It's your Deon!: Please stop saying "[person] and I's."

rangerdeon:

sirmattypants:

didyoudrinkmygingerale:

alifepresalted:

powerpuffgrrrl:

cannibalizm:

powerpuffgrrrl:

cannibalizm:

ohaityler:

thealigshow:

allthewhiskeyinheaven:

“I’s” is not a word. That is so far from being a word.

YES THANK YOU

i know you’re suppose to use “my” instead of “i”, but i usually avoid using “person and my” because i never know if you are suppose to put the person in possessive form. i figure you probably are suppose to, but it sounds to…weird. so i usually say “person and i have” or figure out some other work around.

if you just take out the “person and,” 99% of the time it’s whichever sounds best—me or I. it drives me absolutely NUTS when people say “person and I” all the time when that is not what we were taught in elementary school.

but anyway, i actually just looked this up because i wasn’t sure myself whether you put the other person in the possessive form or not, but turns out you do! yay weird grammar. that sounds bizarre… that’s aaron’s and my cat. huh.

We live in a day and age where lol is pronounced like a word and soul patch is in the dictionary, why do we still care about shit like this

sorry, but this stuff still bothers me. it doesn’t have to bother you, but i’m going to keep posting stuff about grammar and spelling and the right form of “your” because it’s what i’m hoping to make a career out of somehow. you can use whatever the hell grammar or vocabulary you want. it’s just possible that it may bug me.

All I’m saying is that Chris brown debuted on the hot 100 top 10 so we’re probably all going down with the ship by this point

Okay, if you’re going to try to make a career doing something with language, I feel like I have to step in. Because if you’re going to have a career related to language, there’s a good chance you might end up teaching English, and the things you’re saying would frighten me out of the mouth of a teacher.

Language doesn’t work like this. Tell me, where is your idea of ‘correct’ language coming from? What authority are you basing this somehow ‘better’ vision of the English language on? Who are you trusting to give you these ‘One True Answers’ to the questions of language use?

Because whoever they are, they fundamentally fail to understand language. Not only are they giving you false answers, you’re asking them the wrong questions. There is no language variety that is ‘better’ than any other variety, and if you disagree with me, tell me: How would you prove one person’s speech ‘better’ than another? What objective metric would you use? What would your methodology be? Moreover, what would be the point?

‘Alex and I’s’ and ‘Alex’s and my’ and ‘Alex and my’ share a number of characteristics. Here are two: They are all used by many native speakers of English to communicate the concept of belonging to both Alex and me. Not surprisingly, since the people saying these things are native speakers and are therefore competent in the language, they are also all understood to mean that by other native speakers listening.

You object to ‘Alex and I’s’ on aesthetic grounds- it doesn’t look or sound good to you. That’s legitimate. I don’t like the word ‘overly’ and refuse to use it, on the grounds that it’s ugly and I can almost always replace it with a more specific intensifier. Or just the word ‘excessively,’ which really pleases me on an aesthetic level. And it’s my right to prefer this sort of usage, and deem speech or writing that does not conform to it less beautiful than speech or writing that does. Similarly, if, when reading a book, you come across the phrase ‘Alex and I’s,’ you have every right to throw the book down in disgust.

But you are expressing your subjective aesthetic judgment in terms of objective ‘correctness’, which is where I have to draw the line. Native speakers use it; native speakers understand it. If, given that information, you assert that ‘Alex and I’s’ is in error, you’re going to have to make one of a number of deeply problematic supporting assertions. If ‘Alex and I’s’ is an error, are you going to assert that native speakers who use this construction don’t really know the language they were taught from the cradle? Are you going to assert that you have the right to contradict a community which deems the construction acceptable? That your aesthetic opinion, or anyone’s aesthetic opinion, overrides their collective understanding of the specific brand of English that they speak? If you are saying that you have the right to deem an entire speech community incompetent, or only partially competent, to speak their own language, on what power, what font of truth are you basing this right?

This sort of judgment of language is entirely unscientific. You are trusting some grammar textbook over the actual language that real people speak to tell you truths about language and its use. Do you know who writes these textbooks? Real people, for one- these aren’t the Sacred Linguistic Dictates of God here. Secondly, they are mostly hacks. Ending clauses with propositions has been normal, accepted usage of English since, as far as we can tell, English began. Then John Dryden came along and just sort of flat-out declared that that’s not good and people should stop doing it. He didn’t explain why he wanted to alter a fundamental feature of English- it’s hypothesized that he wanted English to conform to the rules of Latin? Which doesn’t make sense, they’re two different languages, they’re not even all that closely related- and, not surprisingly, it didn’t stick. We’re still repeating it, though- “don’t end sentences with prepositions” is only now getting phased out of classrooms.

And that’s the key reason that it’s important to understand how language works, even if you’re trying to teach people the dialect of English that we have arbitrarily declared ‘correct’. If the changes that you are trying to get students to make don’t make sense, students will ignore them entirely. If you try to tell students that the English they speak is ‘wrong’ and that they’re stupid or bad people for using it, they’re going to ignore you- especially if they’re native speakers. Yes, it’s a valuable skill to be able to use the versions of English that society has deemed standard for academics and business and the like. But telling students that their English is less valuable than the prescribed version is not going to help them learn to use either to their advantage.

Anyway, if you’re not planning on ever teaching, I guess it’s not really important. You can keep talking about your opinions on language as if they’re established fact, and relatively little harm will be done. Just thought I’d throw in my two cents (or twenty).

I literally just came.

unf dat reply

I had to bold that because I loved it that much.

The person in bold is not actually correct. There are, in fact, a set of grammar rules for what is considered correct and proper English.
Will everyone follow these rules? No, and it’s a damn shame that some purposely ignore them.
Are they subjective? No, they are not. People use variations of the English language, yes, both in grammar or spelling. However, there IS a correct way to speak English, along with many incorrect, yet ACCEPTABLE variations of it.
The only variation in correct English is the difference in spelling between American English and Queen’s English(I believe that’s what it’s called?).
No, there is no longer a committee making these rules, but there once was. There always is a group of people to trace rules back to. They decided what proper grammar is and people at the time agreed. That’s that. Go rant at those people, they are the ones telling you what proper English is.
You don’t have to follow it, but you should when speaking properly.

Just because someone is a native speaker of a language does not mean they understand and use it correctly, it just means it’s the language they’ve always been taught to mess up.

You don’t have to speak properly, though, but you should under the right circumstances. I’m usually very grammatically correct and speak as properly as possible, especially in my writing, but sometimes, like when I’m with friends who can’t even differentiate between proper and improper grammar, I just say “screw it” and take it down a notch— which for me means dropping a few “-ly”s here and there, since I can’t imagine going further than that.

This is why I love Spanish… The Spanish language does have a committee that decides what’s correct and what’s incorrect. I’m not sure whether or not they have a name in English, but in Spanish they’re called “La Real Academia Española.” They decide grammar and spelling rules in proper Spanish and people follow them when speaking in Spanish. It’s a wonderful thing.