(no subject)

[owlectomy]

WHY IS POKEMON SO ADDICTIVE WHY. That's fifteen hours of my life I'll never get back. But I'd probably have spent them watching Law and Order reruns anyway. My style of gaming is to play semi-obsessively for perhaps twenty-five or fifty hours and then forget about the game entirely, though, so I'm confident it'll run its course.

I wonder if it makes me a hypocrite that I align myself with the descriptivists (like all good linguists!) but want to kill someone when I hear a news anchor say something like "Thanks for watching Dianne and I." I guess I feel like if you are in a profession where you are held up as an example of Correct English (news anchor being one of those professions) and you have standard English as your native dialect, you ought to speak standard English. And for some reason hypercorrections feel worse on my ears than the errors they're meant to correct. My morphology prof said there was a very subtle linguistic reason why sentences like "Jim and me went to the movies" should be considered correct. Okay; but I'm not unhappy with the rule that says it should be "Jim and I went to the movies," because it makes sense that way and doesn't depend on an understanding of subtle grammatical principles. It's just that it gets taught so badly that people overgeneralize and think that "...and me" is always bad, and then they overcorrect.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

>>I wonder if it makes me a hypocrite that I align myself with the descriptivists (like all good linguists!) but want to kill someone when I hear a news anchor say something like "Thanks for watching Dianne and I."

I KNOW. Me too! You're not alone.

[firebreatherjen.livejournal.com]

"Thanks for watching Dianne and I."

That grates on my ears like nails on a chalkboard. I was never much of a grammar Nazi, and many of my grammar skillz have faded in the last six years, but I will never understand why people can't get pronoun case right.