Pay attention to the story. Does it bother you that the narrator can't conjugate the verb "to be" correctly?
We was drivin' up Grapevine Hill passin' cars like they was standin' stillIt doesn't really bug me. My dad talked that way. It's authentic vernacular.
What does grate on me is the increasing use of "was" for "were" in the subjunctive mood. Especially among the twittering classes.
"If I was rich, I would do ____."
Plenty of famous people construct their wishes exactly that way. Just try googling "If I was" (with the quotation marks) and the names of celebrities. You'll be surprised.
9 comments:
No, none of that bothers me.
The who / whom thing.
Simple as can be.
But then the object is expanded to to a phrase, a self contained cluster, and the object is the subject of the phrase so the form reverts back to subject.
I shot at [the guy who shot at me.]
Whom did you shoot at again?
I shot at the guy who shot at me.
Well, you got your little rule within a rule then don't you? After all that browbeating about making sure I use whom when referring to object of a sentence. You and your fancy words for discussing words.
Sometimes it sounds better the wrong way.
I'll shoot at whomever shot me. And maybe it doesn't sound better. Maybe I could have a better example. Then you'd say, well there's your exception.
To the arbitrary rule devised after language was developed and used. Devised to describe what people are doing. And it misses the mark and calls those exceptions.
At age 14, deaf acquaintances twice my senior were having a vocabulary contest game they made up. One spelled AGLU.
Stumped everyone. He wins.
Answer: Eskimo house.
Me: s'cuse, s'cuse, s'cuse, s'cuse me, that's IGLOO.
All four shrugged their shudders and smirked at me for being so precise, like, close enough, Fellah, chuh.
Sometimes it sounds better the wrong way.
Assthetics
Who is almost always acceptable for whom, a good rule for those whose intuitions produce bogus whom's. The exception is fronted preposition, as in "for whom the bell tolls."
"For who the bell tolls" isn't a case mistake, though, but a register mistake. The fronted preposition is formal register and who-for-whom is informal register and the don't mix well.
"Who the bell tolls for" is fine in modern English.
My favorite oddball rule is that subjects of non-finite verbs (verbs not carrying tense) are in the objective case, as in Latin.
This is all from descriptive grammar, the study of what sounds wrong and uncovering the hidden rules, rather than prescriptive grammar.
Quirk Greenbaum Leech and Svartvik _A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language_ is a great 2000-page summer if you want to be amazed at the complexity and number of rules you in fact follow.
I'll shoot at whomever shot me.
Fowler analyzes "whoever" as "any person who," the "person" being the object of "shoot" and "who" as the subject of "shot." The "who" part shows up in the word.
My own non-complex rule is that the "who" always takes on the case of its role in its clause and that's the end of it.
This can be aided by the always-who-for-whom rule in modern English for somebody whose intuition isn't great on the distinction. Just go with "who."
The rule I remember is "To whom or for whom something is done". It's probably not hard and fast. More of a guideline actually.
Our sixth grade teacher used to get so pissed off when we played that 45. So we played it often. He got even more pissed when we played a Cheech & Chong album. I wonder if his objection to this song was the grammar?
That video includes a clip of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth driving his car Tweedy Pie. He was one of a kind, you might say he was sine qua non to the world of hot rodding in southern California. But I am not sure of the proper grammar to use. Neither is my grammer. She dead.
Roth appears at the 1:49 min mark. Yes, he was one of a kind, like George Barris.
The last time I was in LA, and I do mean last time, I visited the Petersen museum in its previous incarnation. There I saw Roth's Outlaw staged next to Norm Grabowski's Kookie car - both iconic vehicles from my youth - I used to watch 77 Sunset Strip with Edd "Kookie" Byrnes and Efrem Zimbalist before he joined the FBI. I really liked that museum, although I understand it has been redone and lost some of the old time grease-under-the-fingernails ambiance it once had.
There were some Barris cars there, too, as I recall. I see that they now have a replica of the Bulldog Cafe - how cool is that? I wonder if the zoning commission would object if I built one of those in my yard. Hey, it's just sculpture, right?
Good times, good times...
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