Yet more feckless wasters.

[spud989]

NorthernBoy said:

There's no apostrophe needed with plurals such as egos.

The word is whose.

The reason that we are laughing at you Marty is the combination of your claims to intellectual superiority with your inability to construct proper sentences. I could write better English at ten than you do now, yet you pretend you are more intelligent than I.

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

[King Herald]

NorthernBoy said:

King Herald said:

. Not his fault, he wanted to work, but he had no real skills and a .

Not his fault?

Where do you think that the rest of us got our skills, in a Christmas cracker?

How on earth can it be anyone's fault but his own that he has no skills?

"I've sat here on my arse all day long and, can you believe it, not a single person has come round and trained me as a lab technician".

This attitude stinks. It truly stinks. It takes time and effort to gain skills. It takes commitment and drive. The acquire none, and to blame the world, not yourself, is just so wrong.

Hey, I was 17 then, and now I'm 52, and just repeating what he was telling me at the time, ya gobby knobjockey.

[Trommel]

spud989 said:

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

Subject or object? Nominative or accusative?

[SGirl]

spud989 said:

NorthernBoy said:

The reason that we are laughing at you Marty is the combination of your claims to intellectual superiority with your inability to construct proper sentences. I could write better English at ten than you do now, yet you pretend you are more intelligent than I.

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

In colloquial speech, you're right. But formally, "I" is correct.

[Lost_BMW]

SGirl said:

spud989 said:

NorthernBoy said:

The reason that we are laughing at you Marty is the combination of your claims to intellectual superiority with your inability to construct proper sentences. I could write better English at ten than you do now, yet you pretend you are more intelligent than I.

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

In colloquial speech, you're right. But formally, "I" is correct.

Are you sure that it is only acceptable in speech? Is this so clear-cut, given the context and the inclusion of 'than', and the absence of the implied 'am'?

There has been a debate about whether the like of the 'than' could be regarded as a preposition rather than as a conjunction (especially given the dropped 'am') justifying the object form of the personal pronoun, 'me', except in the most formal writing. I'm not sure that the original poster or his 'online' tutor intended the post to be the most 'formal' of texts.




'Sits back with popcorn to watch other opinions emerge - after all this is PH where pedantry counts!

[NorthernBoy]

spud989 said:

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

No, it was short for "than I am." so I is perfectly correct.

[New POD]

New POD said:

So, child who had no choice but to be born, is then subjected to living in poverty.

You basically want to live in 1920 ?

Interesting that the state (ie the working population who pay taxes), looks after people who made poor choices, but over time, the "mistakes", become reasonable choices for many.

So a 17 year old girl has a baby, and the council finds her a 2 bed flat and tax payers help support her.

Is she a scrounger ? Has the choice to fall pregnant been made knowing fully what lies in store for her ? Or is she a feckless child herself who like to take risks and thinks nothing through ?

Would she really be homeless and destitute if the state said "Tough" ? and for 100 people like her, whose families would do the decent thing, how many would be truly homeless and penniless ?

Anyone seen the play "The Inspector Calls" ?

[tinman0]

New POD said:

So, child who had no choice but to be born, is then subjected to living in poverty.

Yes.

Until people understand that there are consequences to their actions, then the answer is yes, the child should be subject to living in poverty. The reason there were less teenagers getting pregnant in the 1920s was because there was no safety net like there is today.

[Jimbeaux]

tinman0 said:

New POD said:

So, child who had no choice but to be born, is then subjected to living in poverty.

Yes.

Until people understand that there are consequences to their actions, then the answer is yes, the child should be subject to living in poverty. The reason there were less teenagers getting pregnant in the 1920s was because there was no safety net like there is today.

Sad but true. Creating a generational voter base of dependents has major drawbacks.

[spud989]

NorthernBoy said:

spud989 said:

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

No, it was short for "than I am." so I is perfectly correct.

If you think that leaving out verbs entirely is an acceptable 'short form' of anything then I'm afraid you need to go over a few grammatical basics! It doesn't work; not least because there's no demarcation of the 'short form'. Grammar is reliant upon rules!

SGirl said:

spud989 said:

NorthernBoy said:

The reason that we are laughing at you Marty is the combination of your claims to intellectual superiority with your inability to construct proper sentences. I could write better English at ten than you do now, yet you pretend you are more intelligent than I.

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

In colloquial speech, you're right. But formally, "I" is correct.

You misunderstand. It has nothing to do with formality. It's to do with the function of objects and subjects within a sentence (as sort of indicated by one of the posters above). Using "I" instead of "me" is a politeness myth that's been perpetuated by poorly trained primary teachers for years. I was taught the same thing. It's wrong

HTH

[SGirl]

spud989 said:

SGirl said:

spud989 said:

NorthernBoy said:

The reason that we are laughing at you Marty is the combination of your claims to intellectual superiority with your inability to construct proper sentences. I could write better English at ten than you do now, yet you pretend you are more intelligent than I.

That should be 'me'. Make sure you're correct when correcting others!

In colloquial speech, you're right. But formally, "I" is correct.

You misunderstand. It has nothing to do with formality. It's to do with the function of objects and subjects within a sentence (as sort of indicated by one of the posters above). Using "I" instead of "me" is a politeness myth that's been perpetuated by poorly trained primary teachers for years. I was taught the same thing. It's wrong

HTH

Au contraire, mon petit choux-fleur.

"Than" should be followed by the subjective case when the pronoun in question would use the same verb in an implied clause of comparison as the subject of the sentence. So here: "you pretend you are more intelligent than I (am)". Hence "I" is correct.

Or, to give you another example that illustrates it more clearly:

My friend likes my car more than I
= My friend likes my car more than I like my car
= I like my car, but my friend likes it more

My friend likes my car more than me
= My friend likes my car more than he likes me
= My friend prefers my car to me.

So in the original example, whichever way you look at it "I" is correct.

English is fairly peculiar in its informal interchanging of subjective and objective in this regard. Cf. also the way in which people incorrectly use "I" when they're trying to appear posh, as in "my husband and I are going out for dinner" (correct) and "Fred and Edith went out for dinner with my husband and I" (incorrect). Or, conversely, in spoken language people often use the object instead of the subject: "me and Fred went out for a pint after dinner".

I wasn't taught this by primary school teachers. I'm a linguist by profession, and grammar was one of my specialist fields.

[spud989]

The latter of your examples appears to be what I've (mis-)recognised.

I did a little linguistics myself (alongside my more general English focus - though such a level is well beyond what I now use in my job!), so I'm happy to bow to more specialist knowledge and retract the above. Though, that said, my modules mainly covered things like Language Death and so forth.

However, despite following your logic, it still feels awfully disjointed to remove the verb from the I - almost prescriptive to the point of awkward. Is there any data you know of to suggest that it's a particular change in progress (by way of efficiency, almost?) or is it just the way I'm viewing it?

But, like I said, I'm happy to doff my cap to a linguist who knows what they're talking about!

[Halb]

New POD said:

Anyone seen the play "The Inspector Calls" ?

An Inspector Calls is one of my favourite films. A brilliant turn by Alistair Sim.
A very good early creepy supernatural chiller.

[Pesty]

Halb said:

An Inspector Calls is one of my favourite films. A brilliant turn by Alistair Sim.
A very good early creepy supernatural chiller.

I said this in a thread the other day but would seem relevant,

My daughters English class had to watch it and read the book and review it.

The teacher kept getting wound up because all the kids said it was all her fault for getting sacked and knocked up and then she made it worse by not accepting the cash and she basically did the right thing by killing herself

Apparently she even made a few of them re write their work before marking it

[spud989]

Nothing wrong with having a personal response to a text, but if you blatantly ignore the writer's message and the socialist subtext then the mark will indeed be terrible

Edited by spud989 on Saturday 16th June 23:22

[Pesty]

Exactly

The teacher had bought the 'message' wholesale it would seem.

[spud989]

Yeah, but the fact of that being his message is irrefutable - that comes first and then the any personal disagreement/evaluation has to come after. The teacher did the right thing by getting them to rewrite it if they didn't acknowledge why he wrote it. I've spent the last fortnight marking three hundred similar papers!

[Pesty]

I agree

I still think its funny the kids getting the exact opposite ideas and winding up the teacher though

Love the film it does make a good point even if it does lay it on thick.