Category: Grammar Nazism

Speed Bump #2,158

Grammar Nazism

Seen on Twatter recently:

The problem is that our system has a crisis of legitimacy.

ex-President Applesauce illegally and deliberately imported somewhere between 10mm and 20mm illegal aliens into the USA and illegally provided them with tax dollars you and I earned on the sweat of our brows.

I’m not taking issue with the argument, as always, but I am taking issue with its presentation.

This abbreviation of millions and thousands has always been problematic for me.  The problem, as usual, starts with the Romans and their poxy language, while their stupid numbering system also comes into play.

Latin for 1,000:  mille (M).  So 2,000 (e.g. in dates):  MM.

Unfortunately, when we try to make the M into a million, we have to multiply the Ms into MM.  See the problem?  While numerically it makes sense (1 millimeter = one-thousandth of a metre = 1mm), linguistically we get into all sorts of trouble because when we try to abbreviate millions, as above, the appearance of, say, 20 million (20mm) comes out as 20 millimeters because it’s what we’re used to seeing, thanks to the equally-poxy metric system.

Frankly, we can overcome all confusion by not using abbreviations altogether, i.e. writing “10 million to 20 million”, or even “10-20 million” (inferior, but almost acceptable) instead of “10mm-20mm”.

Mixing Latin with metric is where we all fall over, by the way, because in the metric usage, “m” is also the abbreviation for “metre”, e.g. “Olympic 100m sprint”.  Some have tried to compensate by capitalizing the “m” when you need to express “thousand”, but that muddies the literary reading even more.

Lastly, a free box of .22 ammo goes to the Reader who can first explain to me what “milliard” officially means.

 

Speed Bump #3,145

Grammar Nazism

Here we go again:

“In essence, we note there are two large demographic bodies that resemble one another in the extent of their cognitive impairment: brain-dead politicians and brain-dead electorates. They are not necessarily coterminous. In some nations, one predominates; in others, another. Sometimes the two dispensations are found in sync.

In European nations such as the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Romania, and of course in the higher echelons of the EU itself, the political class is plainly suffering from an access of both mental impairment and historical ignorance, receding into the very totalitarian past they were reconstructed to avert…”

The word he intended to use was “excess” and not “access“, a mistake which kind of undercuts his verbose use of words such as “coterminous” and “dispensations” (“conditions”, surely?).

I quit reading the piece after that, because I couldn’t trust that the writer (and the editor) understood the topic.

I quote, and not for the first time, the late Roger Moore’s excellent statement:

“The point of language is to communicate your thoughts in the shortest possible time and in the clearest possible way.”

This writer fails on both counts, repeatedly.  No wonder A.I. is taking over.

 

Speed Bump #8,745

Grammar Nazism

Oh dear, we have yet another example of SpellChek doing the editing job at a newspaper:

“Vogue Williams flashed her envious physique in a black and white bikini as she took a dip in the ocean in St Barts on Friday.”

The word they were looking for is “enviable” — a physique cannot be envious, only people can be envious — and even “enviable” (worthy of envy) is incorrect:

Nothing to be envious of there, methinks.  Now the Irish ex-model’s hubby, on the other hand:

…has better tits than she does.

But all that still doesn’t excuse the crap grammar.

Speed Bump #3,248

Grammar Nazism

At Insty’s place, I saw this:

…and I was irritated by the non-clarity of the post.

There’s always an issue when using numerical values when writing.  You can write “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” — which is acceptable — or “99 out of 100 people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” which is equally so.  One can argue that the latter usage is more effective in that the scale is better described, and that is generally true when using large numbers, e.g.

“The chances of that cunt George Soros being hit by a meteorite while crossing Sunset Boulevard on any given Thursday are 1 in 174 trillion” works better than “one in one hundred and seventy-four trillion” (too many words, albeit expressing the same distressingly-small likelihood).

However, in the above Twatter post, the writer should not have used the numeral in his sign-off sentence, because there’s another “1” preceding it — referring to the other cunt, Nancy Pelosi — and the sentence as written causes a mental speed bump because in actual fact it is Pelosi (#1) who has changed her position / sold out on the tariff issue.  (Trump (#4) has never changed his position on tariffs:  he’s been arguing in their favor since about the 1990s, long before he  became a politician.)

“Only one hasn’t sold out” would have been the proper way to write it.

Perennial Speedbump

Grammar Nazism

Oh FFS… how many more times am I to be subjected to this linguistic atrocity?

“I was sat with Maura Higgins and Danny Jones at the star-studded BRITs Afterparty…”

No;  you were seated OR you were sitting next to these people.

Of course, this comes from the Daily Mail, so expectations are low.  Even so…

“I Thought This Country Spawned The Fucking Language, And So Far Nobody Seems To Speak It.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Speed Bump #297

Grammar Nazism

From (of course) the Daily Mail:

Angelina Jolie walks away $80 million richer after dragging Brad Pitt ‘through ringer’ in eight-year divorce battle

Were there bells involved?  No?

Then it’s wringer, you fucking imbeciles — the machine what squeezed the water out of sodden clothing with rollers (back before we had clothes dryers).  Not that I would expect Millennial- or Gen Z illiterates to know about them.

Which is no excuse.