Thursday, June 23, 2022

Query Quora

It boggles the mind why anybody would bother to ask a question on grammar in Quora. Quora is one of those websites where anyone can give his opinion on any question even if he has absolutely no knowledge of what he is talking about. I have previously dealt with errors in Quora in four separate blog posts. These are errors that you wouldn't have expected a child to make:

1. Progressing with the Progressive - the same Frank Dauenhauer appears in this post.

2. Pronouns aren't conjunctions  which is hilarious because Veronica Curlette about whom I wrote posted a comment and tied herself up in knots and that obliged me to write a further blogpost:

3. Pronouns aren't conjunctions Part 2 and as if that wasn't enough, a furious Veronica made a further comment, this time citing the dictionary but what's really hilarious was she didn't realise that she had confused a sentence example in the dictionary for the definition!  Naturally, I had to write, rather cheekily if I may be allowed to admit, a further blog post:

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

But people don't learn from their mistakes and these grammar ignoramuses continue to fill the limitless pages of the internet with the fruit of their ignorance. I was alerted to this Quora posting on 3 March but it's hard to address all of them; there are thousands of Quora postings on grammar and sadly, the only people who seem eager to give their answers are all ignorant of grammar. Here's the 3 March Quora post:


Frank wrote only three sentences in his Quora answer but there are three major grammatical mistakes.

1. What he says is contrary to what is recommended by linguists. Don't accept his advice!

2. He must learn not to use grammatical terms that he is ignorant of. 'What' can never be a dummy in grammar. He obviously does not know what a dummy is.

3. This is the same criticism in Point 2 above: since he doesn't know what 'parsing' means, he should not use it. 

I've seen far too many grammar ignoramuses in Quora using grammar terms they know absolutely nothing about. No doubt such terms may make their erroneous pronouncements appear more respectable and authoritative to other grammar ignoramuses but they are very annoying to those who do know what they mean and how shamelessly they have been abused.


For a list of all blogposts on language, please click here..

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