[Magdalen] Creeping UK-ism?

[Sibyl Smirl]

On 7/26/15 3:06 PM, James Oppenheimer-Crawford wrote:
> If it makes better sense, I think that's it.  And it certainly does make
> better sense.
> Grammar only is an effort to explain what we're doing.  We drive grammar;
> it doesn't drive us.

I'm not sure that it makes "better" sense: a team, after all, _is_ just 
_one_ "thing".  So is an army, for another instance.  If the team wins, 
the whole thing wins, not just one or several of them.  Even the 
bench-warmers are part of the team, and part of the win.  There are 
lines of reasoning that go both ways: America and England chose 
different lines for the grammar.  But _everybody_ around me used it when 
I was a child, and we didn't get BBC radio here, then, and saw/heard 
damn few British movies.  What jars on the ear is what does not sound 
"right" to you, not what you learned in school.

I remember what effort my mom put in trying to get me to say "Am I 
not..." which just felt wrong to me, excruciatingly formal, even though 
she was of course correct.  "Aren't I.." seemed to feel all correct to a 
lot of people around me, but I knew the reasoning why _that_ was wrong. 
  I was told enough times that "Ain't I..." was wrong (Mom always said, 
"There ain't so such word as 'ain't'") that that always jarred my ear, 
too.  So I didn't really know _what_ to say.

But that itchy ear of mine does American English, not the Queen's.  I am 
an American.


-- 
Sibyl Smirl
I will take no bull from your house!  Psalms 50:9a
mailto:polycarpa3 at ckt.net