The importance of good writing skills

Well, in Latin, most nouns ending in "us" are considered masculine; the plural of which ends with "ii;" e.g., Prius/Prii. How that's translated to French, (a "romance" language"), is beyond my expertise, but I'd assume it would also be masculine.

Who would have thunk I'd remember these arcane facts from H.S. Latin class?

(Ray V.: another "Fed" worker here)

 

Grammatical skill-sets are quite important for those that choose a line of employment that requires an effective and concise communiqué to individuals that may be confused with local euphemisms.

On-line stuff... like FB or PC FHoP... not so much.


Hey Rae... :wave:

 

Just today we had a division-wide meeting at our company, there were over a hundred people there, and on one of the introductory slides they had the phrase "put the peddle to the metal". Not a terrible mistake I suppose, but something that jumped out at a few of us. So then we joked, "Oh, that guy is such a looser". No, not really, we just moved on.

There's also the "may be" and "maybe" confusion but it's encountered less frequently. I had a cousin complain about her job with the sentence "13.5 hour long shifts are not conductive to staying awake." Ignoring the part about starting a sentence with an unspelled number, I gently reminded her it's actually not "conducive" to staying awake, but then I did a little research online to make sure I wasn't out of line, and found several examples of journalists confusing those two words. That was scary.

There are some situations where I have to say common vernacular is better than using stilted phrasing. My understanding of the rule against using a split infinitive is that it came about because Latin was considered the most exemplary of languages in the Victorian era, and infinitives can't be split in Latin, so we shouldn't do it in English either. That argument doesn't sit well with me, so I split the infinitive with abandon. And being from Minnesota, I commonly end sentences with a preposition - that seems to frequently be the best thing to end a sentence with.

I had to research the "begs the question" usage, I never heard of that distinction before. Great, now another thing that will sit in my brain. At my previous workplace I had a colleague that would interrupt us with "lee" at odd times. Turns out, he didn't like it when we misused adverbs, so we'd be saying something like this: "We need to make sure the code was written correct (lee!) or we'll have to add the fixes quick (lee!)." Eventually I realized how often I completely missed this, and now it bugs me when I see it in print, or on the news, or in a song (like "It just comes natural" by Clint Black). I'm not sure if I should thank or curse my former colleague.

 

The Split Infinitive thing isn't a real rule (and I will go out of my way to sometimes do it just to happily annoy people who think it is).

For that matter, a preposition is a perfectly good thing to end a sentence with.

 

We had flex time on my last job. We could come in any time before 8:00AM and leave any time after 5:00PM

 

Or when people say, " this is Bob, I have an emergency here. Call me at saymynumbereallyfastsouyouhavetoplayitfivetimes."

Congratulations on knowing your own phone number so well that you can attempt to break the land speed record reciting it. Now, can you share it with the rest of us?

 

Several years ago we had an on-site temp agency to fill all the short term positions in a number of company-wide projects whose official commercial name was "Interim On Premise". I couldn't believe that kind of mistake could survive long in such a high profile usage, the actual name of a company, but I was dismissively admonished that "Premise" was the singular of "Premises" when I mentioned it to one of their recruiters, so I shut up and wondered if any of our projects required more than passing command of the language because they wouldn't be screening for that; even if they thought they were, it couldn't've been competent.

 

The Michigan Association of School Boards, otherwise known as MASB, in their great drive for catchy phrases has chosen the motto "Lead Strong". It makes me cringe.

Tom

 

You're right. Lead is a very malleable material. That motto doesn't make any sense at all.

 

Unless they mold it around their feet and jump into the lake.

Tom

 

Thanks. On my grave stone I will have a simple explanation of the difference between it's and its and when to use the proper one.

 

"I want my tombstone to be "HE NEVER COMPROMISED" carved into a towering pillar of marble. (Or concrete, if marble is too expensive.)" - Lore Sjöberg

 

I ams guilty of beings one of da stupids folks!

 

Heard a program on Public Radio addressing this topic.

There has never been a time English, Latin, or any other language was not abused.

There have always been people being too sloppy with a language.

Writers, poets, others on the other end have attempted (and sometimes succeeded) in defining standards.

It's been a tug-of-war.

 

Language is an art. Not everyone is an artist.

 

Obviously some only use the "modern art" version of language.

 

An artist, Picasso is. A linguist, Yoda is not. A philosopher, maybe.

 

Write by numbers, perhaps?

Tom