JumpStart by Robb Armstrong for August 14, 2013

Reminds me of the “Missing Persons” song: “What good are words for, when no one listens anymore… there’s no use talking, at all…..”

Prof danglais is right

The interesting thing about language peevers is that they are almost always demonstrably dead wrong.

Until it is torn down or destroyed. Since they are not there, they don’t know if the house is an “is” or a “was.”

and you’d lose that bet, Mom, we burned the house down when they tried to make us pay the billit’s not Victorian now, it’s ashes

Watch out! Watch out!It’s the Spelling Police and the Grammar Gestapo!

Maybe he used the past ‘imperfect’ tense.

Yep. By the same logic you could argue that since the house will continue to be Victorian as long as it exists, that Joe should have used the future tense.

It’s not even pedantic. “Was” is the preferred tense here, as it refers to a past occurrence (and the current state of the house may be unknown, like Schrodinger’s Cat).

“Youse can dangle…”

I don’t bug peeps ’bout they grammar, I just let ’em look like morans. Spelling, howevar…

G.I.s bivouac:In Tents…

Y’all will have to excuse me for not paying attention. I was dangling my participle.

I swear Joe’s mom is my mother reincarnated. The woman drove me nuts – and the worst of it is, I’m becoming just the way she was!

Reminds me of the old joke about the woman on her first visit to Boston and asked the taxi driver to take her somewhere where she could get scrod.

Yes, and their children will pick out their nursing home so they might want to be careful of the example they set.

I think Joe wins this round. It reminds me of Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses. Joe can only accurately speak of the style the house had been when he last observed it. The longer it is from that time, the more likely he is to be inaccurate, since a house is not a permanent entity. “Was” is fact; “is” is assumption.

Kudos to solitha for invoking the Fair Witness example.

I never did like English grammar!…in my high school, it was crammed into the last two weeks of school in preparation for final exams…ruined those last two weeks when I should have been thinking about summer and not grammar! (I’ve probably already made a mess here with my sentence length and structure, LOL… ;)

People trivializing the Nazi atrocities, by comparing them to people with an education, bother me a lot more than poor grammar.

This is like every time I say “My first boyfriend was Japanese,” and then I think, “well, he probably still is…”