… but this is too much.
We are four weeks into the school year AT A LAW SCHOOL and we are discussing basic grammar. There are people in this class that don’t know that “its” is possessive and “it’s” means “it is.” They also don’t understand that “Smith’s” is not the plural of “Smith.” Rather it means one Smith owns something.
This is ridiculous.
9 comments:
You ain't in J-School, buddy. If people could understand what lawyers wrote then they wouldn't have to pay other lawyers to translate and that would be bad. A missing apostrophe could be the difference in you winning some case some day, so you should be glad those bozos don't have your grammer skills.
"I used to hate writing, but now I enjoy it. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" -- Calvin
Did I tell you this was my favorite Calvin Quote of all time even before you posted it?
No, you didn't. Great minds think alike I guess. When I worked at the paper I made a poster with that quote on it and hung it next to my desk. I don't think my editors were amused.
There was one kid in the class who was arguing with the prof about "Jones's" being the proper plural possessive of "Jones."
Wow! You learn something new everyday in that thar college of yourn, dont'cha?! They sound real smart, yessirie, real, real smart!!
That would've never happened at the U of A College of Law.
We were always grammatically correct.
I'd like to think most of the people in the class already knew all of that. I think we covered it in the fifth grade.
The Jones kid killed me though. He kept arguing it with the professor who was trying to be polite. Finally he said, "I've been spelling it 'Jones's' for as long as I can remember." And I blurted out, "Then you've been spelling it wrong."
The whole class busted out laughing and the kid shot me a dirty look. I told him, "I'm not trying to bust your chops, but I wrote for a newspaper for eight years. I've written and edited more stories than I can count. It's 'Jones'.'"
The professor looked at me, smiled, and changed the subject.
Somebody put Jones's name on the short-list of Republican vice presidential candidates pronto!
And if he has a full-frontal lobotomy maybe he could even be our next Republican president.
Haha, except the kid is a Democrat. :-B
Ahhhh the Joys of Living in heavily Republican Stockton California:
I share some excerpts from recent letters to the editor as well as an excerpt from a best selling book and a recent editorial, Enjoy:
"Bush is a weakling," writes reader Richard Farago. " ... One nuke on every major city in the Middle East, i.e. Damascus, Tripoli, Tehran, etc., and the capital of North Korea, and the entire issue of terrorism is moot."
Edward G. Garrison, quoted in a recent mailbag: "If it were up to me, I'd gather up every Muslim in the country and put 'em in camps and deport 'em back to their countries of origin, and I don't give a damn if they're American citizens or not. They all need to go. ... They're just waiting ... to kill all the rest of us."
"Conservatives Without Conscience" by John Dean:
"Authoritarians have a heightened psychological need to manage uncertainty and fear. They cannot live with ambiguity. They accept and need authority and groups (religion, military, patriotism) to give moral clarity. ... (They) cannot tolerate dissent."
Mike Fitzgerald Stockton Record Columnist:
"For such people, the world's got to be black or white, or it's not safe. Security - and certainty - are worth any price: war, occupation, deportations, torture, the erosion of freedom at home - and sweeping generalizations that amount to intellectual dishonesty."
Mike Fitzgerald is not a flaming liberal either. The fact that he wrote this editorial is astounding.
Fitzgerald once wrote a column stating that police officers should be used to enforce immigration laws and given blanket authority to pull over anyone they suspect of not being in the country legally (ie Mexican looking folk) for any reason or no reason, to check their legal status.
After that brilliant editorial I called Fitzgerald up and suggested that given his reasoning, police should also be allowed to pull over Irish people for no reason and give them a breathalizer test because everybody knows that Irish people drink a lot and are therefore more likely to be driving drunk.
I also told him that since Irish people are harder to spot than Mexicans, maybe they should all be legally required to put potato stickers on their bumpers to make them easier to spot.
He had no response to my brilliant suggestions.
Haha, love the Irish example. One of the profs at Toledo, David Harris, is supposed to be one the foremost authorities on racial profiling in the country. He has been interviewed on national TV and radio several times and has written a couple books debunking what he call the racial profiling myth.
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