How Good Are Your Grammar?
In a world where LOL and BRB are as commonplace as full stops, it can be easy to let standards slip when it comes to spelling and grammar.
However, despite the majority of the population being up to speed with language short cuts, it appears that we value grammar more than ever.
Earlier this year it was revealed that millennials are most annoyed by bad grammar and spelling slips, according to a survey by Dictionary.com.
And now those offended by such faux pas can put their knowledge to the test.
John Sutherland, one of Britain’s most celebrated professors of English literature, is here to test, stretch, amuse and instruct you with his definitive quiz on all things grammatical.
Answer the 15 questions below to sort the grammatical wizards from those who need a little punctuation.
No – unless you want to stress the fact that you’re a stickler for grammatical correctness, however pifflingissimo.
There’s no risk to meaning whichever spelling is used. I personally don’t see any point in preserving the distinction, nor does the IRS, the American tax authority (who wants to tangle with them?), which asks those filing their returns if they have any ‘dependents’. Britain’s HMRC still goes, crustily, for ‘dependants’. Harumph.
4. Despite his publisher’s use of them on his cover, Marsh has little time for the exclamation mark (!): they are, he says, ‘seldom, if ever, obligatory’. The biopic film of Keats’s life is called Bright Star. The Keats poem from which the title is taken opens ‘Bright Star!’. Was Keats wasting ink?
ANSWER:
Poets love the exclamation mark; Keats frequently used it in his opening lines to give the impression of ‘breaking’ into verse, as one breaks into song. Journalists on ‘quality’ papers – like Marsh, style guru of the Guardian – despise them because of the association with the ‘Gotcha!’ school of tabloid headlines.
5. What’s an Oxford comma?
ANSWER: A ‘serial comma’ – the comma that comes after the penultimate item in a list, where there are three or more listed items; e.g. ‘a, b, c, and d’.
It’s widely ignored, which can lead to occasional ambiguity as in: ‘I hate my school teachers, Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger’ (there are lots of variations on this example).
The most thoughtful meditation on the serial comma’s rightness or wrongness is in Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The objection is that the terminal ‘and’ is a conjunction and cluttering it up with a conjoining comma ‘smacks of smug pedantry’, as Harry Mount (BA, Oxon) complains. It was first imposed (via what later became Hart’s Rules – the compositors’ commandments) by Oxford University Press typesetters and editors.
The post How Good Are Your Grammar? appeared first on LewRockwell.
Leave a Reply