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Post by chonies on Sept 5, 2017 13:27:45 GMT -4
I also wanted to tell my friend that she's probably out of luck--the NY Times seems to use the phrase "wants back in" a lot, so it's probably something completely appropriate to them and their aesthetic.
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madangela
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We made it! Welcome, President Biden!
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Mar 20, 2006 13:52:38 GMT -4
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Post by madangela on Sept 7, 2017 7:30:00 GMT -4
The Adam Ruins Everything podcast recently had a language expert on who argued that using Literally figuratively was ok now because so many people do it and we all know what they mean. Ugh. Way to ruin an otherwise fascinating podcast. I saw a commercial last night for an upcoming look back on the Chandra Levy* murder case. Connie Chung is shown reminiscing that she was "literally pulling teeth" when interviewing back then. Wish I'd been there... *sorry, thought it was the Menendi.
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Post by chonies on Sept 7, 2017 13:38:35 GMT -4
Some people deserve a visit from an unlicensed dentist. It's karma.
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Post by batmom on Sept 7, 2017 14:23:46 GMT -4
Batgirl is going to be doing a lot of grammar in English class this year. Does anyone know of a great blogger/site/online resource that pithily explains things like what a clause is?
(Her english teacher is doing his masters in Linguistics so he's a bit of a nerd. She'll probably do ok because she's been in French Immersion since she was 5 so she's used to discussing grammar but she was puzzled by 'clause'.)
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Gigiree
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Post by Gigiree on Sept 7, 2017 17:50:12 GMT -4
I've always liked Grammar Girl (Quick and Dirty Tips). Here is her post on subordinate clauses. BTW, a clause is simply a group of words containing a subject and predicate. A clause may be a sentence (if it expresses a complete thought), but sometimes it's not.
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Post by batmom on Sept 8, 2017 14:08:26 GMT -4
Thanks!
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Post by chonies on Sept 8, 2017 20:08:00 GMT -4
I agree with gigiree on Grammar Girl--not only does she do the quick, accessible explanations, she cites her sources.
Another thing that helped me when I needed a crash course in grammar: googling my question and adding "ESL" or "ELL" or "English learners" or something that would lead me to the types of resources an ESL teacher could use to clarify points.
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Nysha
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Post by Nysha on Sept 9, 2017 12:42:29 GMT -4
Grrr. It's not messy--like, there aren't missing words so it looks like it's been revised but ugh. The story itself is kind of thin, and I don't even care what happens with the horse DNA subplot, I'm just trawling for more grammar issues. Only a Greecie would continue to read a book for the grammar issues.
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Post by LAX on Sept 16, 2017 13:53:56 GMT -4
Can someone point me to the rules for using 'the' in front of the name of a people? I was recently in a conversation where I said "my friend spent her summer with the Mawayana." and was told it's never THE Mawayana, always just Mawayana. I asked why and was told it's like saying The Blacks or The Whites. I told her I didn't think the comparison was apt since we weren't referring to race but a group/nation. She said "you wouldn't say you'd spent the summer with The English, would you?" Actually I would and I wouldn't see anything wrong with it, but maybe I've seen too many movies with Amish characters.
I see it could go either way. For my own people's name I'd use a the or not and think either is fine. We are the Gitxsan. We're Gitxsan. but there are some instances where the sentence looks awkward without a the. "I spent the summer with Gitxsan." which could be corrected by expanding it to "I spent the summer in Kitwanga with some Gitxsan people" but that specificity isn't always appropriate for the situation or useful when brevity is important (like in a tweet)
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Post by chonies on Sept 17, 2017 8:28:29 GMT -4
I'm coming at this from a few places, and I think it depends both on how the ethnonym is being used, and the embedded tone or meaning, although there might be style guides that take a harder stance. I personally think a very orthodox position on this interferes with meaning, but then again I don't take a hard line on the Oxford comma. The role of "the" can function linguistically as a way to make things a discrete other, or a unit. If you take people out of it, you have
I love calico cats. I love the calico cats. I love the calico cat who lives in my house.
Let's discuss: I was recently in a conversation where I said "my friend spent her summer with the Mawayana." Honestly, it depends on the context for me. It sounds fine, especially if the purpose of spending her summer there was to engage with socio-cultural-linguistic Mawayana stuff. It could have been phrased as, "a friend spent the summer in a Mawayana community in Guyana learning their language."
Here's the big picture thing for me: generally there is a push for person-centered language, like "a person with autism" and not "an autistic person" but that's not universally accepted, occasionally by in-group people themselves. However, it's impossible to discuss certain events without using the block-group way of speaking--there is a significant gap in meaning between "Martians killed Saturnians in their community" and "Martians killed the Saturnians in their community", although there other ways to word it.
I checked a few sources, and it goes back and forth. I thought Cultural Survival would take a hardline on this, but they don't More than 4,000 Rohingya people originally from Burma The Rohingya left their traditional homeland Here's Al Jazeera doing it: Nearly all of the Rohingya in Myanmar
Here are two examples of using the ethnonym as an attributive noun Globe and Mail But the plight of the Rohingya people isn't new Guardian her silence about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority
I also think that modern topics about ethnicity are complicated, and the difference between something like The English (or Irish or Germans) takes on a different meaning because you could be talking about people who might not be ethnically German but are German citizens and the conversation is broader. When you're talking about peoples that may not have a nation behind them or who are stateless, there are different layers and nuances that might need a different tone. I think the concept of never using 'the' is a nice ideal that can't be applied accurately 100% of the time.
Source: I looked at anthropology, news and library stuff and didn't find a clear answer.
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