Paragraphs.org - critiquing the world's grammar

titloe

Ang — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:29:22 +0000

asdfaf asfd as fas fa fdadaSDASF FDAF ADF AFAF ADF

There’s a problem

Peter — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:43:18 +0000

That is, with the world’s ability to abbreviate the words “there”, “is”, and “are”. I really can’t believe how many times a day I hear “there’s” misused. On TV, at the office, down the pub. It’s extremely annoying because if people put in just a little thought and unabbreviated, they would realise how stupid it sounds.

Interestingly, this is one of the few occasions in English where the suject comes after the verb. So if someone starts their sentence with “there is …”, you can’t anticipate at that point whethere they will refer to a single or multiple entity. But all too commonly, in my view down to laziness, people say things like “there’s three cookies left”, or “there’s lots of people in the store”. In the latter case, it is easy to see where the confusion is, because it would be correct to say “there’s a lot of people in the store”. Just rearranging words and letters can make all the difference.

The most annoying thing of all is that I find myself from time to time either almost stumbling into the same mistake, or actually doing so and then cursing myself for it. Being such a pedant about grammar means that I always catch myself (I think!), but it still annoys the hell out of me.

What just happened

Peter — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:32:14 +0000

My question is, what happened to the question mark? There are posters for this movie all over London at the moment and every time I see one I can’t help but be annoyed. Actually, Ang and I had a discussion about the title today and decided that it could have been a partial sentence stating a fact. As in “let me tell you what just happened”. I had to agree that this was feasible, even though it still didn’t really make sense. But I knew deep down that there should have been a question mark and wasn’t, there had to be.

So imagine my delight when we returned home and I looked up the film on Wikipedia – it was based on a book called “What just happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line”. See the punctuation? I certainly do. I do love being right.

So that brings me back to my original question: what happened to the question mark? Who decided that there shouldn’t be one? Was there a discussion at the film studio about what looked best, what made most sense, what the public would understand? I doubt it somehow.