Does Grammar Matter Anymore?

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 9, 2012 @12:50AM from the pretty-talk dept.

theodp writes "A lighthearted 4th of July post pointing out how Microsoft Word could help Google CEO Larry Page catch typos in his Google+ posts turned out to be fighting words for GeekWire readers. "Grammar is an important indicator of the quality of one's message," insisted one commenter. "You shouldn't have disgraced yourself by stooping to trolling your readers with an article about what essentially amounts to using a full blown word processor for a tweet. Albeit an rather long example of one," countered another. A few weeks earlier, the WSJ sparked a debate with its report that grammar gaffes have invaded the office in an age of informal e-mail, texting and Twitter. So, does grammar matter anymore?"

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Re:It's like this. by dwye · 2012-07-09 04:25 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually, the double negative behaving in a Boolean manner rather than an intensifying manner (as with most Indo-European languages) is a fairly recent thing. Chaucer would not have dreamed of it, and I doubt that either Spenser or Shakespeare would have been to sure which way was "correct" -- blame the 18th century dictionary writers for creating/codifying rules in a more complicated fashion to allow more complicated thoughts (on paper, at least -- in speech it just gets confusing).
French grammar had almost no influence on English grammar, which is mainly a result of the pidginization that occurred when Old Norse/Danish came in contact with Old English, and all the agglutenate prefixes and postfixes were different while the roots were mainly the same. French words were hoovered up like crazy, but the grammar was ignored.