Interesting Links for 25-04-2012
- In Therapy Forever? Enough Already
(tags: psychology counselling therapy ) - I read about the woman who gave her 7-year-old a breast-augmentation voucher, and now the screaming in my head won't stop.
(tags: women PlasticSurgery children headdesk society ) - Even positive stereotypes can hinder performance (removes locus of control)
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Hm. I haven't previously given in to the new use of "literally". But maybe it's time to do so??
Another pet peeve is when people are correcting people who say "literally" to intensify something figurative, and say "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively". NO THEY DON'T. Everyone KNOWS it's figurative. They're not trying to say it's figurative -- they're trying to say "very" or "I really mean it".
Come to think of it, what word would be best to use in place of "literally" if you want to mean "this is an analogy, but an exact one, that's not exaggerated"? "Actually"?
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And I think that you have to go with the context. I can't think of an alternative.
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I'm a bit of a grammar fascist even though I'm in principle trained to be a descriptivist, so I was relieved that the only one of these drums I bang is less/fewer, and even then it's reflexive, not something I care that much about any more.
I mean, some of those things I'd never do - I tend to avoid split infinitives for example - but I don't criticise them in others - to be honest, I thought even the prescriptivists had given up on split infinitives by this point ( ... )
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I'm not sure, but I think that level of anger is what you get when people feel defensive -- when they feel sure they're right, but they feel stupid because they can't EXPLAIN why they're right, so they hope the argument will just go away. The same sort of thing where people hate Harry Potter because it's so popular, but they didn't think it was so innovative.
'never end a sentence with a preposition'
I still tend to mentally categorise rules into "those that provide some benefit, which may or may not be worth it" and "those whose benefit is solely showing that you know to follow the rules".
Eg. using usual capitalisation rather than all-caps or no-caps provides a specific benefit: it's possible to read it. So I think it's a good idea.
Eg. Capitalising random nouns is not usual so it's wise to avoid it, but only because that's what everyone else does: if we did capitalise important nouns, the language would probably be equally good ( ... )
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