Tuesday, the 8th of April, 2008
Ah. Looks like my usenet feed is back up after having taken
a little vacation.
Heh. Mark Tindall tries to catch out David in some grammatical
errors. Except that he quotes David in this manner:
The Christian homeschooler's (sic) that used to play here
have moved to
http://www.meh-sc.org/
.
...
gunk post's (sic) responding to this post.
The first example catches David fair and square ("I'm shocked,
I say, to learn that there is solecism going on here. Here, can
somone cash out my winnings for me?"). Trouble is, Mark didn't
keep enough of the sentence for the second example
for anyone to ascertain whether David got his apostrophe
wrong or right. David in fact got it wrong, but not as wrong
as Mark Tindall's misplaced "sic", since a "sic" is meant for
an error that is manifest to the reader, and Mark didn't keep
enough of David's sentence to make the error manifest. If
David had written, for example, "As usual, Mark's responding
to this post is a gunk post's responding to this post," David
would have been entirely grammatically correct (using "post's"
as a possessive modifying a gerund "responding"). As well
as observationally correct. Or, David's full sentence might
have been "As usual, the clown of the gunk post's responding
to this post," (using "post's" as a contraction for "post is"),
and David would have correct again. But, too bad, Mark's brain
is apparently so oblivious of the need for context and logical
coherence in reading, he is so incapable of connecting three
collinear dots to make a line, that he habitually deletes the
im****tant part of whatever it is he is quoting and responding
to. And here, Mark's bad habit has hoist him with his own petard,
there being nothing either manifestly or necessarily wrong with the
second quote from David at all.
Moreover, David's manifest error in the first quote (as well
as the error Mark deleted away and then said "sic" to in the
second quote) is well known and understood as the
greengrocer's apostrophe, namely inserting an unwanted
apostrophe before the "s" in a plural. But what does Mark
do with this? Note, ladies and gentlemen, that he trumpets
David's mistake under the subject heading "its" vs "It's".
First on display is Mark's simply wrong use of lowercase and
capital letters in that subject heading. That is, "Its" v
"it's" would have worked just fine (capitalize only the
first word of a title, though then Mark ought to have made
some of the later words lowercase, too) or "Its" v "It's"
(capitalize every im****tant word of the title) or even
especially I like "its" v "it's" (don't capitalize words
presented in quotes as usages), but what Mark did was
choose "its" vs "It's", which, all that accomplishes is
to suggest that Mark---soi-disant Mr. Professional Educator
Man---is confused about whether and when to capitalize or no,
and picked the one option of the four possible options that
most betrays his own ignorance. But what's far worse than
Mark's misspelling is that David's errors (the one Mark
correctly identifies as an error, and the one Mark
misidentifies as such since he out of habit of poor mind
habitually deletes too much of the sentence for anyone to be
able to tell) are *identified* by Mark as an "its" v "it's"
error in the first place. The thing is, "its" is *not* a plural
at all, but a possessive. The greengrocer's apostrophe (David's
error) takes a plural and inserts an extraneous apostrophe before
the "s" turning the word unintentionally into a possessive. The
"its" v "it's" mistake is when people take the possessive "its",
insert an extraneous apostrophe and turn it into the contraction
"it's" for "it is". In other words, yes, ladies and gentlemen,
Mark has simply misidentified the nature of the error entirely,
and plainly doesn't even begin to understand the grammar he
claims to be upbraiding David for mistaking.
How very typical of Mark Tindall. If it weren't so pathetic, it'd
be almost funny how often he skewers himself while trying to "get"
someone else. I pity the poor students who ever had the
fellow as their classroom instructor. To have a classroom
teacher duller than the brightest kids in the class is pretty
common, but well over half the class must've been brighter than Mark
in any classroom he ever stepped into, and respect for such a teacher
would've been simply impossible, except as an exercise in
coerced boredom.
Mike Morris
(msmorris@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
)
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