Mark my words!

[sister_luck]

I'm in marking hell again and as always there are a couple of language issues you might be able to help me with. (And no, I'm perfectly fine with ending sentences with prepositions, that's a non-issue for me, most of the time. Call me a sloppy teacher if you will, but I just don't care about this silly rule.)



Again, this is mostly stuff that is not quite idiomatic and I'm not sure how to fix it.

One of my students is very fond of this construction:

...it wasn't that funny evening
...it wasn't that good idea

Now I know that this does not work - it's probably easiest to tell him to switch the sentence around: the evening/idea wasn't that funny/good, but what about that good of an idea - is that possible, too?

Could you say that one hears muffled music?

Reflexive pronoun issues

I'm not sure whether the reflexive pronoun is just plain wrong here or whether it's just an added extra:

he doesn't know how he should behave himself
he steals himself out of the window

Looking up words in the dictionary:

One girl was looking for a way of saying Draufgänger in English. She got go-getter. What she actually means is a word for a guy who is fond of the ladies and likes taking risks. Any ideas what might be better?

Someone who keeps drinking lemonade the whole evening while everyone around him gets drunk, could be said to stick to lemonade, right?

Getting close to one another

(Mostly for your amusement, but a better way of saying it would be appreciated though one of them might not need fixing:)

They have each other in arms and dance wild and hot
...she tries to kiss him with her tongue
the girls kiss him left and right of his face

Also, what adjective would you use for a person who is making advances to someone? I know that she becomes obstrustive - which I guess is a misspelling of obtrusive is wrong.

And, how would you fix he is in forbidden love with an English girl?



Thanks in advance - I value and enjoy your input very much!

Comments

[gillo]

It used to bother me. I was pretty sure it was wrong to end sentences with prepositions yet I saw everybody doing it on LJ, in fictions I read, or even in blogs, so I began to think I might have been wrong about the whole thing. Now I'm just confused.

It's an old one, that. In Latin it's very poor style to end a sentence with a proposition. So in the Victorian period, when academics like Sweet (of "Anglo-Saxon Reader fame) and his cohorts were working to make English studies respectable in universities, one way they did it was to extend and develop a prescriptive grammar, which included many Latin-style prohibitions. Split infinitives are another.

In most cases it's a matter of euphony. If it's possible to put the preposition elsewhere and still flow smoothly, fine. If not, it's better to put the preposition at the end that add extra words and phrases to extend the sentence and create a laboured sentence-structure. Churchill famously wrote "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.", where the sentence is so clearly clunky that it satirises the whole idea.

This does not help the non-native speaker who hasn't got the instinctive feel for what sounds right, I know. I'd say these days you would worry about it only in the most formal of contexts. Does that help?

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I wonder where I picked the rule, I don't think it has anyhting to do with my latin classes...probably got it from an English teacher when I was in Hghschool.

Speaking of Churchill, I heard today that about 20% of British teenagers think he's a fictional character!

[gillo]

Oh the rule was common enough in old-fashioned grammar books, of the sort used fifty or sixty years ago. If you look in any of the usage guides, though - Partridge, Fowler, Gower - you will find it rejected as an absolute rule any time since.

For example, Eric Partridge in

Usage and Abusage

(my edition is an old Penguin paperback, based on a 1957 revision!) Says "... too great a fear of putting the preposition at the end sometimes leads to even worse errors." He quotes "The late HW Fowler" thus:"it is a cherished superstition that prepositions must, in site of the ineradicable English instinct for putting them late... be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern... The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late and omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language..." (There's quite a lot more. Fowler felt pretty strongly about this. His

Modern English Usage

is still in print, regularly revised and considered a major reference in the minutiae of usage.)

Yes, apparently British teenagers are as dopy about the difference between fact and fiction as American teenagers. It's very sad.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Thanks for explaining the history of the rule - I was too lazy to write it all down and you put it so much better than I ever could.

[gillo]

I'm glad it made sense!