A whole Saturday of grammar-related events at the Guardian building near Kings Cross with the emphasis on entertainment. It doesnt matter whether you know your apostrophe from your ellipsis, youre bound to learn something. 3.35pm BST A Brazilian in the audience says he learnt American English and wonders how he can clamp down on his Americanisms? Dont let anyone pull you up on this stuff unless they speak perfect Portuguese, says Forsyth. Besides, most English-English speakers cant always tell the difference. David Marsh says that the Guardian now has more readers in the US than it does in the UK. When someone in the New York office writes that something happened Thursday he doesnt always have the time or energy to do something about it. Forsyth comes back that he has heard the expression bloody hell, mate a lot recently over in the US as a result of Britains crushing media dominance. Ha ha. 3.28pm BST If youre writing in the first person present tense, how can you use grammar in characterisation, an audience member asks? Arsenal, theyve got a good team this season. Chelsea, they havent got the strength and depth, Forsyth comes back like a shot. I wonder what that question was about? 3.24pm BST Grammar is how the English language actually is. It is the agreement this is how we are going to use the English language. General usage is right. Breaking the rules of grammar can have massively beautiful effects but you have to know when youre going to do it. 3.22pm BST How the hell does one speak daggers he asks? And Curiouser and curiouser. This is catachresis. 3.20pm BST If you wander around the Guardian offices, he says, you will find disabled toilets although the toilets are not themselves disabled. Breaking the rules for effect is something that has been done over and over again. We was robbed. Love me tender. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Do not go gentle into that good night. It works on a subliminal level, he says, now citing TS Eliot. Let us go then, you and I. It should be you and me. Maybe the niggle makes a thing stand out? The Greeks called this inalogy he says, although Im not sure if Ive spelled that correctly. Thunderbirds are go. 3.14pm BST Other examples of this include Star Treks: Space. The final frontier. Imagine how less impact it would have been if it begun: Space is the final frontier, or This is space, which is the final frontier. And then there is Churchills: In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill. And, of course: Me Tarzan. You Jane. Which was never actually said in a film, he says. 3.09pm BST The split infinitive being a bad thing was first proposed in an anonymous American tract in the 18th century. Shakespeare does it: there is no reason not to do it. ALSO there is no reason why a sentence has to have a main verb in it. He cites the first sentence of Bleak House. It runs: London. That, he says, is how to write a first line. 3.03pm BST i before e, except after c. Actually, only 43 English words obey that rule, and 923 words don't! #grammarfun 3.02pm BST By the bible and Shakespeare you can use less for a number, says Forsyth. Tesco and Shakespeare are at one here. 3.00pm BST But there times when the less/fewer rule - anything you can count is fewer - sounds wrong. One fewer mouth to feed, for example. 2.58pm BST Forsyth: i before e except after c is a complete load of cobblers. And lots of people get upset about five items or less at the supermarket. 2.57pm BST And here comes Mark Forsyth to talk about the Elements of Eloquence. He has a school masterly tone and his hands clasped behind his back: a commanding stage presence mitigated only by the fact that he has dropped the battery for his microphone. 2.54pm BST The audience award goes to Anne Corbett, who spotted this on the way to the Guardians canteen to get a coffee at break time. With a special hat-tip the Guardians Human Resources department. Yay guys! Something to be onboarded on Monday? 2.28pm BST Steven Pooles book is called Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower? It sounds like a hoot. 2.27pm BST You definitely get judged if you dont speak the lingo in a corporate environment, says an audience member regretfully. David Marsh adds that jargon originally meant the noise that birds make. 2.25pm BST An audience member says that she is going to find a way of merging the Jesus facepalm into the meaning of stakeholder - a word she hates - online. Poole says that originally the word stakeholder meant the only person in a situation who wasnt involved: they were literally holding a stake - a piece of wood - instead of taking part. Somewhere along the line the meaning flipped... Poole: Apparently people do MBAs mainly to learn the kind of jargon that alienates and bamboozles people who havent done MBAs. Poole advocates a policy of relentless mockery when faced with this jargon, while still managing to keep your job. 2.19pm BST How does one keep up to date with these linguistic innovations, asks a member of the audience? Browse the internet, look at the emoji on your phone. The Urban Dictionary, suggests Andy Bodle from the back of the room. 2.18pm BST I just wish this liveblog had emoji. 2.17pm BST Facepalm is an image with grammar to it, says Poole. Sometimes a situation is so stupid that only a double facepalm, or a Jesus facepalm will do. And there is also headdesk. The internet is enriching our language, insists Poole. And judging by the mixture of hilarity and fascination from the audience, hes making a really good case. When Godzilla give you facepalm you know the fail is epic. You can follow him on Twitter @stevenpoole I will. 2.13pm BST Apparently there is now an emoji only version of Moby Dick. You wouldnt necessarily be able to follow the detail of the plot very closely, admits Poole as the audience giggles a lot. But its early days. 2.12pm BST Bahahahaha! 2.06pm BST Great journalistic questions to which the answer is no. Has the internet killed grammar? Poole points out that if the internet had, in fact, killed grammar it would have been impossible to write that headline. A good point, well made. 2.04pm BST These days, if you wrote Can I have a cheeseburger? in the context of a lolcat, you would be making a grammatical error, says Poole. 2.03pm BST How many people actually laugh when they lol online? *metaphysical question of the day* 2.02pm BST Newbie is not internet slang, says Poole. It originated in the US military, meaning a recent arrival. But n00b - substituting the o for the numeral 0 (because its funny), is. 2.00pm BST Poole has found a letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill dating from 1917 that includes the expression OMG. This stuff is gold dust. Does WTF ever stand for the Word Taekwondo Federation these days? 1.57pm BST Poole suggests that if one is applying for a job, on the whole one does not write LOL. I is amazeballs. This talk is turning out to be full of useful information. For instance, TTYL is internet shorthand for talk to you later. 1.56pm BST Poole: Returning to McCrums idea of grammatical violations. Derp (which is a bit like doh!) FTW (for the win) and amazeballs were recently singled out by the editor of Gawker as not respectable language used by normal adults. But Poole knows people who use things like wtf (what the fuck?) or pwn, which started out on the web as I own you, as in I beat you, but was mispelled and has morphed into its own thing. pwning is now a thing. 1.51pm BST Poole: And what about video games? Are they destroying literacy? Is one thing REALLY replacing the other? Perhaps it is a question of the people who say these things not knowing the nature of the things that young people are doing on the internet. He has produced a screen grab of a video game called Phoenix, in which you are invited to play a lawyer. Its a very wordy game. 1.49pm BST Poole: Can you alternate skim reading with a deep dive? There are a lot of long articles - essays - on the internet these days, for instance in Eon and Matter, because paper magazines exist less and less. Maybe the problem is the fonts on the screen and the adverts that obscure the screen, or the horrible comments underneath that often leave a bad taste in the mouth? People read Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, David Mitchells output... 1.46pm BST Are we losing our deep-reading brain? This question was posed by a group of people advocating a slow reading movement which is apparently akin to the slow food movement. Have our brains lost the habit, he is asking, and mentions tl;dr This is, apparently an internet expression that means too long, didnt read. Poole enjoys the use of the semicolon there. 1.43pm BST Poole has brought up the listicle. It makes some people anxious, he says, that prose is dissolving into a choppy sea of bite-sized paragraphs. He has - of course - a top nine things that you need to know about listicles. 1.42pm BST David Marsh has introduced Stephen Poole, who apparently is a composer as well as an author. The title of his talk is Facepalm: language and the internet. He has begun by citing Robert McCrum, the Observers literary editor, on fears about language in social media. Loose, informal and distressingly dispeptic, is McCrums description of it. He went on to describe the violence it does. But Poole says that people said much the same things about radio and television. 1.38pm BST @guardianclasses #grammarfun terrible delivery by TKMaxx Sheffield. pic.twitter.com/pqcLDIdivSOh. TK Maxx *tuts loudly* 1.36pm BST #grammarfun pic.twitter.com/1Vm3U5G1JcBahahahaha! This might be my favourite. 1.35pm BST There will now follow a collection of grammar mistakes tweeted in over lunch...Here's a great proofreading error! #grammarfun pic.twitter.com/oKlmCM1638 1.28pm BST 12.32pm BST There is a grammar joke on its way. Drum roll... The past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense. Boom-tish! 12.28pm BST David Marsh says that on one of his days off the phrase a lady in a business suit called Marion made it through the Guardians defensive mesh of subediting. The word lunch has come up a few times now and Ramon, who is managing the session, is holding up a piece of card with the words Five minutes on it so the speakers can see. 12.25pm BST Andy Bodle describes the agony of being a newspaper subeditor who has spotted an error in a colleagues copy. Verrrrrrrry awkward, he says. 12.24pm BST Tweet your pics of grammatical errors w/ hashtag #grammarfun to our live blogger Emma http://t.co/5amayL8Dmz pic.twitter.com/QBtME779NYSend in pics of the grammar errors that drive you wild. 12.22pm BST David Marsh says the biggest dispute hes had since he took over as Guardian style guide editor was with the Observer over single or double quote marks: the Observer said it wasnt prepared to give up double quote marks because theyd been using them for 200 years. In the end a compromise was effected, in which the Guardian got its way over double quote marks, in return for giving up the way it wrote dates. 12.20pm BST There are two kind of grammar police, Bodle says. The Dixon of Dock Greens and the military kind armed with automatic weaponry. But grammar-shaming doesnt work any better than slut shaming or obesity shaming does. Its not productive. And now Bodle is asking audience members what their favourite subjects were at school. Usually its to do with the teacher, says Bodle. If teachers have a passion for a subject it can make all the difference. So how do you get people to be passionate about language? Lynne Truss and Stephen Fry are doing their bits. But humiliating people for making mistakes doesnt work: the best way it to make a joke and make it clear that you love language because its fun. 12.14pm BST Eliminating inconsistencies means you can understand people better but it also slows the process of linguistic evolution. 12.06pm BST Bodle: The final objection to grammar, though, is that it is boring. And here objectors are on firm ground. Grammarians have very little authority to tell other people theyre wrong. Language has been compared to wine by Virginia Woolf and to a prostitute queen by George Sand. There are parallels between the way languages work and the way evolution works. (This is getting complicated. There are diagrams illustrating developmental patterns. In the language diagrams novels by Will Self have their own category.) In the cases of both language and evolution, change happens because of copying errors and mutations, processes triggered by geographical isolation. 12.02pm BST Bodle: Phishing emails are getting better but knowledge of spelling and grammar are still the best way of telling them from the real thing. The common mistakes that produce the most misunderstandings are rarely rocket science. Misplaced apostrophes are big. As are homophones. Apparently the Guardian recently had an incident of climate poofing within its august pages. 11.56am BST Bodle: I once had a job at a publisher which was to sift manuscripts and some writers cant actually write. But in 99% of cases if they cant do grammar they cant do the other stuff - characterisation, plot - either. The audience is liking Andys slideshow, consisting of daft paragraphs culled from erotica he was asked to copyedit. Suffice to say, sloppiness of grammar equates to sloppiness of thought. If you want to see the slides, come to the next masterclass. 11.51am BST Bodle: Most anthropologists say that the great leap forward that took place about 100,000 years ago happened almost exclusively because of our rich and complex communication system. Tools, art, use of fire. All these were enhanced by language. Grammar wasnt taught to anyone but the social elite until the 20th century. And yet most of us can get our point across: we have a shared context and a common knowledge of recent events. Non-linguistic ways of communicating: pointing, facial expressions. Grammar is important partly because people judge you on your use of English: employers have to sift applications and are not allowed to do so by gender, age or race, so inevitably communication skills rate highly. Online daters also have a surprisingly high standard of grammar, he says. He has quotes suggesting that even people who are bad at spelling and grammar are fussy about the spelling and grammar of those they date. Ha! 11.45am BST Bodle: Grammar is about as far from comedy as you can get because its about obeying rules, whereas comedy subverts them. Are grammar and comedy opposite to each other? Is it possible to put the comedy back into comma deployment, he asks (see what he did there?). Groans. And thats why you wont see me on Saturday nights at the Apollo. 11.42am BST Bodle starts by saying that he has no qualifications in English and did French for a degree, but nonetheless has been correcting peoples English for 22 years as a subeditor. There followed a quick explanation of what subeditors do. Blimey! Theres a black and white picture of him on Countdown a few years back *geekily impressed* 11.39am BST Marsh introduces Andy Bodle, who once won Guardian headline of the month with Where theres muck theres bras. Anyone remember what the story was? 11.34am BST Next up is Andy Bodle, standup comedian and Guardian subeditor. Time also, dear readers, to mention Muphrys Law, which is in the Guardian style guide. Go easy on me... Im doing my best. 11.16am BST A lady in the audience works in PR and is an ex journalist and has been sent along by her boss, who is a prescriptivist. What should I tell him about this masterclass, she asks? Tell him he is a very lovely, talented man, who is 100% wrong, says Ritchie. The dialogue between prescriptivists and descriptivists is like Professor Brian Cox talking to Russell Brand about astrophysics. 11.13am BST Another question from the audience. I wondered whether you would develop the distinction between written English and spoken English. And how written English has a fossilising effect. Ritchie agrees. The British jihadi, John, in the desert has had linguists listening to him, trying to place his origin. The Yorkshire Ripper was trapped partly in this way - because a linguist was able to place him geographically very precisely - but jihadi John speaks a form of English that is prominent in Hackney but which has spread across the whole of southern England, making it nearly impossible to place him. 11.08am BST On the other hand, trying to get served late at night in a Govan bar with standard English would put you at a disadvantage. 11.07am BST It really helps to be able to speak standard English, says Ritchie. But if you dont there shouldnt be a bias against it. 11.07am BST An audience member says that if someone uses I have went surely they need to be told the standard English usage 11.06am BST Ritchie says that in Guardians sports pages Jose Mourinho says I have went on a regular basis. It would look really patronising if we put it in square brackets, says Marsh. 11.05am BST Yes, says Ritchie. If they could do everything else relevant to the critics job they could also be taught to tweak their language. 11.03am BST David Marsh asks, though, if someone had put in a job application to Ritchie at the Sunday Times I went to Oxford innit would he have given them a job? 11.01am BST Ashamed of your English? That advert used to be on the front of most newspapers. The one great human achievement is language, says Ritchie, and most of us know it is hugely important. But he doesnt have an opinion on the use of enormity or fulsome. We collectively agree on the rules of English because it is our language and not Fowlers language or Gwynnes. English is spoken in South Africa and North Carolina. When an astronomer looks up at the night sky and tells you that the earth is 13.8bn years old, someone else will tell you instead that youre going to have a great day on Thursday. (Astrologers.) There are plenty of examples of people just getting subjects wrong, as Ritchie says traditional grammarians have. Mystic Meg is not good enough, using leeches to cure headaches is not good enough. There are real rules to real grammar but we shouldnt use it as a way of making class points. Much of what we know about grammar we know innately. This is our language, not Neville Gwynnes, he finishes. 10.54am BST Unspoken rules govern the order that we use adjectives. The red big bus? No- the big red bus #grammarfunAnd example of what Ritchie meant when he was talking about adjectival ordering. 10.54am BST Grammatical knowledge is buried in our basic cognition, when one is a native English speaker, says Ritchie. 10.49am BST Apparently there is a correct order to adjectives in a sentence structure. Adjectival ordering is one of the things that identifies native English speakers. Ooh! Here comes the gerund... But we were promised a settling in period first. And yet here it is regardless. The gerund, it turns out, is when the verb becomes a noun. So: to cook is great, wherein to cook is the verb. But in cooking is great, cooking would be the gerund. Voila! 10.43am BST Ritchie is talking about the present tense. Try explaining the present continuous to a French businessman on a Monday morning, he says: it would be almost impossible for him to get his head around. There are about 14 tenses in the English language, apparently. Can anyone name them? 10.37am BST "We live in a 'voiceist' culture- accent and spoken word identifies you" Harry Ritchie #grammarfun 10.33am BST These days it is all too often the case, says Ritchie, that the only people who know the rules of English are those who have learned it as a foreign language. Native English speakers can already do it, so why do we need to learn the rules? Good question. But is he putting himself out of work here? 10.28am BST Linguistic prescriptivists like Neville Gwynne pretend that linguistics doesnt exist, says Ritchie, whereas descriptivists pretend that traditionalists do not exist. 10.22am BST Yay! A tweet from inside the roomHoping to discover that grammar can be fun #Grammarfun 10.18am BST And here comes our first speaker, Harry Ritchie, former literary editor of the Sunday Times, to tell us about the grammar we dont know. He has a soft Scottish accent and quickly establishes that five of our attendees have taught English as a foreign language. Hes discussing why people like grammar books: he thinks that they either want to be told theyre wrong or celebrate the fact that they already knew the thing thats being taught. The most complicated rule of all, he says, is that and which. Fowler is gobbledegook on this, he says, giving an example from Bake Off: the cake that Ian baked melted. Should it be the cake that Ian baked, or the cake which Ian baked? What do you say, grammar fiends? 10.11am BST Ooh. Attendees ahoy! Apparently there are 55 of them, which seems like a lot for 10am on a Saturday. David M is taking responsibility for the Guardians spelling mistakes and thanking people for coming. Apparently we wont be doing the gerund until 2.30pm. Time for coffee first then... David M is telling an anecdote about an ex-girlfriend who went to Harvard and took him on a tour of the institution. At the end a guy in a ten gallon hat said Can you tell me where the rest room is at? The tour guide said Im sorry, sir. This is Harvard. We dont end a sentence with a preposition. OK, then, said the ten gallon hat guy. Can you tell me where the rest room is at, asshole? Tone set. 9.54am BST 9.41am BST 9.18am BST Good morning, pedants. Welcome to the liveblog of a Guardian Masterclass at Kings Place, York Way. Its called The essentials of grammar with David Marsh, who is the Guardians style book editor and the itinerary runs thus. Continue reading...
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