What Kind of Speller are You?

[gailkate]

Booklady Pam posted this on Facebook, and I knew you all would get a kick out of it.

www.grammarly.com/blog/2015/our-new-quiz-is-here-just-in-time-for-the-spellingbee/?quiz&fb_ref=Default

She and I are both Orthographic Purists. You love the rules and conventions of correct spelling — even tending to prefer British or international spellings that are most consistent with organizations standardizing the language. The Oxford English Dictionary is one of your best friends, and you're proud of it!

However, I don't entirely agree with their notion of purists.  BTW there's a spelling mistake in one of the questions - geez!

[liriodendron]

I'm also an Orthographic Purist. I'd be willing to bet that most of us here are. Now, do you have one for punctuation?

[jspnrvr]

Another Orthographic Purist, sentence structure, not so much! BTW, Henry Miller needs some schooling on adverbs.

[gailkate]

Gosh, I never did make it through Henry Miller, though our very correct H.S. English teacher told us his work was art, skipping right past any reference to mature content. Tell me about his adverbs! I'm pretty wordy myself, having steeped myself in Victorian literature, but I'm willing to be schooled on excessive adverbs.

Isn't punctuation a challenge? They keep changing things that I'm adamant about, but the last English class I taught was in 1987, so I'm probably fighting an inexorable tide. Even ere, I find myself looking at something I wrote and thinking, "Is that too stuffy? Couldn't you just once violate the comma splice rule?"

BTW, I do NOT favour British spelling. It is wrong! It is pretentious and affected! I have a friend who persists in using artsy-fartsy Brit spellings like the one I so subtly snuck earlier, and he even spells phone like this: 'phone. Is he living in 1880?

[jspnrvr]

Go back to the question,Gail, asked of him, Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain. Miller's answer was something like" It doesn't matter the nature of the disaster as long as the spelling is done right" I'd vote for "done correctly".

[joew]

Another Orthographic Purist here. I also insist on the Oxford comma.

[doctork]

I deviate from the rest of this crowd - The Writing Realist:

While you understand that standard spelling is important for optimal communication, you also realize how frustrating English spelling can be. You appreciate the help of your spell checker and autocorrect but accept when technology and people are imperfect.

When I attended school in Germany, English class was NOT my best subject, because I read/write/speak American, not English. In Germany, they teach British English, so my spelling was graded as substandard.

[gailkate]

Being a purist doesn't mean not understanding how tough English spelling can be. (Rough, bough, though, through, etc.) But the rise of texting is the catastrophe we've all seen coming - UR Gr8t! It's a changing language, but everyone who's tried to standardize it has failed. We must man the battlements!

Is the Oxford comma the same as the serial comma? If so, I agree and can argue anyone into submission. If not, please tell us what it is.

And Jay, about that "right." I'm thinking we need to know the context of the Miller quotation, because it might be a case for accepting informal usage.

[doctork]

I think Oxford comma is:

For dinner last night I ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans.

vs

For dinner last night I ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans.

I am inconsistent in my use of the Oxford comma, but put it in there if it makes the meaning clearer:

For dinner last night I ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans. I did not drink a separate soup bowl of gravy. Also, I did not eat a stew of mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.

[joew]

The Oxford comma is what prevents authors from dedicating a book "to my parents, Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa.)

[gailkate]

[jspnrvr]

May 27, 2015 12:56:04 GMT -5 joew said:

The Oxford comma is what prevents authors from dedicating a book "to my parents, Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa.)

That right there is funny, I don't care who you are!

[BoatBabe]

Yup, another Orthographic Purist here. I don't prefer foreign spellings, but I certainly prefer foreign pronunciations.

In America, we say demurrage as duh-MUR-udge. In England, they say deh-mer-AHJ. Much nicer.

In America, we say consignee as cun-SIGN-ee. In England, they con-su-NEE. I like both English pronunciations better.

[liriodendron]

There are people who do not use an Oxford comma? Oh, my! The nuns would smack your hand if you forgot to include it. Clearly they know that Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa are not anyone's parents.

[gailkate]

I think it was a big mistake to teach people to put the comma in only when it was "necessary." That's a judgment most people either can't be bothered with or don't know how to make (not speaking of K, of course). Better to insist on all commas in a series and then permit occasional exceptions.

Lirio, were you schooled by nuns? I didn't remember that. I know you're Catholic, but I didn't know you went to parochial school. I spent 2 weeks at St. Boniface, preparing for First Communion, and we mostly talked about sin.
Really, how much do 7-yr-olds know about sin? It was very solemn and weighty for me, causing much introspection and doubt about my Immortal Soul. Commas would have been a relief.

[doctork]

Somewhere along the line, I was inculcated with the following advice about commas:

When in doubt leave it out.

My 7th - 8th grade English teacher was fairly strict but she didn't teach that, so it must have been later on when writing papers and there were big red circles around the "unnecessary commas."

[liriodendron]

I went to Catholic school through 6th grade. My parents had already decided to send my sister (6 years younger) to public school and they asked me whether I wanted to stay where I was or go to public school, too. (They were tired of teachers basically picking and choosing what we were taught. One year I had hardly any geography, another year we did very little math, yet we still got grades in all of those subjects.) I decided I would like to give public school a try. I'd be doing so anyway when I went to high school (we had no Catholic high school in our town and my parents had already decided they didn't want me taking a long bus ride to another town to go to high school) and I figured it might be nice to make some new friends and learn some more math and geography before then.

Unfortunately, I was far too honest a child. We were given forms near the end of the school year asking how many children in our family would be attending the Catholic school in the fall. I didn't bother to hand mine in since no one from my family would be attending. When I got called down to the office about this and was asked if we were moving, I said no and told them that my parents had decided to send my younger sister to public school and they asked me where I would rather go and I said that I would like to go to public school, as well. To say that the principal (a nun) and the parish priest (who happened to be in the office at the time) were upset about this is to put it mildly. Apparently one's schooling is not something that should be decided by a child. After a very long taking to, I left in tears. My parents were so upset with this that my father called both the principal and the priest and told them that if they felt the need to discuss my education ever again that they were to do it with my parents and not with me. He then refused to send us there for religious education classes while we were enrolled in public school.

One of my biggest recollections of Catholic school was going to Mass every day. I never really understood how our principal could sit up in the choir loft and realize that so many children were not paying attention. I mean, if she had actually been paying attention herself, wouldn't she have been too engrossed in the Mass to realize others were not? She'd spend the entirety of the Mass hissing and snapping her fingers and pointing to various children. It was very disrupting and you'd end up paying far more attention to her calling people out than you did to what was going on at the altar.

[BoatBabe]

Now, that's a ringing endorsement.

[gailkate]

Your father sounds terrific. You had wonderful parents.

 
I remembered the "dressed in a little brief authority" quote and looked it up. www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/brief-authority
The scene in "Measure for Measure" doesn't fit your experience exactly, but close enough.  In my day, teaching nuns wore the full habit, and it often covered a drill sergeant's heart. Except, of course, for my beloved Sister Maria Theresea. 

[booklady]

May 28, 2015 7:28:35 GMT -5 liriodendron said:

There are people who do not use an Oxford comma? Oh, my! The nuns would smack your hand if you forgot to include it. Clearly they know that Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa are not anyone's parents.

The AP Stylebook does not allow the Oxford comma so any newspapers that follow that style will not use it (unless it truly affects meaning, as with Joe's parents ). I honestly believe the rule is based at least in part on saving money. It seems like a teeny blob of ink there, but multiply it by thousands of possible uses in 365 or so newspaper editions per year and it can add up.

When the paper I worked for in Vicksburg cut the width of the newsprint they were using by a couple of inches, the company saved $88,000 annually just on ink.

[gailkate]

Our papers did that a few years ago, and we were appalled, outraged, fit to be tied. Now when the pages won't fold easily I wonder how we ever manipulated the larger size.

Style books all have their own rules within rules.  I am very particular about the use of the colon, but newspapers don't give a rip about my rules. What precedes a colon must be a complete sentence!  One cannot say, "the rules are:
x,y,z." "Are" is a linking verb and must have a predicate to link to; thus, "the rules are these:" or, "are the following:"  Strunk and White use a capital letter in a sentence following a colon, which strikes me as too loud. 

No wonder people hate English.

[joew]

Commas are necessary, even if the meaning is clear without them.
www.cbsnews.com/news/missing-comma-gets-ohio-woman-out-of-parking-ticket/

[booklady]

Yay! Like one of those commenting said, "A win for the grammar nazis!"
(Boy, how is that for an offensive term, anyway!)