snowden, if efforts at communication routinely require further clarification, as they seem to do in English, or if those to whom it's important to speak precisely have to make extraordinary efforts to do so using redundancies and obscure diction and constructions (think legalese, not just at its obfuscatory worst but in all cases of careful crafting, e.g., legal decisions and legislation), then the language has a precision problem.

I am pretty certain the dominance of the English language has less to do with its simplicity and more with the influence of the British empire and later the USA.

Do you really think that the effort is due to grammatical ambiguity? It seems like the real reason is to try and eliminate vagueness which of course has nothing to do with grammar.

I disagree strongly. Ambiguous and vague words are a big part of it, yes — probably the largest part — but legal writing is replete with multiple-word phrases that could be eliminated if the sentences they modified could easily be structured unambiguously.

This is what Fly was complaining about; I was commenting that it would be amusing to "correct" somebody in this fashion, mostly because it's manifestly stupid.

I'd be in favor of simplifying the language in cases where no clarity is lost, which would be the case with dropping "whom" -- if the differences between who/whom were great enough to cause any confusion then that would make it a lot easier to remember how to use them. But alas, that's not the case. Also, so many people use "good" when they should use "well" (as well as other adjectives in place of adverbs) precisely because there are no issues with clarity, thus preventing them from realizing that they have said something wrong. Generally the two words mean exactly the same thing with the only difference being which part of speech they are, and the part of speech is made explicitly clear in the context of the sentence.

From randomly looking up some adjectives in dictionary.com I'm actually seeing them having a listing as an adverb as well, for example:

–adverb
20.
in a smart manner; smartly.

so perhaps it's already becoming acceptable to use adjectives as adverbs.

When I was younger I would have been rigidly in favor of adhering to the rules but after having learned more about languages and how they grow and develop I've started to view them a lot differently -- languages are defined by the masses while the rules that are put down for them are essentially a documentation of how people speak and write, rather than the other way around. And as a result I don't feel too bad about verbing or adjectivizing or nouning various words, or just generally making stuff up, if that happens to be the best way to express something clearly. I think that in general, people will naturally gravitate towards a manner of speech that expresses things as clearly and concisely as possible, and it makes more sense to allow this to happen freely than to insist upon adherence to various rules that for whatever reason seem to be holding people back.

And that's not to say I see no value in learning the rules and attempting to speak properly, but this post is getting tl;dr so I'm going to cut off here.

They're not wrong. The nits who've been told by their parents and history teachers to say "well" instead of "good" are wrong.

Here is one of many explanations:

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com...rsus-well.aspx

Hypercorrection FTL.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the clips from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Courtesy of imdb.com:

Edit: Clip for the second scene

One more example I found regarding adverbs:

• “I smell bad” means “I have an offensive odor.” / “I stink.”
• “I smell badly” means “My sense of smell doesn’t work correctly.”

Publix in Florida's express lanes now say:


FEWER THAN 10 ITEMS

Can I have 5 minutes of my life back? From your own link:

yeah, but that's a super rare mistake in everyday English. When was the last time you heard someone say something like "He played the game good" (with the exception of poker players saying running good which I think is mostly tongue in cheek)

I hear it or its equivalent daily, when I'm talking to people outside my family. I suspect that a majority of Americans use good in that sort of context at least some of the time.

People are, for the most part, ignorant morons; that's pretty much the point of this thread.

I feel like you are overstating how often you hear what I'm talking about but maybe you do. Lots of grammar rules aren't particularly real (in that there's no particularly good argument for them existing) but that one strikes me as the kind that almost all speakers would be able to tell by ear alone. "Me and John went to the movies" is arguably an error but doesn't sound too bad, but "John teaches good" sounds really awful.

One reason that I hear it so often is that my son's mother, who is admittedly none too bright, does it constantly and in fact does not understand the difference (which I tried to explain, long ago when we were together), and my son therefore does it constantly as well; I'm thus sensitized to it. But having been so sensitized, I can tell you that it really is quite common.

Also, lol at "me and john went..." being "arguably" an error and not sounding too bad. It's completely, unarguably wrong and sounds abominable to an educated English speaker.

we've had this debate earlier in the thread, but there are as many "logical (whatever you want to take that to mean) reasons for "John and I" being correct as there are for "John and me" being correct.

Furthermore, even educated people make this error all the time and you probably don't even notice quite often. Hell, Obama made that error and he's about as educated as you get.

I submit that I almost never fail to notice when people make the error; perhaps you do. Hell, perhaps others miss it too and I'm overestimating how grating it is generally, but I hear it and cringe.

Note also that you leapt from my statement that it sounds wrong to educated speakers, to your defense that educated speakers say it. There's no inconsistency there.

it's not that big of a leap, if educated speakers will always hear it then they shouldn't make that error. I will notice near 100% of the time if someone says "I is...." and I can promise you I never make that error.

not quite a fair question since I don't interact with native speakers (in person) very often anymore, but people do it all the time

as anecdotal evidence, a google search for "you did good" in quotes yields more results than "you did well"

you did good isn't an error in a lot of contexts though. "You did good to give money to charity"

while i'm a pretty huge grammar nit in general, it doesn't really bother me when people use "me and john" incorrectly but it drives me nuts when they use "john and i" in place of "john and me". i suppose its because i seem to believe that it has to do with the fact that the people who say "john and me" do it because they just don't care while the people who use "john and i" incorrectly are trying to speak correctly but failboat miserably.

and it gets used in such a context about 0.1% of the time

eh looking at the results for "did good" there's only one instance where I'd call it an error in the first 3 pages

looking at the results for "you did good" there's zero instances where i wouldn't call it an error in the first 3 pages, aside from grammar pages