The trauma of grammar-godding

[rymenhild]

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sadly, I cannot protect the English language from my students, at least four of whom should be brought up on charges for crimes against coherence. (Even the quiz author occasionally gets confused; what's up with "faced" in question 7, and why use the slangy "a lot" in a correct answer?)

Some specific crimes against grammar, spelling and punctuation recently encountered by this intrepid investigator:

• A folklore is usually narratives of homespun culture, rather than the elite.


• [H]owever, the movie Excalibur cannot be considered folklore, but is simply based upon folklore because it was made to be mass-produced for prophet.


• Unfortunately, [Igraine] told that her husband gone and marries a new, she gives birth to Arthur who is destined to be the most noblest.


• Robin Hood emerged over time, begging with tales of a cunning mugger on the main highway, to being conbined with a French tale of a May Day celibration involving the marriage of a man named Robin and a maid Marian.

Meanwhile, I promised some people a defense of fanfic to respond to the spirited discussion in my last post more than a week ago, but I want to do it correctly and I have other essays to produce right at the moment. At some point, the defense will show up.

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

...I misread 'cunning bugger' for 'cunning mugger'... I thought, wow, they get slangier in papers every year...
(dies laughing, please kick me into the corner and cover me up with a rug)
Have fun with those essays.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Sympathy.

One wonders about the adumbration of "celibate" re: May Day.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I did notice that, given the explicitly sexualized May Day plays we've read in this class...

although the professor, when explaining one of the sexier passages, neglected to tell the class that the part about "put[ting] crabbes in the fyre" was a venereal disease joke. We'd just been talking about sex, sex, sex - and then the prof said that the crabs were what people at May Day feasts could eat for dinner.

Do you have any suggestions for what a reader should do in cases where the prof misses something useful and relatively obvious?

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Nope, sorry. Especially not with that professor (the dance of politeness becomes too difficult to sustain). If you hold office hrs and the passage comes up in discussion with a student, though....