Je suis Omar

You have to understand what grammar is before we can continue, Wilber. If you could just post one grammar rule you've been taught, that would help.

I didn't say that three year olds are worried about grammar. Why are you so worried about posting your grammar advice?

OGFT: What is it you refer to as false rules. You know exactly what I mean, OGFT. You could probably pick any one of those "grammar" corrections you make to make some money and you'd have a dandy example. Why are you so reluctant to post some of your grammar advice?

No, I've not said such a thing, Wilber. All I said is that the grammar rules that have been taught are largely false. That should in and of itself point out to you that we as children do indeed learn the grammar of our respective languages by ourselves. Parents and teachers don't know the rules of grammar so how could they ever teach them to children. And how do you expect a three year old to understand these most complicated things even if a body did know. And then turn those exceedingly complicated rules into grammatical speech. This has nothing to do with spelling, which has nothing to do with grammar.

Then you should have no problem coming up with some of the examples I asked for.

We all follow the real rules of our language, Wilber, because we can't do anything else. Little children do so. You're still confused as to what constitutes a rule of English grammar. Tell us any that you have been actively taught and we'll almost certainly have a phoney one. OGFT is likely coming up with some as we speak. Or not.

Then you should have no problem coming up with some of the examples I asked for. What was with your big song and dance about "What rules, what rules?"

I know enough to know that he never followed these false rules of English. It simply wasn't possible for him to do so.

No need to get your knickers in a twist, OGFT. Don't be POed by me using WTF. It was only to illustrate that these are small non issues. They have zero to do with grammar other than they actually follow the rules of grammar. If they didn't then people would not understand them. AMLO doesn't work, nor does MALO. Why? Because they don't follow syntactic patterns for English. LMAO does. What I'm talking about is the real rules of grammar versus phoney, made up rules. It's the latter that has been taught, the ones that, thankfully, seem to have gotten the heave ho. The phoney ones will still be with us for a bit until the dinosaurs die off. Kids in future generations will laugh and say, "Do you know what nonsense was taught to people back in the dark ages?" Nobody remembers any of the old canards?? All you have to do is remember being told by someone that you made a language boo boo and you'll have an example. This has happened to everyone at least once in their lives.

That's the point, Wilber. The real rules of English, the ones you never actively or consciously learned, you follow perfectly. The ones that you were actively taught in school or learned from parents etc, the false rules, you don't remember and you don't use them in natural language situations.

These are issues that have great potential for discussion and debate, but they don't focus on the point of the thread - the "grammar" that all English native language students have been taught for a few centuries never described English in the past and does not to this day. Shakespeare never followed these artificial rules, nor did any other well known writers. Even lesser mortals like you and me never followed/follow them, Wilber.

Is there a point to be made, BM?How come no one can recall any of those oh so important grammar rules they learned in high school/university/life as a reporter,editor, ... ?

Of course. Do you foresee a language apocalypse?

Omar: "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"Do try to focus, OGFT.

That's seems like quite the original excuse, MB. Did you think it up yourself, steal it from Fox News, or did your meme generator pump it out?

That you came away from that course with "correct" and "proper" grammar, "Almost everyone's grammar is actually very wrong; Basic grammar is important", is a good indication that that course was full of the very nonsense that has passed as grammar for a few centuries. "basic grammar", "good grammar" and "correct grammar", only exist in books, not in real life.

I didn't suggest we do away with grammar. I said we should, and seemingly have done away with all the nonsense of the last few hundred years that passed as grammar. But why have teachers who don't know about English grammar teach children who know all the rules of English grammar before they arrive at school.

I'd be interested to see your sources, which, you have to note, are nonexistent.

Socialist wrote: Thankfully grammar is on the way out. GostHacked replied: How do you expect to communicate properly without spelling and grammar? The English language is complex. ... If you cannot teach proper ways of effective communication through spelling and grammar, I don't want you near a classroom. I fear it will be very problematic to communicate with the youth if they are not taught proper language skills. Unless you prefer a discovery method here as well. Which is doing the children a complete disservice. From, http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/23417-bc-teachers-getting-screwedagain/page-10 -------------------------------------- I agree with both Socialist and GostHacked. Language is indeed, exceptionally complicated. And it's a grand thing that grammar is on its way out. Contradictory statements? Not at all! English grammar has never been taught in schools in the English speaking world for a good long time. Everyone has to remember being taught a rule by Miss Higginbotham, to which they hadn't a clue as to what she meant. Don't feel bad - Miss Higginbotham didn't have the foggiest either. All the "rules", that some of you dutifully memorized and likely passed on to your kids, were not rules at all. They were bits of folklore that were invented in centuries past and thereafter pounded into students' brains. They failed to stick generation after generation precisely because they were not part of the grammar of the English language. Language, (and its grammar), is an incredibly complicated process, but the notion that we learned it from our parents or at school or at university is just another old canard, albeit a very popular one. I'm pleased to hear that it has been chucked, is being chucked from school systems. It was an enormous waste of time, as it always is, teaching and trying to learn falsehoods. Imagine what we might have learned had we not had our time wasted with these pieces of fiction. Most people can't even remember being "taught" these rules. The more anal retentive among us constantly berate others use of English with these silly notions. Anyone remember their ole favorite grammar rule?

An ex-Robo caller?

Yeah, funny that the USA thinks it has the right to dictate to other countries what they should do. That makes the USA nothing more than gangsters, the mafia. What is this propensity you have that makes you want to support war criminals/the biggest and worst terrorist group on the planet?

All the while Saddam was murdering folks he was a USA puppet dictator. And what Saddam did doesn't come close to what the USA/UK collection of war criminals have done. How you can even show your face here trying to defend the USA is beyond the pale. --------------- The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars A new household survey of Iraqis has projected the civilian death toll from the Bush administrations invasion and occupation of Iraq at roughly 450,000. Passive information-gathering techniques like logging deaths in the Western press have produced estimates closer to 150,000, but such techniques have been proven to miss a lot of people. (To my knowledge no one was counting all the deaths reported in the some 200 Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers in the 2000s, so even the passive information-gathering was limited. And, the Wikileaks US military log of civilian deaths did not overlap very much with e.g. Iraq Body Count, so both of them were missing things the other caught.) Of those extra deaths beyond those who would have died if the US had never invaded, some 270,000 died violently, with US troops responsible for about 90,000 civilian deaths and militias for another 90,000. Of those killed violently, 60 percent were shot, and 12 percent died from car bombs. Some 180,000 died because of the destruction of the public health infrastructure (lack of access to hospital treatment, e.g.). Despite the horrific total, this estimate for 2003-2011 is smaller than the Lancet study of some years ago, which was done under wartime conditions. The authors admit, however, that the death toll could have been even higher; this total is a projection based on 2000 interviews. The US/ UN sanctions on Iraq of the 1990s, which interdicted chlorine for much of that decade and so made water purification impossible, are estimated to have killed another 500,000 Iraqis, mainly children. (Infants and toddlers die easily from diarrhea caused by gastroenteritis, which causes fatal dehydration). So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population. If Iraq had killed 4% of Americans, it would be 12 million people dead. Iraq did not attack the United States. ... http://www.juancole.com/2013/10/american-population-sanctions.html

How many marginalized people are mistreated as in this situation and have no recourse? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x0s-zIG3xBU Does the police office still have a job? Was he tried? Did his fellow officers turn him in, tell him to stop abusing his power?

Everyone with dark skin is considered a felon. This means that police officers have one less thing to tax their brain. .

I actually thought that that brief article covered it really well, DPW. You shorely do have a fondness for quotations.