a joke about two pere ubuists

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> <<Yes, of course it is. It couldn't serve as an
> example
> if it were not both utter nonsense from a stricly
> grammatical POV and correct from a strictly
> grammatical POV.>>
> 
> It's not utter nonsense from a strictly grammatical
> POV.  
> It's illogical, given the usual understandings of
> the
> words "infant" and "great grandmother."

It's a metaphor. 



she/he "is"
/you/they/we "are"  

has nothing to do with it. 


In my post I distinguished "grammatical" from
grammatical. What you are suggesting is that the
violation of prescriptive rules (how one ought to
write or talk) produces grammatical nonsense. But this
claim is simply not true. Logic is irrelevant here so
I don't know why you're bringing logic into it. The
fact that most Americans (not only the President of
the USA) have never learned to use the prescriptive
rules tells us something. These persciptive rules are
alien to the natural workings of language. It's not a
contradiction to claim that most people speak
"grammatically" and not grammatically. There is not a
single linguist today that would agree with your idea
that perscriptive rules have anything to do with
thinking, clearly or logically or otherwise. The truth
is, most of the perscriptive rules make little or no
sense at all. Perscriptive rules conform niether to
logic nor to any lasting tradition. In fact, the
so-called errors that the perscrptives would like to
correct often display an elegant logic and an acute
sensitivity to the texture of language that would be
lost if perscriptive rules were ever sucessfully
imposed. But thank goodness, we've passed 1984 and we
still have poets and novelists and clowns and
Shakespeare.  




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