Correct English??

[Mike375]

I think you should buy this car, Mike or I think you should buy this car Mike

Or

Mike, I think you should buy this car.

So in general, does the name come at the start or the end of the sentence or a both correct or both wrong?

 

[pono1]

I think you should buy this car, Mike or I think you should buy this car Mike

Or

Mike, I think you should buy this car.

So in general, does the name come at the start or the end of the sentence or a both correct or both wrong?

Names starting with the letters A through L occur at the start of a sentence while names starting with the letters M through Z occur at the end of a sentence. Also, if you're buying a particularly expensive car, flattering adjectives may occur at either end of the name.

 

[Rich]

I think you should buy this car, Mike or I think you should buy this car Mike

Or

Mike, I think you should buy this car.

Don't buy it at all, the car's crap! Never listen to a car salesman

 

[Banana]

Why do we say 'teacher taught' but not 'preacher praught'?

 

[Ron_dK]

Correct phrase should be :

Thy shall buy this car 375 or get lost !

 

[RCheesley]

I believe (being a native english speaker) it depends entirely on the conversation. There might be times when I would start the sentence with the person's name - particularly if you are intiating a conversation. Using the name gets the person's attention, then you tell them what you want them to know.

There might be situations where I'd use the second option, and issue the statement first, followed by the name, but this tends to be where you are using a sympathetic/empathetic or persuasive tone, in my experience.

You could also argue it depends on the inflection and intonation - I think you should buy the car, Mike (suggesting Mike buys it rather than me), for example, is quite different to I think you should buy the car, Mike (advising Mike that you think it's the right thing to do).

Interesting conversation though

Ruth

 

[SQL_Hell]

Correct English =

Oi Mike, I is finkin u should by dat phat mota init. Nice 1 brova!

 

[Fifty2One]

Maybe for the same reason one oasis becomes many oases
It is a silly language and very difficult to master... or even get a working knowledge. Fortunately there is spell check. My F7 key almost has the letters worn off

Why do we say 'teacher taught' but not 'preacher praught'?

 

[pono1]

Why do we say 'teacher taught' but not 'preacher praught'?

The Grammar Goons are restricting us...so let's fix that... I should say, "Let's fix fat." Other examples...

Before
The opposing team scored a touchdown.
After
The opposing team scored a suchdown <-- Flexible semantics.

Before
My best friend is now serving in ping pong.
After
My best friend is now serving in sing song. <-- Pleasing to the ear.

Before
The cat crossed the highway.
After
The cat crossed the cryway. <-- Packed with symbolism.

 

[Banana]

Another fun question would be regarding the plurals.

We have a cow, and cows. But we have a goose and geese.

Furthermore, we have a fish and a sheep, but we have fish and sheep.

We also have to say 'They were playing.', not 'They was playing', but yet we must say 'If I were you, I'd play.", not 'If I was you, I'd play.'

Then there's some creative stuff you can do. For example, those sentences are grammatically valid, if not hard to follow.

'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'

'James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher'

Fun language!

 

[Vassago]

Another fun question would be regarding the plurals.

We have a cow, and cows. But we have a goose and geese.

Furthermore, we have a fish and a sheep, but we have fish and sheep.

We also have to say 'They were playing.', not 'They was playing', but yet we must say 'If I were you, I'd play.", not 'If I was you, I'd play.'

Then there's some creative stuff you can do. For example, those sentences are grammatically valid, if not hard to follow.

'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'

'James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher'

Fun language!

Interesting. I had seen the 7 Buffalo sentence before, but never knew of the had had one. It seems the latter one requires proper pronunciation though, whereas the buffalo one is correct as is.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Thanks to Gallagher, the comedian with the watermelon and sledgehammer, we know other oddities of our language.

For instance, in the USA we park on a driveway but drive on a parkway.

English is so hard on people because it was borrowed from more than one root language. So the teacher taught, because "Teach" is an irregular verb. But we say the preacher preached, because "preach" is a regular verb. (I guess preachers take laxatives so they can be more regular?)

We say that robbers rob, burglars burgle, and thieves thieve. (Yes, all valid verbs.) We say that presidents preside, that cooks cook. But it is rare in English to say that crooks crook. "Crooked" as an gerund-form adjective survives but the verb-form is no longer commonly used.

So for those of you having trouble in English, don't feel bad. You're in good company. We get just as confused as anyone else about such oddball words.

 

[Banana]

Didn't know that burgle was a valid verb. But then again, it's much more common to hear "Burglars broke into the house and took the good silverware." rather than "Burglars burgled the good silverware."

Which brings up another point. English has went through so many lurches in various peculiarities we end up with with so many different valid way to say. In fact, English shares lot of common with Perl language.

An example from Orwell satirizing his contemporaries excessive fondness for wordiness:
"A not unwhite rabbit ran across not unsmall field, chased by not unblack dog."

He also has lambasted others for loose choice of words:

"We prescribe a regiment of public policies to alleviate the social ailments." (Does that mean we have to visit our local pharmacy for a refill of whatever it is they're prescribing?)

My personal pet peeves is with passive voice:
"The Saints is the team that he played for." when we have a perfectly acceptable way: "He plays for the Saints."

(To be fair, there are indeed valid cases where passive voice makes sense, as long we're doing some kind of emphasizing the object over than the subject, but I can tell you that the biggest reason of why Victorian writings makes for a dry reading is exactly because of excess toward passive voice forms.)

And don't get me started on articles and subject/verb agreements....

 

[ShaneMan]

Didn't know that burgle was a valid verb. But then again, it's much more common to hear "Burglars broke into the house and took the good silverware." rather than "Burglars burgled the good silverware."

Which brings up another point. English has went through so many lurches in various peculiarities we end up with with so many different valid way to say. In fact, English shares lot of common with Perl language.

An example from Orwell satirizing his contemporaries excessive fondness for wordiness:
"A not unwhite rabbit ran across not unsmall field, chased by not unblack dog."

He also has lambasted others for loose choice of words:

"We prescribe a regiment of public policies to alleviate the social ailments." (Does that mean we have to visit our local pharmacy for a refill of whatever it is they're prescribing?)

My personal pet peeves is with passive voice:
"The Saints is the team that he played for." when we have a perfectly acceptable way: "He plays for the Saints."

(To be fair, there are indeed valid cases where passive voice makes sense, as long we're doing some kind of emphasizing the object over than the subject, but I can tell you that the biggest reason of why Victorian writings makes for a dry reading is exactly because of excess toward passive voice forms.)

And don't get me started on articles and subject/verb agreements....

Then you have us Southerners. We butcher the language all together. We can pronounce one word the same way and have different meaning for it. One of my favorites is "ranch". Off the top of my head here are a few of the meanings for this word (remember it's not the spelling, it's the pronunciation)

1. a large piece of land for livestock to graze.
2. a tool used to loosen a bolt.
3. a dressing to go on salad
4. when liquid is used to "rinse" something off. When I would stay at my Grandmothers house, as a child, she would wash my hair and when she was finished she would tell me to "ranch" the soap out of my hair.

 

[Banana]

Fascinating.

Would have never known that wrench could be homonym with ranch (at least for Southern dialect). Will have to remember that.

I did in fact had a encounter long ago when I was a teenager working weekend shifts at my grocery. One of my co worker had written to me, "I have ate cans of soda, you want one?"

I was bamboozled, and didn't give him a response simply because I could not make the sense out of the sentence and unable to decide if he actually did ate cans of soda or he was pulling a prank on me.

It wasn't until I mentioned it to my English teacher later the week when she told me that 'ate' probably was supposed to be 'eight'. I was floored.

And just imagine- among Italians (and not just Italians; there are others that I can't remember offhand), they do not know their own language's word for 'to spell' (a word)... simply because they have no use for spelling. In fact if we were to tell them about the spelling bees, they would be ??? "What's the big deal? Spelling isn't hard!" owning to the fact that they have much higher correlation between what is being said and how it is written. Not so with English.

Crazy language, I tell you!

 

[Fifty2One]

I think that having english as a second or third language is an advantage over people who have is at their native language. I have sometimes a lot of frustration with people because when you try hard to communicate properly and you get an attitude of wut-eva from other people it makes me wonder if my efforts are for naught.

Bad communication, however, can sometimes be funny...

...a penis mightier than the sword perhaps?

 

[Brianwarnock]

English has went through
....

Brian

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Banana,

"The Saints is the team that he played for." when we have a perfectly acceptable way: "He plays for the Saints."

Most of the time, the New Orleans Saints cannot be said to play at all. They show up for the game in proper attire (suited up, as the coaches would say). Monday night, they were ready to play. But there are days when the only thing you can say about the Saints is that they occupied space. Nobody would say they played American-style football. (Oh, by the way, in case you hadn't figured it out yet, I'm not a Saints fan.)

Another "by the way" - Orwell's sentence involving the not unblack dog and such is a good rule, but there are no hard-and-fast rules anywhere.

For instance, one can use that construct for specific types of comparison. Writers will describe someone's initial attempts to do something as, perhaps, "proceeding through the uncertainty." That same writer, later in the same work, might discuss that same character's improved abilities with practise, as "working now with far less uncertainty than was previously evident." This verbal construction is useful for comparisons, either between two people or between two time-differentiated snapshots of the same person. {My hobbyist writing is showing...}

Of course, any verbal construct can be overdone. Such as "Val-speak" (California Valley Girls) with "He was, like, bummed out and went, Wow, and I went, Double-Wow and we were both, like, blown away. When the cop asked if we had seen anything, we were like no way, man." The strange thing is that despite the pitiful grasp of language displayed by these Val-speakers, they do communicate with one another.

If our UK friends find Val-speak incomprehensible, don't worry. You aren't alone. I believe the Val-speakers use it as a code so their parents won't catch on quite all of what they are saying. They of course believe their parents to be clueless anyway. It is conceptually similar to speaking Hungarian in a Spanish or Vietnamese restaurant so nobody will understand your conversation.

 

[statsman]

The problem with the Saints is that they insist on wearing black jerseys with black pants at home.
The pants do not have a stripe on them.
As a result, they look like they showed up to play in their pyjamas.
Very hard to take a pro sports team seriously under these conditions.

 

[marleymanner1]

I think you should buy this car, Mike or I think you should buy this car Mike

Or

Mike, I think you should buy this car.

So in general, does the name come at the start or the end of the sentence or a both correct or both wrong?

Mike I think u should stay away from cars.

oops...I mean "Mike, I think u should stay away from cars.