You just needed one more line to make an ugly limerick. :P

my cousin just graduated law school and i had to explain to him the difference between effect and affect the other day. at least he can admit he doesn't know the difference and can't ever get them right tho.

I went through the same thing with my wife a couple of weeks ago. It would be nice to just say "effect is a noun, affect is a verb" and be done with it, but of course English isn't that simple, you have the verb form of effect ("effect a change") and the noun form of affect (af-ekt) to worry about. Those are both seen pretty infrequently, but probably enough to make one feel totally insecure about what to use if they're already confused about it.

I think everyone has their grammar Kryptonite. Just as we think it's lol that people can't figure out affect/effect, or the "there" homonyms, or whatever, I can never get lie/lay straight, and I'm sure some people probably think I'm an idiot for it.

Maybe this has already been covered itt, but I hate it when people try to make a plural of any noun ending with "us" by changing it to "i." I guess they think it makes them sound smart.

An example from the facebook thread in OOT: someone uses "stati" for the plural of "status." This would only be correct if the word was a masculine noun directly from Latin. "Status" comes from the Latin verb "sto" meaning stand.

this has probably been covered itt already but i'm not reading 25 pages to find out sorry but what is the correct usage of "who" and "whom?" I have never known tbh.

Simplest way: Try replacing who(m) with he or him, and see which one works. If he works, use who, if him, use whom. Him —>whom.

Examples:

Who(m) was the one you meant? I hate who(m)?

He was the one you meant. I hate him. So it's who in the first case, whom in the second.

I'm Ron Burgundy?

Purely aesthetic question: At what rate do you think one should use these "big three punctuation marks"? Conjure two imaginary 250-word-long passages, differing only in their amount of big punctuation (one has maybe two or three; the other has several), and hold all else equal, especially comprehensibility. Which do you prefer?

In expository writing I don't think it would matter much.

But in narrative writing (whether in fiction or non-fiction), could an excess of these marks alienate the typical reader? And not alienate in the sense of "You and your fancy schmancy signs, what do these even mean? Back in my day we didn't need no fancy punctuation!" but rather in the sense that they are less than fully transparent (right?), and call a bit more attention to it being "writing."

Well I guess, in narrative writing, the equivalence ("hold all else equal" from the 1st paragraph) isn't really a practical one, because em dashes and colons are the sort of punctuation whose excess indicates frequent interruptions of the "fictional dream" (i.e., parenthetical asides or extensive descriptions). And so even if excess big punctuation isn't inherently bad, it's a sign that the writing could be suboptimal in other ways, etc.

Idk. I once read something that said try to keep the instances of each type of big punctuation down to something like one per paragraph (w/ two em dashes counting as one "instance" if they belong to the same clause). That's kind of vague obv, but it makes sense. And since I tend to make punctuation my bitch in first drafts, that advice is better than nothing.

Also, I have come across exercises instructing Write X paragraphs of yada yada, and since I'm neurotic sometimes, they have confused me: Like okay, there's no "standard paragraph word count." Or is there? (Not an exact number but a ballpark figure.)

TTI,

I think that's an unanswerable question. If you're talking about a writer like Raymond Carver, for instance, an excess of big punctuation (or much punctuation at all) would signal something being amiss since his stuff is stylistically predicated on simple declarative sentences, the sum total of which create a certain aesthetic experience (the mental landscape of blue-collar characters mostly imo). John Cheever, however (just pulling a name out of the hat here), writes more complex sentences as part of his style, which models a more complicated, contingent world than Carver's.

So, there's no aesthetic right answer imo, just using the right tools for the job.

I don't write narratively very often, but I do think about the aesthetics of my writing (most of which is on this very forum). And the conclusion I've come to is that it is definitely possible to overuse the big three — or, equivalently, to write in too complex a fashion, using too many sentences that not only are compound but also include thoughts that are sufficiently detached from each other that they cannot be combined with a simple comma-conjunction combination. Moreover, not only is it possible but I have a tendency to do it, as I write it as I think it, rarely editing the structure, and I tend to be thinking about moderately complex logical relationships when I'm writing more than a sentence or two.

In practice, the rule I've come up with is similar to that you mentioned: I try to ensure that I average only one em dash or coordinated pair thereof per paragraph. It generally works out that I use semicolons with about the same frequency, sometimes a little less; colons are less frequent than either of those and I don't view them as a problem. If I find myself incorporating more dashes or semicolons than that I'll occasionally break that no-editing rule, particularly if the context is one in which I really care whether people read what I've written.

I think punctuation is the least of your problems.

Sigh.

The word "Status" certainly is a masculine noun "directly from Latin", a nominalized past participle to be exact. It just belongs to a different declension group than most nouns of Latin origin that are in usage in modern English.

Fascinating. I was misled by the etymology I had send for "status" when I look in the dictionary. I wonder why the dictionary I looked in shows that it derives from the verb "sto" rather than the noun "status?"

I'm sitting in a lecture atm. A sign above the exit reads exactly:

Leave this Theatre
immediately Evacuation
Action Alarm sounds

:/

Tonight on Big Brother, Julie Chen said "Whomever wins this competition will be able to play next week..."

God, what an awful hypercorrection. Someone told the writer "always use whom instead of who! It sounds more intelligent!"

Big Brother is a huge bag of grammar fail every single week. But it's usually just the contestants. Now it's the host, which is pathetic.

Ty CQ and atakdog.

I'd instinctively check if there was any Chinese lettering under it.

---

Wow.

Paragraph is it you

Yeah it's an Australian University. That makes it a lot less excusable imo.

Oh my. I got through a few paragraphs.

Yeah its style impeded linguistic absorption by my rods and cones comprising the videocamera-like orbs of my facial eyes, absorbing data.

Resulting in the unleashing of a dancing racehorse of confusion.

Or something.

Not: good.

I always find it perplexing how someone who is clearly a bad writer winds up not only writing for a living, but doing so in a way that clearly suggests they think they're impressive. I guess stupid gonna stupid.

guys i did not think "stati" was a real plural of "status", it just sounds funny along with the word "ilk" so i used it