The Grammar of Politics Thread
Well this brings me back to the horrors of grammar classes taught by Sister Martin. But the subject of an imperative sentence is always you. 😀
This may sound strange, but every single command has the same subject! Yikes! How is that even possible?
Well, since commands are always speaking to someone or something (you've got to address them if you're going to ask them to do something), the subject is always the word you.
You may have noticed that the word "you" is not even in a command. Because of this, the subject is actually called you understood, and it is written like this: (you)
This means that the subject is the word you, but since you is not written or spoken in the sentence, it is simply understood and is written in parentheses.
209 Replies
In American English we would pronounce it if it's singular but if it's plural the /t/ disappears. Interesting. Perhaps there are some dialects of American English where that's not the case so I'm mostly speaking for myself here.
How about often or gift?
For the official position on caring:
Interesting dichotomy.
Is the ending "-ings"?
No, but I like your line of thinking.
Chez, thank you for introducing me to a brand new experience - being in agreement with you.
In "often" everything is pronounced. But with "gifts" (in the plural), I think it's going to be pretty slight. Something is going on there but it's definitely not a fully realized /t/.
It'll get boring after a while
Also it's not a plural. Not even a noun, in fact.
Is it a medical condition?
No. It's not a massively obscure word.
Do you pronounce "scripts" the same as "scrips"? I don't think I do.
obfuscating
Can I post obfuscatingly?
Very good. There is a longer one though.
Definitely sounds like it could be some country bumpkin thing. Like rural Tennessee or some ****.
Yeah I'm pretty sure I do. I might try producing some spectrograms later to see what is going on there but I don't have an external microphone with me so it might be difficult.
How many letters?
Longer than obfuscatingly? I don't know if that is really proper English, though there are plenty of uses online.
15 letters. It is an adjective. Think suitable prefixes and endings for maximum padding. Or in other words, find a long enough noun or verb and then pad it out.
But zero hits in the COCA.
What is that?
Upon googling, there is a really obscure answer with 17 letters which is definitely not the word I'm thinking of. There is also a second pretty obscure answer with 15 letters which is also not the word I'm thinking of. The word I am thinking of is not hugely obscure, certainly not for its length, i.e. it is gettable for the posters ITT.
The Corpus of Contemporary America English hosted by BYU-- it's a 1 billion word sampling of American english that allows you to search for word usage and phraseology. It requires a login to access but no academic affiliation. I use it all the time to settle debates about what is "correct"-- since there isn't really such a thing only what is used and what isn't.
It's how I was determining that "could care less" is used 11x more than "couldn't care less" in American english.
How would a longer length calibrate how obscure a word is?
Obviously longer words tend to be more obscure (i.e. encountered less frequently in speech or writing) than shorter words, so when gauging the relative obscurity of a word it makes sense to weigh it on a scale of words of similar length. "Going" is more common than "circumlocutory", but that doesn't tell us much about the obscurity of the latter, relatively speaking.