The Pyramid of Stupid

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I would like to introduce you to Kapitano's Law of Professional Competence: For every one person employed to do something professionally, there are a hundred amateurs doing it much better...and a thousand who completely suck at it.

This is why most published novels are rubbish, and most stories you read on the internet are even worse, but a few net stories are outstandingly brilliant. You could spend your whole life reading excellent self-published net fiction and never read a dead-tree book again...if only it didn't take your entire life to find all the good stuff.

It works for music, political analysis, humour, philosophy, and I rather suspect, porn.

Take this utterly execrable net article - and the unintentionally hilarious textbook it rips off. Both are about "how to do english proper" - how to write and speak in that mythical language called "correct English".

John Gingrich begins his article with the title: "20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong". It's not auspicious when an article on prescriptive language use gets it's language use wrong before the first paragraph. This is one of those titles that you only understand because you know the cliche that's being misused. Strictly speaking, I don't think it's even meaningful.

I was going to go through all the errors the author makes, but I just don't have the time or strength. In short though:

Of the 20 grammatical mistakes listed, 17 aren't grammatical at all - they're mistakes about the meanings of words, not the structure of sentences. And of these, four actually are mistakes:

• "Moot" means 'open to discussion' or 'not yet decided', not 'irrelevant' or 'undecidable'.
  
• "Affect" is a verb, "Effect" is a noun...plus a different verb. You can affect a person, which is to have an effect on that person, or to effect a change on them.
  
• A "disinterested" experiment is one where the experimenters don't have a personal stake in the outcome. But a disinterested glance is pretty much the same as an "uninterested" glance.
  
• A "continual" interruption happens frequently. A "continuous" noise happens only once but doesn't stop.

The rules about "Who" and "Whom" were never clear or consistent, and "Whom" hasn't been part of even high-register English for at least 50 years.

It is one of those cases where, if you were an educated young person a century ago, you learned one set of abstract rules in the classroom, and a completely different set of inconsistent rules for use everywhere else.

"Whom" in the classroom was for ablative personal pronouns, whereas outside it was for accusative, dative and sometimes relative third-person animate pronouns - in other words, it replaced "Him" and "Her" but not "He" and "She".

Just in case this is starting to make sense to you, remember that English was taught as though it were a coded form of Latin, and in Latin the dative case corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "from", and the ablative to "by", "with" and "for". Except when it doesn't. However, in pre-Roman Latin "with" was the since-vanished instrumental case, and in modern English "to" is dative but "from" is ablative.

Perhaps if those old schoolmasters had remembered that English isn't derived from Latin at all but from Old High German, we'd have better grammar books now. Or not.

Gingrich thinks "'May' implies a possibility. 'Might' implies far more uncertainty". I've never heard this one before. "May" and "Might" are both auxiliary verbs indicating uncertainty, but "May" is also used for permission, which Gingrich doesn't even mention.

We may be early.
We might be early.
May I go?
You may go.

His carcrash of an explanation for "Which" and "That" manages to completely miss the point that "that" actually has four different meanings, one of which it shares with "Which" - to introduce clauses. And clauses are made subordinate or not with commas, not changing conjunctions as he seems to think.

The cars which were stolen crashed.
The cars, which were stolen, crashed.
The cars that were stolen crashed.
The cars, that were stolen, crashed.

The old pedentries of "Whether" and "If", "Fewer" and "Less", "Further" and "Father", "Since" and "Because" are there. And he declares that "Impactful" isn't a real word because, even though the readership understand it, someone made it up. Perhaps he thinks "Snafu", which he uses, wasn't invented by anyone?

I'm a teacher of English, and you know what makes my job most difficult? Stroppy students, moronic managers, terrible timekeeping?

Well yes. But apart from that, it's textbooks written by idiots who think real English is a bag of rules which a bunch of Victorian academics pulled out of their rectums to (seriously) give themselves a subject to teach. Books which can't even keep their imaginary rules straight, and can't follow them in the text.

That, and students who've read this rubbish and need deprogramming before I can teach them anything.

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