You misunderstand me! I'm not in love with Ho Ching!

Recently, I received an email from a blog reader who made quite a ridiculous remark. He asked me why I had written no posts on Ho Ching's grammar. He asked me if I was in love with her! 

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 3 (or Hell hath no fury like a woman who's told she's a grammar ignoramus)

Nothing amuses me more than to be chased by a Mother Goose with a rolling pin. And that's precisely what happened to me this morning when I woke up to see countless notifications from Quora. Veronica Curlette who is touted in her own website as 'Your On-Line English Language Teacher' posted on Quora, in reply to a question, her own analysis of a sentence that is so outrageously laughable that  I felt compelled to post a little article about it on my blog:  Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions.  That was on 4 November this year and I immediately posted the link on Quora so that Veronica could read it and realise how inadequate she is in dealing with questions on English grammar, a subject which I am persuaded she is pathetically ignorant of. After a few days, she replied on Quora and at first, I thought she was being dishonest because if she had some knowledge of grammar, she would most certainly have seen how wrong she was after reading that first article I posted. But I was wrong. She's not dishonest. She just has no knowledge of grammar.

I wrote a second article on this blog: Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2.  I wrote something brief on her Quora thread and gave a link but she must have removed my post because there is a note that says the comment was deleted. I then posted again on Quora and simply gave the link to my second article and urged her to read it. 

I thought that was the end of the matter but this morning, I was surprised to see that Veronica was hopping mad and she posted a few angry comments on her Quora thread. I don't want to write anything on her Quora thread that is more than a sentence or two because she will probably remove my post as she has already done. But from her angry posts, two things became abundantly clear to me:

1.  She really has no knowledge of English grammar - I'm speaking truthfully and I'm not taunting her, and

2.  She doesn't understand my earlier two blog posts but she can't be faulted since she has no knowledge of English grammar. I write my blog posts with the assumption that my readers are familiar with grammar. As I have always said, my blog is not a teaching blog.

Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2

In my last blog post, Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions, I wrote about the ludicrous errors made by Veronica Curlette, a Canadian English language teacher, in her online post on Quora. I posted a link to my blog post on her Quora post in the hope that she could see how inadequate her knowledge of English grammar really is. I have met many people who think that they understand English grammar just because they speak the language. They mistake their ability to speak a language for a knowledge of its grammar. Many people do not understand that there may be a huge chasm separating the two. I had hoped that Veronica will realise her own linguistic deficiency and will stop making incorrect pronouncements on English grammar. But her brief reply a few days ago on Quora tells me that she has not learnt the value of saying nothing when she knows nothing. This is what she writes in reply to me: 

Pronouns aren't conjunctions

If you have been following my blog, you will probably remember blog posts I have written of the common confusion between a conjunct and a conjunction (see A Conjunct is Not a Conjunction) or between an adverb and an adjective (see Adverbs Aren't Adjectives) but I would never have thought it was possible for anyone to mistake a pronoun for a conjunction.
NOTE: My blog post An Adverb is Not a Preposition is different - it's about linguists who are attempting to change the definitions of an adverb and a preposition. They are not confused, they are just being contrary.

In this quora question, one Veronica Curlette whose profile says she's a teacher of English in Canada for more than 25 years seems unable to distinguish a pronoun from a conjunction. Here's the quora question in bold, followed by the answer Veronica gives:

Progressing with the progressive

Too many people these days acquire their knowledge from the internet but the quality of such knowledge is dubious. It's true that you can learn a lot from the internet - I am the grateful recipient of life-saving knowledge from the web. Recently, I climbed up the roof of my house with the wrong ladder and I couldn't climb down. After that experience, I went on YouTube to arm myself with information on ladder safety and the many different kinds of ladders and I have just ordered (through the internet again) my new ladder which will be delivered tomorrow. That is the kind of knowledge you can gain from the internet. 

I don't normally read Quora but yesterday, I received an email from Quora on a subject that was of interest to me. So I clicked on it and I was brought to a whole new world that I never thought existed. It was a world of the blind leading the blind. Someone asked in Quora the question 'Why is it correct to say "I am having a party tomorrow" but incorrect to say "I am having class tomorrow"?'

An adverb is not a preposition.

When I wrote Puzzling prepositions? Why grammarians should stop being contrary four years ago, I did not fully understand the extent of Bas Aarts and Geoffrey Pullum's linguistic perversity. But since then, I've had the benefit of reading Bas Aarts's book and I've also leafed through Pullum's grammar. Something else happened recently that rekindled my interest in this subject.

A Conjunct is not a Conjunction

In answer to a teacher's question what a conjunction is, a young child replies with some confidence that it is the sign you see at a road junction. That is what I read a long time ago in a newspaper and I can't now remember if it's a true story or just a joke but I am fairly certain that if you direct this same question to the general public, quite a few people will not be able to define a conjunction correctly. I get a lot of emails sent through this blog but because there are so many of them, I usually make no reply although I skim through as many emails as I can. Recently, I read some of the older ones and I noticed that curiously, quite a few of my readers have questions that relate in some way to the conjunction.

One reader is confused why in a list of what appeared to him to be correct sentences,  he was told that the only correct sentence was

Adverbs aren't adjectives

I have often wondered why so many people have apparently insurmountable difficulties in getting their parts of speech right. And some go into hypercorrection mode and commit hilarious blunders.

This morning, the Straits Times published a report about a commotion at a bubble tea cafe. It was just hours before all bubble tea cafes were required by law to close owing to the deadly pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China and has now spread to the entire world. There was a long queue of customers when an argument took place between a delivery man and the cashier at the bubble tea cafe. Here's the news report.

Should English grammar be taught again after 60 years?

Yesterday morning, I saw this on Channel News Asia: