crazietalk.net

throatybeard wrote:
Incidentally, re: Madagascar, I'm sure you know this, but I was gobsmacked recently when I learned that the Nazis' earlier plan was to deport all the Jews to Madagascar.

I had no idea--this bit doesn't make it into garden-variety accounts in the US of the Holocaust, at least not any of the ones I've been exposed to.

Apparently this was plan A, and then the Nazis had their hands full with the English in 1940, so they scuttled the plan and moved onto their even more heinous ones.

throatybeard wrote:

windsor wrote:Serious question Throaty...

Are there 'rights and wrongs' then or just style directives and ethnic differences? Are the 'rights' more basic than we (middle class white folk) think - limited perhaps to the structural level?


I spoke (as a child) Hungarian...and if my memory serves that verb placement was pretty liberal - using Hungarian structure for english would sound very 'wrong'

damn I'm glad I'm a geek not a English teacher.

I just spent 45 minutes on a fantastic answer to this question, and the board software ate it becuase it logged me out. I'm down for the night. Holler back at y'all some other time.

DukieInKansas wrote:I just had to chime in. Your child, and CathyCA's child, are fortunate that they have a parent that can help them with grammar. What about the children in the class that don't have that advantage? I would expect the teacher in a language arts class to have a better grasp of the written word. If nothing else, the teacher should know the difference between students and student's. If the math or science teacher wrote this, it wouldn't bother me nearly as much.

My favorite story of teacher errors - my sister's either 4th or 5th grade teacher kept trying to correct the spelling of the city where my sister was born. She was born in Pittsburgh and the teacher kept telling her there was no h in Pittsburg. The teacher was ignoring the PA after the birthplace and was trying to make it KS.

Turk wrote:

DukieInKansas wrote:I just had to chime in. Your child, and CathyCA's child, are fortunate that they have a parent that can help them with grammar. What about the children in the class that don't have that advantage? I would expect the teacher in a language arts class to have a better grasp of the written word. If nothing else, the teacher should know the difference between students and student's. If the math or science teacher wrote this, it wouldn't bother me nearly as much.

My favorite story of teacher errors - my sister's either 4th or 5th grade teacher kept trying to correct the spelling of the city where my sister was born. She was born in Pittsburgh and the teacher kept telling her there was no h in Pittsburg. The teacher was ignoring the PA after the birthplace and was trying to make it KS.

Actually, DiK, depending on how old the teacher was, she might have been right. For many years, there was a dispute about whether or not to keep the "H". The government actually passed a law trying to standardize place names, and "burg" was the standard spelling. In school, I remember that some kids wanted to put an "H" on ALL towns that ended in "burg" (my neighborhood is one of those). And of course, when we learned that there are other Pittsburgs without the "H" (in KS and CA), we were all "WTF?!? Why can't you people figure this out?!? The stupid language is hard enough as it is, especially for the way us yinzers mangle it in Picksburg!!" (throaty, can I get an 'amen'? )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Pittsburgh