Lol diego

Fair enough.

Defend yourself Professor

I typed out a defense of your position, but I've got the fear of these grammar nits and deleted it lol. Stand up for the weak and illiterate (me in other words).

People write "wrong" **** all the time. Record yourself speaking and see how much grammatical sense that makes as laid out in the prescriptive grammar books and the like.

I don't even think that was "wrong" anyway. Dialect differences and allsorts could explain it. Internet English being closer to spoken English than "traditional" written Englishes of the past.

Would it not be see instead on seen anyway, due to the fact that it's not as if his English professorship (or whatever you'd call it) would have ended (and thus got a past tense instead of a present tense).

Also, don't waste time or owning my English. It is balls I know haha.

Actually, no, it's not. An ad hominem refers to a specific brand of logical fallacy where a personal attack is substituted for an argument against a position. For example, saying "Your argument is invalid because you're a moron" is an ad hominem.

It's an ad hominem no matter whether the statements are actually true or false. The Creationist staple "Evolution is wrong because Darwin was racist" is an ad hominem where both statements are basically false. "The holocaust was bad because Hitler was evil" is an ad hominem where both statements are true. Both are equally invalid from a logical perspective.

What you did, both here and above, was more along the lines of "Your argument is wrong, and you're a moron," which isn't an ad hominem; it's just an insult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Don't worry jimmi you're fine. it's the professor I own.

Firstly, I'm not even remotely concerned about properly punctuating this reply. I'm sending it from my phone.

Here's why his conditional sentence was wrong:

The if clause refers to an 'unreal' time in the past 'if you had looked'. He didn't look and that cannot be changed but we're going to speak about reality as if he did look.

Therefore the main clause must refer to the past. 'would see' refers to present time. 'Would have seen' is how we refer to this past (impossible) reality.

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Yeah, I'll agree with that. However, I still assert that my original post was not an ad hominem attack.

This is my favorite post in this thread in a long time.

No, read it again. I didn't do that. I used the "you're a moron" line as an example and then went out of my way to say that it didn't apply to him. If you think I was trying to slide that in as an insult, you need to improve your reading comprehension.

In your second post you're not calling him a moron, I agree. The "I hope you're not an English teacher ..." part of your first post, even if it wasn't meant to be an insult, can easily be misconstrued as one, though, so it should have been rephrased.

Any obscurity in a work translated from, say, the Chinese is laid to the workings of the...

OR

Any obscurity in a work translated from, say, the Chinese, is laid to the workings of the...

?

OK, I'll accept that and I'll try to play nicer. But it's not an ad hominem attack.

There's nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, I assure you. I was making a logical distinction, not a value judgment as to whether or not you were being a dick. I understood that your statement was a hypothetical, but that doesn't make it any less poor of an example of an ad hominem.

#2 is correct. It's a bit confusing because you wouldn't put the comma after "Chinese" if you removed the interjecting phrase (", say,"). Doing that, however, would change the meaning of the sentence. (The phrase currently reads with the Chinese being one of many potential examples; that change would cause it to refer only to the Chinese).

Because the sentence intends the Chinese to be just one example, it necessitates the interjecting phrase, and thus, the trailing comma. It would be the same if it were structured to read as:

Any obscurity in a work translated from the Chinese, for example, is laid to the workings of the...

(I'm sure there are names for all of this, but I don't know any of them as I do my grammar entirely on instinct )

That's what I thought. I just read #1 in an impressive article that had everything else correct. I thought I remembered seeing multiple sentences exhibit the same structure, but on second look, it appears to have been a mistake.

Commas in this example are working like weak parentheses--which means that it should be possible to remove the material inside the commas as non-essential without altering the basic meaning or syntax of the sentence. But if, in the second sentence, you take out ", say, the Chinese," (or even just ", say," or ", the Chinese,") the sentence no longer works. Thus the first sentence is correct.

I just started reading Never Let Me Go, and it's a cool coincidence that I happened across this sentence:

Pretty sure this is incorrect. How do you figure that these two sentences are at all the same?

"Any obscurity in a work translated from, say, the Chinese is laid to the workings of the..."

"Any obscurity in a work translated from the Chinese is laid to the workings of the..."

Clearly these sentences have different meanings. The first refers to any translated work and uses one from the Chinese as an example. The second refers solely to work translated from the Chinese.

You are correct that the commas function as weak parentheses, but the stronger parentheses version would be:

"Any obscurity in a work (translated from, say, the Chinese) is laid to the workings of..."

I don't know whether or not the original #2 sentence would be improved with a comma between "work" and "translated" but I'm pretty sure that there needs to be a pause after "the Chinese" for that sentence to work.

Frankly I don't think any of those sentences are constructed that well. I'd probably go with:

"Any obscurity in a translated work (from the Chinese, for example) is laid to the workings of..."

His claim is that the first sentence is correct because you can remove the interjectory “say” without altering the sentence's basic meaning or syntax, and that the second sentence is incorrect for the obverse reason. And, here, you're focusing on why you think the first half of that claim (everything before the comma in my first sentence) is incorrect—namely that you think removing “say” does in fact alter the sentence's basic meaning?

(I just want to clarify because it's a bit unclear what certain things in this part of your post are referring to.)

laid to the workings of the what!?

Yup, that's exactly what I'm saying. Removing "say" clearly changes the sentence's basic meaning in my (totally inexpert) opinion.

ETA: I've re-evaluated my position and have determined that that sentence just plain sucks no matter where you put its commas; it is probably not salvageable without clarification as to what the hell it's trying to say to begin with. "Translated from the Chinese" is a clause without meaning. Without context there's no way to know if the author is talking about a work translated from a Chinese language, or if he's talking about a work being translated by the Chinese people.

That's probably the underlying reason why it's confusing people as to where any commas should go.

Okay, forgive my spamming in this thread but this one is making my brain hurt (I think I'm usually very good at grammar, scored a perfect on my English ACT way back when, etc., so this is really bugging me).

Stripping away my other problems with the sentence and reformatting it to my liking, I would contend that these two sentences are both grammatically correct and have a different meaning:

1) Anything translated from Mandarin has obscurity.
2) Anything translated from, say, Mandarin, has obscurity.

Similarly I think that the following two sentences are both grammatically correct and have the same meaning:

3) She never shouted like Miss Lucy did when she got mad at you.
4) She never shouted like, say, Miss Lucy did when she got mad at you.

Obviously the comma structure is different between #2 and #4 when logically it seems like it shouldn't be, so if I'm wrong I would love to have someone show me why (or at least tell me definitively from a good authoritative position).

The reason I feel compelled to place a comma after "Mandarin" in #2 is because, I think, I feel that the interjection of "say" acts as an implied "for example," which would be inserted after "Mandarin" to form:

5) Anything translated from Mandarin, for example, has obscurity.

I don't know if that's an actual grammar rule, though, or just my brain putting the pause in there when it shouldn't.

The difference between 1&2 vs. 3&4 is, to me, that 3&4 is already comparative, so the addition of "say" doesn't really change the meaning; it's redundant. So my brain doesn't insert the implied "for example" and thus doesn't require the pause or the comma.

Is my brain getting this wrong, or am I somehow subconsciously applying some subtle rule of grammar?

I'd say it's because the example situation is the time when Miss Lucy got mad and shouted at you. So that needs to be one clause without any separation. If you separate it then the pronoun 'she' in that clause modifies the opening clause 'she never shouted', and would mean something like, 'she never shouted when she got mad at you, like Miss Lucy did'.

3 and 4 are slightly different because, in 3, only one comparative situation is referenced. In 4, it is implied that there could be other comparative situations.

If you didn't put a comma after Manderin, you would be translating from 'Mandarin has obscurity', which makes no sense. You need to separate Mandarin to make it clear that you are translating from something called Mandarin.

Nice post. To add context, the article is about translating Japanese literature into English. Keene was saying readers of translated literature don't want there to be ambiguity, usually, so he advises translators as a general rule to state things plainly (even if the original work intended to convey some ambiguity).

Larger excerpt:

I absolutely (irrationally) hate the use of an apostrophe when referring to a decade e.g. 1970's.

Was very surprised to see it used frequently in Caro's biography of Robert Moses. Is it in fact acceptable?

In this month's Bluff magazine: