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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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.
So to me, avoiding the new use of "literally" provides some small benefit: if "literally" is used to mean both, occasionally, it will be genuinely ambiguous. Likewise, any instance of using a new word when there's a perfectly good existing word. We already have "lend" and "borrow": what's the benefit of abandoning one and using "lend" for both? But if everyone else wants to, it's probably not worth fighting over.
But I don't see the benefit of avoiding ending sentences with prepositions. It feels like a mangling of some previous rule. Did people used to leave sentences half-finished? Is it a massive overreaction to people moving a preposition to the end of a sentence when it naturally belongs with a verb at the beginning.
I don't even know -- theoretically are we "supposed" to avoid similar constructions even if it puts the preposition at the end of a clause rather than the end of a sentence? It just feels completely pointless and contrary to how English is naturally used.
I mean, so long as people prefer to write that way themselves, and not critise other people for it, I'm absolutely happy for them to do so, but I'm curious if there's an actual rule I'm misunderstanding, or not?
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