When hypercorrection forces an adverb to become an adjective

About a week after I posted this on my blog, a reader informed me that the OED had myriads of examples of 'I feel badly' with presumably the same meaning as 'I feel bad'. The rational part of me could not accept this because as long as 'feel' is used as a copular verb, there is no way an adverb could follow in that manner. It would make nonsense of the sentence. However, 'feel' is an unusual word in that apart from its copulative use, it can also function as an ordinary main verb. Because of the semantic uniqueness of 'feel', might 'I feel badly' be synonymous with 'I have a bad feeling', with 'badly' not functioning as a subject complement, which it cannot under the circumstances? But it still sounded to me as a very odd way of saying it. I was very tempted to dismiss it as a case of hypercorrection that went on to be accepted as correct by reason of its frequency of use.

Frankly, you should say nothing if you know nothing

I was very much surprised when following my last blog post Grammar Ignoramuses Strike Again on Quora, Frank Dauenhauer whose laughably erroneous Quora post I commented on, reacted with seething rage. He made furious comments on that post (you may read them for yourself - just click on the link above) and he also sent me an angry email. He then posted on his Quora page my entire blog post (which is fine - I have nothing to hide) and he tells his Quora followers that he has been "savagely maligned" by me. Why he went ballistic escapes me totally.

As I informed him, every word I wrote in that blogpost is true. When I call someone a grammar ignoramus, I am merely stating a fact. And quite apart from that mistake made by Frank in his Quora answer, I have other evidence that corroborates my assertion that he is ignorant of grammar. If you have been following my blog, you should know that this was not the first time I pointed out Frank's errors. He has made many errors, some of which are pretty outrageous. It's hard to tell which one of his errors takes the biscuit but I am fairly certain what I am about to reveal to you in this article will have many of you in stitches.

Grammar ignoramuses strike again on Quora

A lot of people I know are quick to admit they know nothing about Physics but hardly anyone will readily say they don't know English grammar. I'm sure I have looked into this before elsewhere in this blog. I most certainly have offended quite a lot of people when I call them 'grammar ignoramuses'. But they really are. Most people are ignorant of English grammar. That is a fact and I have given in this blog examples of cabinet ministers in the UK who were stumped by journalists' questions on simple English grammar and I have also mentioned the reason for this. In the 1960s, linguists very wrongly advised against teaching English grammar in schools and this advice was adopted all over the world where English was taught. Although they are now redressing this huge mistake in the UK by reintroducing grammar in schools, it is not wrong to say that most English-speaking adults today are grammar ignoramuses.

But unlike Physics ignoramuses who do not profess a knowledge in Physics, let alone pretend to teach anyone Physics , grammar ignoramuses really believe they are grammar experts. I used to think they were dishonest but I am fairly certain now that it's a kind of benign mental state that makes a person believe he has a vast knowledge in grammar when he is really utterly ignorant of it. They are honest but they are ignorant and they don't even know that.

You can see this in Quora, an internet-based forum where people ask questions and those who think they know the answers give their response. I have mentioned Frank Dauenhauer before in this blog post: Query Quora. That Frank knows nothing about English grammar is obvious. He can't even get his part of speech right and that's kindergarten-level grammar. Here's what he posted on Quora slightly more than a week ago in response to the simple question, 'Is it "I feel bad" or "I feel badly"?':

To gym or not to gym

The first time I heard this word 'wrongly' used was some years ago when my son's friend told me he liked 'to gym'. Since then, I have seen 'gym' used as a verb with all its inflections by mainly youngish people. Although I must confess I absolutely detest such an abominable conversion, I cannot turn a blind eye to how rich the English language has become through this process of verbing over the centuries. There are many examples of fairly recent verbs that originated from nouns and we use them every day without batting an eyelid. One such verb which I use liberally is ‘text’ which today can only be used in the context of sending a message on the mobile phone. It has the advantage of brevity. 'Texting a friend' is much shorter than 'sending him a text message' but brevity alone does not guarantee acceptance of the usage of a word, especially when the usage sounds suspiciously modern. Why then do I (and presumably you too) find ‘text’ more acceptable than ‘gym’ when both words are used as verbs?

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:

When technocrats and mathematicians rule.

Lee Kuan Yew once said, 'Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford'. He was not alone. There were a few other people who made disparaging remarks about the study of Literature. It's not surprising that a country that turns its nose up at the humanities will see its government filled with technocrats and mathematicians. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't want a dithering philosopher who can only think in abstract terms or a historian who is fixated on the past. You want someone with a good mathematician's mind who can grapple with any problem that crops up.  And that's precisely what Singapore has in great abundance. We owe our amazing success entirely to such a rational and competent government. But I am not interested in politics and economics. Let's turn our attention to something quite different.

This morning I saw this sign and I immediately took a pic of it:

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.

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:

When a linguist writes ungrammatically.

I must make it clear that I generally do not care much about grammar and correctness. People who know me well will readily testify that such 'correctness' and I are worlds apart and  never the twain shall meet but when a teacher of linguistics at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) writes an article in the local newspaper about Singlish, you will doubtless accept that I can't be faulted if I expect her to write grammatical sentences which are clear and unambiguous. That is the least anyone should expect of a teacher of linguistics.

When a friend on Facebook referred me to an article in the Straits Times written by one Tan Ying Ying,  Associate Professor of Linguistics at NTU, I read it immediately because I could see that unlike Singlish bashers (and there are many, particularly language ignoramuses such as that disgraceful Speak Good English Movement), she accorded some respect to Singlish and regarded Singlish as a colloquial form of a Singaporean language and I totally agree with her there. But I was disappointed to see that her article did not do justice to the weighty subject of her discussion because it was fraught with errors of all kinds, some of which I am prepared to attribute to an oversight on her part but others of which I cannot help but suspect to be errors which are more serious than mere carelessness.

THE SPEAK GOOD ENGLISH MOVEMENT FINALLY LISTENS TO ME. BUT IT'S TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE.

I posted this article on 17 February 2019 and as it is my invariable practice whenever I criticise the Speak Good English Movement on my blog, I went to the SGEM's Facebook page and posted a link to this blog and I also posted an unequivocal statement that the SGEM was once again wrong. I do this all the time: whenever I post something against the SGEM, I inform it of what I have done on its Facebook page or on its website.  

The next day, I discovered that the SGEM had removed the video along with what I had posted from its Facebook page.

Ungrammatical Grammarly

One thing I usually have to do on this blog is to remove any comment which is nothing more than an ad for the person posting the comment. There is an app called Grammarly that advertises itself as a great grammar checker. I usually don't bother to see how bad such apps are; I just know they are rotten. And I know people who pay for such an app are foolish and gullible. Recently, Grammarly posted a comment on one of my blog posts - LTA's Illiterate Poster - and it's nothing more than an advertisement for the Grammarly app. But what's really shocking is Grammarly can't even ensure that the grammar in its advertisement for its grammar checker is correct. This is what it posted in the comment section of my blog post:

SMU - 20 years of language errors

The Singapore Management University (SMU) recently published an advertisement and as I read it, I could not help but recall what it wrote 20 years ago in its inaugural congratulatory ad at the turn of the millennium. This ad, published in the Straits Times on 1 August 2000, was to congratulate its very first batch of graduates.

Why the Speak Good English Movement harms Singapore

Many of my friends tell me to ignore ignoramuses such as the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and the people associated with it. They think I'm wasting my time but I totally disagree. I truly believe the SGEM and other grammar ignoramuses who love to criticise others when they themselves have no knowledge of grammar are causing harm to Singapore in many different ways. Recently, at a dinner, my fears proved not to be unfounded. Someone at the dinner asked me if I was the writer of this blog. He liked some of my blog posts criticising the SGEM. He told me that a group of women writers in Singapore compiled their writings into a book but everything just fizzled out because of the negative blog review of one Ludwig Tan, a committee member of the SGEM who criticised a very small grammatical error in the book and blew it up. He thanked me for 'being instrumental in shutting down Ludwig Tan's obnoxious blog'.

He was a total stranger to me and there were many other people at the dinner I had to talk to and so I didn't have the chance to speak more to him but what he said puzzled me throughout that evening. I know that Ludwig Tan used to have a language blog that was not only hypercritical of Singaporeans but also highly erroneous in its treatment of the English language and I have had some occasions to expose his errors in this blog. And although I would be delighted if indeed my just criticisms were the reason for the shutting down of his 'obnoxious' blog in which he used to write his scathing but unjustified excoriation of the language of Singaporeans, there can be many reasons why someone removes his blog from the internet and the reason that would warm the cockles of my heart may not be the only reason or even one of the reasons.

At the time when I first discovered Ludwig Tan's highly critical blog, I was really surprised that someone who purports to teach the English language could make so many ridiculous language mistakes. I wanted to explain in this blog why everything Tan said was wrong and why his sometimes harsh criticisms of Singaporeans were not just unwarranted but blatantly wrong. The people he criticised were linguistically correct and it was he who was wrong. But because Tan's mistakes were numerous and almost every blog post of his was riddled with shocking errors that I would not even have expected children to make, I could not address the mountain of errors in his blog. What I did was to screen-save many of his outrageous posts so that I could address them in the future.

When I got home, I looked up my album of screenshots to see if I could find any post by Ludwig Tan that criticised the writings of women writers in Singapore. What small grammatical error could he have chosen to slam?  Was Tan correct in the first place? If the many language mistakes Tan makes are symptomatic of his innate inability to get his language right, there is a high chance he was grammatically wrong in his criticism of the Singaporean women writers.

Sure enough, I found precisely what the person was talking about at the dinner.

The endless mistakes of the Speak Good English Movement

You may be forgiven for thinking that I have a personal vendetta against Singapore's Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) when I honestly have none. You may think that way because this blog has more than a hundred posts that highlight the ludicrous language mistakes made by the SGEM. But the fact is the SGEM is unbelievably ignorant of even the most elementary rules of English grammar and I can't help picking on it when everything it says or publishes is erroneous. I just went to its Facebook page and I saw this:

'Do you say "the photos you sent me" or "the photos you sent to me"? Let's learn and improve our English with Kai Ying and Robin!'  

I was naturally curious what nonsensical error the SGEM might come up with this time and I clicked on the link which brought me to a video that the SGEM produced, complete with real actors. It's a cringe-inducing video which is just what I expected of the SGEM. The video pokes fun at how an uneducated Singaporean speaks which is of course in poor taste. Although the SGEM loves to make fun of the the way an uneducated Singaporean speaks, it is itself hopelessly unable to get its own grammar right. I forced myself to continue watching the video and I waited for the SGEM to make a pronouncement on grammar. As I have shown in countless articles in this blog, the SGEM is totally incapable of getting its grammar right. I knew that all I had to do was to wait for it to condemn a sentence as grammatically unacceptable and the SGEM would most certainly be in error and expose its own ignorance of English grammar rules.  I didn't have long to wait.

This is what the SGEM says: