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Shea explains that while like might be a staple of the Valley girl caricature, the word is actually performing useful linguistic duties:
An infinitive verb is the form with to in the front like, “to be” or “not to be.” Some traditionalists become apoplectic when an adverb is slipped between those two words, like “to boldly go.” But Shea discovered that infinitives have been split since the thirteenth century and that the reason we have this proscription today is because some grumpy grammarians from the 1800s decided that verbs would sound more like Latin, in which it is impossible to split infinitives, if they stayed in one piece. But, Shea points out, Chaucer has split, Shakespeare has split, and not to split sometimes just sounds terrible. If you have a jaundiced view of something, you only see the negative side because of your own bad experience with it. Some misuses are confusing. A car repair place has the sign: “Were Open.” “Are they open or not?” ponders APS.The 18th century saw an explosion in the publication of books about English grammar. The most influential grammarian of his day was Robert Lowth, whose 1762 Short Introduction to English Grammar went through over 40 editions before 1800. Lowth has often been held responsible for all later prescriptive rules, including the split infinitive. As Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade has shown, however, Lowth’s prescriptivism is less evident than has generally been assumed. He certainly had nothing to say about the split infinitive.
And that's a big [thumbs up] from me! What about your question, Sam? Did my answer get a [thumbs up] too? Still, the success of Lowth’s Grammar prompted others to emulate him and brought about a surge of linguistic consciousness quite unlike anything before. Grammar books became one of the publishing phenomena of the day. The result was a circular process.In the sentences “I stole a panda. Like, I couldn’t live without him,” like is a discourse marker, a word used at the beginning of a sentence indicating that a clarification of what has just been said will now be given; one might similarly use I mean to introduce more information. The word "police" is rather special: It has no singular noun form. Something like that police over there is securing the scene would be incorrect. One would always construct sentences in the plural form like so: Fast food restaurants tend to be frequent offenders. Such as with the sign: “We are now recruiting for various roles within our Burger King’s.” The APS comments: “The plural of Burger King is Burger Kings! No apostrophe please!”
These two poles of grammar teaching – the “descriptive” (learning to describe structure) and the “prescriptive” (learning a set of prescriptions about language) – have been evident in the teaching of grammar from the outset. He said the idea that abolishing apostrophes helped the emergency services was “nonsense”. “Having worked in IT for many years it is absolutely standard to write algorithms that ignore punctuation and even spelling variations. I find it very difficult to believe the emergency services require precise spelling.” But that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of communication. Emoji is important. In fact, it makes us more effective communicators in the digital age. Vyv Evans describes people who don't approve of emojis as the grammar police - a slang term referring to people who want to see formal language and grammar - what they call 'correct' English - written online. The grammar police criticise modern styles of English and like to correct other people's mistakes in spelling and grammar.These miscellaneous codes may be used by various police departments to communicate more easily over the radio or in documentation. Parents and teachers in England are angry about a spelling, punctuation and grammar test that school children must sit at the end of primary school. First introduced in 2013, all 11-year-olds at local-authority-maintained schools will take the test on May 10. This year the difficulty level has increased significantly, in line with the new national curriculum, leading to calls for all key stage tests to be cancelled. There are many aspects of the debate around these tests, and the wider culture of testing they are a part of, but a significant issue remains the purpose of learning grammar. Consternation grew and the Lib Dem councillor Tony Bronk, who represents the village, formally put the question to Winchester city council – under procedure rule 15 (3), to be precise. The council clearly liked exact punctuation in its rules. Emojis let us show our true personality, so, Professor Evans says, it stands to reason - in other words, it seems likely to be true - that emoji users get more dates.
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