SPAG tests & questions, and language play

[richardfm]

7/10 for me

 

[Mike Ayling]

I'm a bit nerdy about English - I can be both fussy and laissez faire at the same time. (In case you haven't had children subjected to them, 'SPAG tests are the dreadful spelling, punctuation and grammar assessments inflicted on Y6 children in England.)

Anyway, language is the most excellent playground, and it fascinates me. So this is not about all your pedantic pet hates (for which there's another thread), but playful stuff, as well as questions people might have. A lot of us probably never had old-fashioned grammar lessons (me included); despite that most of us are miraculously adept at it in everyday language, but we can get a bit fuzzy when writing it down.

I genuinely think that human language is one of the wonders of the universe, having evolved with our brains to be learnable, in all its amazing complexity, by infants. Yep, that's right, that screaming ball of little human still beats LLMs (large language models) in what it's doing.

First up: semicolons. Who knows how to use them? And does anyone care??

Test your skill here: https://www.theguardian.com/science...ne-semicolon-use-english-books-study-suggests

In the bad old "White Australia" times after WW2 peopleof Italian origin were referred to a Spags but they were never tested for anything!

 

[swee'pea99]

if parents have different native tongues, they should use them with their children from birth.

Arnando Iannucci, him of The Thick of It, Death of Stalin and many etcs, told in a programme I saw recently how his parents made a conscious decision not to teach their children Italian, "because they wanted us to grow up feeling 100% British."

 

[briantrumpet]

Arnando Iannucci, him of The Thick of It, Death of Stalin and many etcs, told in a programme I saw recently how his parents made a conscious decision not to teach their children Italian, "because they wanted us to grow up feeling 100% British."

I suppose that's understandable, but sad. It's actually quite a small window where the infant brain can be wired truly multi-lingually.

 

[PeteXXX]

I'm quite partial to the Oxford comma.

 

[briantrumpet]

I'm quite partial to the Oxford comma.

There are plenty of examples where its omission leads to humorous misunderstandings.

 

[PeteXXX]

8/10
One I got incorrect as I didn't read the question properly; the other I just plain got wrong.

 

[PeteXXX]

There are plenty of examples where its omission leads to humorous misunderstandings.

There are..

 

[Ming the Merciless]

I do, as a few people on here can attest too!

Just as I read that, my stoma made the equivalent of a fart, as if in protest!

You sure they didn’t install a woopee cushion?

 

[Ming the Merciless]

A pathetic score, I blame being tired for the lack of a semi colon.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

You sure they didn’t install a woopee cushion?

Pretty sure - It doesn't really sound like that (with me anyway).

 

[steverob]

I can't remember them being 'taught' beyond using them in lists or in contrasting clauses, and that was only brief, AFAICR.

... possibly as the fun of it wasn't killed by having it drilled into us before we were ready.

I think that this is a very pertinent thing - I certainly know that my love of language and its complexitities and oddities is probably because I picked them up as I went along and never had it taught to me in a rote fashion.

I was an intelligent child (less so now as a middle aged man!), passed my 12+ back in the day and went to a grammar school, but honestly can't remember being taught formal grammatical definitions or anything like that; you were encouraged to learn from reading books and writing essays what the correct way was through trial and error (and the teacher's red pen!).

To that end, I'm currently seen as my office's "go-to" person for getting work proof-read and tidied up where neccessary - to be fair most of my colleagues have English as a second language, so they will translate documents from their original language (typically Japanese) and get me to give it a pass-by and see if it makes sense as a native speaker.

And yet I took one of those language quizzes previously that was supposedly set at a 10-year-old's level and half the terms they used were alien to me - things like "identify the fronted adverbial in this sentence". I'd never heard of these and initially had no idea what they were; eventually I worked it out by context, but I think if I'd have had to learn things this way, I'd have been bored out of my skull and never learned to enjoy grammar.

 

[briantrumpet]

I think that this is a very pertinent thing - I certainly know that my love of language and its complexitities and oddities is probably because I picked them up as I went along and never had it taught to me in a rote fashion.

I was an intelligent child (less so now as a middle aged man!), passed my 12+ back in the day and went to a grammar school, but honestly can't remember being taught formal grammatical definitions or anything like that; you were encouraged to learn from reading books and writing essays what the correct way was through trial and error (and the teacher's red pen!).

To that end, I'm currently seen as my office's "go-to" person for getting work proof-read and tidied up where neccessary - to be fair most of my colleagues have English as a second language, so they will translate documents from their original language (typically Japanese) and get me to give it a pass-by and see if it makes sense as a native speaker.

And yet I took one of those language quizzes previously that was supposedly set at a 10-year-old's level and half the terms they used were alien to me - things like "identify the fronted adverbial in this sentence". I'd never heard of these and initially had no idea what they were; eventually I worked it out by context, but I think if I'd have had to learn things this way, I'd have been bored out of my skull and never learned to enjoy grammar.

I think the most we did were verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives, and left to get on with the rest. Anyone who admires Richard Feynman will know that it's far more important to understand the thing from first principles than the silly labels humans apply to them.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Situations where I know how to use semicolons correctly: In a list; let me think; that's it.

 

[Dogtrousers]

And yet I took one of those language quizzes previously that was supposedly set at a 10-year-old's level and half the terms they used were alien to me - things like "identify the fronted adverbial in this sentence". I'd never heard of these and initially had no idea what they were; eventually I worked it out by context, but I think if I'd have had to learn things this way, I'd have been bored out of my skull and never learned to enjoy grammar.

I had an old-fashioned education where we did learn about parts of speech in English, sentence parsing, subclauses, indirect and direct objects, transitive and intransitive verbs and so on. Also I did a couple of years of Latin, which was all about the technicalities of grammar.

Add on to that I've learned a couple of foreign languages (not very well) taking a very analytic approach cos that's how I roll. So I understand the mechanics of how languages work. I know what all the bits and pieces are and how they fit together.

And I've never heard of a "fronted adverbial".