The Logic Off Topic list

--- In logic-ot@yahoogroups.com, Dennis Gunn <dennis@s...> wrote:
> 
> I am all for tolerance but I am totally against faky social 
> relativism.  The "Oh we don't expect you to be able to get it 
right" 
> attitude behind it is far more condescending that the empiricalism 
> that it is intended to remedy.

Depends ... sometimes "taught" grammar has functional bugs and 
shortcomings in the specifications, and it often makes more sense to 
use common "sloppy" workarounds that are less likely to cause 
confusion or offence. 

The classic one is the common use of "they" to refer to one person of 
unspecified gender. My lot were taught at school that if you don't 
know someone's gender you _must_ always refer to them as "him", as in 
"Please send in the next job applicant and ask if he wants a coffee".
Everyone I know ignored that rule and used the plural instead, and 
now finally the OED has caved in and accepted that that's now the 
official preferred usage. It's a fairly recent change of policy, so 
you can catch a lot of older people out with it. 

I also hate the way that when you follow a quote with a comma, you 
are /supposed/ to put the comma inside the quotation marks. That's 
logically wrong, and I refuse to do that. It's bad code! 

And I think that the use of certain "taught" rules is just stupid. 
The only thing that I can think of right now that bugs me about US 
grammar is when you get some Dumb American Grammar Nazi who insists 
on saying "an Hotel" with a strongly pronounced H, and corrects 
others who don't. It only seems to be well-educated Americans who do 
that.

"An hotel" is only correct if you are treating "hotel" as a french 
word and not pronouncing the "h" ("Go to an 'otel").
If you pronounce the "h", you are using it as an English word, 
the "n" is no longer neccessary to separate the two vowel sounds "a" 
and "o", and "Go to a hotel" is then the correct English-language 
construction. 

So when I hear someone showing off and loudly proclaiming "An 
_H_otel!", I tend to think that they probably received more education 
than their brain was properly equipped to process. 

[Erk]
Teacher: "In English, a double negative gives a positive, 
but there's no possible way for a double positive to give 
a negative!"
Sarcastic student: "Yeah, right ..."