MetaTalk posts tagged with grammar

possessive pronouns

hippybear — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:32:43 -0800

His, hers, and its. All possessive, none of them take apostrophes. Or: have I seen a lot of hissy fits about this lately? What is the MeFi take on being a spelling nazi? It seems terribly inconsistent to me, when people are corrected and when not. I find myself embarrassed and try to self-correct when my preview-fu fails me, but should we be calling each other out?

It's "great" !

Turtles all the way down — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:50:45 -0800

Anyone want to start a grammar nazi site? I see writing all the time, not only on Metafilter but everywhere, that is mangled and misspelled. Since I'm an active member of MeFi, it breaks my heart to see these things. I want to correct them, but always feel that I am being a pedant and that a corrective comment would be intrusive or unwelcome. I suspect others feel the same way. I propose we start a website of like-minded people to, unapologetically, promote our agenda. Anyone with me?

The Ministry of Type refers to Mefi

i_am_joe's_spleen — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:43:50 -0800

The Ministry of Type quotes Metafilter on quotes (and hopes its pages don't go away).

Spelling and grammar guideline?

TheOnlyCoolTim — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:03:50 -0800

Proposed guideline: Posts are required to be reasonably literate. I'm an elitist asshole. This is what I expect to see on Myspace or the Youtube comments section, not what I want to see on my Metafilter. I think quality control should be an issue here. Discuss.

Talk about your missing periods!

Neiltupper — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:18:09 -0800

I'm sorry, I can't let this post pass without comment This kind of composition is not clever. It's not kewl. It's not original. It wastes the time of both the reader and the writer. And apparently, it's a recent affectation. It looks silly. There, someone had to tell her.

This AskMe is Meta, Ergo...

mendel — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 08:28:02 -0800

If anything belongs in metatalk, a post flaming Metafilter users' spelling and grammar sure does. How much more "about Metafilter" can you get than "I am baffled as to why this is so frequent on a site such as AskMeFi"?

pedantry and mefi

Godbert — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 11:52:13 -0800

There's a time and place for everything, sure, but can we stop using MeFi threads to debate usage of the English language? I'm all for "flag and move on," but this seems to be happening a lot.

Minor Quibble

mcsweetie — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 21:40:39 -0800

minor grammar quibble! when posting a link, this:

"The URL you entered was not found in previous threads, though you may want to check the search page for duplicates, just to be sure"

...should end with a period. bit you know that already.

Grammar Issue

divrsional — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:25:13 -0800

It's worth its weight in grammarcheck to use it's and its correctly.

Bad Grammar

Hat Maui — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:28:59 -0800

Just let me know when your in town

Because your playing in the playground of the internets

Dude your going WAY out of your way to insult me personally

So I think your going over the top here

Jonmc your joking, right?

only you can prevent "your" abuse. for fuck's sake, please. [mo' inside]

no-caps does not mean no-value

caution live frogs — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:51:14 -0800

We've been over this before. Some people prefer typing with the shift key. Others prefer all-lowercase. For the record: can we stop bitching about this in threads? No-caps doesn't detract from the quality of a post or comment. The bitching about it does.

Can we stop pointing out spelling errors?

XQUZYPHYR — Thu, 07 Nov 2002 11:44:04 -0800

A thread about one's attitude turned into a brief argument about spelling protocol, and it reminded me of a recent annoyance that I've seen on a few threads: can we stop with the posts that are nothing but mentioning a spelling error? Odds are if you saw it everyone else did, and if you have to have the honor of being the first to point it out, could you at least pretend to not just be cluttering the thread by actually contributing to the conversation as well?

Not GrammarFilter

Optamystic — Sun, 07 Jul 2002 19:15:37 -0800

Could we possibly make an effort to try to appreciate the content of a given site, rather than have every other link derailed by some niggling critcism of the webmaster's use of fonts/flash/javascript/punctuation?

Can we correct the search result grammar?

starvingartist — Fri, 04 May 2001 07:56:35 -0800

This may be pedantic, and it may have already been covered - I couldn't find a search option for metatalk, nor did I feel like looking through the whole request archive

I noticed that when you search for a topic on metafilter, if only 1 hit results, it says "There were 1 results for...". Would it be possible to put a check for singular results in the script and make the response grammatically correct?