…God could speak to his prophet through the mouth of an ass (and a hinny-ass at that *heh* Numbers 22:22-35), why, oh, why can’t those who today claim to speak for Him at least use good grammar?
“Future Earthquake Warning” Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]
[Note: No, I’m not linking it. The article turns up in a Google search under that title, but I see no sense in providing it linkage.]
And not only does the blogger at “Now the End Begins” (a blog supposedly about “end times Bible prophecy”) pose the nonsensical “Mega-Quake of epic proportions to hit the America’s? [sic]” but she repeats it as a statement (“It is a warning that the America’s [sic] are in danger of suffering a mega-quake of catastrophic proportions during the next forteen [sic] days… “) in her initial paragraph.
Now, why would I feel I need to place much confidence in some gal’s interpretation of “end times prophecy” if she’s not taken the trouble to learn to write English literately? What assurance would this give me that she could actually understand those scriptures she reads and attempts to explicate? Heck, I had a grandfather who ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade to go work in the Oklahoma oil fields (since pay was so very much better than continuing to work a tenant farm in SW Missouri, and he had a mother to support), and his writing, as evidenced by the hundreds of pages of manuscripts he two-finger typed that I have read, was freer of grammatical nonsense than this gal’s.
It just makes me tired to read such things. The blogger at Now the End Begins is probably a nice enough person, and certainly as literate as most Mass MEdia Podpeople, but of course, that’s damning with faint praise, hardly a ringing endorsement. That her source for this “the sky is falling!” post is some anonymous guy wearing a tin foil hat (one of the other articles at her source trumpets, “27 Signs That The Nuclear Crisis In Japan Is Much Worse Than Either The Mainstream Media Or The Japanese Government Have Been Telling Us” *feh*) is yet another reason to look askance at this doomsday post. Add to that simple statements of wrong “facts” (labels the Japan quake as a “7.3” Richter Scale event, for example) and my inducement to read the blog further wanes even more quickly.
Still, rather than reject the content out of hand, in action that would smack of ad hominem fallacy (just because the clock’s broken doesn’t mean it can’t be right twice a day, and blind pigs do find acorns now and then), I’ll look into it a bit. After all, we could experience a tsunami here in SW Missouri, what with that New Madrid fault and all. *heh*
(Of course that was sarcasm. First of all, the geography/geology of the New Madrid fault means that likely damage even from an 8.0-scale quake wouldn’t extend to my area, and besides, where’s the ocean in SW Missouri that would lead to a tsunami? ;-))
In only peripherally-related events…
As counter to such Chicken Littles, here’s a recent (Monday) comment from Jerry Pournelle that pretty well sums up my view of the Chicken Little reporting on the Japanese nuclear plant woes:
I note that although there have been bi-hourly announcements of the impending meltdowns of the Japanese power plants, the latest headlines tell me that the Japanese are struggling to prevent disaster. When it comes to numbers, perhaps ten atomjacks (plant workers) have been hurt, no one has been killed, and fewer than 100 people off site have been exposed to some elevated level of radiation. There have been small releases of gasses.
This is not Chernobyl or even above ground nuclear weapons testing. This isn’t even a mine disaster or a school bus destroyed by a coal-carrying freight train. It’s a disaster but it’s mostly economic. A coal fired plant routinely emits annually far more radiation (there are radioactive ores in coal; not many but not zero) than will have been released when this is over. Or so it seems to me.
The disaster in Japan is caused by flood and earthquake. Concentration on the nuclear bit is political.
Indeed.
Pournelle continued to talk sense on Tuesday. Dutch Boy. Dike. *sigh*
Of course, at least some of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind have a clue. From The Register (UK):
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!
Quake + tsunami = 1 minor radiation dose so far
Now, if only ABCCBSNBCCNFOXMSNBC, The New York Slimes (et al), politicians like Joe !@#$%^& Lieberman, etc., would all just STFU (or die or whatever would be best), perhaps voices of reason could prevail.
I’m not holding my breath.
BTW, I’m well aware of the tongue-in-cheek “grammar fallacy of argument” which, roughly, states that any post or comment that criticizes the grammar, spelling, word usage, etc., of another post or comment will likely contain multiple egregious errors of grammar, spelling, word usage, etc.”
*heh*
Still, just to “prove” (as in “test”–“The exception that proves [tests] the rule”) that rule, I submitted the text above to three separate grammar checkers and the only “errors” found were either genuine errors in the text I quoted from the blogger I (too gently) excoriated and errors that… weren’t errors in my text. The non-errors in my text that were found by two of the grammar checkers were:
- the use of contractions (not preferred in formal writing, which this blog is not)
- word usages which were what I actually intended to say (such as “course” in “of course” which one grammar checker suggested I might want to replace with “coarse”–an obvious error by the grammar checker)
All that illustrates is the dangers of folks trusting spelling and grammar checkers. It’s better to be able to rely on knowing how to spell, and how to write and speak good English. 🙂
I will note that, somewhere in the text above, I missed placing a comma where one rightly belongs to offset an appositive, and I added two commas that some orthographists would disagree with. Brownie points to those who find those. And a big, “Shame on you for wasting time doing that!” sign to them as well. *heh*
I generally screw up with commas and other punctuation. I punctuate the way it sounds in my head – and perhaps that’s sloppy and wrong.
Oh well, grammar was never my strong suit. For that matter, spelling wasn’t either. I do TRY though.
I HATE spell checkers and grammar checkers though. I especially hate the ones that try to auto-correct for you. Half the time they end up replacing what I write with garbage in their attempts to be helpful. I eventually had to turn the auto-correct feature on my smart-phone off for that reason.
I figure it’s better to make a few spelling errors because I’m typing with my thumbs than have the meaning of what I write butchered by a “tool”.
Spelling errors nowadays have to be double-checked against common mechanical typos. 🙂
Orthography in punctuation and spelling aren’t really big bugaboos for me, but grammar and word usage are. Grammar, because it’s really just logic in linguistics: subject-verb agreement, sense and nonsense in apostrophe use (for example, “America’s” is either a possessive construction or a contraction of “America is” or “has” or “was” etc. It simply canNOT be the plural that the writer intended in the examples I cited. Impossible. And yet I see the completely irrational misuse of the apostrophe in that manner constantly), etc. Using a word improperly (usually in an attempt to sound erudite resulting in revelation of subliteracy) is as bad. This is often accompanied by misspelling the word to accommodate the writer’s having only heard it (misused) before or seen it misused by another subliterate. And misuse of common phrases. *sigh* Just as bad. Oh, and misunderstanding of common phrases… *sigh* It’s why I now enclose mini-explanations in some common phrases, viz., “Exception that proves (tests) the rule.” Frankly, most folks miss that one, it seems, but then most folks didn’t grow up completely comfortable with the language of King James, either. *heh*
And then there’re those folks who write “there’s” when “there are (or perhaps “there’re” in casual speech) because of a plural subject. Example: “there’re those folks”=”there are those folks” or “those folks there are” *heh*, NOT “there is folks” as anyone with an ear for subject-verb agreement (or simple reason) will find exceedingly jarring.
I could go on, you know. 🙂
I prefer casual writing that allows me latitude to write more or less as I speak (and yes, I do speak in long, sometimes rambling and obscurantist sentences that nevertheless tend to be both syntactically and semantically consistent , including parenthetical comments like this that are spoken in Italics, though only very, very rarely in Italian *heh*), unless, of course, I were in a setting that required more formal speech, but I avoid those as much as possible nowadays.
🙂
And spell checkers? Useful only for catching typos, IMO. Grammar checkers? Only useful if one knows enough grammar to be able to know when the grammar checker is wrong, which almost every one I have ever used is as often as not. Still, once in a blue moon, a grammar checker can compel me to recheck a construction and at least verify my reasoning for choosing the construction I did, and that can be instructive.
BTW, that “grammar fallacy in argument” (also known as “spell check fallacy” etc.)? A recent example was an email someone showed me from the professor of a class the person is taking wherein the prof excoriated students for grammar and spelling errors in the papers they had submitted so far in the class. That’s right: the prof’s email was replete with “multiple egregious errors of grammar, spelling and even word usage”.
I understood the problem better when I listened to a video lecture by the prof wherein were “multiple egregious errors of grammar, spelling, word usage,” and serial mispronunciations of a primary source’s name, one that any literate person from a Western society would pronounce correctly.
Of course, what made my undergrad days a particularly thorny problem for me was my tendency to hand assignments in with a critique (along with red pencil markings indicating grammatical and spelling errors, etc.) of the professor’s assignment itself, whenever I felt it was warranted. Gladly, I only had a couple of profs I felt were subliterate during my undergrad days (and they weren’t at the school I graduated from), but the attitude was a problem with profs who weren’t sure of themselves in other ways. Some could take the submission of a test paper with a snarky, “Here’s your key,” with aplomb, while others… couldn’t. (I even “earned” a “C” in a course where I had a perfect score on all work, just because the prof didn’t like my attitude. Fair enough. I didn’t like his either. *heh*)
But enough about me. What do you think about me? *VBG*
Ahhh yes, my pet peeve – apostrophes where they don’t belong.
What really boggles my mind, Mel, is when people use apostrophes to create contractions, but they put the apostrophe somewhere other than in place of the deleted letters, e.g., “do’nt” or such like. Boggles my mind, especially when the same person does it consistently. Where in the world did such people learn to read?