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Motivated Grammar
Personal blog · motivatedgrammar.wordpress.comwriting
Motivated Grammar is a personal blog at motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com about writing. Since 2010, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009)”. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Motivated Grammar's posts on English usage, mainly singular 'they' and prescriptive rules such as 'off of' and 'fewer' versus 'less'. Commenters cite them as sources for those points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Prescriptivism Must Die!
Most-linked posts?
- Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-03-12
- /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
What Hacker News says?
Descriptive linguistics doesn't mean "whatever anyone says is correct and it should go." This ain't 'nam, there are rules, and you can still run afoul of them. The basic tenet of descriptivism is that, as people who study linguistic patterns as a science, we can't make a value judgment about a certain set of rules or what a person "should use". However, I think it's generally accepted that we try to strive for some…
Comment linking /2011/11/07/descriptivism-isnt-anything-goes/
on “If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel”Submitted Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThis turns out to be a little harder to dig up from HN Search than I thought, so I've made a list of some of my favorite links on the topic. If you find any other high-quality ones, please let me know—there are several I couldn't easily find again in five minutes. I know Language Log has had many good posts about it. There are many memorable details in this history, such as that the first English grammarian to presc…
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name”Submitted Ill-founded arguments about grammar as a story · 28 points
HN discussiona bit off topic.. but I found this he/she thing really annoying. Then use singular they. See http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... for verification that this is acceptable English.
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “One Thousand Dollars an Hour”Submitted What's the Singular Form of Cattle? (2010) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSingular they has seen wide use for centuries starting with Chaucer and picking up Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Shakespeare, William Thackeray, Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde along the way (list shamelessly stolen from http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... ). If you've only noticed it in the last few months then I suggest that you've not been looking hard enough!
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “A note to Google recruiters (and on Google hiring practices)”Submitted Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis "rule" is really just bull, in my opinion. http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or... So is this a sign of that horror of horrors, the destruction of the English language by modern speakers who can’t be bothered to learn the rules of the grammar? Unsurprisingly, no. As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam…
Comment linking /2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/
on “Dropbox disables ASLR on Windows”Submitted “10 items or less” is just fine as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"They" has been acceptable for centuries. https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t... http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/generic-s...
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the land of Haskell”Submitted The seductive fear that you’re using words wrong (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular. "Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, jus…
Comment linking /2012/07/31/on-off-of/
on “The Elsevier boycott one year on”Good blog post on the subject here: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t... TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier. There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself…
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “The Trans History of the Wild West”Awesome result. I think it's vitally important to acknowledge achievements that happen in parallel with research at the LHC because otherwise we're going to miss a lot of very neat results. I don't know enough about particle physics to be able to comment on the techniques involved unfortunately, but I love reading about the progress that's being made. For someone that Wikipedia's a lot of this stuff, does someone kn…
Comment linking /2010/10/18/has-the-sun-shined-or-shone/
on “Quarks Know Their Left From Their Right”Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the “I’m going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun” linguistic phenomenon. It’s a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always u…
Comment linking /2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
on “Reminding Starbucks that Beautiful Code Should Make Beautiful Language”I admit that the crack about mediocre writing was unhelpful. Also, my whole post was too long. This topic gets under my skin. Beyond that, I would say that many of the things prescriptivists discuss are not grammatical mistakes. They are often disagreements about usage where reasonable people can disagree, but more importantly many of them are literally myths. That is, many of these so-called rules have never had go…
Comment linking /2009/03/04/national-grammar-day-2009-ten-common-grammar-myths-debunked/
on “Pedantry isn't boring – it's essential”
