Discussion on:

Oh for the love of God, put a space after your verbs!

There is no authority for the English languages. If enough people today find backupping to be just fine, then sooner or later it may be generally accepted. Now I can't bring myself to say backupping, but I'm not the judge of it any more or less than you are.
A person's idiosyncratic language is a real thing.
It is never the same as the formal codification of the corresponding society-wide language.
The test I provided gauges the idiosyncratic language(s) and no amount of "It's wrong" will render my test incorrect.
Of course, it's not my test, really. It's straight out of Bloomfield.

It all depends upon whether you prefer a prescriptive or descriptive view of language. If one does not prescribe anything then why bother teaching anything betond rudimentary English in school? Taking it to the extreme somebody could talk or write complete gibberish and say that is is acceptable English as they are using it. Just because some (or even a lot of) people say or spell something incorrectly doesn't make it instantly correct. Language does change over time and given enough people and enough usage a variation reaches critical mass where one could say it is now acceptable or official but where the tipping point lies could be debated forever.
"There is no authority for the English languages."
Yes there is. The English. I don't know whether it was a typo or deliberate but I don't accept that "English language" should be plural either!

It's entirely circular. Someone claims authority, wrecks age-old patterns of use, sets back language development hundreds of years, and the only basis for authority has always been "Because I say so".

You apparently have a nanny view of the people, that they are incompetents that must herded and indoctrinated by the state. The thing is, people were solely responsible for their languages for thousands and thousands of years. Without even a writing system. And they made beautifully expressive languages.

Language is for communication, it won't deteriorate if left alone, and it never has. It only deteriorates when someone with a poor understanding of its complexity tries to make ham-handed rules for it. Then the rules conflict with the real language, and errors start to occur more and more, requiring even more activism, leading to more undermining of natural language ownership for the individual.

The fact is, the English language doesn't exist. Nobody speaks "the English language". Not only are there dialectal variations, but each speaker speaks an idiolect of the abstracted non-entity that is the English-language.
Compare to botany: A flower of the genus Violaceae is NOT the genus Violaceae, it is not even an examplar of the genus Violaceae. An exemplar of the genus can't be an individual, it must be a species.
The genus Violaceae is an abstraction, a classification of various actual past and present plants, such that they're grouped together with genetically related peers.
Same with language, but worse: English is just the family, subdivided into genuses, they again subdivided into species, they again divided into myriad idiolects.

See, here is my problem with the Grammar Police situation you have going there. You understood exactly what the man was saying. Yet for whatever reason you get a kick out of picking on people who may not have the same grammatical expertise as you do (maybe you wet the bed at night and need someone to moan at, or your pet snail died, whatever).

... he doth protest too much.

How is it you know the writer "gets a kick|" out of it? Is that the only reason you post?

with grammar police? After all, we have stealing police, violence police, internet police, et al. Grammar (spelling also) can communicate an entirely different meaning if it is not done properly. And this includes punctuation. This brings up another gripe: the absence of commas (,) so prevalent in writing(s) in the US compared to Canada or the UK. Is the cost of emplacing a comma so high as to be infeasible? Or, are you just trying to give reader flexibility of interpretation?

with those who participate in forums but limit their postings strictly to grammar corrections. I don't expect exact conformation in a public forum, as long as the author can get his point across without the reader needing a decoder ring and a Ouija board. But there are some who can only snipe at the construction and mechanics alone, as if a dangling participle or misplaced apostrophe somehow invalidate the poster's content.

Me, I get 'comma happy' sometimes, scattering them willy-nilly, breaking otherwise acceptable sentences into a series of nearly unrelated clauses, especially around conjunctions.

Let's eat Grandpa!
vs
Let's eat, Grandpa!
Punctuation saves lives.

Wow - what a lot of excitement about grammar! Is it *that* important?
OK maybe it is - just look at the difference one capital letter makes:

"Help your Uncle Jack off a horse."
vs
"Help your Uncle jack off a horse."

and operate without authority.
What's worse, they often have a very poor grasp of what language is and does.
Idiotic bans on split infinitives and double negatives are prime examples.

'can't do without' doesn't always convey the same idea.

Oops! Extra comma!

But a Wombat eats roots.

Eats, roots and leaves
I see what you did there!

he eats, shoots the target, and leaves

Can you make sure that the backup's' backups are back up and backed up
This would indicate that multiple backup processes are now running and that the backup processes themselves are backup up.

Backup's is either possessive or "backup is" in contraction.
So >backup's' is very hard to parse.
The former doesn't really take a possessive, since it's a de facto adjective with a mandatory head noun. (Compare: Blue feet / Jay's feet)
And is is a verb, and doesn't take possessive either.

nt

It probably should have a rearview mirror too.

One that really gets me going is "incase" instead of "in case"

only one, repeat one, space after a period(.) Word processing software automatically puts a half-space after the period, so if you add an extra one, the space will be 3 spaces, not 1 or 1.5. This can cause the mal-justification or breaking of lines, which is poor typographic practice. Unfortunately, most users are totally unaware of the typographic work going on in the background of, say, Word. And, unfortunately, Microsoft programmers are too young to be aware of typography. Thus, any graphics, book or document designer uses a "real" word processing package such as WordPerfect (true) PageMaker or Ilustrator.

either in the days of typewriters when you were told to double space at that point or in the days of DOS based word processors using dot matrix printers that only allowed one space per character and were taught to double space there, too.

Everybody who learned to type in the days when proportional spacing was only available to typesetters. And even they double-spaced after a period.

Don't even get me started on "apart" or "alot" used instead of "a part" or "a lot". Articles, people; they're there for a reason!

a part refers to something that is a component of another item with multiple components. Thus I can have a part of a computer system with me to get it changed.

apart refers to a position, such as being set down away from the other items. Thus I can be sitting down apart from the rest of the team as I don't like them.

Just make sure you use the right one.

are listed many, many pages *apart* from each other, under "A" and "P", respectively. If "a part" is really an entry in your dictionary, is it found in the A's, or the P's?!

Which is NOT the same as 'a part'. The latter is an article and a noun; the former is an ... adjective? Preposition?

"That there spark plug is a part."
"Put them there spark plugs two feet apart."

The word (an adverb) "apart" IS a word. Of course apart has a different meaning from a part.

The word "alot", yes, you are correct on that one!

A lot is a piece of land. And let's not forget allot, as in "to allocate to something or someone". Homonyms are fun. I wish people would learn them.

of English. It is an agglomeration of Viking, French, Danish, German, Indo-European bits, some Hindu and Tamil words brought back by the Colonialists, various North American Aboriginal/First Nations/Native languages, Celtic and so on. It is an absorbi/ative (check it out) language which doesn't practice nationalism like so many other languages. The words themselves have no real rules so grammar and punctuation are the chief means of keeping it in line or mostly understandable. Use malformed grammar and ignore punctuation and lose your meaning. Could start a war.

nt

What do you mean by the "- nt" in the subject of your post, and the nt in the body of it? Please inform me. By the way, good answer about the double space after the period. I did it for years until I read a New York Times article where the author bemoaned that kind of usage. I learned to type on an electric typewriter, so it was ingrained in me. I now have joined the "single space after period" majority.

'nt' in the title signifies there's not text worth reading in the main body, thus you do NOT need to open the message to get the full message. Now the old TR site required you to include some text in the main body so some of us got used to putting the nt (no text) in the body as well - just to meet that requirement. I believe the new layout will allow a totally blank body, but I still put the nt in the body.

All the old regulars know what it means and every now and then a new user asks what it means and all the newer users find out when we tell them.

.

But a simple period will suffice.

It indicates the poster's entire message is in the Subject line. There is no additional text in the message body except something to fill the required field - a space, period, or 'smiley'.

A great little book that was enormously helpful in my transition from typewriter to keyboard. Through it's teachings I learned that when laying out words in Word, only a single space is required after a period.

"It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."

It sounds like something he'd say.

and I'll start in on the media destroying word usage because they're too lazy to learn the proper word to use.

Short version - decimate is NOT the same thing as devastate; despite what the TV media reporters say.

decimate was a roman word, when there was a problem with the army such as desertions the sentence was 1 in 10 would be killed by their 9 closest friends. So it means losing 1 in 10. Devastate, massive damage, like losing 9 in 10.
But as much as we would like to keep with the original definition of the word it is amazing that most dictionaries think that decimate is leaving only 10%.
Our language is falling apart because of the apathy of the people who use it most and should be the guardians of it.

the citizens. It was only ever used in that context until a lazy and stupid media reporter used it instead of devastate when talking about an avalanche destroying a town. Since then a number of lazy media reporters have used it that way and have been pushing to have the modern dictionaries accept it as a valid meaning. It's also one of my pet peeves too.

You used 'your' (possessive adjective) for the contraction of 'you are' in your complaint. Or should it have been you're complaint?

"...rather than help to fix it" should be, "...rather than helpING to fix it."

" . . . rather than help fix it", or ". . . rather than helping fix it".
No "to" required.

nt