Free grammar lessons!

[flypie743]

RE: Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

I don't care. It is a personal way of doing things.

[Squeek]

Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

A false statement has been made. In some situations, one may be required to use an apostrophe to pluralize, in order to be gramatically correct. If one is going to pluralize a letter or a number, that person uses an apostrophe.

EX. Sara got 3 A's and 2 B's on her report card.
EX. John can now count by 2's, 3's, and 4's.

I'd like a source for the numbers, please. I have confirmed your letter use as proper and will adjust accordingly. However, I have not found anything that suggests the use of an apostrophe to pluralize any number. I would also like a confirmation on whether or not you do the same for numbers greater than ten or one hundred. I do know for a fact that you do not do so on years.

I will add it anyway until it is proven wrong.

~Squeek

[GuidoHunter]

APOSTROPHES IN POSSESSIVES

Squeek touched on part of this, but the rest is not the most well-understood of subjects, so mistakes of this kind are often overlooked. I'll try to clear some of this up.

Case 1: Singular possessives that do not end in 's'. Everyone knows how to do these. Add an apostrophe and 's', e.g. "chair's legs", "Mary's face", etc.

Case 2: Plural possessives that do not end in 's'. Like with singular nouns, these are often quite obvious. "The children's homework," "the deer's meat," and "the feet's smell" are all examples.

Case 3: Singular possessives that end in 's'. Unlike with plural possessives, these WILL NOT terminate in an apostrophe simply because they are singular. "Chris's hand," "Tyler Jones's room," or "my boss's job" all end with an apostrophe and 's' just like the other singular possessives.

Case 4: Plural possessives that end in 's'. With these nouns is the ONLY time (save for the two exceptions that will be noted below) that a word terminates in an apostrophe. Examples: "The Millers' house," "the students' homework," and "the rabbits' down." Also note that regardless of the structure, surnames will take the apostrophe after the pluralization. This can look especially awkward with -es names such as with Jones, but the dog belonging to the entire family is still "the Joneses' dog."

Case 5: Exceptions.

1. Obviously, as Squeek has said, "its" is what you should use to denote something belonging to whatever "it" is. It is a singular possessive that does not take an apostrophe, so it is an exception to Case 1.
2. Moses and Jesus. These are the only two singular possessive nouns that terminate in an apostrophe. For some reason, philologists saw fit to let these two figures be special, so don't flip out if you read about "Moses' staff" or "Jesus' word," because they are completely fine.

That's all for now. I think I'm going to have fun writing these.

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

[Squeek]

Guido, I'd love to have you on the team. Feel free to amend anything you wish to amend.

Also note that I edited in a massive amount of things I will update tomorrow.

~Squeek

[Kilgamayan]

Requesting that image get edited into the beginning of the topic post.

[Squeek]

Permission granted.

It is well deserved.

~Squeek

[Cenright]

You're welcome for the sticky. I've been waiting for something like this. The unpreposessing atmosphere of the forums needs to be reversed.

Also, I have added finished / done to chapter 5 for you.

[GuidoHunter]

VARIOUS TOPICS BY GUIDO

Okay, let me start by discussing the simple sentence structure of the English language. We have a SVO system in English, that is to say, a simple sentence will begin with a subject, then have a conjugated verb which may or may not be followed by an object (Japanese, by contrast, has an SOV system).

The sentence "I hit the ball" has those three parts. "I" is the subject, "hit" is the verb, and "the ball" is the object.

I have a chain of logic with this, so please bear with me; I know y'all aren't first graders.

Now, when it comes to people and the words that represent them, there are often two different words that represent the same thing. Such words are I/me, we/us, he/him, she/her, and they/them. Obviously, these words, although they represent the same things in their respective pairs, cannot be used interchangeably, so there must be a difference.

That difference is that the first word in each pair is the subjectiveform, and the second is the objective form. As you may have guessed, the subjective form is used when the idea represented by the word is the subject of the sentence, and the object is used when the idea is the object.

Example: I hit the ball. The ball hit me

This is why it's incorrect to answer a ringing phone and, upon the other end asking for you, say, "This is him." You should, in fact, say, "This is he." Also, you can now understand why it's so wrong use the common phrase in its original form of, "Woe is me."

Read: Woe is I, by Patricia T. O'Conner.

Now that that's been said, we're now ready to cover the differences between "who" and "whom."

Simply put, "who" is subjective and "whom" is objective. But there is one more thing I need to add. When you have a prepositional phrase (a preposition followed by a noun or a noun phrase), the noun part is considered the object of the preposition. Because of this, one of those personal subjects will always take the objective form when it follows a preposition, as will whom. This also applies to whoever and whomever.

However, the object of a preposition can be an entire clause (a phrase with both a subject and a verb). Because of this, you can have the subjective form of a word following a preposition, as in the sentence, "He was before whoever was last." Ordinarily, you would use the objective form because "before" is a preposition, like when you say, "He was before me," but since the object of the preposition is a clause you need a subject, like in, "He left before I arrived."

This leads me to a VERY common grammatical error regarding comparisons.

WRONG: You are better than me at Stepmania.
Whenever you use "than" for comparisons, you need to realize that you will often leave out a verb that is understood
RIGHT: You are better than I at Stepmania.
It is understood that you are saying "You are better than I am at Stepmania, but just because you don't say it doesn't mean it's not there. Just think: you wouldn't say, "You are better than me am at Stepmania," would you?

The last thing I want to cover is regarding prepositions. Technically, it is illegal (in the grammar sense) to end a sentence with a preposition. Now, this is one of the less-respected rules simply because being completely compliant with it can make for some extremely awkward sentences, and sometimes even I can't figure out how they should be worded. However, most of the time they make sentences look much better.

For example:
WRONG: She is the one I gave the present to.
RIGHT: She is the one to whom I gave the present.

If you pay attention to this rule, you'll start to notice how ugly the former sentence looks and sounds. Of course, there are some sentences which are just obscene even though they are correct. If I can think of one some time I'll put it up here. As a closing point, I'll leave y'all with a relevant quote:

"Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put!" --Winston Churchill

And thus I end my second entry.

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

[tsutter]

RE: Free grammar lessons!

thx sqweek lol


Serioulsy though, FFR forums needs this. :\

[linus]

RE: Free grammar lessons!

*Seriously.

[fusi0n]

Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

Im going to save this to my computer. Your a genius.

The author of this thread prays that you were being sarcastic with your non-apostrophes.

I'm*

You're*

~Squeek

Yes, I was being sarcastic :P

...even though you constantly use 'your' when you should be using 'you're'.

I remember asking my teacher in the 1st grade what the difference between it's and its was. They had no idea, of course.

[Squeek]

RE: Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

Replying to a topic elsewhere -

Ever since you got a grammar topic stickied, you've been playing grammar police nonstop. I think most of FFR can agree that you need to quit being the biggest grammar nazi in FFR history. Almost all of your recent posts correct another's grammar. About half of those posts are corrections by themselves, with no relevance to the topic.

I would have put this in a PM, but I knew it wouldn't change anything unless I had some backup

First of all, I have always been like this.

Second, I really only do it when people call ME out on things. Notice how Tank101 called me out on something grammar-related and I replied? If that was not the example, then the RobbyZero thing in post your picture? They have totally different meanings and it's quite hilarious to note something like that.

That's two examples. Find me more and prove your point.

~Squeek

[tnyhwk900]

RE: Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

I was first influenced to make the topic by this:

http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/...hlight=#290079

But after reading your post and reading over that thread, I realized you were replying to Tank. So you can say it was my mistake, but I still think you need to cut it.

[Squeek]

RE: Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

I shall. Don't worry about it. I'll keep it all here from now on and I won't even refer people to this thread for little mistakes. Huge mistakes, like every single one of dancer's posts, I might.

~Squeek

[emccky]

RE: Re: RE: Free grammar lessons!

It's an internet forum, not English class, Squeek. Cut out this shit. No one cares if you have a missing apostrophe or you spell a word wrong. NO ONE CARES