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."