Keith, I mostly agree wholeheartedly with your comments. However, the rules and regulations of English grammar exist only in the minds of English teachers and the anal retentive. There is common usage which is what makes English a usable language, but that is evolving all the time. You can talk of open and closed punctuation and the AR will argue that there is only one way that is Correct (to them that capital C is always implied). I use to carefully use open punctuation in my writing, but have gotten criticized for that so often that I now throw commas into my text willy-nilly. No one ever seems to notice <sad headshake>.
By the way, MickyCrap's spellchecker does not recognize "willy-nilly", but when you spell it withour the hyphen it corrects it to "willy-nilly". Strange behavior indeed. Ciao, Graywolf http://pages.prodigy.net/graywolfphoto ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Whaley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 4:55 AM Subject: Re: OT: Obnoxious Sonofabitch Copyeditor > It occurred to me a number of years ago, that if a non-native speaker > depends on the written word to help him 'learn' the language, good luck! > Unless it's a news organization publication, a predominance of which > speak 'correctly' and with consistently, you're VERY likely to be > mislead as to the correctness of the language used, and the sentence structure. > I keenly observe folks who speak my own native language, and have for > some time. Language and how it's spoken really interests me. > Along the way, it's been more and more obvious that few 'average > citizens' are [either] able to speak or write correctly. That is, in > full accordance with all the rules and regs that govern 'proper' and > 'currently agreed upon' language construction.
