Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / January 2006

Ah, I see. Let us proceed with the "cogent reasons." I refrained from
presenting those reasons when I gave my first response in order to give
you the chance to life the scales of ignorance from your eyes, as it
were. Now, since you demand to be completely embarrassed in the eyes of
all and sundry, and your propensity to pull grammatical explanations
out of your a.s (rather than give learners the respect they deserve) to
be fully demonstrated, I will proceed.

Your construction as indicated in your message to the original poster
is completely invalid and does not exist in modern English, except in a
limited sense with "so long the." That construction is an adverbial
clause which is a reduced relative clause, and has absolutely no
connection with the question originally asked.

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This construction is illustrated below.

First, in a non-reduced form:

The Iranians, who have been for so long the whipping boys of conflicts
in the Middle East, are now being pressured to completely give up
nuclear research.

You may say, in this limited case:

The Iranians, so long the whipping boys of conflicts in the Middle
East, are now being pressured to completely give up nuclear research.

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It would have been a simple matter for you to consult the British
National Corpus (as indicated indirectly in my message) or even run a
simple Google search on the information before you unlocked your
word-hoard, let alone open an up-to-date reference text, but instead,
you chose the aforementioned ass-pulling approach.

This is evidence of negligent incompetence in your chosen field by any
reasonable definition. I thought that you would get the message if I
included a common saying whose meaning would not be perfectly clear to
the learners on this board. My original rebuke was also carefully
couched in the part of message that a learner interested solely in the
meat of such messages would most likely skip over, as it clearly is not
part of a straightforward grammatical explanation.

The experienced language teachers who are part of this group would, of
course, have already figured you out.

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So, as you see, I presented no ad hominem attack whatsoever, instead,
basing my judgement regarding your competence on the fact that you were
too lazy to frame your comment in even a remotely responsible manner.

You blew Pawel off with a bum steer.

Happy New Year, Duck.

The message previously appearing in this thread where this one is now
was written in a fit of pique and was in bad taste. I have removed it.
Anyone who reads this board regularly knows that I have my moments, and
that was one of them. John, you're retired, and it isn't fair to ask
you to be up-to-date on modern language corpus research. I admit that
your advice to Pawel was legitimate, albeit in a rather limited sense,
and I apologize for the confrontational tone of several existing
messages in this thread.

I'm not particularly civilized or even civil, I'm afraid.