//No I do not have a glass eye
That sentence has double negatives, which in English cancel each other out, meaning you do indeed have a glass eye. That should probably be "Yes, I do not have a glass eye", very similar to the song "Yes, we have no bananas". Or just remove the leading "no" -- "I do not have a glass eye."
Heh
I can communicate in "present progressive" well ,but when i got to say smethng in past or future(not progressive )i get confused.eg:-"if i had been you,i would have never done that" or "if i would have been at your place,i would have never done that".
That sentence has double negatives, which in English cancel each other out, meaning you do indeed have a glass eye. That should probably be "Yes, I do not have a glass eye", very similar to the song "Yes, we have no bananas". Or just remove the leading "no" -- "I do not have a glass eye."
Doesn't it depend on the question being asked?
eg.
Q: Do you have any bananas?
A: No, I do not have any bananas.
vs
Q: Are you out of bananas?
A: Yes, I do not have any bananas.
For it to be a double negative it would have to be something like:
"I do not have no bananas." -> which means that you do have bananas.
or the much maligned American-ism:
"I could care less" -> which means you do care some amount
vs
"I couldn't care less" -> which means you don't care at all.
So in text, saying "No, I don't have a glass eye" is just assuming the reader was asking themselves "Do you really have a glass eye?"
I can communicate in "present progressive" well
A midwesterner is visiting Boston for the first time and was told that while there he must try some of the local seafood so after getting in a taxi, he asks the driver, "hey buddy, do you know where I can get scrod around here?". The driver replies "I've been asked that question hundreds of times but this is the first time in the pluperfect subjunctive."
That sentence has double negative
My grandmother was born in Ireland back in the 1880s and lived to the age of 102. She had an odd way of asking questions that made it impossible to answer with a simple yes or no because you were never sure what the actual question was. And even if you could correctly parse the question you were never sure it was what she actually meant. She would phrase each question something like "Isn't it not true that your mother was not mistaken when she asked if you were not going...".
"I could care less"
Guilty :)
When did it become acceptable to use the word "till" as a contraction for "until"? I was taught that contractions are formed by replacing the omitted letters with a single quote mark. That means that the word should be used as
You can wait 'til the cows come home.
Not
You can wait till the cows come home.
Till means to work soil in a specific way.
Till is a type of glacial debris.
A till is a box where money is kept.
When did it become acceptable to use the word "till" as a contraction for "until"?
I'm guilty of using "till" or "til", especially on the internets.
I have always suspected that "till" was actually the older version of "until" (because in Swedish, until is "till"). And, it appears that I am right:
"Till is the earlier form, attested as early as 1330; Until is actually derived from till, not the other way around as in ’til."
So, that gives a redeeming quality to the word "till". So, I have no problems with it.
FTR - I maintain - "no, I do not have a glass eye" - as in the commonly used, "(and) no (before you ask) I do not have a glass eye".
my dear RJ what are you trying to highlight upon by that rhetoric example?? :)
I have always suspected that "till" was actually the older version of "until"
I can always rely on Mike to "root" out the truth.
Pirate Grammer
Till sounds ok to me. I never knew till came before until. I always wrote it with an apostrophe -seems I was wrong
(because in Swedish, until is "till")
Swedish is not mentioned, but Scandinavia etc.is. So Mike and Diafol are right I guess.
Click Here
What bad grammar indicates to me is a lack of critical thinking. It's nothing deep or complex, but that's even more reason that the difference between "it's" and "its" for example should be apparent: i.e., because it's just not that difficult. It makes sense, if you think about it AT ALL. So what is it, you can't spare that tiny spurt of thought to get it right? Maybe that's a bad example because it's only different written, and I suppose some people have no need to write. But in my opinion it's the same difference, I think about it all the same in my pretty little head.
So bad grammar doesn't look good, that much is true, it doesn't read well. Thing is, like someone said on the first page, so many people go to the mall rather than the library... (paraphrase)
Then when it comes to coding, I really get bothered by things like misspellings, especially in code, things like that -- because the thing is that the person writing it is most likely overlooking a slew of other little things too, "minor details", but in programming those can make all the difference; and if your code works, it's very unlikely that it's anywhere close to optimal. This is just from what I've seen. I'm no professional programmer by any means anyway, but I have been cursed with a critical eye (and a hearty slice of humble pie). Grammar and coding are similar in that they are/have syntactical standards for a language. People who tend to overlook "small stuff" such as spelling errors and so forth obviously don't pay very much attention to detail, nor hold themselves to high-quality production standards. It's a matter of integrity.
I'm a real stickler, I know. At the same time, I understand there are people who don't necessarily need to adhere to syntax-standards. My criticism applies mainly to those who believe they have any business in anything having to do with technical writing, as opposed to creative writing, and including code. If you write code and haven't mastered reading and writing in your native language (at least English, I know I can speak for), then I wouldn't expect much from you...
I expect that part of my problem with incorrect grammar stems from mild OCD. I may have said this earlier but it bears repeating. I may have said this earlier but it bears repeating (not funny?). Some also comes from my background as a programmer. Years ago I introduced a bug when I inadvertantly skipped one comma in a FORTRAN call to an assembler routine. The call looked something like
CALL SOMEFUNC(parm,parm, parm, parm,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,parm)
except the actual line of code was spread over two lines. The missing comma caused the last value to be passed as the wrong argument and the assembler routine (poorly written) did no validation for the number of arguments. It took two weeks to track down. There are similar cases in written text where misplacing one comma, or omitting it entirely can change the meaning entirely. A (contrived) example is
No parking is allowed.
No, parking is allowed.
Then there are problems with ambiguity as in
Mary and Stephanie were at the mall when she said ...
I come across this frequently in conversation where the person speaking is well aware of who "she" refers to, but none of the listeners do.
There's no ambiguity -- she refers to Stephanie. I don't recall the exact rule, but she always refers to the closest object, in this case Stephanie.
It depends on the intent of the person who is relating the story. For example, my wife may have spent ten minutes in her head thinking about Mary and the dumb things she says. If she then starts telling me the story, "she" would refer to Mary, although I would have no way of knowing that. I've learned this from direct experience. Likewise when someone says "I ain't got no money." Grammatically this means they do have money but the intention is to say "I have no money."
I can't remember if I posted this or not and I don't feel like looking back through all pages to find out. When I first asked my wife out on our first date, I said it in a way that I thought (at the time) that either yes or no would mean yes.
Would you object to not going out with me?
Seems legit to me! I also popped the marriage question in the same fashion.
would't the neg give no i would not object to not going out with yoi. simply put, fuck off creep.
sorry on mobile monkey fingers
In my mind, which has limited capacity, says that that works out to a yes!
would't the neg give no i would not object to not going out with yoi. simply put, #### off creep
Not objecting to not going out with you could just be apathy or disinterest rather than total rejection so in that way it is a bit 'safer'. Although saying yes to such a phrased question is basically demanding to go out/marry the asker. I also mention it because I have several friends who have no objection to not marrying their long-time partners but also a few who have nearly broken up because their partner wouldn't propose.
Whats going on here !!!!!!!!
We're discussing grammar and you should have ended that sentence with a question mark ;-P
Apostrophes don't hurt either.
While we are discussing grammar, I thought I'd share this article I stumbled on some time ago. For those of you who might be, like me, both grammar buffs and Star Wars fans, here's a nice article discussing Yoda's speech patterns, and in particular, explaining why the prequel trilogy had such an odd-sounding Yoda compared to the original movies.
Reminds me of the Yoda condition I see occasionally in code.
If 5 = x Then
Interesting. There is a word in Finnish, pilkunnussija, which means "a person who believes it is their destiny to stamp out all spelling and punctuation mistakes at the cost of popularity, self-esteem and mental well-being." The literal translation is "comma ###kers".
Interesting. In Dutch we use the word "ant" in place of "comma", or "bit" if you're IT minded.
We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.