Things we should do away with

Skinny jeans, for men and women.

 

In the NFL, fumbles that are overturned on instant replay because the ref's whistle blew before the knee hit the ground.

If it happens more than once to a ref, fire him, because he obviously is blowing the whistle too soon.

 

Did your professor advocate that all rules of German grammar, syntax and use be applied to English, or just this one?

 

Artie Lang

Jeffrey Ross

Sarah Sliverman

Rosie O'Donnell

Joy Behar

Dr. Drew

Dr. Phil

Oprah (oh, wait.....She's leaving on her own [almost(OWN)].

Adam Corolla

Any & all "morning zoo"-type local radio shows

 

Celebrities taking spots in Nationwide Tour events over guys who live out of their cars and need to make a cut so they can pay for their McChicken sandwiches.

 

ESPN's "Pardon The Interruption" (Or as I like to call it, "Pardon The Idiocy").

 

It was a specific discussion of this rule. Somebody asked him about it and he gave his opinion. It was part of an overall theme of understanding that language is not a static thing. It grows and changes over time. English is obviously more stable now than it was centuries ago because the written and spoken word are recorded in so many ways, but we still have new words or new ways of using old words coming into common usage.

Point being, it's not just a willingness to change. It is understanding the nature of language well enought o know that it is going to change whether we like it or not.

 

Well, right, generally. Which is why the other argument being made here -- not by you, I understand -- that prepositions don't require objects because old English has its syntactical roots in German is sort of silly, given that the Norman Invasion happened in 1066 and English took on most of the grammatical rules of French from there on... But I digress.

Let's just say there is no rule against ending a sentence with prepositions. Throw it out. You'd still have a rule that says prepositions must have objects. A rule you'd break if you ended a sentence with a preposition.

So you reclassify those prepositions as some kind of phrasal verb, the grammar equivalent of the NBA's continuation rule. You'd be wrong, but at least it's a plausible argument. You'd say, for instance:

Boys of Summer by Don Henley is my favorite song to listen to.

Your argument is gonna be that "to listen to" is not really a prepositional mishmash, but a helper verb-phrase for your weak verb "is".

But Buck and other right-thinking people are going to come back and say that the sentence is stronger without such piddle.

Boys of Summer by Don Henley is my favorite song.

That's better, and shorter, too.

Boys of Summer by Don Henley remains my favorite song.

That's better still, cause it drops the lameass "to be" verb.

So even if you throw all logic out the window and prove your case for getting rid of this rule, you're still gonna be left with the truth that the sentence can be written better without a dangling preposition. So even if you get rid of the "rule" it's going to remain a "rule" of good writing.

So we might as well stick with the rule.

 

One of my college professors said there was one allowable exception to the rules of English grammar, the sentence, "Lay lady lay."

Because the author of the line was, well, above grammatical rules.

 

That professor I would hang out with.







Someone will get that. I just know it.