English Language Usage Question

[zerosoma]

Originally Posted By: beanoil
Language is a lost art. Do your own independent survey... I found that 7 out of 10 people will respond with "no problem" rather than "you're welcome." When did "no problem" become the proper reply to "Thank You"?


that's more of a way of speaking than an english flaw. what you are saying is, "do not worry about gratitude, this is on me."

 

[01rangerxl]

Originally Posted By: zerosoma
Originally Posted By: beanoil
Language is a lost art. Do your own independent survey... I found that 7 out of 10 people will respond with "no problem" rather than "you're welcome." When did "no problem" become the proper reply to "Thank You"?


that's more of a way of speaking than an english flaw. what you are saying is, "do not worry about gratitude, this is on me."


X2. Well put.

I find a lot of people baby boomer age on up do not like this figure of speech, but many younger generations use it, myself included. It's simply a way of saying that nothing is expected in return for whatever you did to receive gratitude.

A lot of times when people say "thanks" to me, I still say "you're welcome." Sometimes though, "no problem" makes more sense. For example, I have some largely Spanish speaking coworkers who apologize for things that don't require an apology. "No problem" comes in handy a lot in those situations.

 

[stephen9666]

Originally Posted By: scurvy
Originally Posted By: stephen9666
So what are the style guides/rules you use that require your quotation mark/punctuation mark guidelines?


Common technical writing guidelines and logical usage. Only direct quotations or what the user is expected to type or directly observe on a HMI/computer screen go inside quotation marks.

This is often referred to as 'British Style', as I believe it was usage as outlined in Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage".


Ah, good ol' logical usage. If you don't know the rules and do something incorrectly enough times, it has to become "logical." Right?

Just kidding, of course.

AP style says periods and commas go inside the quotation marks. MLA style agrees with very few exceptions. With both, other punctuation marks go inside when they're part of the quoted material. That's more than enough evidence for me to continue doing it. Where I work we have to write by those rules.

Long story short, it's clearly not "incorrect," as you indicated before. Just because different rule systems disagree, that doesn't make one right and the other wrong.

My god, I'm so sick of thinking about punctuation. I'd better go dig up some threads where people argue about whether PYB really cleans as well as some people claim.

 

[FoxS]

Originally Posted By: TallPaul
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: TallPaul
It drives me nuts that people continually use the phrase "due to" when they mean "because of." I was taught never to use the phrase "due to" unless you could substitute the phrase "attributable to." What gives? Am I just old school, or are all these people sloppy? Is our language falling apart over time--entropy in language?


80% of the posters here do not know the difference between "your" and "you're" and "there", "they're" and "their"; and *this* is the thing that irks you?!


Ohhhh. I wasn't clear in my original post. I actually am not all that concerned about language usage here on BITOG so long as we can understand each other and we keep it clean (site rule anyway). I am not even that careful in speaking. It's in writing reports, letters, etc. that this stuff bugs me--especially when someone wants to change what I wrote to improper usage.


Good clarification and I agree

But it's getting worse and I tend to stop worrying about things I cannot control and begin to adjust to the inevitable.

Btw I studied English to quite a high level, and didn't know the distinction in your first post, so you're setting quite a high standard!

 

[TallPaul]

Originally Posted By: FoxS
Btw I studied English to quite a high level, and didn't know the distinction in your first post, so you're setting quite a high standard!
I must confess that I got D's in English all through school. I did a lot of reading, which may have helped be be able to write, but I did study a lot on writing post college and the Strunk and White book was my favorite. I tend to pick up on certain things and hang on to them tightly.

Another one that I like is ending sentences with a proposition. I can't tell you specifically what a preposition is without looking it up, but I know that we are told it is something that we are not to end a sentence with. Yet I read that it was a carryover from Latin and has no business in the English language. It does create a lot of awkward sentences when a preposition is something with which we are not to end a sentence.

 

[TooManyWheels]

Originally Posted By: 01rangerxl
Sometimes though, "no problem" makes more sense. For example, I have some largely Spanish speaking coworkers who apologize for things that don't require an apology. "No problem" comes in handy a lot in those situations.


They would probably say "de nada" (it's nothing), which might or might not sound too formal if you said that instead. My usual reply in that situation is a simultaneous smile, nod and "thanks". Even just a smile and a nod is a good level of acknowledgement. It gets the job done without doing overboard.

 

[Tom NJ]

Originally Posted By: bdcardinal
I think what drives me up the wall is the word "task" being used as a verb.


Any noun can be verbed.

Back in the old days (pre 1995), companies employed well trained secretaries to do all of the business typing. Now with email being the primary form of business correspondence, all employees, including top executives, are leaning over their keyboards and "I-Thingies" taping away on the little keys and shooting out messages without even proof reading them. Since most of these people were not well trained in spelling and grammar, typos and grammatical errors have become so common that they have become accepted.

I can excuse one such mistake in a letter or other message, but more than that leads me to think the author is careless.

Tom NJ

 

[Benzadmiral]

Originally Posted By: TallPaul
. . . Another one that I like is ending sentences with a proposition. I can't tell you specifically what a preposition is without looking it up, but I know that we are told it is something that we are not to end a sentence with. Yet I read that it was a carryover from Latin and has no business in the English language. It does create a lot of awkward sentences when a preposition is something with which we are not to end a sentence.

"That is something up with which I will not put." (Attributed to Winston Churchill, I think)

 

[HerrStig]

Originally Posted By: Tom NJ
Originally Posted By: bdcardinal
I think what drives me up the wall is the word "task" being used as a verb.


Any noun can be verbed.

Back in the old days (pre 1995), companies employed well trained secretaries to do all of the business typing. Now with email being the primary form of business correspondence, all employees, including top executives, are leaning over their keyboards and "I-Thingies" taping away on the little keys and shooting out messages without even proof reading them. Since most of these people were not well trained in spelling and grammar, typos and grammatical errors have become so common that they have become accepted.

I can excuse one such mistake in a letter or other message, but more than that leads me to think the author is careless.

Tom NJ
In an effort to save money, apparently, EDITORS have disappeared from even big "big city" newspapers.

 

[HerrStig]

Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: spasm3
I hate phrases like; "For the first time ever!" or "It's a true fact!".


Don't worry, you just misused a semicolon

I must agree with what others have said about the misuse of "its" and "it's", "their", "they're" and "there" as well as all kinds of punctuation and grammatical nightmares. This site and the Internet in general are a shining example of how lazy society has become with language.

By the way, I wasn't trying to pick on you, I just thought it was funny that in a rant thread about spelling, grammar and punctuation that I'd find a rant that contained one of those errors

Izzat like a "scientific fact?"

 

[Rhymingmechanic]

Originally Posted By: TallPaul
It drives me nuts that people continually use the phrase "due to" when they mean "because of." I was taught never to use the phrase "due to" unless you could substitute the phrase "attributable to." What gives? Am I just old school, or are all these people sloppy? Is our language falling apart over time--entropy in language?


My guess is that people think "due to" makes them sound sophisticated. It also requires a sentence to be more wordy ("due to the fact that..." for example), which they also think shows sophistication. Why say what you mean when you could dazzle your audience with complexity, right?

This article covers your question in depth, even if it doesn't give a definite answer. You'll notice she approaches language from the perspective that usage evolves. That is contrary to the way many of us might remember learning grammar: "This is the rule, and if you break it, I will crack your knuckles with a ruler."

Because, Due To, Since

 

[TallPaul]

Originally Posted By: Rhymingmechanic
My guess is that people think "due to" makes them sound sophisticated. It also requires a sentence to be more wordy ("due to the fact that..." for example), which they also think shows sophistication. Why say what you mean when you could dazzle your audience with complexity, right?


These are probably the same folks who pronounce the "t" in often.

Another one that kills me is "utilize" instead of "use."

How about "close proximity"? (See the punctuation does not always go in the quotes.) But I saw a report that had the phrase "very close proximity" in it. Seems doubly redundant!

But in spoken language we can be a lot looser and one that is pretty funny is when people start a sentence with "For some reason ..." like "For some reason my car would not start this morning."

Thanks for the article link. I'll check it out.

 

[Touring5]

I agree with so much that has been mentioned in this thread. My grammar and punctuation aren't great, but I try to write properly.

It sometimes seems like some people are just simply ignorant or lazy about how/what they write. Perhaps it's just from being in a hurry or using a phone, but sometimes I will just bail on a post if it's that difficult to read.

I was talking to a technical writer one day when I said "..it's a very unique situation...". It took me a second then I realized what I had said. It's kind of like the old Father Guido Sarducci thing about the end of the Lord's Prayer and saying "forever and ever" (his point is that "forever" pretty much covers it).

 

[eljefino]

Originally Posted By: HerrStig

In an effort to save money, apparently, EDITORS have disappeared from even big "big city" newspapers.


Fortunately most have social media comments sections where readers quickly call them on it.

My Dad hates "very unique" but I unroll the situation a little: Uniqueness is the property of something not having anything like it. If something is "very unique," IMO, nothing else even closely resembles that item.

 

[mechtech2]

Due to means 'owing to'.
Because of means 'owing to'.
Attributable to means 'owing to'.
If we try, we may come up with some example that does not fit them all, I suppose.

 

[kb01]

I find the slight variations in punctuation (Oxford commas, punctuation and quotes, use of semi-colons, spacing after periods, etc.) entertaining. These tiny nuances say a lot about where an individual is from, his field, and the style guide he follows.

Minor typos, punctuation issues, and use of run-on sentences don't usually bother me (I'm guilty of it too). On the other hand, incorrect homonyms, word choice, and idioms drive me nuts -- They're/their/there, lose/loose, mute/moot, "could care less"... I wont even get into the lack of capitalization, punctuation, and paragraph breaks that are so common in online postings.

I'm actually a bit surprised to see that it's incorrect to use 'task' as a verb; at the very least, "to task" was military jargon way back when I was in.

Apparently, I'm also guilty of incorrectly using "due to", and tend to use it interchangeably with "as a result of..." and "because of...".

 

[SteveSRT8]

It is really exercising your imagination to think you know much of anything about any poster here.

You don't. But whatever gets you up in the morning....