This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
LynxRunner: Unless I misunderstood what being a grammar nazi is, this doesn't belong here:
This phenomenon has a name: Hypercorrection, which is basically linguistics jargon for "being a pretentious ass."
No, my dear troper, Hypercorrection means when you take a rule to its extreme and end up doing something incorrectly. For example, this is incorrect grammar: Me and Johnny went to the store. This is correct grammar: Johnny and I went to the store. However, you would he bypercorrecting if you said this: Alice spoke to Johnny and I. Correct grammar would be: Alice spoke to Johnny and me. Basically, you take one example and apply it to _everything_, even when it shouldn't apply. It has nothing to do with being a grammar nazi, although I'm certain that there are grammar nazis who hypercorrect. In any case, it's wrong. Hypercorrection =! Grammar Nazi
Looney Toons: <quickly hides mirror> Huh? No, I don't know anyone like this, not on this wiki.
Morgan Wick: And Ununnilium sure wouldn't either. (Oh snap!)
Ununnilium: Not since they started selling me in Germany, anyway.
Planish: Naah. Nobody here. That's why we let things like the split infinitive in "how to properly apostrophize" slide.
Ununnilium: Split infinitives are perfectly good English! English, not Latin! FRAAAA (froths at the mouth)
William Wide Web: Besides, the only reason they can't be split in Latin is because they're one word in Latin. For an actual Latinization(like with the preposition rule) the infinitives would have tobe crushed into one word.
32_Footsteps: Exactly, William. But the early Grammar Nazis were heavily enamored with Latin, so they tried to force English to behave like it as much as possible. It never occured to them back in the day that forcing a language built around Germanic grammar into a Romance grammar structure was absurdly stifling. Though on the bright side, it led English to be the language that, to quote James D. Nicholl, "follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
The Last Conformist: If a bit of Grammar Nazism be allowed, in addition to the usual unitary infinitives (eg. mori "to die"), Latin has various periphrastic infinitives (eg. moriturus esse "to be about to die"), and these later can be split.
HeartBurn Kid: I so want to use this
in the article, but the size and the aspect ratio throw it off, and I can't shrink it without making the text unreadable... :(
Ack Sed: I'm worried more about punctuation nowadays,though the use of 'definite' and 'you loose' still sends me into a Slaine-style warp-spasm. Urrrarrrrrgghh.
Lord Seth: Does anyone think it would be funny to try to have as many grammar/spelling mistakes as possible in this article?
Fast Eddie: Turn away from The Dark Side, Lord Sith ... Seth. I meant Lord Seth.
Ellen Hayes: NO! Please for the love of humanity, no... or at least it would make my head explode.
Drow Lord: There was a page that did that. Sadly, I wasn't the only person not to notice that the numerous errors were deliberate until a little late... (it was an article mainly on dyslexia)
Leliel: I'm like this with my own work...Although it won't stop me from hunting down the next idiot who spells with Rouge Angles of Satin, hitting them with a dictionary and carting them of to the nearest English Reducation Center.
Matthew The Raven: Surely you mean "Reeducation."
Sabre Justice: I'm not just a spelling and grammar but linkage Nazi; I have a growing hatred for red links, improper formatting and even too-long paragraphs. You can always tell my edits because I almost always spot a mistake and go back to change it. An All Red Entry is my worst nightmare... except for that actual entry of course because it's hilarious.
Zephid: What does it mean to split infinitives? I are bad grammar education.
Kerrah: Here's an example infinitive: "To trope". If we want to do that gently, we can either say "to trope gently" or "to gently trope". In the latter example, the adverb goes between the two parts of the infinitive, thus splitting it.
Third Man: I just saw "Guerrilla Grammar" for the first time. WIN
Looney Toons: Snipped this for irrelevance. The entry is about a kind of wiki contributor, not generic correction mechanisms.
- Microsoft Word is the biggest Grammar Nazi of all. It doesn't seem to understand how fragments can make a story more expressive, or explain how to rearrange them, how people actually use grammar nowadays, and it sure as hell doesn't understand that when speaking, people generally aren't grammar perfect. It picks out doubled up words, even if a sentance needs them to make sense. It doesn't always spot genuine grammar mistakes as long as they fit with its own definition of 'correct'.
- Example: Sue could feel the heat of emotion rising up inside of her as she lowering her fist.
Obviously incorrect grammar that for some reason gets no reaction from the grammar check. Sometimes when it 'corrects' your grammar, it totally changes what your sentence meant, or worse, it doesn't make sense anymore. But hey, at least that wiggly line isn't there anymore!
Looney Toons: In re: the query in the most recent (12/9) edit reason — when I created this page, I wrote that passage and in doing so I most certainly did not apostrophize those verbs. Someone must have deliberately inserted them, although I'm embarrassed to say that I missed those changes. If I had noticed it, I would have reverted them immediately.
