Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2010

But harder to read as poetry.  And still not as understandable as
Shakespeare until you get the hang of the grammar and a number of the
common words that are no longer used.

There's a missing  's' from Brooks, so you might not mean me - I was
wrong, though in thinking the book has an apostrophe.

Oy. And I slavishly copied it, even though it didn't seem right.

Hatunen filted:

The torch has been passed to a new generation of nonsense-talkers:

Q:  "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the United States
on a world map.  Why do you think this is?"

A:  "I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh,
some, uh...people out there in our nation don't have maps, and, uh, I believe
that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like,
such as and...I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S.
should help the U.S., err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq
and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our..."

Forget Chaucer and Joyce...if you can understand that, your grasp of English is
second to none....r

Hatunen skrev:

Two elephants are flying a plane. The motors set out, and they
start looking for parachutes. There are none. They look at each
other shrugging their shoulders and jump out the door. While
falling, one remarks to the other:

     I'm sure glad my dad isn't in the ice cream business.

What Katy said.  (Not that I understand the math(s) part at all.)

I think this all sums to: "A mastery of the English language is
necessary to, but hardly sufficient for, the full understanding of
ideas and events described in that language.

I made it through Chaucer with footnotes but no translation.  I had
read the Alice books several times before I encountered Martin
Gardner's *Annotated Alice*, and it greatly expanded my understanding
of the books.  I think I could make it through Finnegans Wake if I
didn't care about the enormous swaths that I couldn't understand, but
I like to understand what I'm reading.  I haven't even made it through
Ulysses (May Chuck Riggs forgive me, wherever he is these days).  I
did manage to get through Gravity's Rainbow, and only then did I
discover a 300-page *Companion* that clarified much of the book (in my
case in retrospect).

That's not much erudition by the standard of this group, but it may
offer one data point when one is talking about measuring one's mastery
of a language by one's understanding of what can be expressed in that
language.

Short version: I find Peter Brooks's claim exaggerated.

All apostrophes must be related in some way, but I hope you see that
these must be only cousins at best. It was the wake of Finnegan, he
was the fellow who had dies, so the normal construction would be that
it was 'Finnegan's wake', showing the possessive. I'm still puzzled,
since I've not yet had time to look it up, why Joyce (or his
publisher) chose to leave out the apostrophe - perhaps it was a sly
comment on an Irish distain for apostrophes, or maybe it was the
publisher's concern that it'd be inaesthetic to have one on the spine.

The apostrophe in 'thank's' is to indicate that it's being thought of
as a contraction of 'thank you', not the plural of 'thank' as in 'to
give thanks'. This might be a misperception if the usual 'thanks X' is
short for 'thanks to you X', rather than a contraction of 'thank you
X'. I've always thought that it was the latter as you could substitute
'thank you' for 'thank's' more comfortably than you could substitute
'thanks to you'. Of course all this begs the question of whether a
contraction could be indicated in this way - again, I think it would
only make sense if the original was actually 'thank-you X' or 'thank-
yous X' [the latter similar to 'to give thanks']. These are difficult
distinctions to see in speech, but, if it was actually 'thankyous
X' [as in more than one thank-you] . On balance, though, I think that
it should be simply the plural of thank, as you suggest.

The OED most helpful quote in regard to this is probably '1866 E.
FitzGerald More Lett. (1901) 82 Don't you dislike the way some People
have of saying perpetually ‘Thanks!’ instead of ‘Thank you’?‥ It is
like cutting Acknowledgment as short as possible.‥ Thanks [is] about
one of the most hideous monosyllables, even in the English Language.'.