grievance: subtitles

I just got into the show Lost. And it's a major, major problem in my life. Especially because I'd just started a new job when I started watching the show. So I basically have no life whatsoever because when I'm not doing work or at work, I'm watching Lost. Oh well. I guess there are worse things than a TV show to which I could be addicted. And let me tell you: it really has become an addiction. (I started watching on Saturday, March 7th and today, on Sunday, March 15th, I'm in the middle of season 2. Kind of problematic.)

With that said, this is not "Grievance: My Inability to Stop Watching Lost." It is, as is titularly expressed, a grievance for subtitles, grammatically speaking. And I'm so upset that it had to be brought to my attention via my new favorite show, but so it has.

Today watching an episode, an entire portion of the dialogue was spoken in Korean and subtitled into English. And not once, but TWICE, did the subtitlers (?) make a grammatical mistake. And the same one. Hey, I guess they're at least consistently stupid.

Of course, I got up on my high horse and decided to not only take a screen-freeze of both (which may get me in trouble for some kind of copyright replication violation or something - oh well) but to also take a veritable "red pen" to this "paper." Ugh...



I've laid this point out in excruciating detail in "grievance: abuse of the english language part deux (english 102)." ("5. Commas ALWAYS go inside quotation marks. As do periods. It doesn't make sense. But you HAVE to do it that way. Tough shit.") And I am, as Tommy would say, "comfortable with" the fact that no one acknowledges or cares about grammar. But the thing "with" which I am not "comfortable" is that this is, like, the most expensive television show EVER. And they don't have ONE single person on staff who understands the rules of grammar? Especially the people who are DOING the subtitles? I would assume that if you're going to pour THAT much money into a television show that you wouldn't want to embarrass yourself with something as easily-caught as this.

And it's kind of insulting to the American people that no one over at Lost cared enough to hire someone who was, I don't know, able to write properly? That no one there thought it salient enough an issue? That no one thought "hey, tons of people are watching this. Let's not further sully the utter conflagration that is the English language?"

That's all.

-moon

grievance: facebook statuses' grammar

I am shocked to my very core that Facebook actually took down the "is" as part of its status template and now leaves it there for optional use.

By what I am even more shocked is that despite this, people continually use it... and use it WRONG. And what I mean by this is the statuses' predication upon a particular kind of sentence format, namely a person speaking about him or herself in the third person.

Now I'm not knocking people who outwardly go against this sentence structure by either eliminating the "is" after their names or writing something after the "is" which is clearly supposed to go against the structure, like a song lyric or simply a noun, e.g. "Jenn DOUGHNUTS!" or "Jenn is Barack Obama is the shit." I am okay with this kind of erratic grammar solely because it is purposely crafted to be so.

My problem is with people who are too dumb to realize that when they start a sentence about themselves in the third person, they must continue to do so throughout the sentence. The following hypothetical statuses do NOT make sense:

"Jenn is so tired I think I'm going to take a bubble bath and go to bed."
Should be: "Jenn is so tired she thinks she's going to take a bubble bath and go to bed."
"Jenn is studying for a PoliSci exam. OMG I'm soooo gonna fail."
Should be: "Jenn is studying for a PoliSci exam and is sooo gonna fail."

I'm assuming that this makes sense and needs not more examples. All I'm saying is that it's ABOVE infuriating to see this kind of crap on my status update page because it is a blatant offense on the structure of modern English. I understand that my rules for speaking are far more stringent than those for others... but casualisms and slangitudes are really what deteriorate language... and our language already sounds like untrained colloquial drivel.

I'm all about technology, but before Facebook... at least people could maintain the same pronoun and subsequent verb form. At least 'til the next SENTENCE began! Pish posh.

-moon

grievance: native english speakers attacking foreigners' english

Let me first say that this is not an act of repentance for having (possibly) offended anyone with either my "English 101" blogs: those blogs are intended to castigate native English speakers because IT IS YOUR FIRST (AND/OR ONLY) TOOL FOR COMMUNICATION, and there is no excuse to not use it well and be proud of your written and spoken word.

It is furthermore not repentance for having offended anyone in my "Foreigners Speaking Too Loudly" blog. Foreigners DO speak too loudly and my theory about this fluoresced as I walked out of class yesterday (furious about this new "rageout target") and joined people screaming in Spanish. Don't get it. I really don't. And I digress.

I was in class yesterday... Oceanography class. Life lesson: don't leave core requirements to your last semester. Bleh.

In any event, the professor's first language is clearly not English. And I actually don't know what her first language is. However... HOW-EV-ER... her English is pretty damned near impeccable. And I just got out of an Astronomy lab taught by an adjunct who A. didn't give a shit about the class and B. LEGITIMATELY did not speak English. (That was fun.) Again: do not leave core requirements to your last semester.

In any event, this BITCH in the class decides she will take it upon herself to CORRECT the professor's English. CORRECT THE PROFESSOR'S ENGLISH?! I don't even do that when English is his or her first language. That's a respect issue. My question to this bitch in the class is "have you ever stood in front of a hundred people and posited that you INDUBITABLY KNEW the answers to all questions on some particular discipline? My guess is no. And if you have, you certainly haven't done it in a language that is NOT YOUR FIRST!" Seriously. The task of being comfortable enough in another language to speak as an authority comes with a lot of pressure. And to bust this nice woman's balls about her having said "most thin" instead of "thinnest" is pretty much complete and utter garbage. (Yes, that actually happened; yes, I've been writing this stuff down; yes, I understand that is not conducive to actually learning.)

The only time speech correction really works (from one person to another) is if there is a systematic error in the speaker's understanding of a language's functional pattern (perhaps a good correction would have been "thinnest" if the professor had in fact said "thinner," but had meant "thinnest"; that is a systematic mistake in which the speaker does not acknowledge the differences between superlative ("-est") and comparative ("-er") constructions. And furthermore, an explanation is necessary. And it should have been done in private, you fucking bitch.

Also, I spent time writing down constructions that the professor did make correctly which are proof of mastery of a language and/or are misused by native English speakers all the time (which leads to my point that most English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers/learners speak far better English than the idiots who are raised speaking it.)

She used "farther" instead of "further" to speak about geographical space. (6 points)
She properly used metaphorical/idiomatic language: "soupy." (8 points)
Formal sentence syntax in a spoken statement: "density of the material in which you're trying to float." Who the hell speaks like that?! Well. I do. And I get flack for it all the time. Oh well. (15 points)
Use of the word "lexicon" (of course, in response to this BITCH FACE correcting her - she did handle it very gracefully though). Use of this word shows several things:
1. That's KIND OF a "hard" word, in the sense that not all native English speakers would know what it means. (Allow me to vouchsafe - it simply means "vocabulary.") (3 points)
2. It shows that she has spoken about lexicology and philology enough to use that word. (4 points)
3. SHE APPARENTLY CARES ABOUT THE WORDS SHE USES!!!!!!! (287356229.44 points)

She gets that many points for the last part because that's a lot more than I can say for a lot of people. So I was actually quite impressed.

So why the FUCK would you, a stupid idiot undergraduate student, feel so pious to flash about your faux-erudite-douchebag-ness to try and destroy power levels in a classroom that are necessary for KNOWLEDGE-TRANSMISSION? And embarrassing a perfectly lovely woman. Ugh. Go to hell.

So, folks... don't FUCKING correct foreigners' speech like this. Soooooo fucked up I can't even deal with it. Plus, you're probably teaching them something wrong. Most foreigners who move to the United States see a decrease in the fluency of their proper English skills because idiot Americans teach them slangs that allow them to be lazy. 'Though I am a big proponent and enjoyer of slangs, I would never sacrifice them for actual language.

Girl in Oceanography class, I hope you read this. And I hope you peed your pants in 2nd grade or something embarrassing that would exonerate you from this. Shame on you.

-moon

grievance: the lsats

"The reasoning above most closely conforms to which of the following principles?"
"Which one of the following most accurately expresses the conclusion of the dietitian's argument?"
"If Malpighi's delivery is first and Leacock's delivery is third, then which of the following must be true?"
"The phrase 'scholarly monographs that sap the vitality of history' in passage A (lines 6-7) plays a role in that passage's overall argument that is most analogous to the role played in passage B by which of the following phrases?"

Read that garbage for 2 hours and 55 minutes straight. And then write an ESSAY. You've just taken the LSAT.

How did our society allow us to get to the point where we, as a whole, are administering, and taking, this test?

The Law School Admission Test is just that. "Admission" being the key word. It doesn't purport to measure "aptitude" as the SAT does. Its pursuit is that of admitting people based on some criterion decided by the LSAC. And apparently that criterion includes "logic games."

What?

I'm sorry. Is the LSAT a test you take to go to school to become a detective? Didn't know that.

After taking my test, I had a conversation with a gentleman who had also taken it. In discussing logic games, he argued against my claim ("logic games blow and I want to punch them in the eye") by saying that he honestly thought that it made sense for that to be something that is tested for aspiring attorneys. His premise for this argument was that "you've gotta be able to think on your feet in court if someone brings up some shit you've never heard before... you gotta be like 'oh if M can't be HERE, L must be here.'" This theory is crap. You can't be surprised by the opposing side in court with surprise evidence. You can't withhold shit and try to surprise your adversary in court. So that theory is complete junk.

However, that is the most valid explanation I've heard. My issue is the fact that the LSATs shouldn't be testing stuff for which you need to learn a technique to be successful. My LSAT tutor told me to "stop fucking thinking" about a hundred times. Apparently I'm supposed to turn into a machine for those 2 hours and 55 minutes and throw rationale out the window. So what is this test really even testing? Your ability to make yourself completely and utterly brain dead? If that's the case, I should have taken an LSAT before I took my LSAT. Nobody should be asked to concentrate on an excerpt about strawberry mites after 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Fuck strawberry mites. They're a bunch of assholes and I don't want to know about them.

Yes. I did study for the SATs as well. But differently. I learned vocabulary words. And now I have a bigger vocabulary. And that helped me in college. Is law school going to be about figuring out how many possible line-ups there are for clowns exiting a clown car based on a specific set of rules that some random person made up? If so, COUNT ME IN! (That was sarcastic. But only because clowns scare me.)

This test makes me angry about the law.

-moon

Comment worth posting from my friend Steve who is an attorney: "I can't tell you how often I'm standing in Court, doing oral argument on a substantive motion and have to say:'Your Honor, with the Court's indulgence, I'd like to draw a diagram, illustrating how Mr. Green, Mr. Red, Mr. Blue and Mr. Yellow typically line up when taking turns fishing in a canoe with only three seats.'" (He, too, is being sarcastic. But only because he hates canoes.)