Complex Numbers

Rebel Without a Clause

Somehow, I thought I'd covered this Mental Floss piece before, but it didn't come up in the search which probably took up more of my time than writing this entry will.

    5 Ways the English Language Breaks Its Own Rules  
The many ways English flouts its own rules can be confusing even to those who speak it as a first language.

As witnessed by, well, everyone, not everybody talks good.

English, the language of Shakespeare and the internet, is often touted for its flexibility and adaptability. But with great flexibility comes great inconsistency.

Perhaps the inconsistency of the language is what makes so many English-speaking people comfortable with contradictions in other areas.

1. Tenses don’t respect times.

“So this guy walks into a bar …” We know a story is coming, and it’s clearly a story about something from the past—and yet, the word walks is in the present tense.

Jokes are traditionally rendered in present tense. I can't articulate why, but it just works better. Unfortunately, people have started using it for entire novels, and I find it fatiguing in that context.

In the sentence If it rained tomorrow, I would stay home, the past tense rained is used to refer to a future event.

I'm no grammartalker, but I thought that's a conditional tense, and it just happens to be the same spelling as the past tense.

2. Definites can be indefinite.

The word this is a definite determiner: It picks out referents that are specific and identifiable. If someone says “This is the right one,” they do so because they expect the listener to know which one they mean. But in the story that starts with this guy walks into a bar, this guy doesn’t necessarily refer to any person the speaker expects you to be able to identify.

Someone really likes "walks into a bar" jokes. That's okay. So do I: Two guys walk into a bar. The third one ducks.

3. Dummy pronouns serve as subjects.

...But in weather sentences like “it’s snowing” or “it’s sunny,” it doesn’t replace any noun phrase. What is the “it” that’s snowing? The sky? The clouds? Linguists call this it a “dummy pronoun,”...

It is true that I have wondered in the past about the antecedent for the pronoun in "it's snowing," but never enough to look up the answer. Now I know, and I feel like a dummy.

4. Objects can be “raised.”

On the surface, the sentences She persuaded them to try it and She intended them to try it seem pretty similar, but they differ in syntactic structure.

This one gets a little esoteric. It's one of those things that I somehow knew intuitively, but couldn't put a name to the grammar used. Well, I guess now I can.

5. Number agreement doesn’t always agree.

I have to admit, this is one I make mistakes with on occasion. Rather than fumble around with grammar rules, though, I generally opt to rewrite the sentence to avoid the awkwardness in the first place.

Alternatively, I just don't notice when it's wrong.

Which, really, can be said for all of these rule-breakers.