mind that the language changes -as long as t doesn't do it in my lifetime.

ira

>Ira's hens set on eggs. ... But for me, they sit on them.<

>Hard to see that "setting on" eggs is any thing other than a rural illiteracy...<

Dear friends,

If you look at the physiology of the fowl, you will see that they cannot sit.

A brooding hen sets eggs, ie, the liquid slowly solidifies, in a manner akin to the way that one bakes a custard until it is set.

I looked up "set" onthe Webster's (1913) site. Interstingly enough, it lists 'to give site or place to' as the 3rd definition, and says this about setting hens, 'The use of the verb set for sit in such expressions as, the hen is setting on thirteen eggs; a setting hen, etc., although colloquially common, and sometimes tolerated in serious writing, is not to be approved'.

I guess this puts a "sitting hen" on par with a "sitting judge".

ira

Do you folks stand on line or in line?

cailin

neither - we queue!

Kate

Cailin 1 - Ira 0

laverendrye

Some do none of the above; they "line up."

Barbara

If I wasn't queueing, I would be standing in line, unless there was a line painted on the ground upon which I could stand.

laverendrye

Is "standing on line" used elsewhere than NYC and environs?

katie_mac

What about
"I'm doing good..."
or
"I'm doing well..."

carolyn

Katie Mac, the five senses, along with linking verbs, take adjective modifiers, while regular verbs require an adverb modifier. Thus, you feel good but you do well--unless you are that Good Samaritan who was practicing "doing good" (unto others).

harzer

Well, I'm glad to hear that grammarians distinguish between rules and regularities, since that means that they acknowledge the existence of rules.

While it is true that languages change over time, and that there is a degree of diversity amongst their dialects at any given point in time, all speakers of a given dialect agree on a set of rules by their observance of them.

Every sentence that has been written here in this thread is grammatically correct because it has been written by a native speaker.

Language is 100% rule-governed behaviour.

What is not rule-governed is the choice of vocabulary.

Harzer

soccr

Regarding whether English has rules, whether it's a highly democratic language, etc. etc. :

It's true that a language evolves according to how people actually use it, and I hear wonderful (and awful) neologisms and constructions every day.

However, that "democracy" applies more to how people speak than how they hear. You may use "different than" (or, apparently, "different to&quot all you want, but there are those who will hear that as an indication of ignorance, defiance of convention, level of education or even class -- at least for another decade or so when it may yet become standard (I'm sorry to say, because "differ from" is the parent construction).

I deal every day with students who think up odd constructions and then think up odd logic to defend the constructions. It would serve them very poorly if I let them "ad hoc" and "ad lib" their way through their training - because at some point, they will be treated better if they know the "standard" forms than they would if they've been so "creative" or "democratic" about their language that they don't even know how bad they may sound to people who will have power over them.

tedgale

Doing good and doing well:

There may be no underlying logic to it but doing good = what Mother Teresa aspired to. Doing well = doing okay.

I asked my little American niece at Christmas how she was and she replied: I m good.

I responded: Any niece of mine is good. But how are you feeling.

Thereafter she cautiously but proudly said: I am WELL.

I wish everyone gave the same weight to Uncle Ted s admonitions........