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comment by veen
veen  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: June 15, 2022

Welcome, all, to the checks notes...

...Alpine cottage? where we have...

FULL GLASSES OF BEER





user-inactivated  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    FULL GLASSES OF BEER

🥰 DALL•E spoils us 🥰

veen  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

prolly should’ve hyphenated the half-full part of my query. but I like this interpretation better

Devac  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm pretty sure you don't hyphenate adverbs with adjectives, but at this point I almost expect English grammar making some edge case like "half-full glass would be a glass that can only be filled up to a half."

kleinbl00  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

By ninth grade I'd made it to the classes where they don't bother teaching you grammar anymore because it's just pedantic and only serves to allow snarky teenagers to call into question why you're diagramming sentences while also being forced to write essays about ee cummings and Tom Wolfe. My friends, however, were not so lucky and were still busily spending 90% of their class time picking through multiple-choice lists of adverbs.

I commented that grammar in general was a waste of time as English dominated trade and governance in no small part because it is largely a loan language whose strength is the incorporation of new vocabulary and sentence structure and that the reason Castilian Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Northern New Mexican Spanish were borderline incompatible was that only Castilian Spanish has a language academy forever holding Spanish, a fundamentally easier and less stupid language, from evolving into something everyone would speak by choice. I believe I compared the study of grammar to reanimating a corpse.

Mind you, I was sixteen.

Apparently this argument so convinced my friends that they decided to take it to their teacher. They did not present it well. They argued, as I understand it, that the study of grammar causes language innovation to "decompose" and thus, if the teacher really wanted them to learn English, they should be allowed to use whatever grammar they wanted. In response, the teacher referred to grammar as "decomposing" for the next two years in my honor.

I have a great deal more geopolitical insight now than I did then. Nonetheless, I maintain that the lower registers of English are as ad-hoc as they are because codifying rules for conversational English is like building a fence on a mudslide, and it is this lack of footing that makes English more inviting to non-native speakers than it would be with a rigid structure. "scare quotes" are effectively "emphasis" for large swaths of the population. You Can Communicate Timing... in many ways. I can type thru instead of through and my spellchecker gives no fucks. "It be" is now acceptable vernacular for "it is".

Note that this does not apply to higher registers of English, which are still abusively codified. But then, that's the purpose of Jargon - it preserves elitism and expertise. As for me? My linguistic skill comes purely from parroting. I can read "hyphenate and adverb with an adjective" and have no idea what that even means out of context. Subconsciously I know that "half-full glass" is improper grammar even though we all know exactly what it means; consciously I know that "half-full glass" is perfectly acceptable in my daily speech but if I were speaking formally or to people I'm not familiar with I would say "half-filled glass" but that's entirely about social signalling and not at all about accuracy.

goobster  ·  651 days ago  ·  link  ·  

(Quiet contented nod, seeing the proper capitalization of the poet's name.)

Devac  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not arguing for proper grammar or nit-picking rules, especially in our informal setting, but as someone who has to pass exams on those higher registers, I have no option but to know those rules. veen is/was in the same boat, hence the comment.

Examinations aside, from my experience with foreign languages, it's heaps more important to know vocab than grammar beyond simple tenses/conditionals, but even then, communication will be predicated on other's willingness to go along.

kleinbl00  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not saying you are. I'm saying that any official case against grammar beyond the most egregious is made without standing.

I literally had to google "list of adverbs" because my brain does not think taxonomically when it comes to words. "Speedily-painted" "roughly-hewn" "viciously-sharp" are all perfectly acceptable English constructions.

Not that it matters. I seriously doubt grammar has been accounted for in Dall-E in the way we're discussing - it's just got a gazillion Markov runs through a huge dataset.

Devac  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I literally had to google "list of adverbs" because my brain does not think taxonomically when it comes to words.

Fair. I suppose it's unfair of me to shoot from the hip after a year of classical languages and heavy IELTS revisions.

kleinbl00  ·  652 days ago  ·  link  ·  

haha it's trying to draw the Zork cabin.