Maggie's Farm

Well, Seabrook, since you brought it up, and more especially since you brought it up in order to comparatively extoll your own skills, would you like to know how awful the sentence (copied below) is, from the construction (not the content) point of view?

"I meant no harm as I enjoy watching how people express themselves on the Internet and trade examples with my sister who is quite arrogant about English usage."

MM can take care of herself --i was just engaging your banter in a like spirit --or trying to anyway. Okay, the sentence --for starters, without addressing aesthetics at all, where you meant to say (i think you meant to say) you and your sister trade examples, what you actually said is that people on the internet and your sister trade examples.

That is, on the internet, your sister trades examples with people. Those people and your sister trade examples of how people on the internet express themselves.

While these trades are in progress, you 'enjoy watching' these trades, but you do not trade.

IOW, you could hardly have written a worse sentence, in terms of the purpose of conveying a specific fact.

A parallel misconstruction would be something like meaning to write a message that you and sis had lunch together while watching Oprah on TV by using the words "I had lunch watching Oprah with my sister on TV." Impossible, especially if without context, to understand whether your sister is with you watching TV or whether you are alone and watching your sister on TV, where she is in the studio as a guest on the Oprah show.

Dimly recalling something about a 'dangling modifier' tho i ain't gonna to try to diagram no dang sentence. But whatever is wrong with these:

"I watched the traffic crossing the street to buy a newspaper."

"I kept my eye out for sharks paddling my surfboard."

...is also wrong with yorn.

I say "I finished the book in a hurry."

You reply "How did you know the book was in a hurry?"

>Aw contrayer, m'dearsea Brook.

The 'understood' (which er, underpins your entire argument) is used only when there is no possibility but one reference.

You might as well write a 500 page novel with nothing but blank pages between a 'the' on page 1 and a 'the end' on page 500, and claim the rest is 'understood'.

While you may call that example another "ha ha best moron sentence I've read today" the principle is sound. Reflect for a moment on the word 'understood'.

How, why, is this word used for the purpose?

There's only one answer: Because there IS no other choice the missing word SHALL be understood.

In your sentence, there is the other choice. So, the missing word may or may not be understood --by a random reader.

To disagree is to say that because the writer understands the understood, the writer may rightfully convey upon the writer a dispensation in the form of a variance on the rules of the English language. This is a perfectly respectable thing to do under two conditions: (1) in writing in a private diary, and (2) in accepting the fact that readers may be less familiar with the meaning than the writer of that meaning, and may thus [a] complain or [b] ignore or [c] silently form an idea other than what the writer will have meant.

Okay, quiz on Monday. you shall need two sharpened #2 pencils. Passing the quiz leads to unimaginable delights; failing the quiz to being taken behind the building and beat with a shovel.

the people on the internet, of course. It's your sentence, why are you avoiding reading it?

Re shovel; that was no threat, that was me thinking about Kesler's post on the DPRK --how it begins with calling people morons, and ends with just dispatching them.