Making fun of Amazon reviews again.

[conuly]

Listen to this one:

I haven't read this book nor do I plan to buy it for my first-grade niece because in reading only the sample provided by Amazon, I found grammatical errors. The Juny B. books are just as bad, and just as annoying. When did this become appropriate in Children's Literature? And why am I the only one annoyed by it? It's not charming. Ending sentences with prepositions, for example, is incorrect, and it shouldn't matter if the story is told from a child's point of view. I want my niece to learn the correct way to write and to speak (and behave, for that matter!), and it seems that the Clementine books are as poor of an example as Juny B.

I will NOT be buying this book or any other that provides a poor example to children of how to write and speak.

Ending a sentence with a preposition! Horrors! Shakespeare... actually, he totally did that, let's not be too sarcastic here.

At any rate, I thought I'd peruse the sample to see the terrible sentence in action. Ah. I've found it. Roughly, it says "She threw herself across the mask she was gluing sparkles onto".

Now, you tell me how you can rephrase that so it sounds natural in the mouth of a third grader. Because I've never yet heard the eight year old who said "Across the mask onto which she was gluing sparkles", and if I did I wouldn't know what to say.

Then there's "I got glue in my hair and was just trying to cut it out..." which doesn't count as it's a cut off sentence, so we're still good.

My god. And for this the woman gives a book she hasn't even read a one-star review! The madness has got to end.

Comments

[redbird]

Also, because it's not possible to correct or complain about grammar and spelling online without making at least one error, I will note that I would unhesitatingly delete to "of" from "as poor of an example" in that Amazon review.

The reviewer seems to be one of the many who have been led astray by grammatical terms and/or grammar teachers who wish they were using Latin.* The mere fact that we call them "prepositions" does not mean that they have to be before something else. (By that logic, I couldn't use the perfect tense for anything that had ended badly.)

*It might be amusing to see what bugaboo she would grab onto, given a language where word order is rarely important.

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

The rule about not ending sentences with prepositions comes from Latin. It is not grammatically incorrect in English to use prepositions to end sentences. (I'm tempted to say "to end sentences with.)

As the saying goes, "That is something up with which I shall not put."

[conuly]

No, it's not incorrect in English.

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's okay. The linguistic police will catch her and force her to do sixty hours of community service reading Language Log. Right? Right? We do have that law in place... please... Mandatory Pullum readings in the street and all that.

*goes to curl back up in her sheltered bubble*

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Because I've never yet heard the eight year old who said "Across the mask onto which she was gluing sparkles", and if I did I wouldn't know what to say."

My daughter might well have said that at eight.

[conuly]

Oh. Well, I still say it's somewhat stilted and unusual for a child of that age.

[conuly]

Hell, half the time what they're whining about are phrasal verbs anyway, as in "put up with".

[conuly]

Also, just FYI, she repeatedly misspelled "Junie B. Jones". But I forgive her that.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I saw a t-shirt the other day that made me think of you. It read, "I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you."

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

More formal language than one is used to hearing always sounds stilted. These days it is unusual for grade-school children to speak correct English, because their parents don't speak it either, but it sounds perfectly natural if you grew up with it.

I had to teach myself slang as a second language in an attempt to fit in with my schoolmates. Rather ironic that so much emphasis is put on the notion that children ought to use correct grammar, yet children who actually do so are stigmatized for it.

[pne.livejournal.com]

unusual for grade-school children to speak correct English, because their parents don't speak it either, but it sounds perfectly natural if you grew up with it.

This.

See, for example, split infinitives: the contortions that people go to in order to avoid split infinitives sometimes sound reasonably natural to me because I heard those sort of constructions from my father growing up.